On 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg left a bomb in Hitler's briefing hut and flew to Berlin to launch a coup. Hitler survived, the coup collapsed within hours, and thousands were arrested in the reprisals that followed.
On a peninsula between three Masurian lakes stands a Baroque palace that was the seat of the Lehndorff family for centuries. It housed Ribbentrop in the war, lost its last owner to the gallows after the 20 July plot, and has been under slow restoration since 2009.
A camouflaged bunker town in the Masurian woods, where Hitler spent more than 800 days, survived a bomb on 20 July 1944 and was blown up by his own army as the Red Army closed in.
