Vox Meditantis

Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze), Rastenburg, East Prussia – 20th July 1944

The porridge was burning.

Wilhelm Becker cursed under his breath as he stirred the thick mixture, watching it catch and stick to the bottom of the enormous copper pot. Twenty-three years in Wehrmacht kitchens, and still the simplest things could go wrong when his mind wandered. But how could it not wander, here in this godforsaken bunker complex in the East Prussian forest, where the very air seemed to whisper of secrets and imminent catastrophe?

He scraped at the burnt bits with his wooden spoon, salvaging what he could. The officers would have to make do—supplies were growing scarce, and even Hitler’s inner circle had learned not to be too particular about their morning meals. Still, Becker took pride in his work. In a world gone mad with war and ideology, a properly prepared breakfast remained something honest, something decent.

The kitchen hummed with its usual pre-dawn activity. Three other cooks worked alongside him, preparing the day’s first meal for the dozens of officers, adjutants, and staff housed within the Wolf’s Lair’s concrete walls. The routine had become second nature: black bread, margarine when available, ersatz coffee that barely deserved the name, and porridge stretched with whatever grains could be procured. Sometimes there were eggs from the few chickens kept behind the mess hall, sometimes a bit of sausage or cheese. Today, there would be porridge and little else.

Becker ladled the grey mixture into serving bowls, arranging them on wooden trays with practiced efficiency. As the senior cook, he often served the higher-ranking officers personally—a privilege that had granted him glimpses into the strange, tense world of Hitler’s military headquarters. He had learned to read the subtle signs: which officers avoided eye contact, who pushed food around their plates without eating, whose hands shook slightly as they reached for their coffee cups.

This morning, something felt different.

The first officers began filtering into the dining hall at precisely six o’clock. Becker recognised most of them by now: General Keitel with his perpetually worried expression, Admiral Dönitz consulting his pocket watch, various staff officers whose names he had never learned but whose breakfast preferences he knew by heart. They moved through the serving line with mechanical efficiency, most barely acknowledging his presence.

Then Colonel von Stauffenberg entered.

Becker had served the colonel before—a striking man despite his war wounds, missing his left eye, right hand, and two fingers from his left hand courtesy of an Allied strafing run in Tunisia. Yet there was something about Stauffenberg that commanded attention, an intensity that seemed to burn just beneath his composed exterior. Unlike many of the other officers, he always acknowledged the kitchen staff with a brief nod, sometimes even a quiet “Danke.”

This morning, however, Stauffenberg looked different. Paler, perhaps. More drawn. He approached the serving counter and selected a bowl of porridge, but his movements seemed mechanical, disconnected.

“Just the porridge today, sir?” Becker asked, noting that the colonel had bypassed the bread entirely.

Stauffenberg looked up sharply, as if surprised to hear a voice. His remaining eye focused on Becker with unsettling intensity. “Yes. Just… just the porridge.”

There was something in the colonel’s voice—a hollow quality that made Becker’s chest tighten. He had heard that tone before, in the voices of men preparing for battles they did not expect to survive.

“Perhaps a bit of honey, sir? We managed to acquire some from a local farmer.” Becker reached beneath the counter and produced a small jar of golden liquid, a treasure in these austere times.

For a moment, Stauffenberg’s mask slipped. His features softened, and something almost resembling a smile crossed his face. “Honey,” he murmured, as if the word itself held some profound significance. “Yes. Yes, that would be… kind of you.”

Becker drizzled the honey over the grey porridge, watching as it swirled and dissolved, creating amber spirals in the bland mixture. “My grandmother used to say honey could make anything taste like home,” he offered quietly.

The colonel’s remaining eye fixed on him again, and for a moment, Becker felt as though he were being evaluated, weighed. “Your grandmother was a wise woman,” Stauffenberg said finally. “Home… yes, that’s precisely what one needs sometimes.”

As Stauffenberg carried his tray towards a corner table, Becker noticed that his hand—the damaged left hand—was trembling slightly. The colonel sat alone, stirring his porridge mechanically, occasionally taking small spoonfuls but clearly not tasting what he ate. His gaze kept drifting towards the windows, though there was nothing to see beyond the thick concrete walls and steel shutters that characterised this underground fortress.

The morning wore on, and Becker found himself watching Stauffenberg from the corner of his eye as he continued serving other officers. The colonel remained at his table longer than usual, nursing a cup of ersatz coffee and staring at his barely-touched porridge. Once, Becker saw him take a spoonful of the honey-sweetened mixture, close his eyes, and hold it in his mouth as if trying to memorise the taste.

Around eight o’clock, as the breakfast service wound down, Becker noticed Stauffenberg had been joined by two other officers—Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim and General Olbricht. They sat huddled together, speaking in voices too low to carry, but their body language radiated tension. Occasionally, one of them would glance towards the serving counter, and Becker would busy himself with cleaning already-clean surfaces.

Their conversation appeared intense, urgent. Becker had witnessed many such discussions over the months—the war was going badly, everyone knew it, and the strain showed in every face within these concrete walls. But this felt different. There was a finality to their gestures, a weight to their whispered words that seemed to press against the very air.

When they finally rose to leave, Stauffenberg’s porridge bowl remained more than half full. He had managed only a few spoonfuls of the honey-sweetened mixture—the only sweetness, perhaps, that he would taste this day.

As Becker cleared the table, he found himself examining the abandoned bowl with unexpected emotion. The honey had crystallised slightly around the edges, creating delicate patterns in the remaining porridge. Such a simple thing—oats and water and a dollop of golden sweetness—yet somehow it felt significant, laden with meaning he could not articulate.

“A shame to waste food,” muttered Hans, one of the younger cooks, reaching to scrape the bowl clean.

“Leave it,” Becker said sharply, then softened his tone. “I’ll handle it.”

He carried the bowl back to the kitchen, but instead of emptying it immediately, he set it aside. Throughout the rest of the morning, as he prepared lunch and supervised the endless tasks that kept the Wolf’s Lair’s inhabitants fed, his eyes kept returning to that half-empty bowl. The honey had darkened now, the porridge had cooled to an unappetising grey mass, yet something about it seemed to demand preservation, as if it held some fragment of dignity that deserved protection.

Around noon, as Becker was preparing to serve lunch, word began to spread through the kitchen staff in excited whispers. There had been an explosion in the conference room. The Führer was dead—no, wounded—no, unharmed. The stories changed with each telling, but the underlying message remained constant: something momentous had occurred.

As the day unfolded and the truth began to emerge—an assassination attempt, a bomb in a briefcase, conspirators being rounded up—Becker found himself thinking of Colonel von Stauffenberg’s untouched breakfast. The honey-sweetened porridge that had promised, however briefly, the taste of home.

By evening, official word had come down: the plot had failed, the conspirators were being arrested. Colonel von Stauffenberg was among them, already condemned, already as good as dead.

That night, after the kitchen had been cleaned and the other staff had retired, Becker returned to that abandoned bowl. The porridge had hardened to an inedible mass, the honey now dark and congealed, but he could still detect its faint sweetness in the air.

He thought of his own grandmother, dead these fifteen years, and her morning ritual of stirring honey into his porridge while sunlight streamed through her kitchen window. He thought of the simple pleasure in that golden sweetness, the way it could transform the most basic sustenance into something approaching comfort. He thought of Stauffenberg’s face as he had tasted that first spoonful, the momentary peace that had crossed his features, the way he had closed his eyes as if trying to hold onto something precious and fleeting.

What was it the colonel had been seeking in that brief moment? A memory of childhood breakfasts? A connection to some fundamental goodness that existed beyond the machinery of war and betrayal? A simple reminder that somewhere, in some other life, mornings began with sweetness rather than conspiracy and death?

Becker carefully scraped the bowl clean, but he saved a small portion of the hardened honey, wrapping it in a clean cloth. He told himself he was being foolish, sentimental, but he could not quite bring himself to discard it entirely. It seemed important somehow—this last remnant of a doomed man’s final search for comfort.

In the years that followed, long after the war had ended and the Wolf’s Lair had been abandoned to the forest, Becker would sometimes unwrap that small packet of crystallised honey. He would hold it up to the light and remember a summer morning when a desperate man had sought solace in sweetness, when the simple act of adding honey to porridge had become, for one brief moment, an affirmation of humanity amidst the machinery of destruction.

He never learned whether Stauffenberg had tasted home in that honey-sweetened porridge, whether it had provided the comfort he sought, or whether it had simply been another disappointment in a morning already heavy with the weight of impossible choices. But Becker chose to believe that somewhere, in those few quiet spoonfuls, the colonel had found what he was looking for: not just sweetness, but the memory of a world where breakfast could be innocent, where honey was simply honey, where the greatest decision of the morning was whether to take a second helping rather than whether to risk everything in an attempt to change the course of history.

Some comforts, Becker had learned, existed not in the eating, but in the hope that somewhere, somehow, sweetness might still be possible.

The End

On 20th July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb exploded during a military conference at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia, but failed to kill the Nazi leader due to the conference being moved to a wooden building rather than the planned concrete bunker. The assassination attempt, part of Operation Valkyrie involving over 200 German military officers and civilians, collapsed within hours of Hitler’s survival. Stauffenberg and three co-conspirators were executed that same evening, with approximately 200 additional participants killed over the following months. This plot remains emblematic of German resistance to Nazism, demonstrating that significant opposition existed within Hitler’s own military establishment and challenging post-war narratives of universal German complicity.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.