The bomb exploded. The great table lifted up and crashed down again in pieces. Shrapnel tore off limbs and fatally wounded four men.  But Hitler, the target, escaped serious injury.

Although the attempted coup succeeded in proving that there was “another Germany,” it was fatal for the military resistance. Hitler smashed its ranks. Conspirators were arrested, tortured, and slowly hanged with piano wire. Although executions continued right up until the last weeks of the war, the military, bureaucratic, and Christian resistance, as it had existed since the late 1930s, was dead by the summer of 1944.

Resistance to Hitler’s megalomaniacal quest to lead Germany, Europe, and the world to further disaster would have to come from other, far less likely quarters: from the streets of Paris, the Riviera, the shattered cities of Germany, and the machinations of Albert Speer and Erwin Rommel.

Both horrifying and life-affirming, Disobeying Hitler tells the untold stories of German revolt against the dying Nazi tyranny.

Randall Hansen discussed his new book Disobeying Hitler on “As it Happens”