Tresckow was born in Magdeburg into a noble family from the Brandenburg region of Prussia with 300 years of military tradition that provided the Prussian Army with 21 generals.

[2] His father, Leopold Hans Heinrich Eugen Hermann von Tresckow, later a cavalry general, had been present at Kaiser Wilhelm I's coronation as the emperor of new German Empire at Versailles in 1871.

At that time Count Siegfried von Eulenberg, the commander of the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, predicted that "You, Tresckow, will either become chief of the General Staff or die on the scaffold as a rebel.

"[3] After World War I, Tresckow stayed with the famed Infantry Regiment 9 Potsdam and took part in the suppression of the Spartacist movement in January 1919, but resigned from the Weimar Republic Reichswehr Army in 1920 in order to study law and economics.

He worked in a banking house and embarked on a world journey visiting Britain, France, Brazil and the eastern United States in 1924 before he had to abandon it to take care of family possessions back home.

In October, he said in Paris to a secretary (the future wife of Alfred Jodl), "If Churchill can induce America to join in the war, we shall slowly but surely be crushed by material superiority.

Subsequently, in October and November 1943, he served in combat as the commanding officer of Grenadier Regiment 442, defending the western bank of the Dnieper River in Ukraine.

[9] As Chief of Staff of the 2nd Army, Tresckow signed an order on 28 June 1944 carrying out a plan originally conceived by Himmler, to abduct supposedly unaccompanied Polish and Ukrainian children in the so-called Heuaktion (Hay Action).

[10] The order read in part "In operations against gangs, any boys and girls taken between ages 10 and 13 who are physically healthy, and whose parents either cannot be located or who, as persons unable to work, are to be sent to the area earmarked for remaining families (the dregs are to be sent to the Reich).

"[11] The kidnapped children were used as forced workers in the Todt organisation, Junkers factories and in German handicrafts as part of an operation to "lower biological strength" of the enemies of Nazi Germany.

[13] Although initially supportive of Hitler because of his own opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, Tresckow was quickly disillusioned by 1934 by the events of the Night of the Long Knives (30 June to 2 July 1934) as well as its violence against the Jewish population.

[15] He therefore sought out civilians and officers who opposed Hitler, such as Erwin von Witzleben, who dissuaded Tresckow from resigning from the Army, arguing that they would be needed when the day of reckoning came.

[16] By the summer of 1939, he told Fabian von Schlabrendorff that "both duty and honor demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National Socialism to save Germany and Europe from barbarism.

[19][20] When Tresckow learned about the massacre of thousands of Jews at Borisov, he appealed passionately to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock: "Never may such a thing happen again!

This approach, made at the height of German expansion and the nadir of anti-Hitler opposition, represented the first initiative to come from the front and from the Army, as Ulrich von Hassell noted in his diary.

Yet when Hitler landed safely at his East Prussian headquarters, it became obvious that the bomb had failed to detonate (the extremely low temperatures in the unheated luggage compartment probably prevented the fuse from working).

Colonel Gersdorff volunteered to be the suicide bomber, intending to explode a bomb on his person near Hitler while serving as a tour guide.

Olbricht suggested that this plan could be used to mobilize the Reserve Army to take control of German cities, disarm the SS and arrest the Nazi leadership once Hitler had been assassinated.

During August and September 1943, Tresckow took extended sick leave in Berlin to draft the "revised" Valkyrie plan with fine details and precise timetables.

Revised orders and additional proclamations that would pin the blame for the uprising on the Nazi party were typed by Tresckow's wife, Erika, and his secretary, Countess Margarete von Oven, who wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints.

[33] These 1943 papers were recovered by the Soviets after the war and finally published in 2007, showing Tresckow's central role in the conspiracy and the idealistic motivations of the resistance group at that time.

[34] But when Tresckow was assigned to command of a battalion on the Eastern Front in October 1943, he was no longer in position to actively plan or effect the coup.

[35] Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who met Tresckow in August 1943 and worked together on revising Operation Valkyrie, took the responsibility for planning and implementing Hitler's assassination.

By the time Stauffenberg was appointed Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army and was ready to carry out the assassination attempt, the Allies had already landed in Normandy.

His wife was arrested on 15 August, and her children taken away under the Nazi policy of Sippenhaft (shared family guilt); however, early in October she was released and survived the war.