Eighty years ago, on 20 July 1944, a group of high-ranking Wehrmacht officers attempted to kill Adolf Hitler and install a non-National Socialist government in Germany. The conspirators acted out of patriotic motives, to end the war and save their country, and for ethical reasons, to stop further Nazi crimes. Most of them paid with their lives for their daring act of resistance. Today, they offer a superb example of the highest moral and personal courage in Germany’s worst times, and their legacy of conservative patriotism— an emotion now often misrepresented and denigrated—gives us scope for moral reflection. The conspiracy failed on 20 July 1944, but their heroism has served a higher purpose.
Early in the morning of that day, 36-year-old Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the linchpin of the conspiracy, had packed his briefcase with two loads of plastic explosives and headed towards Rangsdorf airfield, south of Berlin. He and his aide, Senior Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, were scheduled to fly to Hitler’s headquarters— the so-called Wolfsschanze (Wolf ’s Lair) near Rastenburg, deep in the forests of East Prussia. Stauffenberg, recently appointed Chief of Staff of the Replacement Army, had been ordered to give a report to the Führer. Instead, he was hoping to kill him at the meeting, and then launch the plan to overthrow the regime that he and his fellow conspirators had been working on for more than a year.
More than a hundred officers from generals to lieutenants, politicians, diplomats, and trade union leaders were part of Stauffenberg’s circle. It was probably the greatest military-led wartime coup ever attempted in a modern industrial country. The conspirators knew that the war was going badly, and they hated Hitler because he seemed willing to drag the whole German nation with him into the abyss, condemning it to destruction.
All of their remaining hopes now rested on Operation Valkyrie. This was the codename given to an emergency plan officially intended to deploy army reserves to regain control in the event of internal unrest or an uprising of the millions of forced foreign workers in Germany. In the course of 1943, anti-Nazi officers—most prominently General Friedrich Olbricht, the Chief of the General Army Office in the Army High Command, and Stauffenberg’s friend General Henning von Tresckow—altered the details of the plan to serve as a smokescreen for their planned coup d’etat.
“The leader Adolf Hitler is dead,” was to be the revised plan’s first and central declaration. Operation Valkyrie could be used as a legal camouflage for the overthrow of Hitler’s regime. The reworked Valkyrie plan, signed by Field Marshall Erwin von Witzleben, was designed to mobilise the Wehrmacht against the Nazi state apparatus. Their aim was to detain the leaders of the NSDAP, disarm the SS, dismantle the Nazi regime, and establish a new, non-Nazi government, with former Leipzig Mayor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a staunch anti-Hitler conservative, as its head. The Stauffenberg group hoped to save Germany from total military annihilation. The trigger should have been the bomb killing the Führer.
Unfortunately, a chain of unlucky events foiled the attempt. When Stauffenberg arrived at the Wolf’s Lair, he discovered that the conference with Hitler had been moved forward half an hour to 12:30 pm, because of a meeting between Hitler and Mussolini scheduled for that afternoon. For Stauffenberg and Haeften, this change cut the time they needed to prepare their explosives to just a few minutes. In desperate haste, they went to a changing room to prime the device, only to be interrupted by a staff sergeant announcing a phone call.
The severely war-wounded colonel, who had lost an eye, his right hand, and all but two fingers on his left hand in an air raid in North Africa the previous year, only managed to activate one load of the explosives by pushing in the chemical-mechanical timed fuse. Furthermore, 20 July 1944 was a very hot day, so the briefing with Hitler had been moved from the usual bunker to a light barracks building with windows that would reduce the pressure of an explosion.
Stauffenberg placed his bomb-filled briefcase under the table near Hitler when he entered the briefing room at 12:32 p.m., and left three minutes later under a pretext. From outside, at 12:42 p.m., he saw a massive detonation and thick black smoke. The bomb killed four officers and seriously wounded several others of the more than twenty present. But the solid oak table saved Hitler from the blast, and he survived with only a few burns and bruises. Stauffenberg, however, was under the impression that he had finished Hitler, and so he headed back to Berlin to launch Operation Valkyrie.
After some delay, the conspirators moved to carry the plan into effect. While some of the conspiring generals, like Erich Hoepner and Ludwig Beck, behaved hesitantly, perhaps paralyzed by doubts, Stauffenberg acted determinedly to push through the plan. When he arrived at the German Army Offices at Bendlerstraße in Berlin at 3:45 p.m., he issued orders and called up military districts to urge them to follow the instructions and remove the National Socialist leadership. But they only succeeded in three places: Kassel, Vienna, and Paris. In Berlin, an army unit marched upon the orders of conspirator Lieutenant-General Paul von Hase to cordon off the government quarter “to prevent internal unrest” after Hitler’s alleged death. But then their commander, Major Ernst Otto Remer, was convinced by Goebbels—and, above all, by a personal phone call from Hitler—to reverse the action. The conspirators lost control of the capital after only a few hours.
The whole plan faltered and the regime regained the upper hand. Some operational mistakes and misunderstandings had hampered the enterprise, but of course the prime reason for the fiasco was the failure to kill Hitler. In the evening, the dictator took to the radio to announce his survival and chastised “a tiny clique of ambitious, unscrupulous, and also criminal, stupid officers” who had tried to eliminate him. The Nazi propaganda branded the men of 20 July “national traitors” who had tried to stab the frontline troops in the back—a line of interpretation that persisted even after the total defeat in 1945.
On the evening of 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg and some of his co-conspirators were arrested and immediately sentenced to death. They were led into the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the army offices, to be shot. Before his execution after midnight, Stauffenberg famously exclaimed “Long live Germany.” About twenty years ago, my newspaper, Junge Freiheit, interviewed one of the soldiers who had been present that evening in the Bendlerblock, who confirmed that Stauffenberg’s precise words were, “Es lebe das heilige Deutschland,” (Long live holy Germany). However, some still maintain that he said, “Es lebe das geheime Deutschland” (Long live secret Germany), a coded message inspired by the poet Stefan George, whom Stauffenberg had greatly admired.
The regime’s vengeance against the circle of the 20 July plotters was terrible, with several hundred immediately arrested, tortured, and murdered. Hitler fulminated about the “reactionary clique” and mused that he should have purged his officer corps “like Stalin” did with the Red Army. In the months after 20 July, the regime came after anyone suspected to be involved in the resistance movement. An estimated 7,000 people from different oppositional movements were arrested, and up to 5,000 were killed. One may speculate what might have happened had the assassination and coup d’etat succeeded. It could have saved both Germany and the rest of Europe a great deal of suffering. It is noteworthy that, in the ten months between July 1944 and May 1945, as many Germans were killed as had died in the five years of the war from 1939 to July 1944. An earlier end to the war might have avoided the destruction by aerial bombing of beautiful cities like Dresden and Würzburg, and other cultural treasures.
Had Stauffenberg’s plot succeeded, they would have arrested the Nazi and SS leadership and put them on trial. Further, they would have aimed to establish a civil government, opened the concentration camps, ended the murderous persecution of Jews and others, and reached out to the Western Allied forces and the Soviets to negotiate a peace. However, Stauffenberg and his friends were not prepared to accept the humiliating Allied demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender, and they would have kept on fighting if required. The conspirators could not have prevented Germany’s military defeat, but the moral catastrophe of the nation would not have been as total as it was in May 1945.
Since the war, there has been much debate about the historical interpretation and significance of 20 July 1944. In communist East Germany, the conspirators were caricatured as ‘reactionary’ aristocrats (‘Junkers’) seeking to preserve their class privileges. In West Germany, left-wing critics have often denigrated the Stauffenberg group’s moral reputation by pointing out that they were conservative-nationalists who held authoritarian political ideas and wanted to keep German-speaking territories Hitler had annexed, like Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Sudetenland.
The officers were nationalist patriots: their prime motivation was to salvage their fatherland, which is why today’s left-wing post-national intellectual and political elite of the Federal Republic of Germany must feel suspicious and alienated from them. Stauffenberg’s political development since the 1930s is also telling. After the utter disappointment of the Weimar Republic, which was marred by destructive party conflicts and hampered by the humiliating terms of the Versailles peace dictate, he had initially approved of Hitler’s new direction and admired some early successes, political as well as military. But a painful process of reflection led him to reverse his judgement about the regime.
Many have argued that the conspirators moved much too late—after Stalingrad and the tank battle at Kursk, after D-Day, and with the Russians advancing towards East Prussia, when Germany’s defeat was looking unavoidable—and that they only wanted to save themselves from the wreckage. This charge is deeply unfair to many of the those who sacrificed their lives, and ignores the fact that some had long been trying to organise resistance against Hitler, in some cases as early as 1938 (Lieutenant-General Ludwig Beck, Major-General Hans Oster, and Stauffenberg’s communications expert, General Erich Fellgiebel). Stauffenberg could only act from spring of 1944, when he got regular access to briefings with Hitler.
Some left-wingers have incorrectly alleged that Stauffenberg’s group was indifferent to the fate of the Jews. This is verifiably untrue. Henning von Tresckow (after Stauffenberg the central figure of the resistance movement), Goerdeler, and others had all been deeply disturbed when they heard about Nazi crimes against Jews and others. In 1942, when Stauffenberg learned of large deportations of Jews, he had said to his friend, Captain Joachim Kuhn, that it had to be stopped.
It was thus a combination of patriotic and ethical motives that fueled the resistance movement. Unlike today’s woke antifascists, most of the 20 July men and women held national-conservative political views and were also motivated by Christian faith (Stauffenberg came from a Catholic-Swabian family). A surprisingly large number came from ancient and famous Prussian noble families, like Yorck, Moltke, Schulenburg, Schwerin, Dohna, Lehndorff, Kleist, and Hardenberg. On his mother’s side, Stauffenberg was a direct descendant of the great Prussian general and reformer August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, who fought against Napoleon in the wars of liberation and called for a national insurrection against tyranny. The conspiracy was rooted in the old Prussian ethos of always serving their homeland—not the whims of a clearly disastrous leader.
Notwithstanding the failure of the plot, the very fact that such an attempt was made continues to inspire. Henning von Tresckow urged on his fellow-conspirators with the famous words: “The assassination has to be carried out, coûte que coûte” (at all costs). Even if the assassination at the Wolf’s Lair misfired, he told them, they still had to act in Berlin. “It is not any more the practical purpose that matters,” he said, “but the fact that the German resistance movement has dared before the world and history at the peril of our life the decisive throw.”
On the German political Right, it took some time to acknowledge the towering moral stature of the men of 20 July 1944. After the war, millions of returning former front-line soldiers, who had been misled by the regime’s wartime propaganda, rejected Stauffenberg’s actions as treason. There were also still many unreconstructed old Nazis who were incapable of admitting the crimes and fundamental evilness of the regime. Clearly, a Right tainted by nostalgia about the Third Reich had absolutely no future and no justification. My approach, when I founded the national-conservative newspaper Junge Freiheit in 1986, and when I turned it into a weekly in the 1990s, has always been to put the men and women of 20 July 1944 in a central place in our memorial culture. They are role models: they fought and died for their fatherland. Their idealistic and tragic sacrifice belies the claims of the collective guilt of all Germans.
Over the years, we have published many historical contributions and interviews in Junge Freiheit with family members or surviving participants of the conspiracy, like Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist (who fought together with Stauffenberg, service pistol in hand, in the Bendlerblock on the evening of 20 July, and then narrowly escaped death in a concentration camp) or Philipp von Boeselager (who had provided Stauffenberg with the explosives).
Each year, the German political establishment dutifully commemorates the anniversary of the plot, but the conspirators’ deepest motives are alien to them. The German political establishment harbours post-national visions, and traditional patriotism is strange to them. The Green Party’s Robert Habeck, today Germany’s vice-chancellor, once even wrote, “I have always found love for the fatherland sickening.” This is the worldview of the post-national, internationalist, globalist elite. The 20 July plotters’ patriotic ethos, and their deed of courage in the country’s darkest hour, are a poignant rebuke and a striking contrast to such shallow left-wing ideology.
This essay appears in the Summer 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 31:23-26.
