The Bloody Path to Valkyrie - How Duty, Faith, and Honor Inspired the German Resistance 1933 - 1946

The attempted assassination and coup of the Nazi Regime under Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944 was nothing more than a blip on the radar during a war that was greater than anything ever seen. For decades, historians and researchers have speculated how the outcome of the war would have changed if the coup had been successful. The story that follows examines the role of the Western Allies and their lack of support to German Resistance movements through the eyes of three surviving members and two Americans. Well-documented Office of Strategic Services (OSS) memoirs, official correspondence, and firsthand memoirs of the surviving members of the German Resistance show a clear connection between the Allied intelligence services. These services were primarily based in Switzerland, which had the opportunity and ability to directly support several coup attempts. Despite the Allied reporting at the time and public knowledge of the events, the German Resistance wasn't comprised of desperate and opportunistic Wehrmacht commanders at the end of a losing war. Rather, they were comprised of an often-unorganized resistance going back years before the first shots were fired. The Bloody Path to Valkyrie examines these connections as a humbling intelligence failure in an otherwise successful Allied strategy and detail the foreign policy decisions of the Allied administrations, whose lack of foresight and occasional prejudice led to numerous lost opportunities which may have changed the outcome of the war.