On July 20, 1944, in Valkyrie, an assassination campaign was staged against the German Fuehrer, Hitler, and the film "Action Target Hitler" was based on this true event.
The protagonist of this arguably military coup was the famous Count Klaus von Staufenberg, an army colonel who had been seriously wounded on the battlefields of North Africa and had lost an eye and a hand.
Count Klaus von Stauffenberg
Why did a former meritorious general assassinate the head of state? Why was Rommel forced by Hitler to commit suicide by poison, which of the two forces in the German army, the Wehrmacht or the SS, was stronger?
Turning the clock back to the time before the war, the times made heroes, during which Germany produced a large number of excellent generals, such as Manstein, Guderian, and Rommel, etc., but they all had a common identity from the Wehrmacht, and each of them was an old German military aristocrat, known as the Junker aristocracy.
They were different from Hitler's fanatical national sentiments, and as aristocrats who had experienced the glory and decline of Germany before and after the First World War, they wanted more to revive Germany; and the expulsion of the bourgeois government that launched the revolution in World War I, and the restoration of the privileges of the Junker aristocracy in the monarchical era.
Their opposition to the Nazis' policy of genocide and genocide stood in stark contrast to the fanatical politicians and SS leaders who created "terror," such as Manstein, who had developed a series of "European raiders" that never joined the Nazi Party.
It was these non-Nazi generals who made the Wehrmacht suppress the SS in the early days of World War II, the predecessor of the Wehrmacht was the Army of the Prussian period, which generally received military aristocratic education and had its own unique tradition of military autocracy.
Prussia, with its 400-year military tradition, can be said to be the root of life, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once commented: "Prussia cannot be regarded as a country with an army, but should be regarded as an army by the state." ”
It is not difficult to see that the German military aristocracy has always been a powerful and unignorable political force for Germany, they have their own pride and political demands, to some extent, Hitler has never harnessed this force, and they are only cooperative relations, one demands the revival and the other requires the expansion of the national "rise".
Hitler's situation of improving the status of soldiers, reorganizing the war, and coercing Europe was what the nobles who humiliated and defeated in world war I wanted to see, but on the other hand, these soldiers from aristocratic origins looked down on this artistic student who had no title, no education, and no military merit.
Hitler naturally knew that if he did not have a concubine army, then once the war broke out, he would probably be overwhelmed by the highly prestigious aristocrats, so at the beginning of his term of office, he secretly organized a concubine army completely independent of the traditional German army.
This group of people was first the thugs of the Nazi Party, and later it was easy to call the management a "STORM", specifically for the Nazis to do some covert work, from then on to the fire of the Reichstag, there are their figures behind them, by the time the Nazis came to power, the size of the SA has reached 3 million people.
At that time, the military strength of the SA had completely exceeded that of the 100,000-strong German regular army, and Hitler must have wanted to change the bottom-up system of the German army, when the leader of the SA, Röhm, gave a great gift, and the gift was his own life.
Roma
As a Nazi patriarch, Röhm saw that his power was growing, and people began to drift. He openly stated that he wanted to make a second revolution and purge the German army from scratch, so that the armed forces of the Nazi Party and the regular army were formed, and Hitler saw that the paparazzi had broken a big deal, and in order to ease relations with the nobility and ensure the stability of the regime, in June 1934, in front of his subordinates, he personally stabbed Roma.
As a result of the subsequent purges in the Nazi Party, Hitler's relations with the German military elite finally improved, and in 1935 Hitler announced the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and from then on, the original German Army had a new name, the Wehrmacht. Although it expanded by millions of people, its backbone was still the elite aristocracy of the old days.
As aristocrats, they did not agree with nazi ideas, and it can be seen from the military medal that the German navy and air force all have elements of a swastika flag, except that the most important army uses the traditional iron cross as a mark.
At the beginning of World War II, Wehrmacht representatives questioned Hitler's rapid expansion strategy, but the other side was after all the head of state, so in 1936, Germany sent troops to retake the demilitarized zone on the other side of the Rhine, germany annexed Austria in 1938, and in the same year, Hitler signed the Munich Agreement with Britain and France.
In the face of Hitler's smooth actions, the prestige of the country was getting higher and higher, and at this time Hitler was more and more uncomfortable with the Wehrmacht's attitude of "standing and not doing anything, he would pick a mistake", so Hitler began to make a mistake, trying to force away some senior and powerful nobles, such as the wehrmacht leader in 1939- General Fritzsch, because Hitler ordered people to spread that he was homosexual in the army, and had to resign to prove his innocence.
General Fritsch
As an aristocrat, Hitler could not get up with Hitler from the streets, and then Hitler began to install his own manpower after forcing away several Wehrmacht generals, in the process, the senior officers of the Wehrmacht did not resist, and hitler was the initial pinch of the Wehrmacht.
In the early days, Germany's victory covered up the contradictions within the army, until the drifting mustache took the initiative to act against the Soviet Union in spite of the opposition of the Wehrmacht, and as a result, everyone knew that the war was lost, both sides were looking for each other's faults, anger and resentment accumulated layer by layer, and the contradiction finally broke out in the spring of 1943.
In April, several Officers on the Eastern Front planted time bombs in Hitler's gifts, but unfortunately the detonator malfunctioned, and the most likely assassination failed, and then the scope of the conspiracy became larger and larger, and the Gestapo followed the taste, and as the war was lost, in order to retain more chips for peace negotiations, it became increasingly urgent to get rid of the "madman" Hitler.
So in 1944, the well-trusted Count Staufenberg carried a time bomb when he participated in the wolf's den military conference, and when the time came, the bomb sounded on time, thinking that the stable count was driven back to Berlin to seize power, but he did not expect that before the meeting began, Hitler temporarily changed the venue of the meeting, Hitler did not die, and finally the coup ended in failure.
Hitler launched a frenzied revenge on the military nobility in the country that opposed him, but Hitler still retained his last decency in the face of Rommel, and on October 14, 1944, Hitler sent an envoy to Rommel with poison, announcing that Rommel had conspired to assassinate the Fuehrer and punish him for treason.
Looking back at the Wehrmacht or SS at this point, who is stronger? In general, before 1944, the SS was only a reserve, they were fanatical but not methodical, with the upgrading of weapons and equipment, after 1944, the Wehrmacht was not trusted, the SS appeared more and more, making people think that its combat effectiveness was very strong, but the establishment of nearly a hundred divisions was only the first 20 or so of good combat effectiveness, and most of the rest could be regarded as "police".
In fact, since the defeat of the Wehrmacht in Moscow, Germany has been powerless to return to heaven, just imagine that if the Wehrmacht came to power through a coup d'état and negotiated with Europe and the United States, it may be the most decent peace left for Germany in terms of results