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The Eurasian Politician - July 2004
Christian Jokinen, 13 July 2004: christianjokinen @ yahoo.com
He almost made it. Through the block zones and roadblocks guarded by the SS troops, he had brought a briefcase from Berlin to the place called Wolfsschantze - the Wolf's Nest - in the woods of Northern Poland near Rastenburg, today's Ketrzyn. Inside the briefcase, he had brought a bomb to the situation barrack where the dictator was studying maps with his generals and negotiating about the situation on the Eastern Front. The arriving man put his briefcase to the floor, and using his foot, pushed it under a table, closer to the dictator. Then the man left the room, catching no attention. Five minutes later, at 12:42, the bomb exploded. Five people in the same room were killed instantly. The roof fell on those who were present. The table, under which the briefcase containing the bomb had been placed, blew up into pieces. But that very table saved the life of Adolf Hitler.
Sixty years ago, on 20th July, 1944, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was very close to change the final outcome of the World War II. The failure of Stauffenberg's bomb strike belongs to the greatest tragedies of last century. If the bomb would have killed Hitler, the "Operation Walkyrie" would probably have succeeded; the war would have become one year shorter, saving the lives of approximately four million Germans, two million Soviet soldiers, and 100'000 American and British soldiers, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Jews and other prisoners of the concentration camps who died between the bomb attempt and Germany's surrender.
There were several conspiracies to overthrow the Nazis, and half a dozen assassination attempts targeting Hitler. However, a clear majority of the Germans remained loyal to the Nazi regime to the end. Therefore, historians have described the little German resistance to national-socialism as "resistance without popular support". Among the resistance, the conspiracy of the high-ranking Wehrmacht officers was nearest to succeeding.
Hitler had known as early as at his ascension to power, that there were many officers in the Reichswehr, cultivating the Prussian military traditions, who were opposed to him. Hitler was considered as a populist parvenu by the old elite. However, most of the officers, including many of the later conspirators, welcomed Hitler's ascension to power as a salvation of Germany. They saw Hitler's militarism favorable for their careers, and his revanchism as a chance to wipe out the "shame of Versailles". Hitler also managed to remove those conservative generals, who opposed him, by framing scandals against them. Among these victims were the commander of the army General von Fritsch, and the war minister General von Blomberg. Yet a new anti-Hitler opposition among officer started to take form as early as in the winter 1937-1938, when individual officers understood where Hitler was driving Germany.
Ultimately, the factors that opened the eyes of many officers included the "total war" with all its horrors, the Holocaust of the Jews, and the turning of the military success into setbacks. These things drove officers to join active resistance. Among those officers was Stauffenberg, who joined the conspiracy in 1942. At its height, the conspiracy included well over hundred officers. A coup d'état had been postponed several times.
When pressure mounted on the Eastern Front, and the Western Allies were advancing from west towards Germany, the question arose, whether there was a need for a coup any more. General Henning von Tresckow, who had joined the anti-Hitler opposition before the war already, rejected all the hesitation and demanded that the assassination must be done: coûte que coûte [at any price]. According to Tresckow, the outcome of the assassination would no longer matter as much as "the fact that in front of the world and history, the resistance had the courage to take the decisive step, risking their own lives."
The reason why the officers' coup attempt failed was hesitation. The original plan of the conspirators was to give the alarm order "Walkyrie" at the moment of Hitler's death - the order was originally for mobilizing the supplementary troops stationed in Germany for suppressing possible internal unrest in Germany. The plan of the conspirators was ingenious: When receiving the alarm order, the supplementary troops would occupy all the strategic targets necessary for the success of the coup d'état - without knowing the real state of affairs. The idea of the conspirators was to claim and pretend that "power-thirsty Nazi parvenus" had committed the assassination, and that the Wehrmacht was taking control from them. Immediately after the coup, the conspirators would form a government, which would start peace negotiation with the Western Allies.
However, this did not happen. Only two persons survived from Stauffenberg's bomb blast. One of them was Hitler, who survived almost intact.
The conspiracy fell because the news of Hitler's survival reached Berlin too quickly. The alarm order was not given with the needed promptness, and when the news about Hitler's survival spread, many of those who had known about the conspiracy or secretly supported it, decided to not act, or turn their coats. Outside of Germany - in Prague, Paris and Vienna - the conspirators were successful during the first hours of the coup. They arrested SS officers and disarmed troops loyal to Hitler. In Paris, the units commanded by the conspirators arrested 1200 members of Gestapo and the SS. Sandbags had been taken at the walls for the forthcoming executions of war criminals. However, at the evening the officers loyal to Hitler managed to take over the headquarters of the conspirators in Berlin, the Wehrmacht General Staff Building, known as Bendlerblock. That meant the game was over. The coup that had lasted for ten hours, had failed by the evening.
The executioners of the attempted assassination, Stauffenberg, Albert Mertz von Quirnheim, Werner Karl von Haeften, and Friedrich Olbricht, were executed in the same night at the courtyard of Bendlerblock. Their bodies were buried at once, but the next day Hitler demanded them to be dug up, burn, and the ashes thrown to fields. For the captured conspirators Hitler demanded as painful as possible deaths.
A special unit was founded in the Gestapo to hunt down the conspirators. At its largest, the "Special Unit 20th July" consisted of as many as 400 investigators. Their job was not difficult, because the conspirators had not believed that they could fail, and so they had made no escape plans. Hundreds of members of the conspiracy, or people suspected of that, were arrested, tortured and killed. The luckiest, like General von Tresckow, managed to commit suicide before the Gestapo got them into their hands.
Also the legendary General-Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had known about the conspiracy, was sentenced to death by Hitler on the basis that the conspirators had planned him to take over the command of the Army after the dictator's death. For the "Desert Fox", Hitler offered, as a sign of "mercy", the option of forced suicide. For the other captured conspirators or those suspected as ones, there was no mercy. They were executed in front of film cameras. Later, while watching the films of the executions, Hitler gloated over his revenge.
Can Germans be proud of the conspirators of the July 20th? For fifty years already, the date of July 20th has been celebrated quietly and with somewhat stiff restraint, with some official speeches and laurels. For the great audience, the date is passed without much notice. There are controversial feelings about the conspirators: Although they were opposed to Hitler, and they understood the criminal character of national-socialism, Stauffenberg and the other conspirators were not supporters of democracy and civil liberties in the present meaning. Some of the conspirators were even themselves guilty of war crimes. These officers swore in the name of Prussian military tradition, with values alien to today's Germans: honor combined with military obedience, fidelity and preparedness for sacrifice, deep patriotism and self-esteemed elitism.
During the war, the conspirators of the July 20th were considered terrorists and traitors. In the defeated and divided Germany, the attitude towards the conspirators was twofold: In East Germany, they were claimed to have been "agents of American imperialism", while in West Germany hundreds of streets were named after Stauffenberg. This was, however, not the whole truth of West German attitude at the conspirators. Still in the early 60s, every fourth West German considered the conspirators as traitors. With the distance that the passing of time has allowed, the situation has now changed. According to recent polls, a majority of Germans now admires or respects Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators.
From a Finnish point of view, Stauffenberg's attempt to assassinate Hitler parallels the murder of General-Governor Nikolai Bobrikov by Eugen Schauman on June 16, 1904 [see the previous article]. Both the cases belong to the category of tyrannicide rather than terrorism, although some in Finland have recently claimed that Schauman was a terrorist. How many would say the same about Stauffenberg, had he succeeded? Although Bobrikov, as a tyrant, was not as disastrous as Hitler, the main differences between the two cases are the following: Schauman killed himself after shooting Bobrikov, which Stauffenberg was not going to do; Schauman acted alone, while Stauffenberg was part of a larger conspiracy; Schauman succeeded while Stauffenberg failed; and Stauffenberg was a German officer, and not a citizen of a independence-minded country under foreign rule.
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Christian Jokinen, both a Finn and a German, is a researcher of the Research Unit for Conflicts and Terrorism at the University of Turku. A shorter version of the article was published in Finnish in several Finnish newspapers in July 2004, before the centennial anniversary of Stauffenberg's failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. The same theme of tyrannicide is also studied in Part I: The Case of Eugen Schauman.
The article was translated from Finnish by Anssi Kullberg.