Today in History · July 20, 1944
The plot to kill Hitler
Stauffenberg’s bomb explodes at the Wolf’s Lair — but the Führer survives, and the coup collapses by nightfall.
On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg left a briefcase bomb under the map table at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair briefing hut in East Prussia and slipped out as it exploded.
Hitler survived with minor wounds; the coup launched in Berlin that evening collapsed within hours, and the reprisals that followed claimed the lives of nearly 5,000 people.
