Over the next weeks and months - right up to the very last days of the war - all the organs of Nazi totalitarian terror were devoted to hunting down Germany's best and brightest. Besides aristocratic officers, there were lawyers and economists, Catholic priests and Protestant pastors, diplomats and scholars, conservatives and social democrats. All were arrested, interrogated, tortured, humiliated and hanged. Many were hauled in front of Judge Roland Freisler, president of the "People's Court", a bullying, bellowing Nazi (and former Communist) who took a fiendish delight in taunting and verbally tormenting his victims before handing them over to the hangman. Contrary to persistent legend, the condemned were not hanged by piano wire. However, their deaths - on the explicit orders of Hitler, who had personally briefed the executioner that "I want them hung up like slaughtered cattle"- were terrifying enough. Under the glare of floodlights, and to a soundtrack of whirring cine cameras recording their dying struggles on film for the Führer's own delectation, the conspirators were lifted up by the executioners and their trousers were ripped off. Then, to a chorus of sneering hoots, thin cords suspended from butchers' hooks were looped around their necks, and they were let down to be slowly strangled by the nooses.

On Hitler's express orders, the doomed prisoners were denied religious or spiritual consolation in their last moments on earth. However, the courageous Lutheran chaplain at Plötzensee prison, Harald Poelchau - himself a member of the resistance, and a "righteous among the nations" who had hidden persecuted Jews in his own apartment - defied this vile edict and managed to whisper a few words of comfort to them, smuggling their last messages to their loved ones from the jail. Contrasting the behaviour of the two groups, the killers and the killed, the judges and the judged, is like watching opposite poles of humanity wrestle, the best and the worst.

However, if the fanatical Nazis were not typical of all Germans, the idealistic conspirators were even less so. Indeed, in one sense Hitler himself was right when he described them in a broadcast on the night of the putsch as "a small group of plotters". Often aristocrats - there is an astonishing number of "vons" in the names of the 200-odd victims executed - many were not just friends, but bound by family ties, too: Claus von Stauffenberg's brother, Berthold, along with his first cousins Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and Cäsar von Hofacker, and even his ageing uncle Nikolaus, Count von Üxküll-Gyllenbrand. But if this close-knit conservative network was a conscious elite, containing the proud descendants of great Prussian families - the Moltkes, the Kleists and the Bismarcks - and easily caricatured by Nazi propa-ganda as a small reactionary clique, they were also the custodians of the best traditions and tattered honour of old Germany.