Von Stauffenberg’s son’s story
And now for a change of pace.
I’ve written before about the many failed plots to assassinate Hitler—the most famous, of course, being that led by Claus von Stauffenberg, with which you’re almost certainly familiar.
Here’s a different perspective on the Stauffenberg plot, based on a 2008 interview with von Stauffenberg’s oldest son Berthold, who was ten years old at the time of the assassination attempt that spared Hitler but cost his father (and many others) his life:
Claus’s eldest son recalled with precise clarity how he learned of the event that shattered his family’s lives. “On 21st July I heard a radio report of a ‘criminal attack on the fuhrer,'” Berthold said. “But my questions about this were evaded, and the adults tried to keep me and my next youngest brother Heimaren away from the radio.
“Instead, we children were taken for a long country walk by our great-uncle Nux – a former general staff officer in the Austrian Imperial Army – who kept us entertained with stories of his youthful adventures as a big-game hunter in Africa,” said Berthold. “Naturally, none of us knew that he, too, was a member of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. Today, I still ask myself what thoughts were going through his head during that walk.” Uncle Nux would be tried and hanged a few weeks later for his part in the plot.
The entire thing is well worth reading.
I am copying my post from another thread as a lot of the documents have to do with the talk and discussions leading up to the American Revolution and is what set that to be the almost bloodless thing it was (compared to the french revolutions depredations, but not otherwise).
If the American Revolution was like the French Revolution, the winners would have not given the losers a choice to stay, or leave… they would have been murdered…
but then again, the french revolution was more informed by marx, than the following documents by some very religious people who put the whole of the western ideal of freedom in the point of the heirarchy of rule starting with God…
c. 410 – Augustine, Sermon 12 [Ben. 62] on the New Testament (Matt. 8.8 and 1 Cor. 8.10)
c. 1100 – The Charter of Liberties
c. 1159 – Policratus (the first justification for rising up to remove tyrants)
June 15, 1215 – The Magna Carta
1265-1274 – Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica [murdering tyrants is out, but resisting them is ok]
August 1, 1291 – The Schweizer Bundesbrief
April 6, 1320 – The Declaration of Arbroath
1536-1560 – Institutes (John Calvin)
1556 – A Short Treatise of Politike Power
1557-1644 – The Geneva Bible’s
very important documents as to discussions on what to do with tyrants.. kill them or not? if not, then what? etc…
Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men. (Acts 5.29)
BRING BACK LEX REX!!!!!
i wonder what would happen if we walked around with a T-Shirt that said: LEX REX!!!!!
[how many know about this stuff besides me? rather than assume, i will ask….]
all these documents that set for the moral ideas of freedom, the rule of law and so on, tend to be from very religious Christian or Jewish theologians and men.
if you know the whole cannon of these old writs, you would EASILY understand their animus to religion. for as long as religion lasts, these records and ideas will last, and people will find them and relearn them, or reapply them.
technically my dredging it up to post from others dredging up to post… is the first step to reapplication… as it was the learning of the idea that came before the desire to apply it rather than accept tyranny.
we no longer remember what was meant by “philosopher states”… but its very important.
the change that happened in the Enlightenment was the dethroning of the philosophers as rulers of men through their inane ideas.
Gallileo, and others with their methods and factual records, and the idea that all ideas be grounded in reality, morals, ethics, the new rule of law of which kings are equal to peasants (see how far equality has warped by feminism?), and more.
in fact, the attempts of the dominicans to use the church to crush the arguments that were being put forth (and so the left blames the church not the begger philosopher like them who sought some form of statist power to vanquish enemies!).
but over the time of that, and not long after, the philosophers were relegated to a bunch of people with some kookie ideas that didnt work, but sounded nice.
marx, neitshe, sartre, hegel, etc. etc. etc..
were the army that created the romantic era… a relexive period where philosophers sought to reclaim their power of diktate through jumping a head and defining what science would find, and declaring whatas there.
this is why marx and others say all these futurist things. they were trying to show that they knoew more about the essential universe than the enligtenment people who still believed in god, and whose scientific method crushed their arguments by showing their assumptions about reality had no basis in reality.
so they fomented the future.. they claimed women would be like men and sex would be free and so on. and the people who converted to the philosophical religion which was more cargo cult and easier and whose rules and such, like astrology, had a kind of makes sense feel to it.
this is why as science is now disproving them again… the enlightenment march pushing the philosophers aside. its the philosopphers that seek, again, like the dominicans of gallileo and the church, to seek a greater power (not god) that they can appeal to to vanquish the foes that are unwriting the facts as to the prophecies of marx and others.
this is the real war… and its two camps of very smart people… when the philosophers won in germany, they murdered the jews and smart devout christians and the old… the idea was to erase this defeat of philosophical world views and ideology.
they dont want you to learn that the men of the enlightenment with very superior smart arguments had invalidated the dictatorship by what it was… not that its justification was insufficient… without that idea, you might accept justification to any end. and will.
sadly… this is probably too long and will be cut down… so rather than my continue to reveal this battle between science and philosophy… including the period when the philosophers tried to take over science a prior time in the past..
ok… cut it down…
Today, I still ask myself what thoughts were going through his head during that walk
Save the children who are the only future he has left…
the same behavior was exhibited in the movie., Life is beautiful
its what made the people of this era across the west so exceptional… their lives were bigger than just themselves, and even had focus on the smaller parts of the bigger picture.
i guess today we find it odd as we no longer shield children and raise mental defectives
One of the interesting things about the recent Hollywood presentation of the story, is Stauffenberg’s moral deracination during the process.
I guess that Tom Cruise didn’t find the real Stauffenberg’s actual moral sensibilities, motivations, and quandries, especially given the Catholic context, very interesting or screenworthy.
If that is, he even knew any more about them than the screenplay told him.
Interesting story, wasn’t prepared, however, to read “with incredible chutzpah” in the text.
The failure of the bomb to do its job is one of the too many “what if”s in history.
It is unfortunate that the movie “Valkyrie” did not begin at an earlier point in time and give full credit to some of the other individuals involved in the anti-Nazi plot, particularly Colonel (later General) Hans Oster, who fully grasped the evil of Hitler and began putting together action plans while many of the other eventual conspiracy members were still more or less under Hitler’s spell. It would have been hard to do this under the time constraints of a feature film, of course, but an excellent mini-series on the conspiracy was and still is possible.
One very objectionable aspect of the “Valkyrie” film is its unfair and historically-inaccurate treatment of Erich Fellgiebel, who commanded Army communications. Whereas the real Fellgiebel was a courageous and early opponent of Hitler, the movie makes it appear as if he had to be blackmailed into participation in the conspiracy. There’s not much excuse for treating real individuals like this.
My review of the film here:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6576.html
Fascinating story Neo. I was casually familiar with the story, but found it very interesting to read the son’s perspective.
Berthold would be about a year older than I, and it is intriguing to compare experiences of WWII. Although my father went to war, and the neighbor “boy” next door and the one across the street, both fighter pilots, were killed, my war experience could not compare to the children where the war was actually fought. In fact this story brings home that most Americans really have never experienced war.
Von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators were incredibly brave and dedicated. I have not seen the Cruise movie, but I doubt that he did them justice.
Off topic, but this could get interesting for those of us on the East Coast. It bears watching.
At this point, in American history, it’s interesting to contemplate such a resolution to evil in high political places.
One of the aspects I find interesting about the von Stauffenberg story is that he was a practicing Catholic, as is his son. My completely non-scientific survey of the German non-communist anti-Nazi movement during the time of the Third Reich seems to show that an active commitment to Christianity–Catholic or Protestant–was often a common denominator. Perhaps the belief that there was a higher purpose than mere politics to resisting the evil that the Nazi regime represented inspired the sacrifices and hardships these brave people endured. It’s not that their resistance was particularly effective; it wasn’t, and the Gestapo was ruthlessly efficient at rounding up these “traitors”. But that a resistance existed at all under these conditions I find remarkable. While the Pope may have made his own accommodations with Hitler and Mussolini for the purpose of taking as much heat off the Church and its flock as possible, that clearly wasn’t good enough for other Catholics like von Stauffenberg.
German Resistance Memorial Center:
http://www.gdw-berlin.de/en
…includes biographies of dozens of participants in various forms of resistance, also some interesting articles.
Thanks, David. I read a few of those, and people involved in the resistance seem to fall into several general categories: communists (no surprise); Jews (and there’s a fair amount of overlap with the communists here); liberal politicians; believing Christians; and disillusioned military officers. Von Stauffenberg was of course a Wehrmacht colonel who saw just how badly the war was going, losing an eye and a hand to a strafing Allied fighter in the process. But although it could be argued that he and his fellow conspirators were German patriots more concerned about “saving the Fatherland” than about Hitler’s crimes, it also would appear that he never lost his moral compass. Serving under Rommel, who never had even a whiff of war crimes allegations around him, would make it easier to stay on-course than, say, fighting partisans in the Balkans or Russia. But I have to believe the Church also had a role here.
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Always was struck & fascinated with the ‘cosmic coincidence’ of the Event exactly 25-years later: July 20, 1969…The First Moon Landing by Armstrong & Aldrin.
The vengeance exacted by Der Fuehrer was horrific. He specifically ordered the tried & convicted conspirators to be hanged by piano wire from meat hooks–strangled–and filmed for his subsequent entertainment. But, hey, if it had been Stalin, he’d have killed half-a-million innocents in retribution and slept soundly.