[1] Tresckow, Gersdorff and their circle of conspirators within the Army Group Center were well informed about the war crimes against Soviet POWs and the mass murder of Jews by Einsatzgruppe B, and provided required military cooperation.

After becoming close friends with leading Army Group Center conspirator Colonel (later Major General) Henning von Tresckow, Gersdorff agreed to join the conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler.

[4] A group of top Nazi and leading military officials—among them Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz—were present as well.

Moments after Hitler entered the museum, Gersdorff set off two ten-minute delayed fuses on explosive devices hidden in his coat pockets.

Despite his distinguished record and decorations, his attempts were, according to Gersdorff, opposed by Hans Globke, the powerful head of the German Chancellery and confidant of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and by various former Wehrmacht officers in the Bundeswehr who did not want a "traitor" in their midst.

[6] In 1979 he was awarded the Großes Verdienstkreuz (Grand Cross of Merit),[7] one of the eight classes of West Germany's only state decoration, in recognition of his accomplishments.

A riding accident in 1967 left Gersdorff paraplegic for the last twelve years of his life, during which he wrote and published his memoirs, Soldat im Untergang ("Soldier During the Downfall").

Huerter also found that "Tresckow and his circle were by no means fundamentally opposed to Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union, and that they were well informed of and collaborative in the earliest mass murders of Jewish civilians", as many officers in the Army Group Center were aligned with National Socialist Ideology with its anti-communism and anti-Semitism.

Huerter states that many of the officers of that group of conspirators in particular, believed that these crimes against humanity still in the initial stages would appear "less horrific when weighed against the chance to strike at the heart of the Soviet Union and only when it became apparent that the military risk had not paid off and the mass murders took on genocidal dimension did ethical second thoughts come to play a role for the young staff officers of the Army Group Center".

The memoirs were influential in shaping the post-war discourse on the German military resistance and included many of the "myth-building statements" that fed much later works on the subject.