ORIGINAL 20 JULY 1944 COUP PLOTTER GENERAL OLBRICHT SIGNED DOCUMENT

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.  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.

Olbricht was appointed chief of staff of the 4th Army Corps stationed in Dresden in 1935, an assignment that lasted until 1938 when he was promoted to commander of the 24th Infantry Division. During the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Olbricht commanded the 24th Infantry Division and was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. On 15 February 1940, Olbricht was promoted to General of the Infantry. He was appointed Chief of the General Army Office (Allgemeines Heeresamt) in the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres). He was furthermore made Chief of the Armed Forces Reserve Office (Wehrersatzamt) at the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.

Starting in the winter of 1941–42, Olbricht developed the plan for Operation Valkyrie, a General Staff plan which was ostensibly to be used to put down internal unrest, but was in fact a blueprint for a coup d’état. Together with the resistance circles around Colonel-General Ludwig Beck, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Major-General Henning von Tresckow, he worked to find a means of assassinating Adolf Hitler and bring down the Nazi regime. In 1943, he asked that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg come to work at his office. Stauffenberg would later be the key person in the assassination attempt, with the task of planting the bomb near Hitler.

On the day of the attempted coup, 20 July 1944, Olbricht and Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim initiated Operation Valkyrie by mobilizing the Replacement Army. It eventually became clear the briefcase bomb had failed to kill Hitler however, so the plan to seize key sites in Berlin using units from the reserve army, began to falter. Many consider one of the factors which prevented the coup, was the failure of troops to gain control of communications into and out of Berlin. Hitler and his commanders in the Wolfsschanze were able to broadcast a speech after the coup, which led to the quick demise of the coup as a whole. As a result, the Nazi leadership was able to regain control, using its own loyal troops, within a few hours.

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 prolonged means of execution). Olbricht was the first of the four to be shot. [source: Wikipedia]

Offered for sale are two documents, dated 27 September 1939 which originated during the Poland campaign, one signed by Olbricht announcing that one of his commanders was awarded the clasp to the Iron Cross 2nd class; the second document is the temporary award document to the recipient with Olbricht’s facsimile signature.