Site logo
Site logo
myExtraContent1
myExtraContent5

Site logo

Valkyrie - An Insider’s Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler

By Hans Bernd Gisevius
Da Capo Press


When on July 20, 1944, a bomb—boldly place inside Hitler’s headquarters by Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg—exploded without killing the Führer, the subsequent coup d’état against the Third Reich, codenamed Valkyrie, collapsed. The conspirators were summarily shot or condemned in show trials and sadistically hanged.
 
One of the few survivors of the conspiracy was Hans Bernd Gisevius , who had used his positions in the Gestapo and the Abwehr (military intelligence) to further the anti-Nazi plot. He knew well or had met the major figures involved in planning Valkyrie, including General August Beck, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Colonel Hans Oster, and von Stauffenberg. The conspiracy was widespread, involving a wide circle of former politicians, diplomats, and government officials as well as senior military men. The anti-Hitler movement, largely motivated by moral outrage than by political expediency, had started as early as 1933 and involved several putsches and assassination attempts.
 
Valkyrie, an abridgment of Gisevius’s classic insider’s account To the Bitter End, is an intimate memoir as riveting as it is exceptional.
myExtraContent7
myExtraContent8