Although the individual reactions of the Allies to 20 July varied slightly, the general response to the assassination and its failure was relatively muted and soon transformed into a propaganda point for the war effort. The news of the 20 July plot pretty much filtered out of Germany almost as soon as the coup failed, initially from German media outfits. Hitler himself took to the German airwaves on 21 July at 1 AM to reassure the German public he was still alive and that the coup had been squashed. Goebbels and the German news service also became quite active in the following weeks describing Hitler's providential survival and the renewed need for a more National Socialist war effort. The military also witnessed an upswing in ideological agitation within the Wehrmacht. The Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier (NSFO), which had been established earlier in the war to instill the correct ideological mentality within the troops, found a new vitality after the 20 July plot. By 22 July, the NSFOs were reading Hitler's speech and others by loyal commanders like Donitz reminding the soldiers of their duties and that insubordination was akin to treason and those guilty of it would meet the same fate as the 20 July plotters.

News of the bombing caught Allied intelligence relatively unaware and thus there was little time to frame a proper response to it. From his vantage point in Bern, OSS station chief Allen Dulles had some contacts with the Goerdeler group, which in his reports back to the US were codenamed the Breakers. But the American spychief had very little specific knowledge of the Breakers and his contacts with them were very limited. Thus the OSS had very little idea of the scale or goals of the Stauffenberg plot. In a March 1944 cable, Dulles explained to Washington the nature of this faction:

'The term "Breakers" refers to a German resistance organization which is made up of liberal and educated persons from special governmental and military circles; however, its organizational structure is loose. It is reported that they would like to see drastic social changes based on western rather than eastern orientation but that they fear that circumstances are forcing Germany toward an eastern influence

There was very little that Dulles or other OSS chiefs knew about the dimensions of Valkyrie nor were their German contacts willing to part with such information. Therefore most of the OSS treated the Breakers as just one of several factions competing for power in the collapsing Third Reich and thus looked on them as a source of intelligence and an asset for the postwar order.

This dim view of the resistance meant that events of 20 July caught the Allied intelligence agencies relatively flat-footed and they were led more by facts on the ground. Dulles did send a proposal to Washington on 22 July proposing that the President comment on the plot and in case the rebellion gained any traction, that the US make:

some announcement to the effect that any German town which sides with the opposition would not be attacked whereas Gestapo centers and Nazi strongholds would be bombed unsparingly.

But the swift unraveling of the coup precluded this option and of Dulles's proposals, only an adjustment of German-language propaganda remained a viable option.

The Soviet response to the 20 July plot was also likewise muted and proceeded along already established channels of psychological warfare. The Soviet-run Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland (National Committee for a Free Germany/NKFD), which was primarily composed KPD emigres and, increasingly, German PoW officers, welcomed the news of the assassination attempt. In an appeal to the German people on 23 July, the NKFD praised the plotters and called for more action:

Every blow against the Hitler system, whoever may strike it, is a blow against the mortal enemy of our nation. Every action against Hitler and his henchmen is a truly patriotic deed.

The Soviet-run Freies Deutschland's German language radio broadcasts and newspapers publicized the 20 July coup and urged more military officers to act against their state. But the NKFD was ill at ease with the aristocratic ethos of the largely military 20 July plotters and was more comfortable with them being martyrs than actual allies in the fight against Hitler. In a speech of 16 August, NKFD member Anton Ackermann noted that the coup failed because it did not incorporate the German people, and thus was a "palace revolution," rather than a serious attempt to end the war. Other NKFD theoreticians postulated that the events of 20 July were just the harbingers of a wider social revolution in which Germany's monopoly capital had panicked over what it had created with Hitler, indicating that Germany had reached a threshold in which the forces of the toiling masses could no longer be held in check inside Germany.

Nor were the Soviets and the NKFD the only ones to apply an ideologically-tinted interpretation of the 20 July plot. Working stateside for the OSS, Herbert Marcuse dismissed the 20 July plotters as scions of the social classes that abetted the rise of Hitler in the first place, the bourgeoisie and the military. A US governmental postmortem of 20 July, conducted with the input of various German emigres concluded:

One source described the men who planned the revolt as "yesterday's men." Certainly most of them were upright and respectable men. But neither the world nor Germany itself would have found them to be imbued with a truly democratic spirit.

Neither FDR nor the State Department were terribly interested in commentating on the coup and the White House was quite silent on the affair. While German-language propaganda broadcasts highlighted the 20 July plot, the American response in Washington and in the US media was apathetic to the assassination attempt. The New York Herald Tribune reporting on the bloody aftermath of Valkyrie that "'Let the generals kill the corporal or viceversa, preferably both." Churchill engaged in similar sentiments. On a 2 August speech to the House of Commons, the Prime Minister framed the coup as part of the wider rollback of German military fortunes:

Not only are those once proud German armies being beaten back on every front but in their homeland in Germany, tremendous events have occurred which must shake to their foundation the confidence of the people and the loyalty of the troops. The highest personalities in the Reich are murdering one another, or trying to, while the avenging armies of the Allies close upon the doomed and ever-narrowing circle of their power.

This speech played into larger British stereotypes about the entrenched bloodthirsty nature of Prussian militarism and the danger posed by it.

In hindsight, this confusion and tactical instrumentalization of the 20 July plot was perhaps inevitable. The plotters had at best a hazy view of what a post-Hitler Germany would look like and such visions were often quite contradictory; whether or not killing Hitler would lead to a negotiated settlement with the Allies or selective continuation of the war under new leadership was something the plotters themselves never really clarified to themselves. Allied caution and skepticism over the coup was warranted given the resistance's meager efforts prior to 20 July. Nor did the 20 July plotters really have a coherent ideology or mentality. This nebulousness allowed the Allies to pigeonhole the plotters into preconceived notions about the structure of German society, which were often freighted with ideological baggage.

Sources

Dulles, Allen, and Neal H. Petersen. From Hitler's Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942-1945. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Kershaw, Ian. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.

Klemperer, Klemens von. German Resistance against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938-1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt.Germany and the Second World War. Volume IX/I, German wartime society 1939-1945 : politicization, disintegration, and the struggle for survival. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008.