The Execution by Andy Marino

Author:Andy Marino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

JULY 15, 1944

The noonday sun did nothing to dispel the gloom of the Wolf’s Lair. Seated at a table beneath an austere pine tree, Claus von Stauffenberg pushed the remnants of a late breakfast around his plate. He felt a creeping desolation in his bones. Even the sun is repulsed by this place, he thought, glancing around the drab, melancholy camp of concrete huts and bunkers hidden deep in Poland’s Masurian woods. The atmosphere was one of eerie, tense quiet. It could be a peaceful place—it probably was, once—but the endless SS checkpoints, all those secret passwords and searching eyes, gave visitors the feeling that they were constantly being watched.

This was simply an extension of the Führer’s paranoia. He had taken to wearing a bulletproof waistcoat and metal-plated cap, and Stauffenberg had heard a report that several men were garrisoned here with the sole purpose of tasting Hitler’s food in case it had been poisoned.

The Valkyrie plotters believed that Hitler had gotten wind of the conspiracy. There could be no more delays. Even without Himmler or Göring present in the briefing room, Stauffenberg had resolved to plant the bomb. Taking out the Nazi high command had proved too lofty a goal. The assassination was now solely focused on the Führer. Any other high-ranking Nazi officials would be a bonus.

Even if he weren’t eating breakfast with a bomb in the briefcase at his side, Stauffenberg thought he would still be swamped by a feeling of growing dread. His stomach knotted, and he gave up on the plate of eggs and sausages.

Freedom can only be won by action, he said to himself. The simple words had become a mantra between Stauffenberg and his brother Berthold. All the poetry he had quoted to rally his aristocratic friends to his cause, the high-minded principles he had cited in defense of assassination as a necessary tactic to save millions of lives—all of it had sloughed off like dead skin as the stark reality of his role became fixed in his mind. Now he thought in the blunt phrases of his more proletarian colleagues.

There was nothing poetic about a bomb. A bomb was fire and destruction.

The poetry would come afterward, when they rebuilt a Germany free of Nazi rule. The poetry of rebirth, peace, and prosperity.

Today, he must transform himself into a blunt instrument, and it was helpful to think in equally blunt terms.

“No appetite, Colonel?”

For a brief moment, Stauffenberg feared he might lose his breakfast at the sound of Field Marshal Keitel’s voice. There was a slightly mocking edge to it, as if Keitel viewed Stauffenberg’s inability to finish his food as something he could use against him at a later date.

Stauffenberg forced himself to meet the man’s eyes with cordial indifference. “The flight from Berlin was especially turbulent. I’m afraid my stomach isn’t what it once was, ever since North Africa.”

He held up his right arm, giving Keitel a good look at the empty sleeve where his hand had been.

Keitel eyed Stauffenberg’s injury with

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