At 12:42 p.m. on July 20 of 1944, the solid oak table in Adolf Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” erupted into splinters. The Führer was tossed out of his chair. Others were thrown into the windows and against the wall by the blast. A mere 50 yards away, a pair of German officers, assuming the greatest monster in their nation’s history was dead, began their rush to Berlin.
The 81st anniversary of that daring plot is today. In Berlin, soldiers turned on the Nazi regime, only to discover that a bloodied-but-not-beaten Hitler had rallied his loyalists against them. After months of planning, the July 20 plot, often known as Operation Valkyrie, was to burn gloriously but end in tragic failure.
Many fail to recognize that the strongest opposition to the Third Reich for the duration of its rule came from the Right. The Left … proved little threat.
The leading figure in the plot was the Baron Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a dashing and devoutly Catholic member of the old nobility. Stauffenberg found himself horrified by the slaughter of Jews and recognized the Nazi regime as destroying the traditional values he valued so dearly.
Although there were many opponents of the regime within the German ranks, it was Stauffenberg’s determination that organized these elements into a coherent effort. He won over 22 additional officers over to the plot and personally placed the bomb in Hitler’s lair that nearly took his life.
Stauffenberg had always been skeptical of the Nazi regime. He had pointedly refused to join the party, a common move for professional advancement, amidst the purges of the 1930s. His bishops denounced the government’s attempts to control the church and the murder of innocents. By 1942, he had borne witness to the mass killing of Jews in Ukraine and concluded “these crimes must not be allowed to continue.”
Over 5,000 Germans were killed and up to 20,000 more put in concentration camps in retaliation to the coup attempt. Some were directly implicated in the plot, but most were slaughtered over connections to anti-Nazi leaders such as Stauffenberg. Others were arrested but had their execution stopped by the advance of Allied armies, such as the Catholic priest Augustin Rösch.
Due to the Nazi practice of collective punishment, thousands of women and children in the families of the men were killed or sent to camps. Many, including Claus von Stauffenberg’s brother Berthold, were tortured to death. Their excruciating deaths were then captured on film to be shown to Hitler for his sadistic pleasure.
Claus von Stauffenberg himself was dragged to an open courtyard after his capture on the very night of July 20. Under the soft illumination of truck headlights, a handful of gunshots snuffed the flames of he and three other soldiers in the plot.
The Baron’s body was left in an unmarked grave. Before his body was lost, Hitler ordered him dug up so his uniform’s medals could be stripped and his remains cast over a trash heap. Yet, his last words have continued their echo in the books of historians: “Long live sacred Germany!”
The spirit of the German resistance effort was that of the sacredness of human life, of honor for their nation against tyranny, of the importance of oaths within a transcendental order. Their resistance to Hitler was not in spite of their conservatism, but a direct consequence of it.
In justifying what he recognized was an abrogation of the oath he had been made to take to the Führer, Stauffenberg cited the concrete principles of natural law. Captain Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a compatriot of a similar mind, declared that “it is either Hitler’s life or the lives of hundreds of thousands.”
For many, it was their faith that drove them to resist.
Some were sympathizers of Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Protestant churches. These refused to join a state-controlled Nazi Protestant church that rejected the Old Testament as “too Jewish.”
Most, like Stauffenberg, were Catholics. Pope Pius XII had explicitly condemned the Third Reich and oppression of Jews several times by this point. Every priest in Germany had, by requirement of the Church, denounced the atrocities known to have been committed against the physically and mentally disabled.
One of Valkyrie’s last surviving participants, Philip von Boeselager, recalled overhearing a Nazi general remark that “when the war is over, we will have to purge, after the Jews, the Catholic officers in the army.” Stauffenberg explained his motivations thus: “we submitted this challenge before our Lord and conscience and it must be done … because this man [Hitler] is evil personified.”
Myths abound that slander of the plotters of July 20. Many fail to recognize that the strongest opposition to the Third Reich for the duration of its rule came from the Right. The Left, caught in internecine warfare between communists and moderates, proved little threat.
Some downplay the fierce anti-Naziism of the plotters, claiming that the soldiers were little better than Hitler and only motivated by the impending Allied victory. This line of thought withers at the test of the record.
Plotters such as General Henning von Tresckow had organized to overthrow Hitler since at least 1938. General von Tresckow knew that the good men of the nation had a duty to “prove to the world and to future generations” that they had not stood idly by as tyranny ruled. He had attempted an earlier plot in 1941, but it had fizzled out due to a weakness in internal organizing.
As late as 1956, most Germans deplored those brave enough to have tried to overthrow Hitler at the apogee of his power. West German attempts reversed that, but Communist East Germany refused to honor the plot at all on the grounds of its religious conservatism.
It is no longer the case. Today, 81 years after July 20 of 1944, the courtyard where Claus von Stauffenberg was murdered is now a monument to the German Resistance and a site where many German officers take their oaths, a stark reminder of sacred liberty. Germans join the rest of the world in honoring the courage of the few who were willing to stand when so many others cowered.
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