It Happened on July 20th

The film reconstructs the attempt on Hitler’s life of 20 July 1944. It was organised by officers of the German army. What they wanted was to end the war before Germany was destroyed altogether. At the centre of the account is Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg. The film is chiefly interested in the mechanics: the making of the plan, the placing of the bomb, the hours that follow. Instead of staging heroism it moves step by step. The work was made in West Germany eleven years after the war. Another German film on the same subject opened the same week. Bernhard Wicki takes the lead in G.W. Pabst’s German film of 1955, seventy five minutes long.