July 20th Plotters

In addition to being the day that humans first landed on the moon, July 20th is remembered for the most successful assasination attempt against Adolf Hilter. In 1944, the German Resistance was becoming aware of the events at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The Resistance movement had recruited Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg to carry a briefcase containing a bomb into a military conference. The colonel set the timer and excused himself from the room.

At 12:40 the bomb exploded, killing four people. Hitler himself, protected by the heavy conference table escaped with only minor injuries.

That night Stauffenberg and three other resistance leaders were court martialed and executed by General Friedrich Fromm. Between five and seven thousand citizens were linked to the plot and arrested, of those about 200 were executed. Many of those arrested were family members with no role in the plot but were implicated under Himmler's Sippenhaft (blood laws). General Fromm himself was tried and executed himself the following March for being aware of the conspiracy but not reporting it.

The July 20th Plotters are remembered at the site of Stauffenberg's death (now a memorial to the resistance movement).

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I know this because July 20th 1994 is the day I stopped driving fast and started listening to NPR, following my first (and only) speeding ticket, east of Perham en route to Duluth, Minnesota.