British Intelligence and the July Bomb Plot of 1944: A Reappraisal

During the summer of 1949 Winston Churchill invited a surviving member of the German opposition to his home in Chartwell, Kent. He informed his guest that ‘during the war he had been misled by his assistants about the considerable strength and size of the German anti-Hitler resistance’. In the light of recent archival research, we now know this statement to be not entirely truthful. Using previously unpublished material from the Guy Liddell diaries, the memoirs of the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, and a selection of Foreign Office (FO) minutes and wartime interrogation reports, this article will aim to overturn the prevailing view that the July bomb plot and its antecedents represented a British ‘intelligence failure’ as opposed to a failure of political judgement and imagination on the part of Churchill, Eden, and the FO. It will be asserted that, because of a mixture of political indifference and ‘group think’, crucial intelligence concerning the existence of a determined anti-Hitler resistance was ignored. Documentary evidence confirms that when von Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded the officially held view that no such element existed in Germany, senior figures in Whitehall were ‘naked’ in the face of events. These officials were victims not only of their own political misjudgement, but ultimately of the Churchillian policy of ‘absolute silence’ which ensured that the intelligence cupboard was bare at the very moment they, as ‘consumers’ of intelligence, were most hungry for information.