Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

The 20th of July, 1944.

The Wolfsschanze,

Germany's headquarters on the eastern front.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

Nestled away in the deep forests of Poland,

Adolf Hitler is drawing up plans

that he believes could secure his victory in Europe.

The führer strategies

are interrupted by a knock at the door.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg,

Hitler's trusted chief of staff walks in

holding a briefcase.

But Stauffenberg is not here to talk battle plans,

he's here to kill Hitler.

There were lots of plots to kill Hitler,

and he survived so many

that it made Hitler feel that he really did have

this kind of divine providence behind him

that made him survive.

The most celebrated plot against him

was the July bomb plot of July, 1944,

in which you've got this kind of cadre of senior officers

all over the Third Reich

who have been meeting in secret for many years actually.

On the 20th of July, 1944,

Claus von Stauffenberg

made a serious attempt on the Führer's life

by bringing a bomb into the briefing room where Hitler was,

placing it under his desk

and hoping that it would kill Hitler.

Adolf Hitler,

the most notorious dictator of the 20th century.

Outraged by the Treaty of Versailles

and Germany's humiliation in the first World War,

Hitler fiercely campaigned

to rescue the Fatherland from ruin.

The mood in Germany at the end of World War I

was that of a humiliated and defeated people and nation.

This fight had been going on for four years.

Millions of people had died and no one had got anything,

or no one had got anywhere.

It was a mood of revolution,

a mood of deep dissatisfaction, a mood of instability,

and it felt like the country was on the brink of collapse.

His mesmerizing public speeches

called for a new order in Germany,

one which would cast off the weakened incompetent structure

of the Democratic regime,

and instead install a supreme national leader.

Citizens from all corners of the country

fell for the relentless promotion of his ideology,

and Hitler successfully recast himself as Germany's savior.

What Hitler is absolutely amazing at is speechmaking.

And to begin to understand Hitler,

you've really gotta understand

that he was the most amazing demagogue.

Hitler's speeches are really vitriolic,

but they're very effective,

and they attract regular audiences,

and he's really good at using populist themes.

And labels scapegoats for losing the war.

You name it, Jews, communists,

you know, whoever Hitler hates,

that given moment, he'll lay into them.

Listeners are listening and watching this,

and they're thinking, yes,

these are the reasons for our economic hardships.

And Hitler's also got this huge personal magnetism,

and he's got this instinctive understanding

of the psychology of crowds.

And of course,

you know, like any really brilliant public speaker,

he's going to use that to his advantage.

It's like a conductor with an orchestra.

Like many dictators before him,

he became insistent on protecting his godlike image

and divine right to power.

The Führer kept himself away

from the more violent and brutal aspects of the regime.

He promoted anti-Jewish propaganda,

but refused to bloody his own hands,

relying instead on his loyal circle

to rid Germany of its enemies me.

So the issue of how Hitler managed

to keep his popular image clean

while the final solution was underway

is obviously a very interesting

and a very difficult question.

But I suppose the essence of it is two things.

First of all, that those mass shootings

that were taking place in the USSR were not on German soil.

And of course, the second part, the most important part too,

that the death camps, all of those were on Polish soil.

So they were out of the immediate frame of sight

or reference of the Germans.

So again, in some way, they were happening elsewhere

and not really in their immediate field of vision.

Hitler is always mindful of public opinion.

I think that it's always important to remember that Hitler,

you know, does always worry about

what the German people think about him.

He doesn't just sort of seize power in 33 and then not care.

You know, he wants to be liked, he wants to be popular.

He's a political leader after all.

And all political leaders,

democratic, or fascist or otherwise, want to be liked.

However, Hitler and the Nazis

were not entirely immune to the consequences

of their dark agenda.

Feelings of disillusionment and disgust

built up amongst certain individuals.

And by 1944,

Hitler faced the biggest threat to his life yet.

Out of Hitler's Nazi regime,

spilled not only a drive to preserve

the country's economy and global status,

Nazism also meant the annihilation of Germany's enemies.

And in 1935, the creation of the Nuremberg Laws

set its sites firmly on the most hated group in Germany,

the Jews.

So we know that from as early as

Hitler's writings in "Mein Kampf,"

that he was personally antisemitic.

So we see his personal antisemitism

translated into state policy.

There were many different measures, legal measures

taken against the Jews, and also illegal measures as well.

So very early on,

there was a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.

Very early on too, there was a civil service law,

which essentially threw out Jewish civil servants

from their positions.

The Nuremberg Laws

really put into place some legal parameters

for how the situation would be with Germany's Jews.

But what they did really was to turn

Germany's Jews into second class citizens,

really to take away their equal citizenship rights.

And also to forbid marriage or sexual relations

between Jews and Aryans.

Many citizens bought into the ideology

that the very presence of Jews threatened the German people.

Ordinary people everywhere

began practicing antisemitic views

and encouraging the idea that Jews were an inferior race,

separate to the superior Aryan Germans.

Before long, such poisonous rhetoric

turned into violent action.

And on the 9th of November, 1938,

the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of attacks

across the country.

You suddenly get this thing called Kristallnacht,

the Night of Broken Glass in 1938,

where the Nazis just literally set fire

to synagogues everywhere.

The world really noticed Kristallnacht,

you know, this absolutely horrific

destruction, slaughter, violence

carried out by the state against its own people.

It showed the world what Hitler was.

He was effectively a gangster and a murderer.

The violence was supposed to look

like an unplanned outburst of popular anger against Jews.

But in reality,

Kristallnacht state-sponsored vandalism and arson.

Nazi leaders actively coordinated it

with Adolf Hitler's support.

There's no doubt about the centrality

of antisemitism to Hitler's worldview.

There's absolutely no doubt about that.

But what he seemed to be trying to do

was sort of stay in the shadow

so that when we get a pogrom like this,

that the public, the German public and the population

were quite affronted by it.

Maybe not because they particularly supported the Jews,

but because it was a kind of a sort of flagrant violation

of law and order and sort of

a kind of very violent, violent affair across the land.

So, you know, it wasn't popular in that respect.

So there's that idea then

that Hitler was sort of staying in the shadows

and not being associated with that.

I think he managed to maintain his popularity

during this time,

first of all, because he was staying in the shadows

of more unpopular policies.

And there was certainly that sentiment

among the German population

because of this myth that surrounded the führer,

that well, if there were unpleasant things going on

or policies that they didn't like,

then somehow that Hitler couldn't know about it,

that he wasn't associated with it,

that it had to be one of the other leaders.

Universal approval of the violent pogroms

was not a reality for Hitler.

In fact, opposition lurked in unexpected places

and arose from unexpected individuals.

Major general Henning von Tresckow

absolutely despised the Nuremberg Laws

and the violent Kristallnacht attacks.

From as early as the 1930s,

the Nazi officer had been plotting Hitler's overthrow

and gathering a trusted circle of people

to assassinate the Führer.

Tresckow's disgust towards extreme antisemitism,

consequently spurred him on to become a key architect

of Operation Valkyrie.

Meanwhile, at the graveyard attached to the institution,

bodies are exhumed for autopsy.

20,000 are buried here,

15,000 who died in a lethal gas chamber

were cremated and their ashes in turd.

Death books found hidden in the wine cellar

of the Hadamar institution revealed part of the story

of the mass killings.

The bulky volumes contained thousands of death certificates.

Profession unknown, nationality unknown

was written after each name.

Feelings of disenchantment, however,

did not halt with Hitler's anti-Jewish policies.

In 1939, one of the darkest programs of the Nazi regime

came into existence.

Aktion T4.

Where Hitler's popularity starts to take a real dent

is his association,

or the Nazi association with what is called the T4 program.

Now, the T4 program

is named after the address in which it was headquartered,

Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin.

And it really was the most repellent form

of kind of Nazi quote unquote "medicine"

that you could imagine.

Because it was this idea

that you have to treat a people as a body.

But what if you've got part of your body as a population

that is considered to be weak,

i.e. sort of cancerous or deformed,

or has hereditary illnesses?

Well, why don't you just chop them off as well?

Because if you can get rid of them,

i.e. people with congenital problems,

you are gonna stop those bad genes being passed on.

And that's essentially what the T4 program is.

It is basically chopping people out of life.

You're killing them.

You're killing children with epilepsy.

You're killing people who've got mild spinal deformities.

You're killing people who've even got stutters

because you are saying they're genetically weak

and we don't want them,

if we're gonna make this strong, blonde Aryan race

full of perfect super humans.

It's kind of pseudo medicine, it's pseudoscience.

The unlawful system of mass murder,

outraged many German citizens,

particularly Protestants and Catholics,

who led protests against the exterminations.

Relatives of patients everywhere frantically panicked

with many, withdrawing their relatives

from asylums to care for them at home.

In some places, doctors and psychiatrists

also cooperated with families

to have patients discharged or transferred

to private clinics beyond the reach of T4

Führer Chancellery Director Phillip Bouhler

and physician Karl Brandt led the killing operation.

Under their leadership, T4 operatives established

six gassing installations for adults

as part of the euthanasia action.

For every person killed, a death certificate was prepared,

giving a false, but plausible cause of death

to hide the evil reality.

Hitler publicly canceled the program in 1941

after outcry from the German people.

However, the killings in fact, continued

until the end of the war.

By 1945, the Nazis had callously murdered

as many as 300,000 innocent people.

The T4 euthanasia program

represented in many ways a rehearsal

for Nazi Germany's subsequent genocidal policies.

Planners of the final solution

later borrowed the gas chamber method

to eradicate the Jewish and Roma populations

on a scale never before seen in history.

Two years into the largest conflict in history,

Adolf Hitler devised his riskiest move yet,

Operation Barbarossa

Hitler despised Bolshevism and Stalin's regime.

Intent on wiping out the Soviet Union,

he ordered Nazi troops to invade Russian occupied territory

on the 22nd of June, 1941.

Hitler had assured the high command

that we have only to kick in the front door,

and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling down.

But Russia was not France.

Despite the serious losses inflicted on the Red Army

and extensive territorial gains,

the mission to completely destroy Soviet fighting power

was not achieved.

The Soviets were not going to go down easily.

Had Hitler stopped

after he'd successfully conquered France

and the low countries,

and not decided in June, 1941

that he was going to invade

this really quite big country called Russia,

he may have stayed in power.

But of course, what Stalin's got

is a lot of room to fight him,

because he can retreat and retreat and retreat and retreat,

and you've still got thousands of miles of Russia behind you

that you can fall back on.

But also what Stalin does is he's very good at regrouping

and getting his forces back together.

Germans use a lot of overdesigned tanks,

overdesigned uniforms, overdesigned weapons.

What the Russians are good at doing is

just getting things together in a kind of makeshift way.

But that works.

You know, everything Russians have,

uniforms, tanks, weaponry,

really simple, really easy to use,

really easy to mass produce very, very quickly.

German kit takes ages to produce.

So this is another real problem that's faced by the Germans.

1942 would be an even worse year

for Hitler's fight in the East.

The Führer hoped to take

the strategic city of Stalingrad easily,

but the well-armed Red Army and the fierce Russian winter

made German soldiers' lives absolute hell.

By mid-November,

the Germans found themselves outnumbered, outgunned,

extremely low on food and medical supplies,

and surrounded by Russians.

But Hitler refused to withdraw troops.

He placed prestige over lives and commanded

they hold their positions to the last man

and the last round.

He also promised additional provisions,

provisions that never arrived.

So when the tide of the war turned in 1943

with a battle of Stalingrad

and then the fortunes went the other way,

then that sort of question of the infallibility

of the Führer came to be called into question.

So whilst by this point after Stalingrad,

the cult of the leader was diminished somewhat,

he'd created this myth of the Soviet hordes

and this great Soviet enemy to such an extent

that out of fear and out of desperation,

both the army and the home front

really worked until the bitter end before capitulation.

Left with little choice,

German general Friedrich Paulus went against Hitler's orders

and surrendered his weakened troops to Russia

on February the 2nd 1943,

an act which Hitler later called "treason."

The heavy defeat, punctured the Führer's power in Europe,

and a lurking feeling of disenchantment

spread throughout the German army.

Stalingrad soon became a major catalyst

for conspirators across the Third Reich

to join the plot to kill Hitler.

Claus von Stauffenberg was no exception.

He had witnessed firsthand the absolute catastrophe

on the eastern front

and became convinced that Hitler had to be removed.

Stauffenberg was born into an aristocratic family.

Despite joining the Wehrmacht,

he, like many elites,

tended to view the Nazis with this taste.

However, it would not just be a class issue

that persuaded Stauffenberg

to turn away from his divine leader.

His time on the Eastern front opened his eyes

to the mass murder of Jews and Slavs.

Outraged, the young officer openly stated,

"They are shooting Jews in masses.

These crimes must not be allowed to continue."

As well as places like Auschwitz,

which were relatively easy to keep quite secret,

what people also knew about from troops

returning from the front,

and especially from the Eastern front,

was the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads

that went behind the German lines,

killing anybody they regarded as

being an enemy of the Third Reich,

such as Jews and communists and so on.

And the Einsatzgruppen killed millions of people,

and it was impossible to keep that quiet.

Stauffenberg became so vocal in his criticism,

his officers decided that he should be posted to Tunisia,

a move which would end with Stauffenberg

losing his left eye, his right hand, and two fingers

in a surprise attack by American fighter aircraft.

Stauffenberg's life-changing injuries

did not hinder his mission

to rid Germany of its ruthless dictator.

Instead, his fate placed him in an even better position

to implement the plot,

right at the heart of Berlin.

In September, 1943,

Stauffenberg was posted to the headquarters

of the replacement army on the Bendlerstrasse.

Here he would be introduced to two key conspirators,

Major General Henning von Tresckow,

and General Friedrich Olbricht.

The tide of the war was now turning against Germany.

The trio had to move first to implement the plot.

We shall defend our island,

whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on beaches, landing grounds,

in fields, in streets, and on the hills.

We shall never surrender.

Olbricht put forward a new strategy

for staging a coup against Hitler.

The replacement Army had an operational plan called

Operation Valkyrie

to be used in the event of a breakdown of law and order.

Valkyrie was the perfect way to mobilize the reserve army

during the takeover.

Tresckow and Stauffenberg worked tirelessly

to modify Valkyrie

and at the same time remain undiscovered.

The pair drafted plans to occupy German cities,

take control of Heinrich Himmler's SS and Gestapo,

and even arrest the Nazi leadership.

The plotters finalized every tiny detail,

even devising a whole new government structure,

following takeover.

General Ludwig Beck would be placed as head of state,

the long-term resistor Dr. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler

would become Germany's new chancellor.

Tresckow would take control of all German security services,

and either Olbricht or Stauffenberg

would serve as state secretary.

The only question that remained was how to kill Hitler.

There were lots of plots to kill Hitler,

and he survived so many

that it made Hitler feel

that he really did have this

kind of divine providence behind him

that made him survive.

But actually, the most kind of celebrated plot

against him was the July Bomb Plot of July, 1944,

in which you've got this kind of cadre

of senior officers all over the Third Reich

who've been meeting in secret for many years actually,

what they wanna do is to get rid of Hitler.

And they don't want to get rid of Hitler because he's evil,

that may be part of it,

they want to get rid of Hitler

because they think he's fighting the war badly,

and they just are fed up with him.

And indeed Hitler is fighting the war badly

'cause he's a terrible, terrible strategist.

The conspirators considered poisoning his food

and even shooting the Führer at a dinner party.

But by late 1943,

Hitler had become increasingly paranoid and suspicious,

often abruptly changing plans or tightening access.

In the end, a time bomb was the only option.

At the time of planning,

none of the conspirators had direct access to Adolf Hitler.

However, in 1944, everything changed for Stauffenberg.

General Friedrich Fromm,

the commander of the replacement Army,

appointed Stauffenberg as his chief of staff.

Fromm was the only officer other than Hitler

who could initiate Operation Valkyrie with his signature.

Aware of his subordinate's plan,

he made a deal to remain quiet

on the condition that he became a top official

in the new government after the mutiny.

The plan was coming into place,

and Stauffenberg was now in a position

where he could see Hitler on a regular basis.

Of all the conspirators,

he was the best placed to become the assassin.

Time was ticking.

Certain defeat in the war closed in,

and the coup needed to take place soon

to save Germany from total destruction.

The Army had posted Tresckow to the eastern front

and the original assassin, General Hellmuth Stieff

had backed down from the plan.

Stauffenberg took total control of the resistance,

but in doing so,

he placed himself as both the assassin and the commander

of the Valkyrie Operation in Berlin.

Hidden away in the dark shadows of the Masurian woods,

Hitler was gathering his most trusted offices

for a military conference at the Wolfsschanze.

It was the 20th of July, 1944,

and Stauffenberg found himself

in the Eastern front headquarters,

alongside his aide, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften.

Briefcase in hand,

the Colonel now had the perfect opportunity to plant a bomb

that could change the course of history forever.

So on 20th of July, 1944, everything's in place.

You've got people in Berlin ready to take over the SS.

You've got various army units all over the Third Reich,

ready to go, the drop of the code word "Valkyrie,"

which is gonna say that Hitler's being killed.

However,

the summer sun had reared its brutal head.

The atmosphere was intense and uncomfortable.

And irritated by the heat,

Hitler moved the meeting from the Führerbunker

to a wooden hut.

At 12:30pm, Stauffenberg excused himself to a nearby room,

claiming he needed to change his shirt.

But in reality, the pair began fussing the first bomb.

A guard knocked at the door,

urging the colonel to hurry.

Haeften and Stauffenberg panicked.

The Führer was waiting

and no time remained to fuse the second bomb,

one bomb would have to do.

As the seconds slipped away,

Stauffenberg swiftly excused himself

under the pretext of making a phone call.

But unbeknownst to the would-be assassin,

Colonel Heinz Brandt positioned next to Hitler,

inadvertently collided with the briefcase,

deftly nudging it behind a table leg.

The fate of Europe now hung in the balance.

At 12:42pm, the bomb detonated.

Shock waves reverberated through the Wolfsschanze.

Stauffenberg and Haeften quickly escaped

driving to a nearby airfield

to return to Berlin and finish the job.

The hopes of resistance crumbled as the aftermath unfolded.

Stauffenberg, Olbricht, and Ludwig Beck

rushed to commandeer various government buildings

and arrested general Fromm for refusal to cooperate

until Hitler's death had been confirmed.

But soon came the news they had been fearing.

Hitler was, in fact, very much alive.

As it happened, the furniture took most of the blast,

and Hitler got away with just very superficial injuries.

And put into place straight away,

the capture, the arrest, and then the execution

of all of those who were involved in that bomb plot.

Had the bomb found its place to Hitler's left,

had the meeting unfolded in the Führerbunker,

and had Stauffenberg triggered both devices,

the assassination success would've seemed inevitable.

Yet fate intervened.

Hitler emerged with only limited injuries,

sheltered by a table leg

that absorbed the brunt of the blast.

The plan had faltered, the tables had turned.

The dream of a world without Hitler

slipped through the grasp of those who dared to defy.

Furious and humiliated,

Hitler ordered commanding officer Otto Ernst Remer

to arrest the conspirators and bring them to him alive.

But a bitter general Fromm had other ideas.

To hide his involvement

from ordered immediate court martials,

the conspirators now faced swift and brutal reprisals

for their bold attempt to alter the course of history.

Ludwig Beck asked for a pistol and shot himself,

the first of many suicide attempts in the coming days.

At 00:10 hours on the 21st of July, 1944,

Colonel von Stauffenberg, General Friedrich Olbricht,

Lieutenant Werner von Haeften

and another officer, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim

were killed by firing squad in the Bendlerblock courtyard.

On the eastern front, Tresckow learned of the plotters fate

and committed suicide.

Until the end, he remained loyal to the cause.

The plot to kill Hitler was well and truly over.

The 20th of July, plot

serves as a testament to the bravery of those

who dared to stand against a ruthless regime.

Even in the face of almost insurmountable odds.

If the plan had succeeded,

it would've undoubtedly shortened the war by many months

and saved countless lives.

However, Hitler's days were still numbered,

and he would face the looming shadow of death

sooner rather than later.

The Russians move steadily from the East

whilst the western allies crossed the Rhineland.

By April, 1945, 3 million Soviet troops

dealt brutal blows to the last traces

of the German resistance.

With the Russians at the gates to Berlin,

Adolf Hitler had nowhere to run.

The first half of 1945 is probably

the darkest six months in Germany's history

because it being invaded by

the Russians, the Red Army from the East,

and you've got the other allies

coming through from the west.

And it's the Russians who reach Berlin first,

and when they reach Berlin,

it's a city in rubble, it's a city in flames,

it's a city in chaos.

It's a city in which

squads of marauding loyal Nazis

are going around hanging people

who are not taking part in the resistance to the city.

It's a city in which

you then got some Nazis committing suicide.

It is the most benighted, appalling place you can imagine.

And you've got the Soviet army

literally raping and pillaging this city.

Towards the end of the war, of course,

Hitler was spending more and more time

in his mountain retreat, The Berghof.

And then people were seeing less of him.

He was making less and less public appearances.

And then eventually, in the last months of the war,

into the Führerbunker.

And this is when public opinion of the Führer

starts to crumble.

Hitler's last days in the Führerbunker

under the Reich Chancellery in center of Berlin,

are kind of terrible end of a Shakespearean tragedy.

As the thunder Russian artillery all around them

and they're deep, deep inside this

sort of concrete underground fortress.

Everybody's sort of kind of going mad and especially Hitler.

On April the 30th,

he committed suicide in his bunker

as the city at the heart of his thousandth year Reich

burned to the ground and crumbled in ruins around him.

The war in Europe ended forever on May the 7th, 1945,

and Hitler's rule was finally over.

The question of how much the Germans knew

about what had happened to the Jewish population

is very complex.

So certainly they knew

that their Jewish compatriots were disappearing,

being taken away.

They were being taken away they believed

as indeed some of the Jewish people themselves believed,

they were taken away to work in the East.

During the war, word leaked out

from people who had escaped some camps.

There were aerial pictures taken of places like Auschwitz.

So, you know, by the middle of the war,

the world at large had a very good idea

that this slaughter was being carried out

on an industrial scale.

Yes, some rumors did circulate back

from soldiers on leave,

and other information did filter back to the Reich.

But the German population was busy with facing its own war,

dealing on a day-to-day basis with the course of the war,

allied bombings, rationing, food shortages.

There was a deliberate policy on the part of the Nazis

that this extermination should take place,

not on German soil so these death camps were all in Poland,

so they were outta the direct line of vision

of the German population.

When the Germans fully appreciated

what had been done in their name by the Nazis,

it took a very long time for that to sink in.

If you look at public opinion polls carried out

in the 40s and the 50s in Germany,

there was still a lot of residual affection for Nazism.

It was felt that this was something

that had made Germany great again.

It was something that had got things moving and done.

Yes, there had been excesses,

the small matter of the Holocaust clearly.

But people, some people in Germany were willing just to say,

if we can divorce the kind of genocide bit from Nazism,

you know, is Nazism so bad?

Minority of Germans were still

affectionate towards Nazism and towards Hitler.

The tyrannical force of Nazi Germany

sent the world into chaos.

An empire of hate, violence, and discrimination

had spread across the world like a virus.

The atrocities of the Nazi regime

came to popular attention.

Both the Western and the Soviet forces

came to liberate the Nazi camps,

and they were absolutely shocked and horrified

with what they found.

And once that became known to the German people as well,

then they were again absolutely horrified and appalled

about what had been carried out in their name

by the Hitler dictatorship.

Hitler's rule left a mark on history,

a reminder that this behavior should never be tolerated

and the world should not dismiss

such brutal atrocities again.

Certainly there are a lot of reasons

why you might have voted for Hitler in the 30s,

not all of which involved you being evil.

But certainly if you are a fan of Hitler

after the war still,

and after all the revelations that have come out,

then I would say you definitely are evil.

Today the Valkyrie conspirators

are memorialized as heroes,

even inscribed into the very geography of Germany

through street names.

A reminder that in times of darkness,

there will always be those brave enough to fight evil

even from the inside.

German guns.

German bombs.