Someone Moved the Briefcase. Hitler Lived.

On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase bomb two meters from Adolf Hitler. An officer who did not know what it was nudged it behind an oak table leg, and the blast killed him instead. The courtyard where Stauffenberg was shot that night is now where German soldiers swear their oath.

The briefing at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's fortified East Front headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia, was set for 12:30 on July 20, 1944. Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, thirty-six, chief of staff to the commander of the Reserve Army, carried two blocks of plastic explosive in his briefcase, each on a ten-minute chemical fuse. He had lost his left eye, his right hand, and two fingers of his left hand to an Allied strafing in North Africa the year before, and the wounds slowed him. In a washroom he armed only one bomb before a knock at the door hurried him out. One bomb, he decided, would have to do.

The meeting had also been moved. Because the day was hot, it was shifted from the concrete bunker, sealed and windowless, to a wooden barracks above ground with the windows propped open. That single change let the blast vent into the open air instead of being trapped against concrete.

Stauffenberg placed the briefcase under the briefing table, as close to Hitler as he could get, then excused himself on a pretext and left the room. After he was gone, Colonel Heinz Brandt, taking Stauffenberg's vacated seat, found the case against his feet and nudged it to the far side of the heavy oak table leg, away from Hitler.

At 12:42 the bomb went off. It blew out the windows, tore a hole in the floor, and killed four men. One of them was Brandt. Hitler, leaning over the table's thick top to study maps, was shielded by the same leg that had absorbed the blast. His trousers were in tatters and his eardrum was ruptured, but he was alive. That afternoon he walked the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini through the wreckage. That evening he went on the radio to tell Germany he was "entirely unhurt apart from negligible grazes, bruises or burns," and that "[a]n extremely small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and at the same time foolish, criminally stupid, officers" had tried and failed to kill him. "I myself thank providence," he said.

Stauffenberg, who had seen the blast from his car and was certain Hitler was dead, flew to Berlin to trigger Operation Valkyrie, the coup that was to use the Reserve Army to seal the capital, disarm the SS, and arrest the Nazi leadership. It collapsed in hours. The communications at the Wolf's Lair were never fully cut, the Berlin plotters hesitated, and once Hitler's voice reached the airwaves the units stood down. Just after midnight, General Friedrich Fromm convened an impromptu court martial at the Bendlerblock, the Army High Command's Berlin headquarters, and had Stauffenberg and three conspirators shot by firing squad in the inner courtyard. Stauffenberg's aide, Werner von Haeften, threw himself in front of the rifles before his chief fell.

The retribution was vast. The Gestapo arrested more than 7,000 people and executed 4,980, many after the show trials of Judge Roland Freisler's People's Court. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, named under torture though he had been bedridden from a strafing three days earlier, was offered suicide or a trial that would doom his family; he bit a cyanide capsule on October 14, 1944, and was buried with full military honors, his death announced as a war injury.

The strangest legacy is in the courtyard. The Bendlerblock is now the German Resistance Memorial Center, and every July 20 new Bundeswehr recruits swear their oath to the constitution on the very paving stones where Stauffenberg was shot. The postwar German military built its founding doctrine, Innere Führung, on the lesson the conspirators paid for with their lives: a soldier's obedience ends where conscience begins. The plaque on the wall reads, "You did not bear the shame. You resisted."

Also on this day

1807: Napoleon granted the Niépce brothers a patent for the Pyréolophore, the world's first internal combustion engine, after it powered a boat upstream on the river Saône. Nicéphore Niépce would go on to invent photography.
1810: A refused flower vase sparked the Revolt of July 20 in Bogotá, the first junta of New Granada and the opening move of Colombia's independence. It is still Colombia's Independence Day.
1881: Sitting Bull surrendered his Winchester at Fort Buford, five years after Custer's death at the Little Bighorn, telling the major, "I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man in my tribe to surrender my rifle."
1923: Pancho Villa was gunned down in his Dodge roadster in Parral, shot sixteen times in an ambush by seven riflemen, three years into a retirement he had bought with a pardon.
1976: Viking 1 became the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars, touching down on the seventh anniversary of Apollo 11 and fifty years ago today.