Stauffenberg as an officer standing at attention (l.) and Hitler on Wolf’s Lair, five days before the assassination attempt
Photo: AKG
It’s a milestone anniversary that takes place tomorrow. July 20, 1944, the day of the most famous assassination attempt on Hitler, is celebrating its 80th anniversary. And the anniversary will be celebrated appropriately. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (both SPD) will be present at the memorial event in Berlin’s Bendlerblock. And in the afternoon there will be a “solemn vow by recruits of the Bundeswehr in memory of the resistance against the National Socialist tyranny.” Wehrmacht Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg attempted to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, almost a year before the German defeat in World War II. A bomb he planted and hidden in a briefcase exploded during a meeting at the Führer’s Wolfsschanze headquarters, killing four people. Unfortunately, Hitler survived, albeit slightly injured. The attempted coup against him failed and the conspirators of July 20th were executed.
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Stauffenberg, photogenic nobleman, has become the symbol of German resistance against Hitler. The closer you look at the hero Stauffenberg, the more astonishing is the boundless reverence that is shown to him. Even well-intentioned biographers like Harald Steffahn attest to him having a “Greater German, Reich-oriented, ethnic way of thinking, a revisionist tendency and, finally, a fascination with everything that looked like action, fame, greatness.” Stauffenberg had internalized the anti-Semitic and racist mindset of National Socialism. After the attack on Poland, which he had previously described as “redemption,” he described the situation in the conquered areas in a letter to his wife: “The population is an incredible mob, a lot of Jews and a lot of mixed people. A people who only feel comfortable under the thumb. The thousands of prisoners will do our agriculture a lot of good. In Germany they are certainly useful, hard-working, willing and frugal.«
The atrocities committed by the SS and the Wehrmacht must not have gone unnoticed by him, who served on the Eastern Front. It is not clear whether this was the reason for his decision to join the resistance. What is certain is that he was worried about the impending military defeat and the expected conditions that the Allies would impose on the German Reich. After he was wounded in Tunisia, Stauffenberg is said to have said in the hospital: “It’s time for me to save the German Reich.”
Stauffenberg was a contradictory figure. Despite everything, he and his co-conspirators decided, albeit late, to resist – unlike the vast majority of Germans. That alone deserves respect. “If they had ended the war, it would have saved millions of people’s lives,” says Ruth Hoffmann, author of the recently published book “The German Alibi.”
But why did Stauffenberg become a symbol of resistance against German fascism? Why not all the social democrats, socialists and communists who had resisted fascism long before the impending German defeat and were therefore among its first victims? Before Stauffenberg became a symbol, he and his co-conspirators in the Federal Republic of Germany were seen as one thing above all, as “traitors,” Hoffmann explains in her book. The protective claim that the Germans had been seduced by an evil clique of fascists was widespread. The idea that people could have defended themselves against what happened between 1933 and 1945 would have contradicted this simple self-image.
This interpretation was promoted not least by the fact that the entire administrative apparatus of the Federal Republic of Germany, and not least the CDU and the FDP, was riddled with former NSDAP members. Hans Globke, for example, who helped write the Nuremberg racial laws, was one of the closest confidants of the first Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU). Those who were in the resistance had a difficult time. Unlike the few convinced National Socialists who were no longer able to practice their professions because of the half-baked denazification, numerous survivors of resistance fighters received no pension, describes Hoffmann. The Nazi verdicts for high treason still applied and were used by the judiciary as justification.
However, as the Cold War developed, change gradually began. On the one hand, the young Federal Republic had to be rearmed. It made sense to focus on the military personnel involved in the attack on July 20th. This could be presented as the “other Germany” and, above all, establish a new military tradition abroad. Linked to the ongoing anti-communism – alongside anti-Semitism, one of the central elements of Nazi ideology – the many communist resistance fighters were also forgotten in the front line against the GDR and the Soviet Union. Hoffman quoted one of them, Greta Kuckhoff, who was involved in the “Red Orchestra.” She warned as early as 1947 that because of the focus on July 20, all those who did not decide to resist only after Hitler’s plans had led to an unsuccessful war were forgotten.
But active forgetting does not stop even from those involved in the conspiracy of July 20th. After all, it wasn’t just reactionary military officers, conservative officials and politicians who were involved in the overthrow plans. Julius Leber, for example, SPD politician, or Anton Saefkow, member of the KPD. The fact that she and others are hardly remembered today is the result of countless attempts by conservatives to co-opt them, writes Hoffmann in her book. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for example, claimed in 1979 that it was the Christian Democrats who brought the “moral and political legacy of resistance into the politics of the second German Republic.” Stauffenberg, the conservative nobleman, outshines all other resistance fighters.
And today? History is made and builds on past discussions. Barracks, streets and squares are named after Stauffenberg. Not only is the resistance on July 20th narrowed down to Stauffenberg. He is also exploited on all sides – even the AfD refers to Stauffenberg. The role that it plays in historical review is relatively clear: to make the bourgeoisie and the nobility forget them as gravediggers of the Weimar Republic and stirrups of fascism. It is the assurance that one can be against Nazis without questioning the social conditions that produce fascism. In order to achieve this self-assurance, one is all too quick to overlook a lot when looking at one’s work and thinking and at the same time to ignore other resistance fighters who cannot be easily placed in a bourgeois tradition.
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