Claus von Stauffenberg

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Claus von Stauffenberg

Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (15 November 1907 – 21 July 1944), German army officer, was one of the leading figures of the July 20 Plot of 1944 to kill Adolf Hitler.

Military career

Stauffenberg was the third of three sons (the others being the twins Berthold and Alexander) in Jettingen, Swabia, near Ulm in the Kingdom of Bavaria, to one of the oldest and most distinguished aristocratic Roman Catholic families of Southern Germany. His parents were Caroline Schenk von Stauffenberg (née von Üxküll-Gyllenband) and Alfred Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the last Oberhofmarschall of the Kingdom of Württemberg. Among his ancestors were several famous Prussians, including August von Gneisenau.

(The family's original name was Stauffenberg, and they held the noble titles of Schenk and Graf. After 1918, when the Weimar Republic abolished all noble titles, they added the words Schenk and Graf to their surname. Stauffenberg's formal surname was thus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. By convention he is usually referred to in English simply as Stauffenberg.)

Stauffenberg was very well educated and inclined toward literature, but eventually took up a military career. In 1926, he joined the family regiment in Bamberg, the Reiter- und Kavallerieregiment 17 (17th Cavalry Regiment). It was around this time that he and his brother Berthold were introduced by Albrecht von Blumenthal to poet Stefan George's influential circle, from which many notable members of the German resistance would later emerge.

In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany. While some aspects of the Nazi Party's declared ideology were repugnant to him, Stauffenberg did not oppose others, in particular its nationalism. By 1939, however, the growing systematic maltreatment of Jews and suppression of religion had offended Stauffenberg's sense of morality and justice; he felt, for instance, that the November 1938 Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") had brought great shame upon Germany.

In his military career, Stauffenberg had been promoted to Hauptmann (captain), a rank he held for six years, on 1 January 1937. His regiment became part of the Sixth Panzer Division and in 1938 was involved in the occupation of the Sudetenland following the Munich Agreement. Once the Second World War broke out in 1939, von Stauffenberg and his regiment took part in the Polish, French and Russian campaigns. Towards the end of the French campaign, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class.

On 1 January 1943, he was promoted to Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) and was soon transferred to the North African campaign. There, while he was scouting out a new command area, his vehicle was strafed by British fighter-bombers and he was severely wounded. He spent three months in hospital and ended up losing his right eye, his right hand, and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand, although he later joked that he hardly knew what he had done with all ten fingers when he had them.

While his uncle, Nikolaus Graf von Üxküll, had approached him to join the resistance movement, it was after the Polish campaign in 1939 that Stauffenberg's individual conscience and his religious convictions urged him to act. Initially, he felt powerless as he was in no position of authority to help organise a coup, but finally in 1943, after recuperating from his wounds, he was posted as a staff officer to the Replacement Army located in an office on the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin.

Here, one of his superiors was General Friedrich Olbricht, a committed member of the resistance movement. In the Replacement Army they had a unique opportunity to launch a coup, as one of its functions was to have "Operation Valkyrie" in place. This was a contingency measure which would let it assume control of the Reich in the event of internal disturbances when communications with the military high command were blocked. Ironically, the Valkyrie plan had been agreed to by Hitler, and was now secretly to become the means of sweeping him from power.

Stauffenberg believed that Hitler's military ambitions would destroy Germany. He felt that there had to be an attempt on Hitler's life to show the world and history that not all Germans mindlessly followed Hitler.

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Bust of Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (Memorial to the German Resistance, Berlin)

The July 20 Plot

Main article: July 20 Plot

While Stauffenberg's part in the plan required him to be at the Bendlerstrasse office to telephone regular Army units from around the Reich to arrest leaders of political organisations, such as the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo, in the end he was the only one of the conspirators who had regular access to Hitler, at his briefing meetings.

Even with only three fingers remaining, von Stauffenberg, in 1944, now promoted to Oberst (Colonel), agreed to carry out the assassination of the German Führer, Adolf Hitler himself. The attempt took place at the Führer's briefing hut at the military high command Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) near Rastenburg, East Prussia (today Kętrzyn, Poland) on 20 July 1944.

Stauffenberg's briefcase was packed with explosives, and a simple ten- to fifteen-minute timer set. He entered the briefing room where Hitler was present, placed the briefcase under the table, announced that he needed to make an urgent phone call to Berlin, and then quickly left the room. He waited in a nearby shelter until the explosion tore through the hut. From what he saw, he was convinced no one could have survived the blast. Although four people were killed and almost all present were injured, Hitler was injured only slightly as he was shielded from the blast by a heavy, solid oaken conference table.

Stauffenberg and his aide de camp, Leutnant Werner von Haeften, quickly walked away and talked their way out of the heavily guarded compound to fly back to Berlin in a waiting Heinkel He 111. Stauffenberg only learned of the failure on his return to Berlin. While he was in transit, an order was issued from the Führer's headquarters to shoot Stauffenberg and von Haeften down, but the order landed on the desk of a fellow conspirator, Friedrich Georgi of the air staff, and was not passed on.

When Stauffenberg arrived in Berlin, he began the second phase of the project: to organize a military coup against Nazi leaders. However, Joseph Goebbels announced over the radio that Hitler survived an attempt on his life. Hitler broadcast a message on the state radio, and it became obvious that the coup attempt had failed. Shortly afterwards, the conspirators were overpowered in their Bendlerstrasse office, with Stauffenberg being shot in the shoulder.

General Friedrich Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, himself a suspected conspirator who was later executed, held an impromptu court martial and condemned the ringleaders of the conspiracy to death. Stauffenberg, along with fellow officers General Olbricht, Leutnant von Haeften and Oberst Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, were shot later that night by firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock (Headquarters of the Army) in Berlin.

As his turn came, Stauffenberg spoke his last words: Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland! ("Long live our sacred Germany!"). In an attempt to assuage his troubled conscience for assassinating his fellow conspirators, General Fromm gave the officers an honourable burial in the Matthäus Churchyard in Berlin's Schöneberg district. There is a stone in memory of the event in the churchyard. The next day, however, Stauffenberg's body was exhumed by the SS, stripped of his medals and cremated.

Another central figure in the plot was Stauffenberg's eldest brother, Berthold Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg. Berthold was tried in the People's Court by Roland Freisler on 10 August and was one of eight conspirators executed by strangulation, hanged slowly in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, later that day. Stauffenberg's wife and children were also arrested by the SS, and in the final hours of World War II were about to be executed when the SS decided not to carry out the order when they became aware that British troops were within 400 meters of their location.

Since the end of the war the Bendlerblock has become a memorial to the failed anti-Nazi resistance movement. The street's name was changed from Bendlerstrasse to Stauffenbergstrasse, and the Bendlerblock now houses the Memorial to the German Resistance, a permanent exhibition with more than 5,000 photographs and documents showing the various resistance organisations at work during the Hitler era. The courtyard where the officers were shot is now a site of remembrance with a plaque commemorating the events, and includes a memorial bronze figure of a young man with his hands symbolically bound.

Family

Stauffenberg married Nina Freiin von Lerchenfeld in November 1933 in Bamberg. They had five children: Berthold, Heimeran, Franz-Ludwig, Valerie and Konstanze. Nina was interned in a concentration camp after her husband's execution. She died aged 92 on 2 April 2006, at Kirchlauter near Bamberg and was buried there on 8 April. The eldest son, Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, became a general in West Germany's new army, the Bundeswehr.

Stauffenberg's widow described her late husband thus:

"He let things come to him, and then he made up his mind ... one of his characteristics was that he really enjoyed playing the devil's advocate. Conservatives were convinced that he was a ferocious Nazi, and ferocious Nazis were convinced he was an unreconstructed conservative. He was neither."

Literature

• Hoffman, Peter (1995). Stauffenberg : A Family History, 1905-1944. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45307-0. Translation of the German-language original, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder.
• Roger Moorhouse (2006), Killing Hitler, Jonathan Cape, ISBN 0-224-07121-1
• Wheeler-Bennett, John; Overly, Richard (1968). The Nemesis of Power: German Army in Politics, 1918-1945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Publishing Company (New Impression edition). ISBN 0-333-06864-5.
• Template:De icon Hoffmann, Peter (1998). Stauffenberg und der 20. Juli 1944. München: C.H.Beck. ISBN 3-406-43302-2.
• Burleigh, Michael (2000). The Third Reich: A New History. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-64487-5.
• Stig Dalager, "Zwei Tage im Juli", documentary novel dealing with the 20th of July. Aufbau Taschenbuch-Verlag 2006.

External links

• Stauffenberg and the Assassination Attempt of July 20, 1944 – Featured topic at the German Resistance Memorial Centre's website
• Emerging from the Nazi shadow? – BBC report of 60th anniversary of the 20 July plot; by Clare Murphy, BBC News Online
• Photos of the 20th July 1944 Memorial in Berlin – Part of the photo collection of Ian J. Sanders
• Long Live our Sacred Germany: The Claus von Stauffenberg Story

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