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Valkyrie: An Insider's Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler

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This is not some professor guessing at what things were like from the safety of his office some decades after the events took place - this is an eye-witness and a participant to events that are both historic and insightful. The author Hans Bernd Gisevius takes us to the heart and the soul of WWII Germany and gives us a insider look at events. In his book "Valkyrie: An Insider's Account Of The plot To Kill Hitler" we get to understand much better the mindset of those involved in this assassination attempt and what motivated them.

Fascinating beyond belief - this true life story is an amazing tale. I am surprised that this was not a movie before now. There are real heros, and villains, and those that are hard to classify as either, and of course, there are so many victims. This was the author's memoir and it is rather odd that he doesn't try to show showcase himself in any better light - he seems brutally honest about himself. He tells of the planning, his fellow conspirators and of the events which drew them all to take this action. This should be a must read book for anyone trying to understand what was going on within Germany at that time.

If this was just a novel - no one would believe it! The Third Reich and much that it stood for are bared open for examination by readers. This is a powerful story and one that continues to have much energy and life over 60 plus years after the events. I highly recommend this book and give it the highest book rating from The Military Writer's Society of America - FIVE STARS!

The book was very rough in the beginning. The author uses the first 112 pages giving summaries about some of the people in the coup and some others who we never read of again. It was very hard to get through it- he has a very dynamic vocabulary and if your just an average Joe like me and not a English major you might have to read over a sentence more than once.
Once it gets into his diary of the days before during and after the attempt it gets very good. Since its a primary source written only a year or two after the war his perspective of things was not hindsight like of veterans stories written now.
I have read up on the assassination attempt and have saw many shows about it on the History channel but this book was not written by a historian 50 years after the fact- it was written a year after the war ended and by someone who was actually part of it. I gave it only three stars because of the beginning but the rest was amazing. For a primary source on a historical incident that was a lot more important than history makes it- you need to read this book.

Plus I am sure you want to know if that movie with Tom Cruise was historically accurate.

Hope this helps everyone

This book is an revised edition of the original "To the Bitter End" book. The first section (before the July 20th assignation attempt) appears to be a condensed version of the original. There are lots of details and information but not much substance.

Where the book really shines is with the July 20th putsch. Here you really get an insider's view of what happened and what went wrong. This view is clouded by the author's background and status, but that prejudice also comes through in the text. In this narration you feel like the "fly on the wall", watching things unfold to a bloody end. In all, it was a fascinating read and one of the best descriptions of the attempted Hitler assassination I've read.

Be sure to read the introductions both before and after you read the book. The introductions describe the interpersonal relations in the putsch and also show how these relations can cloud history.

The author begins the book describing all the different assassination attempts on Hitler leading up to his account. This part was long, dry, and difficult to read. The second part, which kept me reading, was his firsthand account of Operation Valkyrie. And the third part was his reasoning behind the book. I personally felt the entire book was nothing more than a justification for his escape while the other conspirators were executed, and for Germany's actions during the war. The gist of the book was that people living in terror do things they normally wouldn't do, even if they know they are wrong. He failed to mention, not even once in the entire book, the murder of millions of Jews. If it were as simple as Nazi Germany invading other countries for the sake of imperialism a person could be more understanding of an individual that was just following orders, but there is no excuse for knowing that millions of their own people were being slaughtered and doing nothing about it. I gave the book three stars because the author's description of Colonel Stauffenberg was very interesting; he obviously had ill feeling towards him for some reason. His description was certainly different from what the movie portrayed.

When the book you're about to read comes with not one, but two prefaces apologizing for the fact that the author is an unreliable witness to history, and to take what you're about to read with masses doses of salt, you have to wonder what it is you just got yourself into. Any doubt that this was true was dispelled when I found the constant references to "Major Roemer" of the GD Guard Battalion. Gisevius was of course trying to refer to Major Remer. He incorrectly reports that Remer was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and killed before the end of the war. In fact, Remer was promoted to Lieutenant GENERAL and lived to ripe old age in Spain, having been banished there from West Germany for being an unrepentant neo-Nazi and holocaust denier!

It is that inattention to historical detail that is rife in this book, which suffers in many ways. Many of the ranks are translated verbatim into English - so that Gruppenführer becomes "Group Leader". If you aren't intimately familiar with the rank system of the SS and Gestapo, this just becomes gibberish. But much is expected of the reader, and a working knowledge of German politics, cultural and social history, and much background knowledge, in order to make sense of much of what is going on. Many of the (few) humorous comments fall flat. The book is described as a digest of a much larger body of work, and it is obvious that much has been left out - jarringly so.

But even if the entire manuscript had been presented, the biases of the author are obvious; he paints himself in flattering terms and as the introductions note, is unaware of the subleties of thought of others, whom he paints in the worst possible light, especially Stauffenberg, whose motivations he only briefly explores. This isn't a history of the movement, it is mostly first person gossip, and not compelling at all, as there is nothing to draw the reader in - no maps, no photos, thinly drawn characterizations and entire years for which no information is shared.

It's mostly an unreadable mess and a lot of purposeless axe-grinding. And the funniest part, is that the introductions make it clear that this is exactly what it is.

The free world owes large debts to men like Gisevius, which makes it all the more tragic that his gifts did not include the ability to be more generous in his writing, or more gifted.

Worth a look for the curious, but there are far better books on the Bomb Plot.

An outstanding book for those of you who would like to see the attempt to remove Hitler from the inside. Having worked in the Abwehr the author can show you something no other author can as he became involved with Admiral Canaris, the head of the German intelligence arm and a conspirator against Hitler as early as 1938. The novel The Commodore by John Lowe, which I recently read as well, can be an enjoyable primer for this in-depth book.The Commodore

The movie Valkyrie made me seek out this book, which the only account of the July 20 1944 plot against Hitler written by a surviving participant. The author, Hans-Bernd Gisevius, was a civilian, a former police official, a diplomat posted in Switzerland during the war, and a long-term associate of plot leaders Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler. Gisevius returned to Berlin the week before the attempt on Hitler to participate in the coup. These events, however, are only the last few chapters of a two-volume history of German opposition to Nazism from the Reichstag fire of 1934 to the attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944.

The book published under the title "Valkyrie: An Insider's Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler" is an abridged translation of the original German Volume 2 of Bis zum Bittern Ende, which is out of print, but I was able to find used, on rough yellowed paper printed in Gothic script. The original German book covers the events since early 1938; Valkyrie, since the beginning of the war in 1939.

The book is a depressing story of intelligent and courageous men ineffectively trying to overthrow one of the worst political systems in history. Gisevius doesn't just tell you what happened, but also reflects on the events and shares ideas that I believe are useful to those who have the misfortune of having to combat totalitarianism in their countries.

For example, Ludwig Beck's resignation as chief of staff of the German army in 1938 in opposition to Hitler's reckless expansionism prompts Gisevius to discuss whether it is more effective to stealthily sabotage the system from within or to leave it and become a dissident. Gisevius notes that every country occupied by the Nazis had a resistance movement, and that these movements achieved some results, while the people who stayed in official positions were reviled as traitors. He also notes that the situation was different in Germany, home of the Nazis, where open opposition was tantamount to suicide, and exiles abroad never managed to influence events inside the country. The only way to achieve anything as an opponent was to rise to the highest possible position within the system and subvert it from within, which Beck didn't do but the other July 20 plotters did.

65 years after Gisevius wrote this theory, it explains how totalitarian regimes failed in different ways, depending on whether they were homegrown or imposed from outside. Homegrown totalitarian regimes like Franco's in Spain, or communism in the Soviet Union and China were all brought down by high-level insiders: king Juan-Carlos in Spain, Mikhail Gorbachov in Russia, and Teng Hsiao-Ping in China. By contrast, communist dictatorships imposed from the outside in Poland or Czechoslovakia were brought down by dissidents like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel.

When discussing the future of Germany with co-conspirators in Berlin in the week leading up to July 20, 1944, Gisevius also pondered the problem of denazification. His goal in overthrowing Hitler was to bring back the rule of law in Germany, which would have required removing all Nazis from positions of authority. To do this promptly would require special courts, which he felt was inconsistent with bringing back the rule of law. Two years later, the allies did set up a special court in Nuremberg, and created new international law in the process.

The conspirators also had a; variety of far-fetched, unlikely schemes to end the war. Stauffenberg, the insider with enough access to Hitler to deliver the bomb, had an "Eastern strategy" to make peace and an alliance with the Soviet Union to repulse the Anglo-Saxon invaders in the West. Gisevius had a "Western strategy" in which the leader of German forces in France, Rommel, signed a cease-fire with the western allies and marched together with them to purge Germany of the Nazis.

What is most astonishing about the conspirators is that they were able to meet, exchange ideas, hatch and abort plots for six years without drawing the attention of the nazi secret police. Stauffenberg even met in late 1943 with German socialist and communist party leaders to discuss his Eastern strategy. They were not even discreet. Beck, for example, kept notes of his meetings and had a roster of members for a new German cabinet in plain text. These documents, found by the Gestapo in a search of Beck's apartment on July 21 helped it round up the conspirators as well as many sympathizers who had neither participated in the July 20 plot nor been aware of it.

The July 20 plotters may have been clumsy, and, in these late-night conversations, they may have sounded like college students remaking the world, but, a week later, they were dead, except for Gisevius who lived to tell their story. Gisevius is a witness, not a historian, and should be taken as such.

This book has many flaws, but it is the sole memoir available to historians written by one of the conspirator in the plot to kill Hitler. As such, it must be given five stars for its historical value even when some of the information is not supported by other evidence and some comments are obviously colored by the author's personal opinions.

Hans Bernd Gisevius was practically the only major conspirator to survive who had an intimate knowledge of the plot. Other such as General Speidel survived, but they only had limited knowledge and that was confined to their part to play subsequent to the assassination. The reader needs to read this book in conjunction with "The German General Staff" by Walter Goerlitz or some other works that deal with the plot in a more comprehensive fashion and provide a background for the German General Staff's culture and role in opposing Hitler to put Gisevius's comments into perspective. Nonetheless, the author's depictions of the interplay between the various conspirators are invaluable and essentially unavailable anywhere else.

This book was written originally in 1946 by the author and this volume is an abridged version of the author's "To The Bitter End" (translation of Zum Bittern Ende.) It covers the time period from 1939 to January 25, 1945, when the author made his escape to Switzerland. Peter Hoffman added a new Introduction in 1998, and this volume is being sold now in conjunction with the release of the movie on the Valkyrie Plot. Although abridgements often leave out much relevant detail, this abridgement does not suffer from that problem and is more readable than the original (either in German or the English translation.)

All that being said, this book should be on the shelf of every person interested in World War II and Nazi Germany.

The book came quickly and just as described. Would do business with this vendor again. A+

i bought this book for my dad and he said it was hard to get into thats all i know about this book