Operation Valkyrie - Planning

Planning

The original plan, designed to deal with internal disturbances in emergency situations, was designed by General Friedrich Olbricht's staff in his capacity as head of General Army Office and was approved by Hitler. The idea of using the Reserve Army in the German homeland for a coup existed before, but the refusal of Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Chief of the Reserve Army and the only person who could initiate Operation Valkyrie besides Hitler, to cooperate was a serious obstacle to the conspirators. Nevertheless, after the lessons of a failed assassination attempt on March 13, 1943, Olbricht felt that the original coup plan was inadequate and that the Reserve Army should be used in the coup even without Fromm's cooperation.

The original Valkyrie order only dealt with strategy to ensure combat readiness of units out of scattered elements of the Reserve Army. Olbricht added a second part, 'Valkyrie II' which provided for the swift assemblage of units into battle groups ready for action. In August and September 1943, Colonel Henning von Tresckow found Olbricht's revision inadequate and greatly expanded the Valkyrie plan and drafted new supplementary orders. A secret declaration began with the words: "The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead! A treacherous group of party leaders has attempted to exploit the situation by attacking our embattled soldiers from the rear to seize power for themselves." Detailed instructions were written for occupation of government ministries in Berlin, Himmler's headquarters in East Prussia, radio stations and telephone offices, and other Nazi apparatus through military districts, and concentration camps. (Previously, it was believed that Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg was mainly responsible for the Valkyrie plan, but documents recovered by the Soviet Union after the war and released in 2007 suggest that a detailed plan was developed by Tresckow by autumn of 1943.) All written information was handled by Tresckow's wife, Erika, and by Margarete von Oven, his secretary. Both women wore gloves to leave no fingerprint.

In essence, the plan was to trick the Reserve Army into the seizure and removal of the civilian government of wartime Germany under the false pretense that the SS had attempted a coup d'état that included the assassination of Adolf Hitler. The key requirement was that the rank-and-file soldiers and junior officers who were supposed to execute this plan would be motivated to do so based upon their false belief that it was the Nazi civilian leadership who had behaved with disloyalty and treason against the state, and were therefore required to be removed. The conspirators counted on the soldiers to obey their orders as long as they came from the legitimate channel — namely, the Reserve Army high command in the emergency situation following Hitler's death. Apart from Hitler, only General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Reserve Army, could put Operation Valkyrie into effect. Therefore, Fromm had to either be won over to the conspiracy, or in some way neutralized for the plan to succeed. Fromm, like many senior officers, knew in general about the military conspiracies against Hitler, but neither supported them nor reported them to the Gestapo.