The man who almost assassinated Adolph Hitler: Claus von Stauffenberg

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.. Count Claus von Stauffenberg was born in one of the oldest aristocratic families in Southern Germany, in the family, closely related to the royal house of Baden-Wurttemberg - father Earl held a high position at the court of the last king of Baden-Württemberg. Klaus was the third child in the family. His elder brothers were Berthold and Alexander. Claus von Stauffenberg was brought up in the spirit of Catholic piety, German patriotism and monarchical conservatism. He received an excellent education, marked his literary talents ... Zeitgeist, education, love of country, all this could not lead him to a military career. Claus Philipp Maria entered military service in 1926. Stauffenberg enthusiastically ... took Hitler's rise to power in 1933, believing in the fact that the Nazi regime would ensure a revival of Germany. Later, however, his attitude to the National Socialist ideas changed. The reason for this was the atrocities committed against the Jews and the persecution of religious ministers in Germany. At the beginning of World War II, Stauffenberg was an officer in the Bavarian Cavalry Regiment, participated in the occupation of the Sudetenland in Polish and French campaigns, was at the German-Soviet front, and in 1943 - in North Africa. Seriously injured in Tunisia (loss of his left eye, his right hand and two fingers on his left hand), Klaus miraculously survived and returned to service. By this time he had realized that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster ...

The family man: Claus Stauffenberg with wife Nina Baronesse von Lerchenfeld, Baroness von Lerchenfel. They married in 1933.

Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (15 November 1907 – 20 July 1944) was a German army officer and Catholic aristocrat who was one of the leading members of the failed 20 July plot of 1944 to kill German dictator Adolf Hitler (Operation Valkyries) and remove the Nazi Party from power in World War II Germany. Along with Henning von Tresckow and Hans Oster, he was one of the central figures of the German Resistance movement within the Wehrmacht.

Stauffenberg (left) with Hitler at the Wolfsschanze, Rastenburg, five days before the assassination attempt. Alos in the picture with his back is Friedrich Fromm, the commander in chief of the Reserve Army. 

A young von Stauffenberg

KNOW ABOUT VON STAUFFENBERG

Stauffenberg was much more than an action hero driven by the kind of simple moral imperative that suits Hollywood's desire to portray everything in terms of starkly opposed opposites of good and evil. He found moral guidance in a complex mixture of Catholic religious precepts, an aristocratic sense of honour, Ancient Greek ethics, and German Romantic poetry. Above all, perhaps, his sense of morality was formed under the influence of the poet Stefan George, whose ambition is was to revive a "secret Germany" that would sweep away the materialism of the Weimar Republic and restore German life to its true spirituality. Inspired by George, Stauffenberg came to look for a revival of an idealized medieval Reich, in which Europe would attain a new level of culture and civilization under German leadership.

VON STAUFFENBERG: A DESPERATE HERO

Stauffenberg was confident that an anti-Nazi government would be able to work out an arrangement with the Allies and avoid unconditional surrender. Julius Leber sought in vain to disabuse him of this illusion. In a paper apparently written by Stauffenberg himself and left behind in army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse on July 20, the hope was expressed that Germany would remain a "significant factor in the constellation of powers" and that the Wehrmacht would be an "effective instrument" in bringing about negotiations "on an equal footing" with the Allies.

The tenacity with which Stauffenberg clung to this misconception has often been noted. Perhaps, as some commentators have speculated, he needed it as much as he needed his moral outrage in order to take action. After all, any clearheaded assessment of the situation could only have led to the conclusion that events should be allowed to play themselves out to the bitter end. The historian Gordon Craig regards the German conspirators as incurable "romantics," and his characterization is probably apt, even in respect to Stauffenberg. But the critical undertone of that judgment denies them the dignity of their efforts, however desperate, impulsive, and irrational they may have been. The particular heroism of the German resistance resides precisely in the hopelessness of the conspirators' position, in what one historian calls the "last hurrah of a lost cause."

Utterly without support or encouragement from within or without, they carried on the struggle even though, by the end, no national or tangible political interest could be advanced. Thus the assassination attempt of July 20 was launched in the spirit of Tresckow's words to Stauffenberg: "coûte que coûte"-do it "whatever the cost." Stauffenberg surely knew that the political goals he was serving by killing Hitler were now a mere fantasy. To the Allied demand for unconditional surrender he and his friends responded with an equally unconditional determination to act, motivated at this point by only the most abstract and general ideals: the dignity of humankind, justice, responsibility, self-respect. It is revealing that all discussion of the "right psychological moment," which had played so prominent a role in the debates of previous years, had long since ceased.

The dashing Wehrmacht officer in 1936

After several unsuccessful tries by Stauffenberg to meet Hitler, Göring and Himmler when they were together, he went ahead with the attempt at Wolfsschanze on 20 July, 1944. Stauffenberg entered the briefing room carrying a briefcase containing two small bombs. The location had unexpectedly been changed from the subterranean Führerbunker to Speer's wooden barrack/hut. He left the room to arm the first bomb with specially-adapted pliers, a task made difficult because he had lost his right hand and had only three fingers on his left. A guard knocked and opened the door, urging him to hurry as the meeting was about to begin. As a result, Stauffenberg was able to arm only one of the bombs. He left the second bomb with his aide-de-camp, Werner von Haeften, and returned to the briefing room, where he placed the briefcase under the conference table, as close as he could to Hitler. Some minutes later, he excused himself and left the room. After his exit, the briefcase was moved by Colonel Heinz Brandt.

KNOW THE REAL VON STAUFFENBERG

But even in the late 1930s, he was markedly more sympathetic to National Socialism than were many more senior officers. His relatives were wont to describe him as the only "brown" member of the family. While he was later to lose altogether his enthusiasm for National Socialism, he never lost his contempt for parliamentary democracy. This alone would make him ill-fitted to serve as a model for the conduct and ideas of future generations.

Goering inspects the room after the explosion

When the explosion tore through the hut, Stauffenberg was convinced that no one in the room could have survived. Although four people were killed and almost all survivors were injured, Hitler himself was shielded from the blast by the heavy, solid-oak conference table and was only slightly wounded.

Stauffenberg and Haeften quickly left and drove to the nearby airfield. After his return to Berlin, Stauffenberg immediately began to motivate his friends to initiate the second phase: the military coup against the Nazi leaders. When Joseph Goebbels announced by radio that Hitler had survived and later, after Hitler himself personally spoke on the state radio, the conspirators realized that the coup had failed. They were tracked to their Bendlerstrasse offices and overpowered after a brief shoot-out, during which Stauffenberg was wounded in the shoulder.

THE REAL VON STAUFFENBERG

The over-ambitious military strategy adopted by Hitler in 1941, which led to disaster at Moscow in January 1942, was repeated on an even greater scale in the following year, and it became clear to Stauffenberg that it was overstretching Germany's resources to such an extent that failure was becoming inevitable. Even more important, the mass killings of Soviet civilians behind the Eastern Front, the murder of three and a half million Soviet prisoners of war, the looting and destruction of Soviet property, above all, the shooting of hundreds of thousands of Jews, convinced Stauffenberg that the National Socialist regime was recklessly squandering the goodwill that it had initially met among the peoples it had freed from Stalin's yoke. It was betraying his idea of a new Europe under the benevolent rule of the Reich. Indeed, Stauffenberg thought it was betraying the ideals of National Socialism itself.

The death sentence for Stauffenberg

STAUFFENBERG SHOT

In the courtyard outside, several military vehicles pulled up, their headlights glaring. Along all the sides of the square, groups of curious onlookers gathered. In the middle stood an execution squad consisting of Lieutenant Werner Schady and ten noncommissioned officers. As the prisoners emerged from the staircase, they were positioned in front of a small pile of sand. Olbricht was the first to be shot. Next it was Stauffenberg's turn, but just as the squad fired, Haeften, in a defiant gesture, threw himself into the hail of bullets. When the squad again took aim at Stauffenberg, he shouted, "Long live sacred Cermany." Before the sound of his voice died away, shots resounded. 

In what turned out to be a futile attempt to save his own life, co-conspirator General Oberst Friedrich Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army present in the Bendlerblock (Headquarters of the Army), charged other conspirators in an impromptu court martial and condemned the ringleaders of the conspiracy to death. Stauffenberg and fellow officers Colonel General Olbricht, Lieutenant von Haeften, and Oberst (Colonel) Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim were shot before 1:00 a.m. that night (21 July 1944) by a makeshift firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which was lit by the headlights of a truck.

As his turn came, Stauffenberg spoke his last words, "Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!" ("Long live our sacred Germany!") Others say the last words were: "Es lebe das geheime Deutschland"("Long live the secret Germany!") Fromm ordered that the executed officers (his former co-conspirators) receive an immediate burial with military honors in the Matthäus Churchyard in Berlin's Schöneberg district. The next day, however, Stauffenberg's body was exhumed by the SS, stripped of his medals, and cremated.

HIMMLER WANTED TO KILL STAUFFENBERG'S FAMILY

 Himmler discussed the failed coup at length at a meeting of gauleiters in Posen two weeks after the event, declaring that he would "introduce absolute responsibility of kin ... a very old custom practiced among our forefathers." One had only to read the Teutonic sagas, he said: "When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed or when there was a blood feud in a family, they were utterly consistent. . . . This man has committed treason; his blood is bad; there is traitor's blood in him, that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. And so, too, will Count Stauffenberg's family be wiped out down to the last member.

Accordingly, Himmler ordered relatives of the Stauffenberg brothers arrested, from their wives all the way to a three-year-old child and the eighty-five-year-old father of a cousin. A third Stauffenberg brother, Alexander, was not involved in the plot but was nevertheless returned from Athens to Berlin, interrogated at length, and dispatched to a concentration camp. The property of all relatives was seized. After an interrogation that yielded nothing of interest, Countess Stauffenberg was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, as was her mother. Her children were placed in an orphanage.

IF STAUFFENBERG HAD SUCCEEDED.....

Had Stauffenberg's bomb succeeded in killing Hitler, it is unlikely that the military coup planned to follow it would have moved the leading conspirators smoothly into power. Large parts of the army, the SS and the NSDAP would have resisted by force of arms, and a civil war would have been the most probable result. There can be little doubt, however, that this would have brought huge military advantages to the Allies, and that the war would have come to an end several months sooner than it did, with the consequent saving of millions of lives.

Stauffenberg's resting place

Today, there is a stone in memorial of this event.

Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg (Stauffenberg's wife he had married in 1933) and others were awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Honorary Medal of the City of Bamberg for their commitment to the preservation of the old town of Bamberg.

FROM THE BBC
The following day Adolf Hitler made a radio broadcast to the German nation detailing the failed assassination and thanked fate for allowing him to continue his "work".

The planned coup, known as the July plot, was led by senior military leaders like Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben and General Ludwig Beck.

After Claus von Stauffenberg had placed the briefcase under the table next to Hitler, he left the building, heard the bomb explode and assumed Hitler was dead.

He flew to Berlin to join Von Witzleben and Beck and take over using the German Home Army. But through a series of lucky circumstances Hitler was only slightly injured, though three
other people were killed.

Von Stauffenberg was arrested the same day and shot. The rest of the conspirators were tried and hanged or offered the chance to commit suicide.

Eight of those executed were hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks and their executions filmed and shown to senior members of the Nazi Party and the armed forces.

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Suggested Reading

Countdown to Valkyrie: THE JULY PLOT TO ASSASSINATE HITLER

By

NIGEL JONES

This book is vastly superior to the recent movie. Author Nigel Jones initially covers some of the previous assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler. Hitler always credited "Providence" for his survival, and confirmation that he was to continue with his plan for Germany. The book really picks up its interest when Count Claus von Stauffenberg and his cohorts realized the war was lost with the D-Day invasion at Normandy, and put together their plan to show the world they wanted to save Germany before it was totally destroyed.

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Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie

By

MICHAEL BAIGENT and RICHARD LEIGH

Overall I found this book a good history of Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators. It tells the Valkyrie story not only in an exciting way, but with keen psychological insights that do not assume to know more about the characters and their motivation than the authors possibly could. What I found most fascinating was its exploration of the national psyche of the German nation -- the authors make the reader understand how German "volk" character, mysticism, the defeat of WWI, the Treaty of Versailles, and the Teutonic need for order and a leader all conspired to make Hitler not only a predictable leader growing out of the Weimar Republic, but an almost inevitable one.

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Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944 
By

PETER HOFFMAN

 Stauffenberg is not only a hero of Germany, but of anyone on earth who loves freedom and respects the laws of God and humanity. Stauffenberg was Germany's guardian angel, who attempted to save his nation and slay the man he deemed "the antichrist." Doctor Hoffmann paints a wonderful picture of Stauffenberg's early life and military career. He then moves into minute detail of the plot to kill Hitler and the man whom fate had chosen to lead it.

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Plotting Hitler's Death: The Story of German Resistance 
by
JOACHIM FEST

The author of this book, Joachim Fest, is one of the better know of the German World War 2 historians so I was expecting a well researched and factual book. What I found was just that. Fest first takes us through a history of a number of the failed plots and people responsible before sending the second half of the book on the plot that actually got the closest with a bomb blast injuring Hitler. Fest describes the set up of the plot, what was to take place after the assassination in regards to taking control of the German government and the assumptions of what would happen with the war. We also get a chapter on what happened to the members of the plot once it failed.

Overall this is an interesting and well-constructed book. 

Pictorial history of the Eastern (Russian) Front: Second World War

Hitler at a German victory military parade at Warsaw on October 5, 1939. Occupation of Poland gave Hitler a road into Russia. Barbarossa came almost two years later in June 1941.

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The assault on Russia began on June 22, 1941. Some German generals had misgivings about the date. They felt it had begun a month too late. They knew about the harsh Russian winter which had defeated Napoleon's armies before. But Hitler was adamant. Thus Barbarossa began.

OPERATION BARBAROSSA

The German army made rapid advances into Russia. Hitler and his generals were jubilant. For some time it seemed like Russia too would fall quickly like France and Poland had done.

WHERE HITLER WENT WRONG?

His most disastrous error was to go into the Soviet Union as a conqueror instead of a liberator. The Soviet people had suffered enormously at the hands of the Communist autocracy for two decades. Millions had died when the Reds forced people off their land to create collective farms. Millions more were obliged to move great distances to work long hours, under terrible conditions, and little compensation in factories and construction projects. The secret police punished any resistance with death or transportation to horrible prison gulags in Siberia. In the gruesome purges of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had systematically killed all leaders and all military officers who, in his paranoid mind, posed the slightest threat to his dictatorship. Life for the ordinary Russian was drab, full of exhausting work, and dangerous. At the same time, the Soviet Union was an empire ruling over a collection of subjugated peoples who were violently opposed to rule from the Kremlin.

Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler's legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression. Had Hitler done this, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.

With such a policy, Hitler would not have gained the Lebensraum , or living space for the German people, that he coveted, but once the Soviet Union had been shattered, he could have put into effect anything he wanted to in the pieces that remained.

Hitler, however, followed precisely the opposite course of action. His "commissar order" called for the instant shooting down of Communist party agents in the army. He sent Einsatzgruppen

Two days before the Germans struck, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's commissioner for the regions to be conquered, told his closest collaborators: "The job of feeding the German people stands at the top of the list of Germany's claims in the east....We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people."

The genuine welcome that German soldiers received as they entered Soviet towns and villages in the first days of the campaign was quickly replaced by fear, hatred, and a bitter guerrilla war behind the lines that slowed supplies to the front, killed thousands of Germans, and increasingly hobbled the German army.
or extermination detachments to come behind the army and rout out and murder Jews. He resolved to deport or allow millions of Slavs to starve in order to empty the land for future German settlers.

The enthusiasm spread to the battle-front. German soldiers were full of nationalistic fervour and hoped for an early victory.

FAILURE OF BARBAROSSA

A large portion of the failure to successfully execute Operation Barbarossa must go to the planners and those involved with German intelligence. Many key failures of either or both directly led to the Germans being stalled in the snows just outside Moscow in December, 1941. As far as horse cavalry was concerned, the mighty "German accounts tended to ridicule cavalry units as hopeless anachronisms. During the winter of 1941-42, when all mechanized units were immobilized by cold and snow, the horse cavalry divisions (and newly created ski battalions and brigades) [of the Russians] proved effective…" Here the Germans stubbornly clung to their belief in a quick war that would be long over before the snows of October could set in. It would appear that no thought was given in the time leading up to the attack for contingencies based on failures to meet objectives. For instance, how could the planners not have drawn up contingency plans to cover cold weather operations? Flexibility is a major key to successful warfare.

Hitler moved the date for Barbarossa back to 22 June from 15 May because of "[t]he German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece during April and May, 1941…also caused a series of delays in the attack on Russia itself." At the time, it likely seemed the sensible thing for Germany to do; but by December, with their armies poised to finish off Russia and take Moscow, it can be seen as a key contributor to Nazi defeat. This delay of five weeks would prove to be crucial! Had Barbarossa started in May instead of June, they would have arrived in Moscow and Leningrad sooner and would have taken both cities. This was yet another in a long line of German errors and miscalculations that contributed to their defeat against the Russians in the war; but logistics might have been the key area that really broke the Nazis back. 

Hitler's actual military plans also were so false strategically that they could only succeed if the Red Army collapsed from internal stress. That, in fact, is what Hitler counted on. He did not expect to win by a superior method or concept, but by relying on the Russian army to disintegrate after a series of initial battles.

Great generals don't win wars in this fashion. They don't depend upon their enemies to make mistakes or give up. A great general relies upon his own ideas, initiative, skill, and maneuvers to put the enemy in a position where he must do the general's bidding.

Hitler's greatest strategic mistake was his refusal to concentrate on a single, decisive goal. Instead he sought to gain---all at the same time---three widely distant objectives: Leningrad, which he sought to smash because it was the birthplace of Russian Communism; the Ukraine and the Caucausus beyond, which he wanted for its abundant foodstuffs, 60 percent of Soviet industry, and the bulk of the Soviet Union's oil; and Moscow, which he desired because it was the capital of the Soviet Union and its nerve center.

Hitler wanted all of them. Indeed, he expected to reach the line Archangel-Caspian Sea in 1941. That is 300 miles east of Moscow, and only about 450 miles from the Ural mountains. But Germany did not have the strength to achieve all of these goals in a single year's campaign. At best, it had the strength to achieve one. 

 

Goebbels propaganda machine went into overdrive extolling the German troops.

The great weakness of the panzer divisions was the condition of the roads. In the vast Soviet Union there were only 40,000 miles of paved highways. Most routes were dirt, and turned into muddy morasses in wet weather. In a panzer division fewer than 300 vehicles were fully tracked, while nearly 3,000 were wheeled and largely restricted to roads. In the west this had been little problem, because of the abundance of all-weather roads. In Russia their relative absence meant that panzer mobility would be ended with the first mud. 

The greatest fault of the Red Army was its organization of armored and motorized forces. It possessed fifty tank divisions and twenty-five mechanized (motorized) divisions, far more than the Germans, but Stalin had not accepted the German doctrine of concentration of armor. The largest armored formation was a mechanized corps of one motorized and two tank divisions, and these corps were widely dispersed across the front, not massed as were German panzer formations. Furthermore, each mechanized corps's divisions were often a hundred kilometers apart. Some corps were subordinate to field armies with the job of supporting local counterattacks. Others were held in reserve to take part in counterthrusts under front (army group) control. Soviet armor, spread out in small packets, thereby repeated the error that the British and French had made in the 1940 campaign.

German Propaganda Poster in Ukrainian Language. This was to demoralise the Soviet army.

Germans bomb Leningrad. Russian civilians die.

A Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) woman takes a dead body for mass funeral.

Even in the areas occupied by the Germans, Russian partisans kept up the fight. They were not fighting for the Soviet Union. They were fighting for Mother Russia. As were all the soldiers in Stalin's army.


The harsh Russian winter really turned the tide. The German war machine ground to a halt literally in the heavy Russian snow. The German generals had acted hastily in attacking Russia. They had not factored in the winter. The Russian soldiers were well clothed in the harsh weather (above).


The ill-prepared and poorly clothed German soldiers froze to death.


The winter gave Russia to crank up its war production. Soviet factories churned out tanks and arms.

The Soviet poster tells the story of Russian determination.

The Soviet army was standing up. The tide was turning.

The Russians threw into the battlefields fresh troops who began to overwhelm the Germans.

STALIN'S MISTAKES

The Communist military 'genius' Stalin introduced "[i]n 1937, 'dual-command' (which) was hammered on with the purge. 'Military Soviets', the command-and-control device of a senior officer flanked by 'political members', blanketed the major commands and institutions."[6] Not only had Stalin shot or imprisoned nearly all of his senior military leaders during the mid-1930s 'purge:' but the idea of adding another layer into an already complicated command structure would prove to be nearly the Russians undoing in the first months of Operation Barbarossa. If not for the size of the country and its armed forces—this might have been the decisive edge the Nazis could have exploited to finish Russia in the early weeks after 22 June, 1941. Again though, these two events caused Hitler to over-estimate the effect it would have on the Russian armed forces and the regular soldier who would do most of the fighting and dying for Mother Russia.

The Russians counter-attacked ruthlessly.

The German soldiers were tired.

More fresh German tanks and arms were sent by railroads to Russia but the tide had turned.

Russians attacked and the Germans were on the back foot.

Russians tanks roll into the war fields

The Nazi tanks were destroyed

A German plane crashes. Symbolic of the state of the war.

Soviet army retakes Kiev

"Stalin's organ", Katyusha rockets firing on German positions.

Soviet fighter planes now dominated the skies

Ruins of a German Panzer.

Restoring the pre-Barbarossa border.

A losing army. German Prisoner-of-war.

Raising the Red flag over the Reichstag.

Soviet army chief general Zhukov rides during a victory parade .

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