-Eberhard von Breitenbuch will become a favorite source of speculation for alternate historians of the future. What if he'd used a bomb, as all of his fellow conspirators had planned? What if he'd shot Hitler two days earlier, or two days later? And, perhaps the most obvious, what if he'd succeeded outright? But, of course, he did none of those things.
What he did do, around noon on October 16, 1945, was shoot Adolf Hitler twice in the chest in the middle of the last Fuhrer Conference to be held at the Berghof, with a small Browning pistol he'd smuggled in past SS Security. The first bullet passed neatly through Hitler's left lung; the second passing through Hitler's arm, rib, and the big muscles of his chest before lodging in his spine.
Just before the Fuhrer was rushed out of the command pillbox, unconcious from shock and with a sucking wound to the chest, a volley from a dozen SS SG-44s took Breitenbuch in the chest, killing the young officer instantly. A moment later, Obergruppenfuehrer Theodor Eicke, commander of Hitler's personal guard, shot Field Marshal Walter Model in the head as an obvious partner in the conspiracy.
A tableau arose for a moment; the unarmed Army officers, including Luftwaffe commander Kesselring and Peenmunde commander Dornberger, frozen at one end of the locked room, Eicke and his men at the other, loaded machine guns trained on the Army men, fingers trembling on the triggers.
It's hard to say what happened next (there is a paucity of reliable eyewitness testimony) but the best evidence suggests that one of the Army officers, perhaps Wilhelm Keitel, slipped on a pool of blood and fell across Breitenbuch's dropped pistol.
The SS immediately opened fire, riddling Keitel with bullets, as the trapped Army officers fled for the locked exit door. In a matters of moments, as Eicke shouted "Kill all the traitors!", Field Marshals Walter von Blomberg, Walter von Reichenau, and Fedor von Bock were dead, shot in the back as they managed to tear the lock off the door. Albert von Kesselring and Walter Dornberger fall as well, critically wounded. Dornberger will linger another few weeks in an Army hospital before dying; von Kesseling will live out the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
Only Erich von Manstein, oppurtunist extraordinarie, is thus still alive and articulate (he ducked under the table) when Lt.-Colonel Wilhelm Heinz and his men break down the pillbox's door a moment later; alive to cry out, "It's the SS, they've shot the Fuhrer and are launching a coup!"
The subsequent exchange of fire is heard by both nearby SS and conventional Army troops, and thanks to foolish aggression and clever calculation, the German Civil War has begun.
As the roar of gunfire grows louder from the camp, an anonymous, forgotten truck, carrying the unconcious Adolf Hitler and two SS doctors, speeds away toward Munich.
-An hour later, in Oldenburg, the headquarters of the German army facing the Americans in the Low Countries, General Heinz Guderian personally executes Heinrich Himmler after the former SS chief is dragged from the ruins of his former command post (Guderian used an entire panzer brigade to bring him down).
Similarly, in Rome, Italian and German Army troops arrest every SS officer in the city; Erich von Witzleben is the most senior surviving Army officer in the Reich, already there is talk of him as the next Chancellor.
But there is no such talk in Berlin, where Reinhard Heydrich has purged every OKH officer that so much as looked at a swastika cross-eyed, and declared himself provisional leader of the loyalist forces of the Reich.
Swiftly, he dispatches Dr. Joseph Goebbels to Nuremburg, to conduct a massive rally with the elite of the Party faithful; to tell the citizens of Greater Germany that the Fuhrer is alive (which he is) and well (which he isn't.)
-There are 10,000 people in Nuremburg Stadium, a mix of administrators, Party officials, SS officers and loyal soliders, on the afternoon of October 16, 1945, cheering with varying degrees of madness as Admiral Karl Doenitz, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and then Joseph Goebbels proclaim their loyalty to the fallen Fuhrer and to the ever-lasting Thousand-Year Reich.