Each year on July 20, Germany commemorates one of the most important acts of resistance in Germany to the Nazi regime, the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

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Officers, including Hermann Göring, view the room that was destroyed by the suitcase bomb planted by Stauffenberg.

(© dpa )

This year will mark 65 years since Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg stashed a bomb-laden suitcase under a table at one of Hitler’s military conferences on July 20, 1944, in East Prussia, now Poland. While some men were killed in the blast, Hitler survived with only minor injuries.

However, fleeing the scene, Stauffenberg saw a body carried from the barracks and assumed that his plot had succeeded. But by that night, it was clear that the dictator was still in control. Hitler loyalists quickly retook the army headquarters in Berlin where the conspirators had planned to manage the transfer of power, and Stauffenberg and his co-plotters were summarily executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock building. More executions would follow as the Nazi regime investigated and prosecuted others involved in what became known as the July 20 Plot.

Adam von Trott zu Solz

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Adam von Trott zu Solz, jurist and diplomat, was a member of the resistance involved in the July 20, 1944, plot.

(© picture-alliance / akg-images)

One of those sentenced to death in the aftermath was Adam von Trott zu Solz, a trained lawyer who refused to join the National Socialist Party and had studied in England and the USA. He joined the Foreign Service in 1940, a position that enabled him to establish contacts with a wide array of regime opponents at home and abroad. Along with other prominent figures in the “Kreisau Circle,” which had become the center of civilian resistance, von Trott worked on a comprehensive blueprint for a new post-Nazi Germany, also developing the visionary idea of integrating Germany into a future European Federation.

In 1944, he was actively involved in the preparations by the resistance group led by Stauffenberg to assassinate Hitler. The dramatic failure of the assassination attempt, however, was synonymous with the pronouncement of his death sentence: von Trott was arrested on  July 25, 1944, and executed in Plötzensee prison in Berlin on August 26 after being sentenced to death by the Nazi Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court).

Annual commemoration  

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Defense Minister Jung lays a wreath during the ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

(© dpa - Bildfunk)

Today, the Bendlerblock, where the conspirators had planned the assassination, known as “Operation Valkyrie,” and from where they planned to manage the transfer of power, houses the Berlin offices of the Federal Ministry of Defense as well as the German Resistance Memorial Center. It the site of the official annual commemorations of the assassination attempt.

 On July 20, 2009, the Federal Government held a wreath-laying ceremony at noon in the courtyard where the executions took place in honor of the resistance against National Socialist tyranny. In the afternoon, the Federal Government will hold another ceremony at Plötzensee Memorial Center in honor of the victims of National Socialism. More than 2,500 people were executed at Plötzensee between 1933 and 1945.