21 March 1943: The Suicide Plot to Kill Hitler; A Two-Minute Delay That Changed History

On 21 March 1943, a group of German officers came closer than ever to changing the course of the Second World War. They hatched a suicide mission to kill Adolf Hitler, a plan so precise that its success might have ended the war that very day. Its failure, however, prolonged the conflict by two years, costing around fifty million lives, many of them civilians.

By that March, the war had reached a critical stage. Germany had suffered a crushing defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, its first major loss, but still held momentum on the Western Front. Senior German officers, led by Major General Henning von Tresckow, realised Hitler was steering the nation toward disaster. Determined to stop him, they began plotting a coup.

Their first attempt aimed to arrest Hitler during a visit to the German Army headquarters in Borisov, the Soviet Union, followed by a coup in Berlin. But Hitler arrived under heavy protection by loyal SS guards, and the conspirators never got close.

Undeterred, Tresckow devised “Operation Flash” on 13 March 1943. This plan was bolder: a bomb hidden in a bottle of alcohol, delivered to Hitler’s plane during a stopover in Smolensk, set to explode over Minsk. A young officer, unaware of the plot, carried out the task as instructed. Yet again, luck favoured Hitler: the bomb’s detonator failed, and the coup in Berlin never materialised.

Finally, the conspirators prepared their most precise and dangerous strike yet, a suicide assassination during Germany’s “Heroes Memorial Day” on 21 March. Hitler was to inspect an exhibition of captured Red Army weapons at the Zeughaus Museum in Berlin. Colonel Claus von Gersdorff, a trusted officer, volunteered to carry the explosives, hiding two bombs with ten-minute timers in his coat. The plan was to approach Hitler just before the bombs exploded, embrace him, and die alongside him, triggering the coup immediately.

But Hitler’s fortune intervened once more. He rushed through the museum in only eight minutes, leaving before the bombs could detonate. Gersdorff had less than two minutes to act. He sprinted to a nearby toilet and defused the explosives at the last possible moment, saving his life, and leaving the world to face two more years of war.

Historians agree that had Hitler lingered for even two more minutes, the outcome of the war, and history itself, might have been entirely different. Those two minutes contributed to a prolonged conflict that claimed around fifty million lives, many of them innocent civilians.

This extraordinary true story inspired the film Valkyrie, in which Tom Cruise portrayed Colonel Claus von Gersdorff, dramatizing one of history’s closest brushes with an alternate world where Hitler’s death might have ended the war.