Original subtitles

Powell: Adolf Hitler caused the deaths of 50 million people.

An entire nation followed him to ruin.

He was hated by those he persecuted

and even by some of his own commanders,

yet, in 25 years, no one managed to kill him.

Winston Churchill had very few bodyguards,

whilst Hitler had thousands.

He needed them.

During his travels across Europe,

there were over 40 attempts on his life.

Now, with access to captured original SS records,

the producers of "Churchill's Bodyguard"

can reveal for the first time, in this new series,

how fate and a small number of hand-picked bodyguards

helped this evil genius to cheat death

on so many occasions.

Why did no one manage to kill Adolf Hitler?

Enough people wanted to.

But as this series shows,

it was not as simple as it sounds.

Even when an attempt was meticulously planned

and the plotters had access to the dictator's

innermost sanctum, luck played a crucial role.

On July 14, 1944, Hitler flew into

the Wolf's Lair at Rastenburg.

He was just days away

from the most dangerous attempt on his life.

The Wolfsschanze was the most famous

of Hitler's military headquarters.

The location in East Prussia, now Poland,

was specially selected by Hitler because it was

surrounded by forest and marshes --

a perfect wilderness area to hide a military headquarters.

Hundreds of heavily armed bodyguards and elite troops

patrolled the perimeter.

Massive concrete bunkers,

whose remains can still be seen today,

protected Hitler from bombing raids.

Yet it was not an enemy from the outside

that came closest to killing the Fuhrer,

but a trusted member from within his own ranks.

That was the only way Hitler could be cornered

in his Wolf's Lair.

Work first started on Hitler's ultimate stronghold

in the autumn of 1940.

During the Blitzkrieg

in France, Hitler had used temporary HQs.

But even while the battle

to subdue Britain was at its height,

he was looking ahead.

The defining struggle of the Third Reich would be

with the Soviet Union, and the Fuhrer

needed a permanent base in the east.

Hitler's top construction expert was 49-year-old Fritz Todt.

A former pilot in World War I,

he oversaw Hitler's biggest building projects,

including the massive Westwall, or Siegfried Line,

on the border with France.

Todt visited the chosen site in November 1940.

Because of the nearby swamps

and the high level of water beneath the soil,

he ascertained that bunkers

could not be sunk beneath the ground.

But the surrounding forest did afford excellent cover.

When laborers started to clear the area,

artificial trees were erected,

along with camouflage netting, to ensure that no enemy

aerial photography could capture

signs of work.

The building site was given the code-name

of Askania Chemical Works.

This explained the need for the construction

of roads and a railway line.

Barracks for the bodyguard were built,

and, in an inner sanctum,

brick and concrete bunkers for Hitler and his generals.

As the headquarters rose out of the wilderness,

preparations for Operation Barbarossa,

the invasion of the Soviet Union,

were underway.

A titanic force of three million men

was armed and transported to the east.

Then, three great thrusts

plunged deep into the Soviet Union.

On June 22, 1941,

just two days after launching Operation Barbarossa,

the Fuhrer arrived at his new Wolf's Lair

by train from Berlin.

[Crowd cheering ]

Hitler chose the name of his headquarters

because early in his political career,

Herr Wolf had been his secret name for hiding from the police.

He was delighted when real wolves

were spotted in the vicinity of the headquarters.

He identified closely with the predatory beasts.

The Wolf's Lair became Hitler's

main military headquarters for the next four years.

He spent months on end inside the dingy bunkers,

staring at maps and shouting at his generals

when they brought him bad news.

His rooms were air-conditioned,

but the fetid swamp air was humid.

The noise of the ventilation system constantly annoyed him.

Man: "I feel like a prisoner in these bunkers.

"I need space to think.

"When I was young, I dreamed of vast, open spaces.

"Here, I have to pace around the card room

to get some ideas."

Powell: The Wolf's Lair was the most highly protected

of all his headquarters.

More of his bodyguards were concentrated there

than anywhere else.

A security zone

stretching several miles around it

was patrolled by the troops

of the army's Fuhrer Begleit Battalion.

The 2 1/2 square-mile main complex

was surrounded with a minefield

and a formidable barbed-wire fence.

A road and railway line ran east-west through this,

with a checkpoint at each end.

And another road ran south through a checkpoint

towards the airfield, about three miles away.

Inside this outer fence were two more security zones,

each with barbed-wire fences and checkpoints.

The first, also on both sides of the railway,

contained the barracks and living quarters

for the Begleit Battalion and HQ staff.

The second, concentrated north of the railway,

was Hitler's inner zone,

with his briefing hut, bunker, and accommodation

for his top military commanders and adjutants.

Within this inner zone,

the Begleitkommando and RSD bodyguards were

responsible for the Fuhrer’s personal protection.

One of their major security problems

was that there was always building work

going on at the Wolf's Lair --

new offices and accommodation for the increasing numbers

of people stationed there.

And then, at the beginning of 1944,

a major new building program began to convert

the brick-and-concrete bunkers of the Fuhrer and his elite

into massive concrete-and-steel shelters.

The original bunkers were covered with

a four-meter thick shell of steel and concrete,

and Hitler insisted on a three-meter thick

layer of gravel between the layers of concrete

to absorb any bomb blasts.

These new bunkers were completely windowless,

and Otto Gunsche, Hitler's personal adjutant,

who had been one of the early SS Begleitkommando bodyguards,

describes how claustrophobic they felt.

Man: "it was a real maze inside the bunker.

"You reached the rooms by passing through air locks

"in the corridor.

"They were sealed by armor-plated doors.

"The corridors zigzagged all the way

"to Hitler's office and bedroom.

"Pipes brought in oxygen from the outside

"because Hitler didn't want the oxygen tanks

inside the bunker in case they exploded."

Powell: Inside these rings of bodyguards and fortifications,

Hitler should have felt secure.

But while the outer defenses of Hitler's HQ

seemed impossible to penetrate,

and his bodyguard screened everyone

entering the Wolf's Lair to work,

it was from within his most-trusted inner circle

that Hitler had most to fear.

There was one danger which obsessed Hitler all the time

he was at the Wolf's Lair and which he continually

urged his bodyguard to be on its guard against --

an assault from the air.

He had only himself to blame, for he had been the first

to come up with the idea of attacking

a seemingly impregnable fortress from above.

At Eben-Emael, on the Belgian border,

concrete-and-steel gun emplacements

could defeat any land-based assault.

But in May 1940, Hitler sent in

his elite paratroopers in gliders.

Landing on top of the shelters, they blasted them open

with explosives.

It was a terrifying demonstration

of how a surprise air attack

could overcome an impregnable fortress,

and Hitler never forgot it.

At the Wolf's Lair,

anti-aircraft guns were installed

all round the complex

to defeat just such an airborne assault.

Camouflage was an important part of the air defenses.

Roofs of bunkers were painted in camouflage schemes,

while netting with Bakelite leaves covered most buildings.

The fake leaves were changed to suit the different seasons.

But by 1944, another sort of aerial attack

had begun to haunt Hitler -- a raid, using the long-range

heavy bombers the Allies were developing.

In 1943, US and British bombers mounted raids

which damaged the massive concrete

U-boat pens at French ports on the Atlantic coast.

The brick-and-concrete bunkers at the Wolf's Lair

could not withstand such attacks,

and in February 1944, a building program began

to encase them entirely in thick steel and concrete.

Whether these new bunkers

would have kept Hitler safe from the massive

deep-penetration Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs

which the British were now developing will never be known,

because the Allies never chose to attack the Wolf's Lair.

Although everything had been done

to disguise Hitler's HQ from the air,

the Allies certainly knew exactly where it was.

By the spring of 1944, Allen Dulles,

the US spymaster in Switzerland,

had passed on precise details of its location.

And this is confirmed by a message

from General Eisenhower’s headquarters,

recently uncovered

in the British National Archives in London.

Dated October 7, 1944,

this refers to information pinpointing the Wolf's Lair

found on a dead German officer.

So if the Allies knew the exact location of the Wolf's Lair,

why didn't they bomb it and kill Hitler?

The cynical answer is that by this stage of the war,

many Allied commanders considered Hitler

more useful alive than dead.

His military judgment had deserted him

and he was driving his troops to defeat.

As a result, no serious Allied air raid

was launched against the Wolf's Lair.

Instead, the declining situation for Germany meant that

Hitler's own generals were far keener on seeing him dead.

With him out of the way, they hoped to reach

some kind of agreement with the Allies

before their country was obliterated.

1943 was the year of disasters for Hitler.

At Stalingrad, an entire German army surrendered to the Soviets.

During the summer of 1943, Hitler tried

to regain the offensive.

But as Nazi and Soviet armies clashed

on the battlefield near Kursk,

it was the Germans that were outfought.

By the early months of 1944, Soviet forces were

advancing on a broad front

across the Ukraine towards Eastern Europe.

This redoubled Hitler's fear

that a division of Soviet paratroops

might be dropped on the Wolf's Lair.

He practiced throwing hand grenades

and carried a Walther PPK pistol in a secret pocket.

But he and his bodyguard were obsessed by the wrong threat.

The enemy was already within the gate,

and only one thing

was holding it back.

Many German officers

who now wanted Hitler gone were grappling with

a crisis of conscience.

[Speaking German]

From 1934, every member

of the armed forces had had to swear

a personal oath to defend and obey Adolf Hitler.

And most, like Luftwaffe Captain Karl Boehm-Tettelbach,

took this extremely seriously.

[Speaking German]

This accompanied my whole life till the very end.

I mean, oath is oath.

There is no doubt that I can't break the oath,

or otherwise I would commit suicide

if I planned something else.

But this is very serious, the oath for a soldier.

Powell: But by 1943, some officers had concluded

that the behavior of Hitler and the Nazis

absolved them from their oath.

Highly-decorated veterans

like Captain Axel von dem Bussche-Streithorst

were driven not just by concern that Hitler

was leading their nation to a catastrophic defeat,

but because they were appalled and disgusted

by the crimes being committed on the Eastern Front.

[Gunfire]

Von dem Bussche witnessed

a mass execution of Jews in the Ukraine.

SS soldiers forced them into a pit and shot them

at pointblank range -- 5,000 in one day.

Bussche was sickened by the slaughter

and later said that he wished he'd gone with the Jews

and died with them.

By January 1944,

he was ready to turn himself into a suicide bomber.

Chosen to demonstrate new uniforms

and weapons to Hitler at the Wolf's Lair,

von dem Bussche planned to trigger a grenade in his pocket.

He would then grab Hitler

and let the bomb blow them both to pieces.

Once again, Hitler's uncanny luck saved him.

The display was canceled.

Bussche returned to the battlefront,

where he lost a leg in action.

But Bussche was only one isolated example

of a growing feeling that Hitler must be disposed of.

There were other forces moving to kill him,

and soon these would carry out

the single most deadly attempt to assassinate him.

It would occur during the period when the bunkers

at the Wolf's Lair were being rebuilt, and the influx

of hundreds of laborers had put Hitler's bodyguard's

security arrangements under particular strain.

But it would not be outsiders who would be responsible,

and once again, it would be Hitler's luck

that would save him.

The Wolf's Lair, July 20, 1944 --

senior officers gathered at the temporary

wooden conference hut being used for briefings

while the usual building was bomb-proofed.

At 12:25 PM, Hitler arrived.

He ordered the windows of the hut to be opened

because of the summer heat.

Inside, the officers gathered around a long oak map-table.

Hitler leaned across it to study the maps.

On his left were Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,

Chief of the Armed Forces High Command,

General Alfred Jodl, Army Chief of Staff,

and his deputy, Walter Warlimont

On his right were General Adolf Heusinger,

chief of army operations,

his chief of staff, Colonel Heinz Brandt,

and Luftwaffe General Gunther Korten.

General Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler's chief adjutant,

stood at the right-hand end of the table,

alongside stenographer Heinrich Berger.

Another officer was ushered in --

the chief of staff of the Reinforcement Army,

a distinguished combat veteran

who had lost an arm and an eye --

37-year-old Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg moved in between Heusinger and Brandt

to Hitler's right and placed his briefcase

against the solid wooden table leg

about six feet away from the Führer.

General Heusinger continued with the briefing.

Then Stauffenberg said that he must make a telephone call

and left the room.

He left his briefcase behind.

As he moved back, Brandt moved it

to the other side of the table leg from Hitler.

At 12:40 PM,

as Stauffenberg walked towards his staff car,

the conference hut exploded behind him.

Hitler was blown backwards but survived.

Those to his left --

Keitel, Jodl, and Warlimont --

were only slightly injured,

as was General Heusinger on his immediate right.

But those further down the table on the right --

Colonel Brandt, the man who had moved the briefcase,

Korten, Schmundt, and Berger --

all died immediately or shortly afterwards.

Many years later, in 1963,

General Warlimont described the scene.

Warlimont: Hitler was lying on the big, oaken conference table

with almost the whole of his length when the bomb exploded.

I myself must have blacked out,

though only for a fraction of a second.

When I came round again, I saw --

my first look naturally went to Hitler --

that he turned away from the conference table

and went to the door right behind him,

supported by Field Marshal Keitel.

He of course looked somewhat worried,

but didn't speak a word,

and apart from that,

I remember that his hair was somewhat on fire

and particularly that his trousers were stripped

almost in the whole length from foot to hip.

Powell: Immediately, everyone blamed the foreign laborers

working on the site, but Hitler wasn't so sure.

What was certain was that he had survived

his closest assassination attempt ever,

and that yet again,

his survival was down to pure chance,

not the actions of his bodyguard.

Colonel Brandt's action in moving the briefcase

to the opposite side of the heavy wooden table leg

meant that this had deflected much of the blast.

The open windows of the conference hut,

plus its flimsy construction,

had diffused the blast of the explosion.

If the bomb had exploded inside Hitler's usual concrete bunker,

everyone would have been torn apart by the shock wave.

Apart from splinters in his legs,

perforated eardrums, and a sprained right arm,

Hitler was unscathed.

By that afternoon, he was well enough to greet

the deposed Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.

As Hitler showed him the shattered conference hut,

he crowed,

"More proof that fate has selected me for my mission,"

and claimed that he was immortal.

Within minutes of the explosion,

all checkpoints were alerted, and the Begleit Battalion

sealed off the area.

A communications blackout was imposed,

and Begleitkommando and RSD bodyguards

searched for further bombs.

But Stauffenberg and his assistant,

Werner von Haeften,

had already got past two checkpoints.

At the first barrier, the guards had heard the explosion,

but Stauffenberg showed them valid passes

and was allowed through.

At the second barrier,

Stauffenberg's car was halted, but he got out

and telephoned one of the headquarters' officers,

who then gave him permission to proceed.

From there, Stauffehberg's car drove through the Gorlitz forest

to Rastenburg airfield.

By 1:15 PM, it was reported that

Stauffenberg and Haeften had flown to Berlin.

And by mid-afternoon, events in Berlin made it clear

that the bomb had been part of a wider coup attempt.

Stauffenberg re-appeared at the War Ministry

in the Bendlerstrasse.

His boss, General Friedrich Fromm,

the commander of the Reinforcement Army,

who had known of the coup attempt but refused to join it

until Hitler was dead, was detained,

while his deputy, General Friedrich Olbricht,

proclaimed a state of emergency with the code-word Valkyrie.

Key points in the capital were to be seized by soldiers,

supposedly to guard against a revolt by thousands

of slave workers.

32-year-old Major Otto Remer,

commander of the elite Grossdeutschland Regiment,

was told to seal off the government quarter

around the Wilhelmstrasse,

including the Propaganda Ministry,

and to take Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels into custody.

[Speaking German]

Remer was an ardent Nazi.

The orders didn't quite convince him.

He refused to believe that Hitler was dead.

Goebbels didn't believe it, either.

He managed to get through to the Wolf's Lair

and spoke to the Führer.

He then handed the receiver to Remer, who heard Hitler's voice.

[Speaking German]

Man: "Major Remer, can you hear me?

"Do you recognize my voice?

"They tried to kill me, but I am alive.

You are to restore order in Berlin for me."

Powell: With his crack troops behind him,

Remer turned the Propaganda Ministry into a command post.

He informed all military units in Berlin

they were under his control.

Goebbels then broadcast the news that Hitler had survived

an assassination attempt.

Confirmation that Hitler was still alive

and part of the army had remained loyal to him

completely undercut the coup attempt.

As his fellow conspirator, Hans Gisevius, later described,

Stauffenberg worked heroically to rally supporters.

Gisevius: I saw him as he arrived,

and it was a performance you will never forget in your life.

He rushed from one room to the other,

and you heard the telephones ring.

There was a permanent ringing from Paris,

from Königsberg, from Vienna, wherever you like.

Powell: But realizing the coup

was all but over and the War Ministry surrounded

by troops loyal to Hitler, Fromm jumped off the fence

and turned on von Stauffenberg and other key plotters.

They were arrested,

and Fromm summarily condemned them to death.

At around midnight, Stauffenberg, Olbricht,

Haeften, and Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim

were marched into the Ministry courtyard and shot.

Just before he died, Stauffenberg shouted,

"Long live our sacred Germany!"

At 1:00 in the morning, Hitler broadcast

from the Wolf's Lair to the German nation.

Man: "My German comrades,

"I am unhurt.

"A small group of ambitious

"and stupid officers

"have tried to eliminate me and my high command.

"Colonel Count Stauffenberg planted a bomb

"right next to me.

"I have some minor bruises and burns.

"The circle of conspirators who tried to kill me

"is small and has nothing in common

"with the wider spirit of the German armed forces.

"It is a criminal gang.

"This affair will be settled in the manner

to which National Socialists are accustomed."

Powell: He meant that blood would flow

throughout the Third Reich.

But when Hitler said it was a small criminal gang,

he was wrong.

As the Nazis dug deeper,

they discovered a level of opposition

that was far wider than had been expected.

War heroes and military men of impeccable reputation

were implicated --

even a former chief of Hitler's bodyguards.

It was profoundly shocking for Hitler,

and would change forever his attitude

to those people around him.

The day after Hitler nearly died

in the bomb blast at the Wolf's Lair,

the arrests began.

The SS was determined to root out

every vestige of opposition to Hitler

inside the German army.

And, in truth,

the extent of the military plotting should have been

no surprise to Hitler's bodyguard.

Over a year earlier,

the Gestapo had begun closing in on the leaders

of the abortive 1938 Generals' Plot

to overthrow Hitler if he ordered

an invasion of Czechoslovakia.

General Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr,

the military intelligence service,

and General Ludwig Beck, the former army chief of staff,

had continued to encourage opposition.

But Hitler's lightning victories in the west

had meant that there was little immediate taste

for direct action.

That all changed with Stalingrad.

Officers on the Eastern Front,

led by General Henning von Tresckow,

the senior operations officer of Army Group Center,

made several attempts to assassinate Hitler,

all of which were thwarted by the Fuhrer's

extraordinary luck.

Tresckow was encouraged both by Oster

and his boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

But in April 1943,

the Gestapo arrested one of Oster's staff

for aiding Jews to escape from Germany.

Oster became a suspect.

He was placed under house arrest

and then banned from associating with the Abwehr.

With Oster and Beck now under constant surveillance,

the leadership of anti-Nazi opposition

had to pass to other hands.

And the most important of these

was a charismatic young colonel,

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg

Stauffenberg was from an old aristocratic family in Swabia.

He had joined the army in 1926

and swiftly been recognized as an exceptionally able officer.

Initially impressed by Hitler's determination

to restore Germany's prestige, Stauffenberg soon became

disillusioned by the Nazis' brutal ideology.

In 1938, he had learnt of the Generals' Plot

to overthrow Hitler, and in 1940,

he was assigned to the General Staff,

working under one of its leaders -- General Franz Halder.

The two men discussed the need to get rid of Hitler

before he led Germany to total ruin.

Like so many other German officers,

it was Stauffenberg's experience of the crimes

being committed on the Eastern Front

that convinced him

that his oath to Hitler

was null and void.

And while recuperating from losing an arm and an eye

after being strafed by Allied aircraft in Tunisia,

he made up his mind to turn

from talk to action.

His opportunity came when, in September 1943,

he was assigned to the staff of General Hans Olbricht,

the deputy head of

the Reinforcement Army in Berlin.

The Reinforcement Army

was responsible for training and supplying

recruits for the fighting forces

and also for maintaining security within Berlin.

Stauffenberg soon discovered that Olbricht

was a senior member of the resistance,

and through him, met all the main conspirators.

He impressed them with his organizational skill,

and soon became the linchpin of a new plot.

The plotters immediately faced a problem --

killing Hitler would not be enough.

To overthrow the Nazi regime, they would need

substantial armed forces to defeat Himmler's SS

and its military arm, the Waffen-SS.

This had grown hugely

from the 120-man bodyguard unit founded in 1933

to guard Hitler's residences

into a parallel army of more than one million men,

ruthless and dedicated to its Fuhrer

and his regime.

Olbricht and Stauffenberg's solution was ingenious --

they would use Operation Valkyrie,

the contingency plan

for the Reinforcement Army to put down a mass uprising

by the hundreds of thousands of foreign slave workers

in and around Berlin.

Once Valkyrie was announced,

thousands of reserve soldiers would move into action

and secure all government and Nazi Party buildings.

The plotters' other major problem

was how to get to Hitler.

He now rarely left the heavily-guarded Wolf's Lair

or his residence at Berchtesgaden.

This was solved on June 1, 1944,

when Stauffenberg was promoted to chief of staff

of General Fromm, the overall commander

of the Reinforcement Army.

Stauffenberg's new position gave him direct access

to conferences with Hitler.

It was ideal.

He also sounded out Fromm about the plot.

Fromm declined to support it openly,

but was not shocked by the idea

and let the plotters get on with it.

Five days later,

the Allied troops stormed ashore in Normandy.

The plotters knew that

they must act quickly if Germany was to have any chance

of negotiating an honorable peace

and avoiding total defeat.

They also knew that the Gestapo

was steadily homing in on them.

Twice during early July,

Stauffenberg traveled to Berchtesgaden

for conferences with Hitler.

On both occasions,

he managed to carry a bomb into the meeting room.

But the plotters had decided

that he should only explode it if Himmler

as well as Hitler was present,

and on both occasions, the SS chief was missing.

The next time would not be at Berchtesgaden,

for unexpectedly, on July 13th,

Hitler decided to move to the Wolf's Lair, even though

the reinforcement of his bunkers had not been completed.

But luck seemed on the side of the plotters.

The next day, General Fromm was ordered

to come with his chief-of-staff

for a conference with Hitler.

On the morning of July 15, 1944,

Stauffenberg and Fromm

flew into the Wolf's Lair

and were photographed being greeted by Hitler.

Stauffenberg was carrying his bomb,

and just before going into the conference,

he phoned Olbricht.

Valkyrie was triggered.

Almost immediately,

the Reinforcement Army began to move into Berlin.

Then Hitler's uncanny luck intervened again.

He cut the meeting short.

Frantic phone calls followed,

and Olbricht was told to call off Valkyrie.

It was a false alarm.

Five days later, it would be for real.

By midnight on July 20, 1944,

Stauffenberg's bomb plot had failed.

Hitler was alive and hungry for revenge.

Stauffenberg and three other leading plotters were executed

in the courtyard of the Ministry of War.

General Beck, who had been the plotter's choice

to succeed Hitler, was allowed to shoot himself.

Fromm, who had turned on Stauffenberg and Olbricht

in an attempt to cover up his knowledge of the plot,

was relieved of his duties and later shot for cowardice.

Over the next few days,

more than 6,000 suspects were arrested,

at least 50 of them officers of the general staff,

including Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben,

who would have become the plotter's army chief.

From August, many were displayed at show-trials

presided over by the notorious judge Roland Freisler.

The once-proud generals

were humiliated by being paraded in civilian clothes.

They were not even allowed belts

to keep up their trousers.

[Man speaking German]

Freisler tried to shout the accused into submission,

but many had their say in court,

even though the verdicts were a foregone conclusion.

Many of the conspirators were hanged at Ploetzensee Prison

in a particularly grisly way --

by thin wire from meat hooks.

The executions were filmed for Hitler's entertainment.

Some sources say that as many as

4,000 people were killed.

It was the biggest purge

in Nazi Germany since the Night of the Long Knives.

The trials dragged on

into the next year,

when an Allied air raid hit the courtroom.

A piece of the building fell on Freisler

and killed him.

Henning von Tresckow, the man behind

so many assassination attempts on Hitler during 1943,

avoided immediate arrest

because he was still serving on the Eastern Front.

But he took a grenade and killed himself.

As the Gestapo

investigated further, Paris emerged as the other

center of the plot.

The German military governor of France,

General Carl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel,

had supported it, and planned to use his troops

to neutralize key SS and Gestapo headquarters in Paris

as soon as Valkyrie was announced.

[Speaking German]

From January 1944, Field Marshal Ervwin Rommel

had commanded the German army in France.

Since his great success in north Africa,

the Desert Fox had been a hero of the Third Reich.

The Stauffenberg conspirators worked hard to get him on board.

The Allied invasion of France

finally convinced him that the war was lost,

and he tacitly joined in.

Rommel indicated in confidence that if Hitler

were assassinated, he would enter into

peace negotiations with the Allies.

Stulpnagel would then order all German troops

to evacuate France and withdraw

to the Siegfried Line in Germany.

But on July 17th, Rommel was severely injured

when his car was shot up by a British fighter.

On the day of the bomb plot,

he was in hospital and played no part in events.

But in Paris, Stulpnagel moved as planned

against the SS and Gestapo, even though the messages

coming through from Berlin

were confused.

By 10:30 PM, his well-organized troops

had imprisoned over 1,000 SS officers.

It was a remarkably effective operation

and showed how successful the coup might have been

all over the Third Reich.

But the news that Hitler was still alive

encouraged forces loyal to the regime.

The next morning, Stulpnagel had to admit defeat.

He attempted suicide,

but only succeeded in blinding himself.

Nursed back to health, he was then executed.

As the Gestapo investigated further into

the French connection with Stauffenberg's plot,

they discovered the most shocking link.

The name of Rommel,

thought to have been the loyalest of the loyal,

kept coming up.

Finally, on October 14th, two SS officers

arrived at Rommel's home in Ulm.

They gave him a choice -- either he could

go on trial for his part in the plot and face disgrace,

or he could commit suicide,

retain his honored position in the Third Reich,

and save his family from retaliation.

Rommel was driven away from his house and took poison.

Even Hitler's favorite general,

and the man who first led his elite bodyguard battalion,

had turned against the Führer.

Nazi propagandists said

he died from his wounds,

and he was given a grandiose funeral.

Gunther von Kluge,

Rommel's successor in France, was also implicated in the plot

and committed suicide when ordered back to Germany.

The plot was a profound blow to Hitler

and led to massive changes to his security.

No one, however senior, was to be trusted again.

Everyone entering his presence was now checked and searched.

Belatedly, his bodyguard at the Wolf's Lair

realized that the real threat was no longer from outside,

but could come from deep within hitherto trusted ranks.

One of the few soldiers Hitler could trust was Otto Remer,

the man who had foiled Operation Valkyrie

because he was convinced that Hitler was not dead.

Remer was now promoted to colonel

and put in charge of the Fuhrer Begleit Regiment,

an expansion of the Fuhrer Begleit Battalion

originally commanded by Rommel.

But even the fanatical loyalty of men like Remer

could not stop the inevitable.

By the beginning of November, the Red Army had reached

the border of East Prussia and was within 80 miles

of the Wolf's Lair.

On the 20th, Hitler left his lair for the last time

and flew to Berlin.

The bunkers of the Wolfsschanze were prepared for demolition.

And in January, just after the Soviets

launched their great offensive

which was to take them to the gates of Berlin,

they were blown up.

Today, the ruins can still be seen deep in the Polish forest.

They remain a monument to the megalomaniac dream

of creating a massive empire in the East

which finally destroyed Hitler's Reich.

And also to the fact that nowhere, however well-guarded,

could the hated dictator be completely secure.

As events showed, even at his favorite personal residence,

the Berghof, in the Bavarian alps,

the place where Hitler should have felt most safe,

he was surprisingly vulnerable, and once again,

the threats would come not just from outside,

but from those he trusted most.

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