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Von Stauffenberg, Claus Philip Schenk (1907-1944)
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He was
the youngest of three sons of one of the oldest and most distinguished South
German families. Stauffenberg grew up in a massive, turreted Renaissance
chateau that had been the ancient seat of counts and dukes. Strikingly
handsome and with a fine physique, he excelled both academically and in sports.
Developing a passion for horses that qualified him for a place on the German
Olympics team, he also exhibited an inquisitive and intelligent mind that
pursued literature and the arts; he spoke fluent Greek and Latin.
For a while,
young Stauffenberg considered a musical career, then architecture; but at the
age of nineteen, in 1926, he entered the army as an officer cadet in the famed
Bamberg Cavalry Regiment 17.
During the hectic
years of German economic unrest and the Nazi rise to power, Stauffenberg
remained an apolitical military officer. In 1930, he met
seventeen-year-old Nina von Lerchenfeld, descended from a line of Bavarian
nobility. They married after a three year betrothal.
By 1936, when
Stauffenberg was posted to the War Academy in Berlin, he and his wife had
started a family; their first son was born in 1934. In Berlin, his
all-around brilliance attracted the attention of ranking German officers and in
two years he emerged as a twenty-nine-year-old officer of the high command.
He was a dedicated patriot and, according to his family, "basically
a monarchist. He was not dogmatic. He saw in the monarchy a better
type of constitution than the one that existed in the Weimar Republic."
While not opposed
to National Socialism in the mid-1930s, Stauffenberg was certainly far from a
slavish follower of Hitler. Stauffenberg's first doubts about the Nazi
programs came during the virulent anti-Jewish campaigns of 1938. But when
the war started in September 1939, Stauffenberg was willing to perform his duty.
He did so with characteristic energy and talent, earning a solid reputation as
an officer in the Sixth Panzer Division's campaigns in both Poland and France.
In early June 1940, just before the Dunkirk assault, he was transferred to the
army high command. And for the first eighteen months of Operation
Barbarossa, the Russian campaign, he spent most of his time in Soviet territory.
There he witnessed firsthand the brutality of the SS. His Russian service
disillusioned him with the Third Reich.
During his
service at the front, Stauffenberg obtained leave for major holidays.
Stauffenberg's visits to his family were welcome respites from the deteriorating
situation on the Russian Front. The unnecessary disaster at Stalingrad in
February 1943 further alienated Stauffenberg from Hitler's strategy. As
soon as the battle for Stalingrad finished, he asked for a transfer to a new
front, and he was sent to the Tenth Panzer Division in Tunisia, just in time to
join the last days of the fierce battle of the Kasserine Pass.
On April 7, 1943,
his car drove into a mine field and he was seriously wounded. He lost his
left eye and suffered injuries to his left ear and knee. He also lost his
right hand, and the surgeons had to amputate part of that arm as well as the
ring and little fingers of his left hand. The doctors doubted that he
would survive; if he did, they thought, he would not regain his sight.
Stauffenberg returned home in the early autumn of '43 for recovery and
convalescence. He had been in a military hospital in Munich prior to this
time, and it is here where he made his most important contacts with the people
preparing a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Any other man,
almost killed from his wounds, would have likely retired from the military and
the conspiracy. Stauffenberg did neither. By midsummer, after much
practice with the three fingers of his bandaged left hand, he wrote letters to
his superiors notifying them of his intention to resume his duties within three
months. In the summer he also confided to his wife that he felt compelled
to act to save Germany. "We general staff officers must all accept
our share of the responsibility," he told her.
By September of
1943 Stauffenberg was back in Berlin as a lieutenant colonel and chief of staff
to General Friedrich Olbricht at the general army office. Now with a block
eye patch, the heavily decorated six-foot-three Stauffenberg had become a
legendary soldier in the Berlin command. While he settled into his new
assignments, he also quickly achieved political control of the disheartened
conspirators. He insisted that the new government have an anti-Nazi
cabinet, and he recommended a list of potential leaders. Recognizing that
the conspiracy needed younger military men ready to mobilize their commands, he
persuaded some of the most important German officers to support the coming
putsch.
In early 1944, a
senior officer let it be known that he would be available to the conspirators:
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the celebrated "Desert Fox."
Stauffenberg and many of the other conspirators did not trust Rommel,
considering him a Nazi who was only abandoning Hitler because the war was being
lost. Whatever his motivation, Rommel differed with the conspirators on a
major point. He was against assassinating Hitler, believing it would make
him a martyr. Instead, he thought, Hitler should be tried before a German
court for his crimes, at the same time a separate peace was signed with the West
and the war continued against the Russians.
However,
Stauffenberg and many of his friends realized the West would never accept a
separate peace. As the war situation worsened they hastened their plans to
remove Hitler and take control of the government. The new effort was
code-named Valkerie, after the beautiful maidens in Norse mythology who hovered
over the battlefield to select those who would die. In this case, Hitler
was to die.
In June 1944,
Stauffenberg and many of his colleagues were surprised by the successful Allied
landing on the beaches of Normandy. Some of the conspirators thought they
should abandon the assassination plans since the end was inevitable, and they
did not want to be blamed for bringing about Germany's defeat. But in
heated discussions, Stauffenberg convinced the plotters it was critical to kill
Hitler to stop a needless loss of lives, and to prove to the world that the men
of the German resistance dared to take the decisive step against the Nazi
dictator, despite incredible personal risks.
By July,
Stauffenberg had been promoted to full colonel as the chief of staff for the
commander in chief of the home army. This was a stroke for the
conspirators since it gave him frequent personal contact with Hitler. Any
chance of success rested on his ability to kill Hitler. He approached his
new assignment with the same zeal and determination that marked his entire
career. He practiced setting off the English-made bombs with his three
remaining fingers.
On July 11,
Stauffenberg brought a bomb to Berchtesgaden, and although he was with Hitler
and Göring for half an hour, he did not release the bomb because Himmler was
not present. The conspirators had decided it would be be best to kill the
three top Nazis in one moment. A second chance came on July 15, this time
at Rastenburg. Himmler and Goring were not present. Stauffenberg
left the room and telephoned his conspirators in Berlin to inform them that
though only Hitler was present he was about to plant the bomb anyway. When
he returned to the conference room, Hitler had left.
On July 20,
Stauffenberg was again scheduled to meet with Hitler, this time at the Wolf's
Lair, his East Prussian headquarters. This time, the plotters decided to
kill Hitler no matter who was present. Instead of being held in the
underground bunker, where the enclosed area would magnify the blast, the meeting
was held in the conference barracks, with all ten windows open because of the
hot weather. Walking to the conference with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,
Stauffenberg excused himself on the pretext of having forgotten his cap and belt
in an anteroom. There, with his three good fingers, he swiftly opened the
briefcase, broke the capsule that started the primitive timer, and then calmly
rejoined the waiting Nazis. In ten minutes the bomb would explode.
Inside the
conference room, Stauffenberg took his place a few feet to the right of Hitler.
He placed his briefcase on the floor, against the stout oak leg of the
conference table. With four minutes left on the bomb, Stauffenberg quietly
left the room on the pretext of receiving an important call from Berlin.
After he left, one of the officers leaned over the table to get a closer look at
the war map, and found Stauffenberg's case in his way. He moved it to the
far side of the massive table support, unwittingly protecting Hitler from the
brunt of the blast. At twelve-forty-two in the afternoon the bomb
exploded. Stauffenberg was standing a couple of hundred yards away
observing the scene when he saw the building go up in a roar of smoke and
flames. Debris flew in the air and some bodies came out of the windows.
Stauffenberg had no doubt that everyone in the room was dead or dying.
Although an
immediate alarm was sounded, Stauffenberg talked his way past four armed SS
checkpoints. At the nearby airfield, he boarded a plan with its engine
running and began the three-hour trip to Berlin.
Unknown to
Stauffenberg, Hitler had survived the blast. His back was cut by a falling
beam, his legs were burned, his hair was singed, his right arm was temporarily
paralyzed, and his eardrums were punctured, but he was not seriously hurt.
Four others died, and many were critically injured. Meanwhile, with
Stauffenberg in the air, the conspirators lost their momentum and leadership.
The message from the Wolf's lair was not clear as to whether Hitler was dead or
alive, and as a result no one in Berlin issued the Valkyrie Orders to start
military operations to take over the government. Everyone idly waited for
Stauffenberg's landing, and when he did arrive in Berlin, he was stunned to
learn the most crucial hours had been lost. No one had even seized the
radio broadcasting headquarters or telephone exchanges. He rallied the
plotters, and the conspirators did manager, for the rest of the day, to hold
some major buildings and detain some loyal Nazi forces, but the open
communication lines slowly carried the word that the Führer
had survived. Stauffenberg refused to believe it. But once that news
spread, some key officers who had been fence-straddling reverted to supporting
Hitler. The news also guaranteed that forces loyal to Hitler were
energized for a bitter fight.
At nine p.m. the
conspirators were startled to hear a radio announcement that Hitler would
shortly address the nation. By eleven that night the dwindling leadership
of the conspiracy was sequestered in the war ministry when a group of loyal
Nazis burst in. During the ensuing scuffle, Stauffenberg was shot in his
remaining arm. Within half an hour, his former superior office, General
Friedrich Fromm, announced that Stauffenberg and three others had been sentenced
by a summary court-martial to immediate execution. Stauffenberg, the
sleeve of his wounded arm soaked in blood, was led to a courtyard in back of the
ministry. There an army truck's headlights lit a wall where the condemned
men were lined up to be shot. "Long live our sacred Germany!"
Stauffenberg shouted as he fell to the floor, dead at the age of thirty-six.