10 Deutsche Mark German Resistance

This piece was issued to mark the 50th anniversary of the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler, organized primarily by Claus von Stauffenberg and a broad coalition of Wehrmacht officers, diplomats, and civil servants. The conspirators planned to invoke Operation Valkyrie — a legitimate emergency protocol — to seize control of Berlin immediately after the bomb detonated. It failed. Stauffenberg and three co-conspirators were shot in the Bendlerblock courtyard before midnight.

West Germany had been slowly rehabilitating the memory of the resistance movement since the 1950s, but public commemoration remained politically awkward for decades given how many former Wehrmacht officers occupied prominent postwar positions. The Bendlerblock itself became a national memorial only in 1980.