The Schwarze Kapelle (German for Black Orchestra) was a term used by the Gestapo to refer to a group of conspirators in Nazi Germany, including many senior officers in the Wehrmacht, who plotted to overthrow Adolf Hitler.
Drawn heavily from the aristocracy, they feared Hitler's policies would ruin their country and hoped overthrowing the Nazi Party would preserve their vision of Germany.
Members utilized the Abwehr, headed by top-ranking conspirator Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, to regularly communicate with their counterparts in Britain, other Allied nations, and various neutrals.
Moreover, Britain's covert apparatus had been burned in the Venlo Incident, losing two SIS (MI6) officers—including Sigismund Payne Best, who had extensive knowledge of British espionage on the continent—to supposed "discontented conservatives" who were actually German SD counterintelligence operatives.
[6] There had been enough support from high-level military commanders during both the 1938 and 1939 plots that the chief conspirator, Abwehr head Admiral Canaris, was able to propose preventing the war to Britain as an outcome of the first, and surrender in the second.
High ranking conspirators in the Wehrmacht, who were central to any coup attempt, also feared they would be seen as traitors if Germany did not receive favorable terms after replacing Hitler.
The disastrous September 1941 stall and subsequent total failure of Hitler's plan to invade and conquer the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, renewed the conspirator's hopes.
When Roosevelt announced at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 that the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender, an approving Churchill and others realized this would force the Germans to fight "like rats.
[9] Throughout the rest of 1943 and into the first half of 1944 the Allies continued their gains in the Mediterranean Theatre and massed men and materiel for a European invasion along the French channel coastline.
So widespread was the terror and prosecution that even some of the highest ranking generals of the German military who had not been direct members of the Schwarze Kapelle but merely knew of the coup attempt in advance through them and supported it - such as Field Marshalls Erwin Rommel and Gunther von Kluge - were swept to their deaths.
Von Kluge, Supreme Commander of German forces in the West, was deposed by Hitler on August 16, 1944, a day after he was suspected of seeking a surrender to the Allies, and took cyanide en route to Berlin to avoid hanging via the People's Court; Rommel, hero of the Desert Campaign, architect of Atlantic Wall, and the popular choice to replace Hitler, was forced to take cyanide by him to prevent retributions being taken against his family.