It was not only Himmler who gained by the failed attempt. Hitler’s position was strengthened enormously. For the paladins at the Wolfschanze, for Keitel and Jodl and the other military men who could count themselves fortunate at escaping mutilation or death at the hands of a brother officer, for ordinary Germans oppressed, in the words of the SD public opinion report, by ‘a kind of creeping panic’[61] at the steadily worsening news from every quarter, the explosion in the conference room acted like a cathartic, releasing pent-up desperation.[62] ‘Holy wrath and boundless fury fill us at the
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