OPINION:
On July 20, 1944, deep in the forests of East Prussia’s Masuria, a charismatic young military officer excused himself from a situation conference of the Third Reich’s senior military officers. It was high noon at the Wolf’s Lair, and Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, recently appointed as chief of staff to Gen. Friedrich Fromm, armed an explosive charge inside his briefcase while in a nearby washroom.
When a guard informed him that the meeting had begun, Stauffenberg returned to a small room with Adolf Hitler and two dozen military officers. Minutes later, when Stauffenberg left to take a planned phone call, the charge detonated but Hitler survived.
The coup, which arose from a repurposed military plan called Operation Valkyrie, was set into motion by a coalition of military officers and civilian resisters seeking to overthrow the Nazi regime and save Germany from destruction.
Like many other German officers, Stauffenberg admired Hitler’s military success. In time, however, he saw how the Fuhrer’s irrational decisions endangered Germany. His Catholic faith and aristocratic honor also forced him to see Hitler’s true self: a sadistic tyrant who reveled in dominating, degrading, torturing and taking life.
Stauffenberg’s disillusionment with Hitler developed gradually. The 1934 Night of the Long Knives and the 1938 Kristallnacht exposed the regime’s brutality, while the war and the Nazi mass murder of Jews convinced him that the Fuhrer had to be removed. As a soldier, Stauffenberg was alarmed that Hitler turned on his Brownshirts to consolidate his power. As a Catholic, he was deeply offended by the persecution of Jews.
After the war erupted in 1939, Stauffenberg’s uncle and a politician approached him about joining the resistance. He declined, but his brothers began communicating with anti-regime figures. After his friend Joachim Kuhn was captured by the Red Army in 1944, Soviet interrogators recorded Kuhn’s account that Stauffenberg had been horrified by the mass shootings of Jews and had declared, “These crimes must not be allowed to continue.”
Stauffenberg’s destiny took a turn in April 1943 when, while serving in Tunisia, his column was strafed by Britain’s Royal Air Force. After losing his left eye, his right hand and two left fingers, he returned to Germany to recover at his family’s estate at Lautlingen Castle. There, his determination to remove Hitler hardened. After receiving a visit from military officers working with Gen. Friedrich Olbricht, a committed resistance member, he joined a secret plan against Hitler.
Before long, Stauffenberg became the driving force behind the resistance’s co-option of Operation Valkyrie, an emergency contingency plan originally developed by the Nazi regime. In 1943, he unapologetically told a fellow resistance member, “I am committing high treason with all means at my disposal.”
After several failed attempts to position other resistance members near Hitler at the right time, Stauffenberg decided that his special access to the Fuhrer during briefings gave him the best chance. Although he doubted his mission’s success, Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow convinced him that someone had to try to prove to the world that some Germans opposed the Nazis.
On July 20, 1944, during a briefing at the Wolf’s Lair, Stauffenberg carried a briefcase containing explosive charges and placed it under Hitler’s map table. When he stepped out to take a planned call, a colonel inadvertently moved the briefcase behind a solid oak table leg, which shielded Hitler upon detonation. Stauffenberg and his aide escaped to Berlin, but the Valkyrie coup collapsed after word spread that the Fuhrer survived.
After a shootout inside the Bendlerblock, Stauffenberg, his aide and two generals were arrested and lined up before a makeshift firing squad in a courtyard, illuminated only by the headlights of a truck.
As the firing squad took aim, Stauffenberg’s aide, Lt. Werner von Haeften, used himself as a human shield to protect his commanding officer. Before being executed, Stauffenberg shouted, “Long live sacred Germany!” a salute to the anti-Nazi country he cherished.
Gen. Fromm ordered that the executed officers receive a burial with honors, but the SS exhumed Stauffenberg to strip his uniform of medals.
Three weeks later, Stauffenberg’s brother and seven others were tried before the Nazi “People’s Court” and executed in a slow, torturous strangulation. The executions were filmed for Hitler’s viewing, and hundreds of others were prosecuted in show trials. Thousands of others were later arrested as part of a Nazi purge.
Some have denigrated the Valkyrie resisters by suggesting their motives were more about saving their rank and wealth before an Allied invasion, but Stauffenberg knew his mission was suicidal, and substantial evidence shows he was morally repulsed by Hitler’s persecution of Jews.
His bravery, and the moral courage of others, such as White Rose student activist Sophie Scholl, are examples for us to follow, proving that even in the most terrifying climate, compassion is more powerful than fear, and good ultimately triumphs over evil.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and senior U.S. official who serves on the editorial board of The Washington Times.
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