With Hitler dead, Stauffenberg and his co-plotters would have moved swiftly to take control of the armed forces and to replace the Nazi regime with the alternative government that they had prepared. That their coup would have been successful, even in these circumstances, is by no means certain. Nazi loyalists in the SS and within the Wehrmacht would undoubtedly have moved to overthrow the government installed by the conspirators, proclaiming the assassination to have been the most heinous stab in the back imaginable in Germany's struggle against forces determined to destroy the country. Most likely, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and German police, would have headed a ferocious fightback against the new government. A civil war might have ensued. Assuming, however, that the plotters were able to reckon with sufficient backing in the Wehrmacht to secure their hold on power and suppress any counter-rising from Himmler's forces, they would rapidly have tried to open negotiations with the Western powers, Britain and the US, to end the war in the West. 

The British and Americans had, in fact, long thought that any successful coup from within Germany would result in a takeover of power by the Wehrmacht — seen as the pillar of the regime's aggressive expansionism — and might well endanger their alliance with the Soviet Union, held together solely by the determination to destroy Nazism and German militarism once and for all. The Western Allies would, therefore, almost certainly have rejected the successful plotters' overtures towards a separate peace, and remained insistent upon unconditional surrender on all fronts. Since the only alternative open to the new government would have had been to continue a war it considered lost, inhumane and immensely destructive to Germany, it would have felt compelled, however unwillingly, to have accepted unconditional surrender, in the East as well as in the West. Whether all army units, especially on the Eastern Front, would have laid down their arms might reasonably be doubted. But the collapse of the Eastern Front under the Soviet offensive that had begun a month earlier, on June 22, and subsequent disarray of German forces there, would probably have meant that any opposition to a concluded unconditional surrender would have fairly swiftly disintegrated. It is imaginable that the war with Germany would have been over by the end of July 1944.

Millions of lives, as already noted, would have been saved as a consequence. Whether a lasting peace would have resulted, and whether the path to democracy would have been as swift and uncontested as proved to be the case in western Germany, are open questions. By July 20, 1944, there were no foreign troops on German soil. Even an unconditional surrender at that time would have left the Reich territorially intact. Though deprived of its eastern conquests, Germany would still have held at that point Austria and the Sudetenland, even the annexed western parts of Poland. The victorious powers would have removed these from Germany. But there would have been no division of Germany itself, something only finally determined at Yalta in February 1945. A united Germany might well have proved a greater source of postwar tension among the victorious powers had war ended in July 1944 than the divided postwar Germany did in reality. And establishing a stable, successful democracy, as actually came to pass in West Germany after 1945, would not have been easy. The resistance leaders who would have formed the new post-Nazi government were themselves no democrats. Some even wanted to hold on to significant Nazi territorial gains. Even after what did happen, a third of West Germans still opposed the attack on Hitler's life as late as 1952, when around a quarter of the population retained a "good opinion" of Hitler. It seems certain, therefore, that a new "stab in the back" legend, of the kind that had helped to undermine German democracy after the First World War, would have been a barrier to the successful foundation of a new democracy after the Second World War.

The other two chances of ending the war earlier were missed strategic opportunities, on the Eastern and the Western Fronts. The first of these even preceded the Stauffenberg bomb-plot, and might conceivably have ended the war in the early summer of 1944.

This was a Soviet offensive, one most feared by the German Army General Staff, based upon the prognosis provided by Major General Reinhard Gehlen, the highly competent head of the Foreign Armies East military intelligence unit. The expectation in the General Staff was that the Red Army would exploit the temporary disarray on the Western Front following the landing of the Allies in Normandy at the beginning of June and would launch a huge attack in the east concentrated on a single weak point in the German defences which would have the effect of delivering the death-blow to the eastern army. Gehlen had pinpointed an area around Kovel in the Ukraine, on the edge of a bulge of Army Group Centre, stretching eastwards beyond Minsk, as a special weakness. If the Soviets were to attack through Kovel in a massive offensive, Gehlen pointed out, in a north-westwardly sweep (reminiscent of the German "sickle-cut" through the Ardennes in 1940), there would be little to stop them reaching Warsaw at breakneck speed and advancing from there to the Baltic coast near Danzig. The German Army Groups Central and North would be cut off then and completely destroyed in the process, and the way would be clear for an assault on Berlin, whose defences were then far less well prepared than they eventually would be in April 1945. That was what the Germans feared would happen. Such a Soviet offensive, they thought, would have had several considerable chances of success.