Monday, July 19, 2004

IN MEMORIAM COUNT KLAUS SCHENK VON STAUFFENBERG (1907-1944)
 
 
Colonel Count Von Stauffenberg


 
 
Fate has offered us this opportunity, and I would not refuse it for anything in the world. I have examined myself before God and my conscience. It must be done because this man (Hitler) is evil personified.
 

                                                            -Oberst Graf Klaus Schenk Von Stauffenberg
 
 
On July 20, 1944, failed the last serious attempt to kill Hitler. It was carried out by a brave Colonel of the German Reserve Army, Count Klaus Schenk Von Stauffenberg. Somewhere around 12.37 Eastern European Time on that fateful day he entered the conference room in a wooden barrack in Hitlers supersecret Eastern Front Headquarters, the Wolfsschanze, near Rastenburg in East Prussia. The room was full of high-ranking officers, aides and bodyguards. He shoved a briefcase containing a powerful bomb, activated minutes before, under the table upon which large maps of the Ostfront were displayed. Soon thereafter he left under the pretext that he had to make an urgent telephone call. At 12.42 EET the bomb exploded. Scores of men were killed and wounded, Hitler, standing on the opposite side of a heavy wooden leg of the table and somehow protected by it since he was leaning heavily over it, survived. In the meantime, Stauffenberg, with incredible luck and courage, had managed to talk his way out of the compound and flew to Berlin, where his co-conspirators had managed to disable critical communication lines and put the Reserve Army, whose cadre contained many officers sympathetic to the cause, on high alert using the procedures of the so-called Valkyrie Operation – an operation initially designed to mobilize whatever reserve forces were available in Germany in the event of an uprising among the millions of slave workers in the country.
 
Critical in keeping this Reserve Army under their control, and hence having the military clout to thwart any Nazi attempt to keep the conspirators from power, was the arrest of key Nazi figures. Perhaps the most critical of these was Joseph Goebbels, the Reichspropagandaminister. A bewildered Major Otto-Ernst Remer of the Wachbattailon Grossdeutschland, a decorated Eastern Front veteran, entered Goebbels office in Berlin’s Governments District. Being a military man through and through, he wanted indeed to obey his orders and arrest Goebbels. As fate would have it one critical phone line was still on and Goebbels was able to let Adolf Hitler talk directly to Remer. Albert Speer, Hitler’s Armament’s Minister, who was also present, watched transfixed as Remer, upon hearing the Fuehrer’s unmistakable voice, stiffened and upon Hitler’s request to quell the revolt, shouted: “Jawohl, mein Fuehrer”!
 
Essentially the coup was foiled from then on. Accomplices in Paris were able to fool and even lock up die-hard Nazis but after that fateful phone-call all was lost.
 
That same night, Von Stauffenberg was executed by a firing squad on orders of General Fromm, Chief of the Reserve Army, who was also a conspirator but tried to escape his fate by silencing as many as possible of those involved. 

 
Because Hitler stayed in power, millions would die still. The events of that distant July 20th once more emphasize the responsibility the world has in not letting dictators stay in power. Von Stauffenberg was a man who knew that responsibility. He was also a man who believed in God, family and country. Colonel Klaus Schenk Von Stauffenberg was a Rightwinger. 


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