The Devil´s Own Luck
As the personal Kondor aircraft carrying Hitler from Smolensk back home to the East Prussian "Wolf´s Lair" lifted into the grey skies of 13.March 1943, there were at least three men left behind on the runway with good reason to be glad not to be aboard.
Locked up in the plane with the Führer was a package described as containing brandy bottles a gift for a friend of General Tresckow, Chief od Staff to Kluge´s Army Group Centre in Russia. In fact the case contained a bomb constructed from British components. And, as Hitler chatted to his colleagues, the acid fuse activated by Kluge´s ADC, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, was alredy eating away the wire that would release a spring and strike the detonator.
Operation Flash, as this intended coup was called, was the work of many eminent conspirators: men who needed no further conviction that Hitler was leanding their nation to certain ruin. Admiral Canaris and Field-Marshal Kluge were ready to welcome the demise of the beloved Führer: but Kluge had chickened out of the original plan to machine-gun Hitler and his bodyguard on arrival Smolensk. The bomb seemed a more discreet solution. They were reliable devices, these British bombs (dropped by the RAF for use by saboteurs).
In theory, Hitler´s remains should have been distributed all over the town of Minsk, half an hour from take-off.
The conspirators waited - and waited. Two hours later came the news that Hitler had landed safely at Rastenburg. For Schlabrendorff the interesting question now arose: had Colonel Brandt, the man who had kindly agreed to deliver the brandy, passed on the package? Deciding against an urgent trip to neutral Sweden, Schlabrendorff rang Brandt - who apologized. The packet was still with him. Truthfully, the conspirator explained that contents were the wrong sort of brandy - and said he would fly in forthwith to deliver the real goods.
Brandt handed the package over, with a playful jerk that convulsed his visitor with terror. Carefully he took the bomb away and as carefully opened it up in the sleeping comparment of a train to Berlin. As he recorded:" The mechanism had worked; the small bottle had broken; the corrosive fluid had consumed the wire, the striker has hit forward; but - the detonator had not fired". And the war went on.