True story of "Operation Valkyrie", the plot to kill Hitler,and how despite all the odds in it being successful fell completely apart leaving those who executed it ending up being executed themselves by Hitler's secret police, the dreaded Gestapo, and SS troopers.
It seem so simple at first with German war hero Count Cluse Von Stauffenberg, Brad Davis, getting together with a number of fellow German Army officers with a secret plan to knock off the German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, Mike Gwilym. With Hitler no longer in charge they then plan to sue for peace with the allies thus preventing their beloved Germany from being plastered off the face of the earth. The plan soon runs into a number of roadblocks with no one willing to risk their lives in a suicidal attempt to kill Hitler along with themselves.
Stauffenberg who's already given his right arm as well as left eye, in being wounded during the fighting in North Africa, for the Fatherland isn't that eager to give up his life in stopping that madman, Hitler, from destroying the country that he loves. Hitler plans to fight the remainder of the war to the very last man, as well as woman and child, in his scorched earth strategy of holding off the allied advance thus destroying the German nation and people in the process by doing it.
The film has us see how the plot to assassinate Hitler started when the war began to turn against Germany in the early Spring of 1943. With devastating losses in both North Africa and the USSR it became evident to many in the German General Staff that Germany had already lost the war. With only a miracle like the new super-weapons that both Hitler and his Propaganda Minster Joseph Goebbles, Jonathan Hyde, have been boasting about Nazi Germany's days were numbered. It was that stark reality that had Von Stauffenberg decide to go on with the plan to assassinate Hitler. As it turned out the perfect plan had many pitfalls the major one being that even if Hitler was killed would the German Army and people go along with those renegade German officers who killed him?
Getting to see Hitler in his bunker-the Wolf's Lair-in East Prussia Stauffenbrg manages to place a suitcase bomb within a few feet of his Fuhrer only to have it placed along side a table leg by another German officer that, with the explosion being directed away not towards the German leader, ended up saving Hitler's life. With Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators thinking that Hitler was killed in the explosion they prematurely came out into the open, in trying to take over the government, and thus with no one in the military as well as general public supporting them sealed their own fate.
Stauffenberg and Co. not only ended up losing their lives in their attempt to put an end to the Hitler Regime but the lives of some 5,000 other Germans, mostly their friends and family members, in the remaining nine months that the war in Europe was to continue. As noble as their cause and intentions were in ridding the world of Adolf Hitler the attempt on his life, and him surviving it, only helped not hurt the German Dictator which was the exact opposite that Stauffenberg & Co. expected it to achieve.
By miscalculating their support in the German General Staff, a number of whom suddenly got cold feet and switched sides, and the German people Stauffenberg's, and the generals, plan went up in smoke together some nine months later with Hitler's Germany that at the time it failed to eliminate. That feat was accomplished by the victorious allies and ironically Hitler himself who's insane actions, in his conduct of the war, did more to help the allied forces to destroy him and his Nazi Regime then almost anything else!
