Helmuth Stieff - Resistance Fighter

Resistance Fighter

Invited by General Henning von Tresckow, Stieff joined the German resistance in summer 1943. Taking advantage of being in charge of Organisationsabteilung, he acquired and kept all sorts of explosives, including some from foreign sources. He provided the explosives for von dem Bussche's cancelled assassination attempt on Hitler at the Wolfsschanze in November.

As one of the officers who had occasional access to Hitler, he volunteered to kill Hitler himself in a suicide attack, but later backed away despite repeated requests from Tresckow and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg to carry out the assassination. On July 7, 1944, during a demonstration of new uniforms to Hitler at Schloss Klessheim, a palace near Salzburg, Stieff was indisposed to trigger the bomb. Stauffenberg therefore decided to kill Hitler himself.

In the morning of July 20, Stieff flew with Stauffenberg and Lieutenant Colonel Werner von Haeften in the Heinkel He 111 plane provided by General Eduard Wagner from Berlin to the Wolfsschanze. In the night he was arrested and brutally interrogated under torture by the Gestapo. Stieff held out for several days against all attempts to extract the names of fellow conspirators. Ousted by the Wehrmacht, he was tried by the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) under President Roland Freisler and sentenced to death on August 8, 1944. At Hitler's personal request, Stieff was executed by hanging in the afternoon of that same day at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.