Last week marked an ominous legacy of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hilter gone wrong. On 20 July 1944, a 36-year-old German army officer, Col Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, arrived at a heavily guarded complex hidden in a forest in East Prussia. His mission was to kill Adolf Hitler. The Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, was Hitler’s secret headquarters on the Eastern Front. Stauffenberg was attending the daily briefing between the Fuhrer and Germany’s high command – but in his briefcase, he carried a bomb. If the attack would have worked, the course of history in the 20th century would have been drastically altered.
