Tomorrow, July 20, is the 70th anniversary of the failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It was carried out by an alliance of Catholic and Protestant officers of the Wehrmacht (regular German Army), mostly aristocrats. It was highly unusual for this sort of men to engage in an act of rebellion--they took their oaths of loyalty to the army and its commander, and to their country, very seriously. But they had become progressively horrified as they learned the wickedness of the Nazi regime, and had come to believe that killing Hitler was the only possible way both to put an end to the atrocities being committed by the regime, and also to end the slaughter of World War II, which they realized could not be won and therefore had no point. The Catholics among them were concerned about the morality of assassinating a democratically-elected, legitimate leader of a country (which, like it or not, Adolf Hitler was). They consulted with the cardinal-archbishop of Berlin, and with contacts in the Vatican, in order to be sure that such an act of resistance was morally justified. They received a go-ahead, explicitly from some quarters and tacitly from the very top. There had been several attempts made earlier, but all had failed. The July 20 attempt, urgent because of the recent Normandy landings, depended on a bomb in a briefcase placed beside the Führer at a meeting by Lt. Col. Claus Count von Stauffenberg. Unfortunately, someone thought the briefcase was in the way, and moved it to the other side of an oak table before it went off. Three officers and a secretary were killed...but not Hitler. As a result, some 7,000 people were arrested and 5,000 executed (with the failed attempt being used to justify a crackdown on all opposition, leading to perhaps 20,000 deaths in all). And the war went on for nearly another year. All because someone moved a briefcase. One of the central plotters was Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow, a Prussian Protestant and the chief of staff for Field Marshal Günther von Kluge (who was aware of, and sympathetic to, the plot, as was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, hero of the Afrika Korps). Von Stauffenberg, a Catholic, had had a long and distinguished military career which including losing an eye, one hand, and some fingers of the other hand in North Africa. But there were many more officers involved. Some scholars in the West have played down the idealistic component of this German resistance, arguing that the officers involved merely wanted to end an unwinnable war. Documents captured by the Soviets and given by Mikhail Gorbachev to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1989, however, prove that Christian opposition to Nazism was central to their motivations. Von Tresckow, in an attempt to prevent himself from being tortured and revealing the names of conspirators, killed himself. Von Stauffenberg was executed by firing squad; his brother was killed by being garroted (strangled) repeatedly to the point of death, revived, and strangled again until he finally expired in agony. Von Kluge, summoned by the Gestapo, likewise killed himself; Rommel, as a war hero, was given the choice between killing himself or being executed, and took the former option. Von Kluges aide, Philipp von Boeselager (a Catholic aristocrat from the Rhineland), managed to elude detection and to survive to the end of the war. He reluctantly allowed himself to be interviewed and assisted in writing his account of these events in a book well worth reading: _Valkyrie: the story of the plot to kill Hitler, by its last member_, a book which I highly recommend. Remember, and honor, these brave and virtuous Germans. amazon/Valkyrie-Story-Hitler-Member-Vintage/dp/0307454975/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1405796297
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 18:58:52 +0000
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