Klaus von Stauffenberg, aristocratic and devoutly Christian German soldier  who decided Hitler must die

In 2008, Konstanze von Schulthess-Rechberg, Stauffenberg’s daughter, wrote a book about her mother, Nina Schenk Gräfin (Countess) von Stauffenberg. Highlighting the complexity of her father, she claimed: ‘He let things come to him, and then he made up his mind ... one of his characteristics was that he really enjoyed playing the devil's advocate. Conservatives were convinced that he was a ferocious Nazi, and ferocious Nazis were convinced he was an unreconstructed conservative. He was neither.’

Whatever ambiguity may linger around his precise political preferences, Stauffenberg was a devout Christian, interested in philosophy, an aficionado of poetry and an accomplished horseman.

Before the Battle of Stalingrad Stauffenberg had been prepared to give Hitler and his regime the benefit of the doubt but he was nauseated by the mass murder of Jews and the treatment of civilians on the eastern front.

Hitler’s insatiable appetite for war and his reckless military incompetence also played a part in alienating him from the regime and enabled him to conclude, despite his religious scruples, that Hitler’s assassination was a lesser moral evil than allowing Hitler to remain in power.

On July 20 1944 Stauffenberg placed a briefcase containing a bomb under a table at which Hitler was presiding at a staff conference at the Wolfsschanze, his HQ at Rastenburg in east Prussia.

The bomb exploded, causing significant damage. Stauffenberg slipped out of the meeting shortly before the explosion and flew to Berlin, believing that Hitler had been killed.

However just before the explosion, Stauffenberg's briefcase had been moved behind a table leg away from Hitler. The bomb was not as powerful as intended and Hitler was leaning over the thick oak table looking at maps when it went off which shielded him from the blast.

Three officers and a secretary died in the explosion and most of those present were injured but Hitler survived. So as a result of a series of unlucky accidents, Hitler escaped with only minor injuries.

The fact that telephone communications between Rastenburg and the outside world had not been cut and energetic counter-measures taken by SS Major Ernst Remer in Berlin compounded the failure of the plot.

As Ian Kershaw, the UK’s foremost historian of Nazi Germany, explains in ‘The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944-45’, ‘Once it had been plainly established that Hitler was alive, support had drained away from the coup planned to follow his presumed death, which collapsed in the course of the evening. Stauffenberg and three other close collaborators were shot by firing squad late that night. The other plotters were soon rounded up. Most were tortured, subjected to appalling show trials and barbarously executed.’

Hitler regarded his survival to be ‘a divine moment history’ and claimed that the plot was the work of ‘a very small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous, criminal and stupid officers’.

This invites two observations. First, the plot was much more than simply a military conspiracy and less conservative in inspiration than is widely supposed. The range and diversity of those involved in the plot is rather striking. It included Social Democrats, old Nazis, Prussian conservatives and some Roman Catholic priests and Lutheran pastors (notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

Secondly, the savage reaction of Hitler and Himmler suggests that even they did not believe their publicly stated assessment. Almost 5,000 people were executed. Many others, including Rommel, committed suicide.

The most obvious consequence of the plot’s failure was that the power of Himmler and the role of the SS were greatly enhanced.

As Kershaw has pointed out, Hitler had ‘a ruthless apparatus of enforcement and repression at his disposal’, ensuring there were no further attempts to overthrow the Führer after July 1944.

Regime change was completely off the agenda because no one possessed either the will or the capacity to prevent Hitler leading Germany to total destruction.

What would have happened had the plotters succeeded?

Any answer is largely speculative. Almost certainly the July plotters would have sought peace with the Allies in the west but may have wished to continue the war in the east against the Russians. The western Allies presumably would have refused because it would have split the coalition with the USSR (which was based on the complete destruction of German militarism and the defeat of Nazism) and insisted on ‘unconditional surrender’ on all fronts.

The plotters then would then have been confronted with the choice of fighting on or complete capitulation. If they had chosen the latter they would have saved a great many German lives (and Allied lives too). German military casualties in the final phase of the war were horrendous. As many German soldiers died in the last 10 months of the war as in the four years before July 1944. So if the war had been brought to a swift conclusion, the lives of 50% of the German soldiers who died in the Second World War would have been spared.

Stauffenberg was summarily executed in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the Supreme Headquarters of Army (OKW), in Berlin which was also effectively the headquarters of the July plotters. A statue of a naked man marks the spot where Stauffenberg was shot. In front of the statue is a plaque which reads (clumsily) in translation as:

‘You did not bear the shame.

You resisted.

You bestowed the eternally vigilant symbol of change

By sacrificing your impassioned lives for freedom, justice and honour.’

The Bendlerblock today is home to the German Resistance Memorial Centre and is more or less opposite the German ministry of defence in a street now named Stauffenbergstrasse. It is one of the most interesting places to visit in Berlin.