Description
RARE ORIGINAL WARTIME SIGNATURE & DOCUMENTS – FRIEDRICH OLBRICHT – JULY 20 PLOT CONSPIRATOR
Rare grouping of two documents, one with original and second with facsimile signature of July 20 plot conspirator, FRIEDRICH OLBRICHT. Awarded to Heinrich Koewius, commander BB 24. Both are for his EK2 Spange.
FRIEDRICH OLBRICHT (4 October 1888 – 21 July 1944) was a German general during World War II. He is known for being one of the plotters involved in the 20 July Plot, an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Olbricht was a senior staff officer, with the rank of infantry general. He was secretly in contact with most of the leaders of the resistance. They briefed him on their various plots and he placed sympathetic officers in key positions. Olbricht quietly encouraged field commanders to support the resistance. By late 1943, his office was the centre of Resistance plotting, under Claus von Stauffenberg.[1] Had the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler been successful, Olbricht would have assumed the position of minister of war in a post-Nazi regime.
At 21:00, Olbricht was arrested at his headquarters in the Bendlerblock by soldiers from the Berlin garrison. Later that evening, Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm held a hastily arranged court martial, supposedly in an attempt to protect himself from being exposed as a silent conspirator. Olbricht, Quirnheim, Stauffenberg, and his aide Werner von Haeften were then taken outside to the courtyard and executed by firing squad, against Hitler’s orders to take the would-be assassins alive (those who were captured alive received more painful and
