Valkyrie

“The most exhaustive and authentic-sounding account of the conspiracy to kill Hitler.” —New Yorker

Foreword by Allen W. DullesIntroduction by Peter Hoffman

When on July twenty, 1944, a bomb—boldly placed inside Hitler's headquarters by Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg—exploded without killing the Führer, the subsequent coup d'état against the Third Reich collapsed. The conspirators were summarily shot or condemned in show trials and sadistically hanged. One of the few survivors of the conspiracy was Hans Bernd Gisevius, who had used his positions in the Gestapo and the Abwehr (military intelligence) to further the anti-Nazi plot.

Valkyrie, an abridgment of Gisevius's classic insider's account To the Bitter End, is an intimate memoir as riveting as it is exceptional.

“This is one of the most riveting inside stories to come out of Nazi Germany, [full of] nauseating details about murderous Gestapo chiefs, conspiring Wehrmacht generals, terrorized Reich ministers and the human freaks on top of the pyramid called the Third Reich. . . . [A] thriller it is. Only an insider could add to the picture such detail.” —New York Times Book Review

“Invaluable. . . . [Gisevius's] account has the inexorable march of a Greek tragedy.” —Atlantic Monthly