In Memorium: The Conspirators of 20th July 1944

by Sean Jobst

20 July 2020

Claus von Stauffenberg

On 20th July 1944, a diverse group of individuals from different sectors of German society led by a principled core of Wehrmacht officers, had a fateful date with history. The action they decided to take meant there was no turning back and many fully suspected it would end in their mortal deaths. Yet they knew not acting would have worse consequences, for they were men highly conscious of not only their personal but all of Germany's honor and memory. By their Conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Party State, they may have been "traitors" to tyranny but they were in every sense heroes to the Geheimes Deutschland, secret Germany, that remained immortal underneath changing political structures.

While the events of that fateful day have been well-documented down to the smallest detail, more legendary are their motives. These were as varied as the Conspirators themselves, but among the core group of officers there were common features allowing us to see them as the patriots they were, despite the claims of the regime and its apologists that they were "traitors" to Germany; and the principled men they were, despite the claims of Germanophobic court historians who peddle in aspersions about their "opportunism" and other ignoble motives. As such these were men who rejected all sides of the dialectics that, in their different ways, were enemies to the German nation. So it's no surprise such enemies have maligned these men.

Referring to the poisoned shirt that led to Hercules' death, Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow told fellow Conspirator Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff these last words: "No one among us can complain about dying, for whoever joined our ranks put on the shirt of Nessus. A man's moral worth is established only at the point where he is ready to give his life in defense of his convictions"(Fest, 289-290). For Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, failure might be inevitable "but even worse than failure is to yield to shame and coercion without a struggle"(ibid., 254). It was no accident that generally these military officers were the men of action within the Conspiracy, vis-a-vis timid civilian would-be leaders, for these officers felt duty-bound to serving the Nation and guaranteeing its honor: "In Stauffenberg's eyes the armed forces were one of the essential pillars of the nation, called upon to guarantee both its security and reputation"(Kramarz, 43).

Henning von Tresckow

The Conspirators had different visions for Germany, but they subordinated these differences in the common cause to be "traitors" to the regime so as to serve the Nation. There were strong undercurrents of the Conservative Revolution within the officer circle, the Conspiracy being one refuge for many of these who had engaged in an "inner emigration" from the regime (Tauber, I, 18). Through their actions, looking ahead more to how future generations would view them than how they were spun within their lifetime, these residual elements kept alive the "political alternatives beyond Nazi totalitarianism, neoliberalism, and party-parliamentarism"(ibid., 125). I term this alternative the Geheimes Deutschland, words uttered by the mystical poet Stefan George who planted the seeds through his disciples the Stauffenberg brothers, long after his own death in December 1933.

Upholding an "aristocracy of the spirit" to protect Germany's "inner strength", George taught mental discipline and "form" as an ideal, "the air which the intellectual movement in Germany must breathe if it was to live"(Kramarz, 29-30). Contrary to how the term was hijacked, he envisioned a "Neue Reich" as a realm of culture and the spirit over anything political. His goal of "producing a good new race of men" was embodied by the words Geheimes Deutschland, a poem he dedicated to Berthold von Stauffenberg and which formed the last words of Claus as he was facing the executioners' bullets: "Es lebe unser geheimes Deutschland!" (Long Live our secret Germany). Just as George had carried on the old German mystical tradition, Stauffenberg and the Conspirators' actions allowed the intellectual seeds to be transmitted for this inner strength long after their deaths.

Stefan George with Claus and Berthold

Much has been made of many of the Conspirators coming from aristocratic backgrounds, but more important was their service that transcended class. Interviewed by the authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, Claus von Stauffenberg's son defined his father's action as stemming from this obligation of service: "This was in the family tradition. We are not really a military family. Public service, really. I absolutely feel the sense of public service. As I understand it, this feeling is part of nobility"(Baigent and Leigh, 106). This led those authors to observe: "As always with Stauffenberg, the sense of aristocratic responsibility functioned as a governing principle, a moral imperative. It went hand in hand with a respect for the people, but a mistrust of the mob"(ibid., 151). Action had a direct correlation to these values, as defined by Claus himself: "Freedom can only be won by action"(Kramarz, 132). Lieutenant Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, a Strasserite slated for the role of Interior Minister in a post-Conspiracy government, spoke in 1931 of "the chivalric ideal of service to the population as a whole"(Mommsen, 168).

These were men descended from a long line of people who had served the Nation, imbued with the ethos of all Germanic tribes and regions. Supporting regional self-governance down to the most local level, Schulenburg worried: "Too much centralization would hugely inflate the state bureaucracy and thus increase its political power"(ibid., 170). As noted by their childhood friend Theodor Pfizer, the Swabian Stauffenbergs "were rooted in this soil, they blossomed in this air." Indeed, they saw "Swabia as the heir  to the humanist tradition of the Renaissance, and pride themselves on the fact that Schiller, Hölderlin and the nineteenth-century poet and nouvelle writer Eduard Mörike 'all had their roots here'"(Baigent and Leigh, 104). Given my own Swabian heritage, I take special pride in this tradition which stems from our ancestral culture built upon Hallstatt, Suebi and Alemanni values, nurtured by centuries of freedom-loving men and women, and given expression by our intellectuals.

The Prussian Tresckow refuted notions of his region's "militarism" (a common trope used to blame Germany for World War I) in 1943: "The idea of freedom can never be disassociated from the real Prussia. The real Prussian spirit means a synthesis between restraint and freedom, between voluntary subordination and conscientious leadership, between pride in oneself and consideration for others, between rigour and compassion. Unless a balance is kept between these qualities, the Prussian spirit is in danger of degenerating into soulless routine and narrow-minded dogmatism"(Balfour, 130). This is the true spirit of that region, not that of Prussia's ruling elites which subjugated other German regions. A lesson I personally learned, tending to view Prussianization as synonymous with a centralism inimical with our South German regions - but finding a greater appreciation of this "Prussian spirit" via the lives of Tresckow and Schulenburg.

Fritz-Dietlof von den Schulenburg

Far from being either militarists or opportunists as maligned by both dialectics, the Conspirators were humanitarians who wanted to ensure the war they were unable to prevent was ended quickly and led to a lasting justice. Seeing the "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934 as the first sign of the regime's lack of respect for concepts of law and justice, Stauffenberg worried: "The fool (Hitler) is bent on war and is prepared to squander the flower of Germany's manhood twice in the same generation"(Baigent and Leigh, 177). Claus was fully aware his fateful action would be misconstrued as "treason" by many, but was resilient: "I know that he who acts will go down in German history as a traitor; but he who can and does not will be a traitor to his conscience. If I did not act to stop this senseless killing, I should never be able to face the war's widows and orphans"(Hoffmann, 127).

The Conspirators were proud of being Germans from their specific regions of the Nation and this only deepened their vision for a decentralist Europe of regions. The great philosopher Ernst Jünger maintained close ties with the Wehrmacht  conspirators in Paris, who circulated his thirty-page book Der Friede (The Peace) that proposed such a visionary post-war Europe. The diplomat and lawyer Adam von Trott zu Solz, slated for the position of Secretary of State if the Conspirators had been successful, desired a "fraternal bonding of the ordinary people of Europe" against both plutocracy and the Soviet threat (Mommsen, 185). For Stauffenberg: "In his view, the war should not lead to a sort of colonization of Europe but to the final elimination of centuries old tensions"(Kramarz, 77). Schulenburg envisioned the creation of various agricultural "partnerships" to usher in "the swing from the city to the countryside" and form a "new Europe with an eastern bulwark," founded upon the three principles of preventing exploitation, protecting basic individual freedoms, and the rule of law in place of arbitrary powers (Mommsen, 160).

Ernst Jünger

Stauffenberg and the Conspirators were more than justified in their actions, putting their duty to the Nation over a misguided "loyalty" to a leader who had time and time again betrayed his own oaths and hampered the war effort with his own serious mistakes and micromanaging over the Wehrmacht, especially on the Eastern Front. They were not breaking their oaths because the oath of the other party had already been nullified. But they were fully absolved of any "guilt" exactly because their true oath was to the German Nation and neither one person or a Party whose own rise to power lended more to palace intrigue and coercion. One of the few survivors of the Conspiracy, Major Philipp von Boeselager, cited Hitler's military ineptitude, bribery of Army leaders, and civilian Party leaders willfully oblivious to the military situation (Boeselager, 84-93) as a primary motive for his Tresckow Group.

I am the proud descendant of a great-grandfather who was a Wehrmacht Unteroffizier with the Gebirgsjäger, killed in action near the Caucasus in February 1943. The Wehrmacht were greeted as liberators by the various peoples of the Soviet Union, long oppressed by Bolshevism. It took measures to win over the local peoples, seeing their enemy as the totalitarian system called Bolshevism and not the peoples of the East. This was certainly true for Ukraine, the Cossack region of southern Russia, and the Caucasus. "The success of these measures was soon to be seen. There was no guerrilla warfare in the Caucasus, and the North Caucasian people were soon fighting enthusiastically on the German side"(Kramarz, 101). On their heels came SS ideologues and Party administrators, imbued with an archaic German chauvinism against Slavic peoples, squandering all the goodwill engendered by the Wehrmacht. 

It was the Wehrmacht which then had to bear the brunt of these actions, in the form of partisan attacks and allowing Stalin to turn the tide by appealing to "Mother Russia" rather than the Comintern. His later actions against central and eastern Europe shows just how much the old Communist subversion remained, but his appeals worked as much owing to ineptitude of the German National Socialist leaders as to the connivance of the Western Allied leaders. So it was that the officers of the Conspiracy were fighting as much against the harmful attitudes of the civilian leaders and ideologues as much as they were fighting the outer threat of Communists: "And so we had not only to prevent the Russian steam-roller from crushing eastern Europe, but also to curb the SS's capacity for destruction" (Boeselager, 123). This realization is what led Stalin's propagandists to greet news of the failed Conspiracy: "Hitlerite Germany will be driven to her knees not by insurgent officers, but by ourselves and our Allies!"(Beschloss, 7).

The Wehrmacht was initially greeted as liberators
by the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union, but 
potential allies against Bolshevism was squandered
by the regime's anti-Slavism, spearheaded by civilians

Stauffenberg was a humanitarian to Czechs and Poles while posted in those countries, despite the brutal actions of the likes of Erich Koch that owe more to the medieval Teutonic Knights, fighting in the name of Christianity against heathen Slavs, than anything truly Germanic. It was Stauffenberg who later used his position to create a Russian Liberation Army, winning over many Cossacks and Russian soldiers, only to be repeatedly hampered by Party leaders. Hitler personally spurned Ukrainians and others allying with Germany (Boeselager, 83, 194-195fn2), clinging to anti-Slavic old colonial notions even while this could have turned the tide and saved millions of lives. Stauffenberg "was especially outraged at the treatment given to Soviet soldiers who had surrendered or been captured; he spoke about this openly and with passion"(Herwarth, 216).

Schulenburg upheld the right of peoples under German occupation to maintain their "national character" and "freedom to pursue their own cultural and political development unhindered." Perhaps aware of Nietzsche's famous adage about fighting monsters lest one becomes a monster themselves, Schulenburg warned against "Bolshevism in another form" "if people and property in the occupied lands were seen as mere objects for ruthless exploitation" and he called for a "common Germano-Slavic destiny"(Mommsen, 160). The Conspirators' unswerving anti-Communist principles are contrary to modern self-professed National-Bolsheviks who also attempt to co-opt their legacy, the Conspirators' opposition to a chauvinistic German colonialism having nothing to do with reducing Germany to subservience in a Moscow-based Eurasianist superstate. For they were patriots in every sense of the word, and it was their love for the Fatherland which spurned them to their fateful action.

Nor were the Conspirators looked upon favorably by the ruling elites and propaganda outlets of the Western Allied countries. Before the House of Commons, Churchill scoffed at them, claiming they were merely trying to elude their inevitable, absolute defeat by "murdering one another"(Beschloss, 7). Roosevelt saw any success of the Conspiracy as contrary to his wish to "remake postwar Germany from the ground up"(ibid., 5). Most American newspapers adopted Hitler's dismissal of the conspirators as "a clique of ambitious officers." The New York Times called Stauffenberg's bomb "an instrument typical of criminals." The New York Herald Tribune gloated on 1st August 1944: "Let the generals kill the corporal or vice-versa - both would suit us." This remained the dogma for Germanophobic court historians who dealt scornfully with the German anti-Hitler resistance, such as William L. Shirer, John Wheeler-Bennett, Henry M. Pachter and Richard J. Evans. They held to a fiction that the German Nation itself held to some deep-seated "militarism", so that the regime was merely an "expression" of this rather than an imposed totalitarian system. In their impulse to completely demonize Germans and make the Allied leaders angelic, they ignore that Hitler had been appointed as Chancellor by Hindenburg against the latter's previous oaths, not a "democratic" consent of the German people. 

The genocidal plan by Theodore Kaufman was
praised by American newspapers and leaders

For the cruel reality was the Conspirators were living in a world where values such as honor and justice were in short supply; one ruled over by forces with their own self-serving motives and not bound by their own good faith. The Allies' absolute insistence on "unconditional surrender" meant that even if successful, the Conspirators could not stem this inevitable tide. Eugen Gerstenmaier, a civilian Conspirator of the Kreisau Circle and a leading postwar CDU member and Bundestag president, made this somber conclusion: "We, the German resistance, did not want to understand it during the war, but we finally learned it afterwards. This war was not fought against Hitler, but it was fought against Germany." The same Western elites and their propaganda outlets had long directed their ire not against Hitler and the Party but Germany itself, peddling in boycotts and "declaration of war" against the entire Nation, as well as very genocidal plans such as those of Henry Morgenthau and Theodore Kaufman.

As if to underscore what the Conspirators were truly up against, there is a "collective guilt" that has been impugned upon the entire German Nation. Yet their courageous actions were the perfect testament against such a notion, as noted by General Adolf Heusinger, who in 1944 had been too "nonpolitical" to participate himself but on its anniversary in 1959, proclaimed that "....they [the men of July 20] are the noblest witnesses against the collective guilt of the German people. Their spirit and posture remain to us [shining] examples"(Tauber, II, 1127fn25). Ironically, such a collectivist attitude as this "guilt" or the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen, was exhibited against the Conspirators' families via the Sippenhaft doctrine introduced by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Such notions clearly have close parallels with the Old Testament tradition of "Amalek" ("smite and utterly destroy, spare them not" - 1 Samuel 15:3) than anything either Germanic or Western. It was also in keeping with the psychotic fantasies about collective destruction and scorched vengeance that increasingly dominated inside the Berlin Bunker.

The passing of personal responsibility meant that the Conspirators were up against many others who had their inner convictions but misguided sense of oaths no matter how often the leader's oaths to them were violated. And it's also seen in the Allied leaders' insistence on unconditional surrender, for they wanted to see the Conspiracy fail as much as the Hitler regime wanted it to fail, no matter how many millions would have been saved if the war had ended that summer day in 1944. The Conspirators are the remedy to these dialectics, including the treasonous purveyors of this "collective guilt". It could be that the defeat was inevitable, in the same vein as what Franz Schauwecker wrote about World War I: "We had to lose the war in order to gain the nation" (Aufbruch der Nation, 1929). Political structures come and go within history's cycles, but what the Conspirators upheld was a deeper reality - and in this realm, it was they who won and not their detractors of either dialectic. In a word, what was preserved was Geheimes Deutschland - they embodied and preserved it for future generations. And it is in this spirit that I remember them with these words: "Es lebe unser geheimes Deutschland!" Stauffenberg died upon these words so that others may truly live by them.

My visit to Stauffenbergplatz in Stuttgart, 8 July 2016

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Baigent, Michael, and Richard Leigh. Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008.

Balfour, Michael. Withstanding Hitler in Germany, 1933–45. London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988.

Beschloss, Michael. The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.

Boeselager, Philipp Freiherr von. Valkyrie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Fest, Joachim. Plotting Hitler's Death: The Story of the German Resistance. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1994.

Herwarth, Hans von. Against Two Evils: Memoirs of a Diplomat-Soldier during the Third Reich. London: Collins, 1981.

Hoffmann, Peter. "Internal Resistance in Germany," in Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, ed. David Clay Large. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Kramarz, Joachim. Stauffenberg: The Architect of the Famous July 20th Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967.

Mommsen, Hans. Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance Under the Third Reich. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Tauber, Kurt P. Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism Since 1945. Vols. I and II. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.