Operation Valkyrie
The original plan, designed to deal with internal disturbances in emergency situations, ensured combat readiness of units among scattered elements of the Reserve Army.
The idea of using the Reserve Army in the German homeland to unseat the Nazi regime had existed before, but Fromm's refusal to cooperate in a prospective coup posed a serious obstacle to the conspirators.
Nevertheless, after the lessons of a failed assassination attempt on 13 March 1943, Olbricht felt that the original coup plan—which anticipated a more spontaneous uprising—was inadequate and that the Reserve Army should be used even without Fromm's cooperation.
In August and September 1943, co-conspirator Major General Henning von Tresckow, finding Olbricht's revision inadequate, greatly expanded the Valkyrie plan by new supplementary orders that undermined the staunchest Nazi institutions by implicating them in Hitler's death.
A treacherous group of party leaders has attempted to exploit the situation by attacking our embattled soldiers from the rear to seize power for themselves."
With this premise securing the credible motivation for the Reserve Army to seize control of the organs of state, detailed instructions were written for the occupation of government ministries in Berlin, of Himmler's headquarters in East Prussia, of radio stations, of telephone exchanges, of other Nazi infrastructure through military districts and of concentration camps.
The conspirators depended on the assumption that the rank-and-file soldiers and junior officers designated to execute Operation Valkyrie would be motivated to do so on the basis of their false belief that the Nazi civilian leadership had behaved with disloyalty and treason against the state and the leader to whom the army has sworn allegiance, and were therefore required to be removed.
The conspirators counted on the soldiers to obey their orders so long as they came from a legitimate channel—namely, the Reserve Army High Command—in the emergency situation following Hitler's putative death.
An unscrupulous clique of party leaders without frontline service have exploited this situation to stab the fighting front in the back and to seize power for their own selfish ends.
I therefore make it the duty of all army, navy, and air force commanders to support the holders of executive power with all means at their disposal and to ensure that their directives are obeyed by the agencies subordinate to them.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht Field Marshal von WitzlebenParticularly notable for its apparent anticipation of the release of "political prisoners" from concentration camps in the General Government of occupied Poland, this telex is preserved in the Bundesarchiv.
Signed, The key role in its actual implementation was to be played by Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, after his assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944.
Stauffenberg's position as Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army gave him access to Hitler for reports and at the same time required his presence at headquarters for implementation of Valkyrie.
By this time Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had taken charge of the situation and had issued orders countermanding Olbricht's mobilisation of Operation Valkyrie.
Shortly after midnight, the condemned men were led to a mound of earth back-lit by idling vehicles where each was executed by firing squad in the courtyard of Bendlerstraße headquarters.
