Austria

July 20, 1944, Operation Valkyrie, the Plot to Assassinate Hitler Fails

Operation Valkyrie was the plan by German Count Claus von Stauffenberg and other senior German generals in the Wehrmacht to assassinate Adolf Hitler and several other high ranking Nazis in an attempt to end the war in Europe. It failed.

Stauffenberg planted a bomb concealed in a briefcase under the conference table in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in East Prussia, but another German officer unknowingly moved the briefcase to a spot farther down the table behind a heavy wooden leg where the blast of the explosive was directed outwardly.

Hitler survived with very minor injuries. Four Nazi officers were killed in the blast, 13 others were injured, 3 seriously. The conspirators, believing Hitler dead had already moved to wrest control of the government from the Nazis and with the news that Hitler survived it quickly collapsed. Conspirators were arrested, tried in a kangaroo Nazi court and quickly executed. The war would drag on for many more months at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Prelude to a Coup: By July of 1944, the war in Europe had turned against the Germans. In the east, the sheer weight of the Soviet Union’s endless supplies of troops, tanks, and planes had pushed the Germans back into Poland.

In the west, the Allies had crossed the English Channel on D-Day, gained a foothold in France and were pouring troops and supplies into the continent. They were close to breaking out of their Normandy beachhead and sprinting across Western Europe.

The Allied air forces ruled the skies, especially over the battlefields in France. Allied fighter-bombers were taking a terrible toll on German armor and their supply lines. German cities and their industrial might were beginning to suffer under the non-stop bombing by the Americans during the day and the British at night.

With the situation looking bleak for the German people, growing tired after five years of war and millions of casualties, a group of German Army (Wehrmacht) officers planned on using “Operation Valkyrie” which was a German World War II emergency government operations plan issued to the Reserve Army of Germany to execute and implement in case of a general breakdown in civil order of the nation.

The plan of these officers was to assassinate Hitler, disarm and arrest the SS which would free all the German soldiers from their oath to Hitler once he was dead. General Friedrich Olbricht, Major General Henning von Tresckow, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planned on modifying it on July 20.

Their plan involved tricking the Reserve Army into the removal of the Nazi government with the story that the SS had attempted a coup d’état and assassinated Hitler. The conspirators counted on the soldiers’ obedience to their orders from the Reserve Army High Command.

Colonel General Friedrich Fromm, as commander of the Reserve Army, could activate Operation Valkyrie. Only he and Hitler had the power to do so. Therefore, for the coup to succeed, therefore, Fromm had to be convinced to go along with the conspiracy or be removed from the equation.

Stauffenberg as Chief of Staff to the Reserve Army would attend briefings with Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair HQs. He planned on executing the assassination and then race back to Berlin to execute Valkyrie. The conspirators had already contacted the Allies thru Allen Dulles the OSS (later CIA Director) Chief of Station in Switzerland.

Between 1943 and 1944, five attempts to assassinate Hitler were put into motion and none of them ever got implemented. As the war progressed, Hitler was seen less and less in public and even shunned Berlin for the most part. He spent most of the later years of the war either at Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg with an occasional visit to his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. He was heavily guarded by the SS and Gestapo in both places because the Nazis feared an assassination attempt.

July 20 Attempt: On that fateful day, von Stauffenberg flew to Wolf’s Lair for the conference. He went into the men’s room to prime the bomb, he could only prime one as a result of war wounds, he lost an eye, his left hand and two fingers on his right.

He gave the other bomb to his aide, rather than leaving it in the briefcase where it was sure to explode anyway. The bomb consisted of a two-pound block of plastic explosive that was primed with a pencil detonator. He crushed the cap end which consisted of a thin copper tube containing copper chloride that would take about ten minutes to silently eat through wire holding back the firing pin from the percussion cap.

At 12:30 Stauffenberg entered the conference room and placed the bomb under the conference table next to Hitler. After just a few moments, he was paged out of the room for a phone call, which was the plan. Colonel Heinz Brandt saved Hitler’s life inadvertently by pushing the briefcase with his foot behind a thick wooden leg of the table. It directed the blast away from Hitler. It would direct the blast closer to himself, however, as his leg was blown off during the explosion which took place at 12:42.

The bomb demolished the conference room and killed a stenographer. Of the 24 people inside the conference room, only 4 would die. The blast blew out the windows and doors and a few bodies flew out as well.

Stauffenberg, believing Hitler dead, raced with his aide and driver and bluffed their way thru three checkpoints. His aide, Werner von Haeften, then tossed the second bomb into the woods on the road to the airport. They had an He-111 bomber standing by at the airfield and by 1300 they were airborne back to Berlin.

By 1600 Stauffenberg reached Berlin, he telephoned the other conspirators saying Hitler was dead. The order was given to initiate Operation Valkyrie. But a phone call from General Erich Fellgiebel, also a conspirator to the Reserve Army HQs stated that Hitler was alive. The troops didn’t know who to believe and that froze them with indecision.

Fromm, who had been sitting on the fence, called the Wolf’s Lair and spoke with Field Marshal Keitel who demanded to know where von Stauffenberg was. Fromm turned his back on the resistance and switched sides. He said he thought Stauffenberg was with Hitler.

Fromm attempted to have Stauffenberg arrested when he arrived at the Bendlerblock HQs. Olbricht and Stauffenberg then detained Fromm at gunpoint. In other places in Germany and occupied France, the army officers who were part of the plot were going thru with the plan as they’d been instructed.

But it was quickly falling apart. Himmler, who had contact with several conspirators, playing both sides against the middle, moved to consolidate Nazi power. At 1800 hours the conspirators in Berlin were still sitting on their hands as several key officers were wracked by indecision.

At 1900, Hitler called Major Remmer in charge of the Berlin garrison to assure him that he was still alive. Remmer’s orders were to surround the Bendlerblock HQs but not to enter. The conspirators panicked and many were attempting to switch sides. Stauffenberg was wounded in the gunfire. Fromm regained control of the HQs and convened a hasty court-martial for Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Haeften, and Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim. He sentenced them to death and hastily shot them in the courtyard just after midnight to cover his own tracks.

Otto Skorzeny appeared and with Remmer they took charge of the situation and under orders from Hitler stopped all summary executions to allow the Gestapo to interrogate the rest of the conspirators.

Aftermath: Hitler, Himmler and the Gestapo decided to arrest anyone remotely associated with the conspirators and in the latter’s case, to settle old scores with anyone remotely associated with opposition sympathies.

Over 7000 German citizens were arrested. Of those, nearly 5000 were executed. Those arrested were put on trial in a kangaroo court run by fanatical Nazi judge Roland Freisler who would shout and browbeat the accused for the newsreels who filmed it all. The accused were stripped of their uniforms and given old, shabby clothing that didn’t fit. All of the accused were found guilty and were sentenced to hang with the punishment being carried out within two hours of sentencing. Included in the killing was Fromm who was found out anyway and executed in March of 1945 by a firing squad.

The failure of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot meant that the war would continue for another 9 months with hundreds of thousands of casualties. The last of conspirators, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin died in 2013 in Munich. The conspirators, long dismissed as disloyal Germans were finally thought of as heroes.

Photos: Wikipedia

On This Day in 1944, 800 Gypsy Children Are Gassed At Auschwitz

During the Holocaust, it wasn’t just the Jews who suffered at the hands at the Nazis although they bore the brunt of the racism and extermination at the hands of the Germans and their allies during World War II. The Gypsies were also persecuted during the reign of Hitler and his henchmen.

The Nazis at their death camp at Auschwitz gassed 800 children including over 100 boys between the ages of 9-14 on this day. How did this ever be allowed to happen?

The Gypsy people were hated by the Nazis, the definition of what constituted a Gypsy to the Nazis was often the same as what constituted a Jew in the racist writings of the Third Reich. As early as 1937, the roundup of Gypsies was beginning in Germany.

The Germans did little to conceal their murderous plans. In 1937, Dr. Robert Ritter, a racist with a medical degree gave a presentation in Paris on what would be the racial definition of Gypsies as the Reich considered Gypsies “asocial.” In December of 1937, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree that provided grounds to arrest people, not for committing crimes but for being “asocial.”

The Nazis confined Gypsy (also known as Roma) families at Lackenbach beginning in 1939. Yet, the rest of the world turned a blind eye to what was happening in Germany in the plight of the Jews, the Gypsies, and others. Once they began to acquire more territory, the Jews and Gypsies were quickly targets for elimination by wandering groups of Einsatzgruppen or forced deportation to the camps. In late 1941, over 30,000 German gypsies were deported to Poland. At the same time there were over 5000 Austrian Gypsies deported to the Lodz Ghetto, then the Chelmno death camp where they were all gassed in early 1942.

In Vichy France, the Secretariat for Jewish Affairs rounded up thousands of Gypsies and many were shipped them off to Dachau, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald. Some 15,500 died in the Nazi camps while 40,000 survived in the French internment camps.

In Croatia, the locals were only too happy to help the German invaders carry out their murderous plans. They targeted the Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies and out of 27,000 that were rounded up, over 26,000 died. Other figures put the number much higher, close to 90,000.

In Italy, the Italians balked at rounding up Gypsies, but after the German occupation some of the Italian Roma were rounded up and sent away, but most however escaped. The Hungarian Roma fared little better. Over 30,000 were sent to the death camps and there, 27,000 were murdered and never returned. A rate of 90 percent.

It was in 1943 that the Germans began moving all of the Gypsies, (Roma and another group called Sinti) from the labor camps to Auschwitz.

In a bizarre twist, in one of the camps in Auschwitz, BIIe the 6000 Roma were allowed to live as families. Inside the Gypsies, despite the deprivation and brutal nature of the guards would play their music, and have circus-like performances. But a disease manifested itself there in the inmates, Noma, which has symptoms similar to leprosy. It was then that the Germans decided to eliminate the entire 6000 Roma in the camp. They separated over 1400 that could work and sent them to labor camps and the remainder were murdered by getting gassed.

Yes, it wasn’t just the Germans who carried out these heinous acts, but the Austrians, Romanians (a German ally), Croatia, Vichy France, and others were just as complicit in helping the Germans deal with their “Gypsy Problem.”

So great was the bias against the Gypsies in Germany, that after the war in 1950, the Gypsies sought reparations from the German government. However, they would get no compensation for their suffering or brutal murderous treatment at the hands of the Nazis like so many other victims of the Holocaust did. Approximately 1.5 million Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis and others during the war. And yet their suffering went unheeded.

The German government, in its decision, stated that “Gypsies have been persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record.” This slight was not rectified until 1979 which by then had seen many, if not most of the survivors passed away.

Photo: Wikipedia

Jagdkommando

Jagdkommando
The Jagdkommando is the Special Operations Unit of the Austrian Armed Forces stationed in the town of Wiener Neustadt. The unit’s main missions include:

SR-Special Reconnaissance
DA-Direct Action
MA-Military Assistance

History
The name “Jagdkommando” has its origins in the time of WW1, when small assault squads of the Austrian K.u.K. Army were called what translates to “manhunt command.” The history of the Austrian Special Operations Forces began after WW2 when two Austrian officers participated in the US Army’s Ranger School as part of their training in order to set up a similar course for the eventual establishment of Jagdkommando in 1961. Since then, the officers and soldiers of Jagdkommando continued to devolve by taking part in similar courses in the United States and all over Europe and by combining the lessons learned with “homegrown” tactics and knowledge.

Missions took Jagdkommando operators to the Balkans (KFOR, etc.), Afghanistan (ISAF, until 2005) and Chad / Central African Republic(EUFOR, since 2007) and most recently to Mali.

Selection and training
Selection is usually held once a year and has a duration of 6 months. The program normally begins in January with 3 weeks of pre-selection. During this time the candidate will take the physical tests required, receive additional training and a undergo a 72 hour Field Exercise, which is the core event of the selection process.

Most candidates will fail during the 72 hour exercise which includes long road marches in squad size elements, psychological test batteries, and total sleep deprivation. The pre-selection course is conducted by active operators as well as by enablers of the unit.

Normally 20-25% of all candidates will pass the pre selection course and continue with the so called Jagdkommandogrundkurs, the basic course of selection. The first few weeks are held in the remote area of Allentsteig, a giant military training area in close proximity to the Czech border. The first seven weeks of small unit tactics are overshadowed with plenty of snow, freezing weather, very small amounts of sleep and permanent pysical performance. Candidates will get used to the heavy Lowe Rucksack and spend most of their day with it on their backs while conducting patrols, ambushes and raids in the forrests around Allentsteig.

After the small unit tactics phase, which will elemintae the last few unfitting candidates, the basic course will continue with block course of two or three weeks each:

Basic Demolition Course
Airborne Course
Amphibious Insertion/Extraction Course
Field Survival Course
Basic CQB course
Comabtives Course
Field training exercises
SERE: The final and most infamous course is the SERE training.

Over the last few years the SERE training took part in the Alps of Salzburg. The “run phase”will last up to ten days, while the candidate must check in at a given checkpoints every 24 hours. The checkpoints are set 20-30 km apart, considering the mountains in between the points and the tactical need to stay off roads and trails, the candidates will be very busy meeting their time limits and rarely find sleep. Finally after days on the run and being hunted down by infantry units, helicopters and K9 units, the candidates will be ambushed and captured at on of their checkpoints. This marks the beginning of the “captivity phase”. Being the last phase of the selection course this phase will last 72 hours.

After completing the SERE course the remaining soldiers (normally 10-15% of all applicants who started the pre selection course) are accepted into the Jagdkomamndo brotherhood and awarded the “mudd-green” beret with the Unit Crest on it. Most of the graduates will be given a slot as active operators in one of the two Task Groups of the unit, while some go back to their regular Army unit.

Jagdkommando soldiers take extreme pride in their long and unique selection course and the prestige that comes along with earning the green beret inside the armed forces.

If a soldier is chosen to become an operator after selection he will attend the Einsatzausbildung 1, a course where he will refine his operator skills. The training will last up to one year.

Normally it starts off with a five week drivers course, followed by shooting classes. This will be the first time for operators to use the advanced weapon systems Steyr AUG A2 Kdo and the FN P90. After weeks at the shooting range the next courses will be very mountain orientated, like the mountain airborne course, winter warfare and mountaineering courses as well as ski training.

After the mountain courses the individual job training will begin. Depending on the assignment the operator will attand the Weapon Sergeant Course, Medic Course, Communications Sergeant Course or Engineer Course.

The SOF CQB course that follows teaches the latest techniques in HRO, CC, and DDO. Jagdkomamdno operators train together with several NATO SOF units worldwide and so the used SOPs and tactics are very similar to other SOF units.

Differnt other courses will complete the Einsatzausbildung 1, such as the Urban SR course, advanced comatives training and Air Assault techniques.

After more than 18 months of training the operator will be assigned a team in the 1st SOTG (Special Operations Task Group) or the 2nd SOTG. The 3rd SOTG belongs to the Army Reserve Component. A typical Jagdkommando team consists of six operators: the Team Leader, Team Sergeant, a Weapons Sergeant/Sniper, Engineer Sergeant , Medic Sergeant and Communication Sergeant. Each team is assigned to one insertion speciality, such as freefall, amphibious, mountain and mobility.

Operations
The Jagdkommando took part in all major missions of the Austrian Armed forces. Operators served on the Balkans, Afghanistan and several African countries. The operations in Chad and the Central African Republic were very beneficial for the unit as new equipment was issued and important experience on the long range SR sector was gained.

A small number of operators was part of “Operation Egypt” in 2012 during the uprising in Egypt. The mission was to assist Austrian and European citizens to get out of Egypt safely.

Equipment
The primary weapon system of an AUTSOF operator is the Steyr AUG A2 Kdo, which was introduced before the first Chad Deployment in 2007. The 5.56mm NATO rifle feeds from 30 or 42 round magazines and shows some major improvements to the Steyr AUG A1/A2 rifles, like the NATO muzzelbreak for suppressor use and the bolt release button for quicker magazine changes.

Glock pistols make up the sidearm arsenal of the Jagdkommando. Model 17 in 9mm is issued with a Glock Tactical Light, while Model 21 in 45. ACP comes with a suppressor.

Every operator also receives a FN P90 machine pistol in 5.7x28mm. The weapon comes with 50 round magazines, an EOTech or Aimpoint Optic and a suppressor.

Modern Body armor vests and camoflage uniforms are available, but a lot of operators stick to personally bought gear when it comes to plate carriers, boots and uniforms.

The heavy weapons of the unit include the MG 74 in 7.62mm NATO, the Carl Gustav 8.4cm, and the Barret .50cal sniper rifle.