When on July 20, 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.