Light in the dark night

Seventy years ago today, officers of the Wehrmacht attempted to seize the German government from the Nazis by assassinating Hitler. They did not succeed, and the reprisals against them, their families and anyone who might have been connected with them redefined the concept of savagery.

There were 7000 arrests and nearly 5000 executions, although of course (as with the Night of the Long Knives, which had been carried out ten years earlier) there were a lot of unrelated scores being settled in all the bloodletting.

Nonetheless, the attempt was an extraordinary act of courage and honor, all the more remarkable when you consider that every member of the Wehrmacht swore an oath of personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler—not to the German government (or, as US armed forces do, to uphold the Constitution). And officers, in particular, took things like oaths seriously. To decide that there was a higher loyalty than that of their professional, soldierly oath was huge.

Moreover, although the July Conspiracy, as it’s come to be known, is most often referred to as an assassination attempt, that was only part of the plan. Killing Hitler—or even killing him and his top henchmen, Himmler and Goering—without replacing the Nazis with another government would have done nothing more than set off a power struggle and result in more lunatics running the asylum. Which would make no difference in dealing with their external enemies.

No, Claus von Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow, Friedrich Olbricht, Ludwig Beck and the rest wanted to find a way to seize control of Germany to negotiate some kind of peace (or at least an agreement) with the Western Allies, which would prevent the total destruction of the country, and perhaps enable a continued fight against the Soviet Union. They basically wanted to find a way to get around the Allies’ stated policy of accepting nothing less than unconditional surrender from Germany.

It was much more ambitious and complicated than a simple assassination—even one of a figure like Hitler, and I wonder whether there was any realistic possibility of achieving the ultimate objective (seizing military and political control). But perhaps what matters is not so much that they succeeded as that they tried. Someone—a small group of principled men and women—tried to turn their country away from the path of nihilism.

As I said, their failure had serious consequences not only for them and their own loved ones, but for the Nazis’ prosecution of the war. It’s hard to imagine them prosecuting a more vicious war than they had in the East, but it was as though any thought of restraint or accountability had been blown up with the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg.

It took a long time for the Germans to acknowledge that the Walküre conspirators were one of the good things of 1933-45. For years they were considered the worst sort of traitors, soldiers—officers—who broke their sacred oaths and betrayed Germany.

It took a generation for Germans people to accept some responsibility for the starting and prosecution of the Second World War. Even with their nation in ruins and evidence of atrocities clear in front of them, they were sorry not that they’d started the war, but that it had had a bad outcome for them. They viewed Stauffenberg and the others s having contributed to that bad outcome.

However, slowly they began to acknowledge that maybe the July Conspirators upheld values higher than those of mindless order-following and national arrogance, and that they were in fact exemplars of the notion that not all Germans were active or even passive Nazis.

The Bendlerblock building—a center of German military planning from the time of the Second Reich—was from which the Walküre group had hoped to run the transition from the Nazi government to their own. Instead, late on the 20^th, forces loyal to Hitler stormed the building and arrested the conspirators. Stauffenberg and a couple others were taken out to the courtyard and executed in the early hours of 21 July.

It is now the home of the German Resistance Memorial Centre. And this is how it is represented in the courtyard:

I think that, considering the kinds of militarized madness we’ve been seeing in our world just in the past week, it’s good to remember that even in the worst situations, there are some people who step up to the plate (however imperfectly) and proclaim, “Hey—let’s try to stop this.”