Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg

Count Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg
PICT4156.JPG
Bust of Colonel Count von Stauffenberg
(Memorial to the German Resistance, Berlin)
Born Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf
15 November 1907(1907-11-15)
Jettingen, German Reich
Died 21 July 1944 (aged 36)
Berlin, Nazi Germany
Cause of death Execution by firing squad
Nationality German
Employer Wehrmacht Heer
Home town Albstadt, Germany
Title Oberst
Known for 20 July plot coordinator
Religious beliefs Roman Catholic Church
Spouse(s) Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg
Parents Graf Alfred Schenk
Caroline Schenk Gräfin
(von Stauffenberg family)
Relatives Gm Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (son)

Count Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf[1] von Stauffenberg (15 November 1907 – 21 July 1944) was a German army officer and Roman Catholic aristocrat who was one of the leading officers of the failed 20 July plot of 1944 to kill German dictator Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power in World War II Germany. He was one of the central figures of the German Resistance movement.

Contents

Early life

Stauffenberg was the third of three sons (the others being the twins Berthold and Alexander) of Alfred Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the last Oberhofmarschall of the Kingdom of Württemberg, and Caroline Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg (née Gräfin (Countess) von Üxküll-Gyllenband). Claus was born in the Stauffenberg castle of Jettingen between Ulm and Augsburg, in the eastern part of Swabia, at that time in the Kingdom of Bavaria, part of the German Reich. The von Stauffenberg family is one of the oldest and most distinguished aristocratic Roman Catholic families of southern Germany.[2] Among his (Protestant) maternal ancestors were several famous Prussians, including Field Marshal August von Gneisenau.

In his youth, Claus and his brothers were members of the Neupfadfinder, a German Scout association and part of the German Youth movement.[3][4]

Like his brothers, Claus was carefully educated and inclined toward literature, but eventually took up a military career. In 1926, he joined the family's traditional regiment, the Bamberger Reiter- und Kavallerieregiment 17 (17th Cavalry Regiment) in Bamberg. It was around this time that the three brothers were introduced by Albrecht von Blumenthal to poet Stefan George's influential circle Georgekreis, from which many notable members of the German resistance would later emerge. George dedicated Das neue Reich ("The new Reich") in 1928, including the Geheimes Deutschland ("secret Germany") written in 1922, to Berthold.[5] The work outlines a new form of society ruled by a hierarchical spiritual aristocracy. George rejected any attempts to use it for mundane political purposes, especially Nazism.

Stauffenberg at the Kavallerieregiment 17

Stauffenberg was commissioned as a Leutnant (second lieutenant) in 1930. He studied modern weapons at the Kriegsakademie in Berlin-Moabit, but remained focused on the use of the horse—which continued to carry out a large part of transportation duties throughout the Second World War—in modern warfare. His regiment became part of the German 1st Light Division under General Erich Hoepner, who had taken part in the plans for the September 1938 German Resistance coup, cut short by Hitler's unexpected success in the Munich Agreement. The unit was among the troops that moved into the Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia that had a German-speaking majority, as agreed upon in Munich.

Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Stauffenberg and his regiment took part in the attack on Poland. Afterwards, he at first tolerated the way the occupation of Poland had been handled by the Nazi regime and the use of Poles as slave workers to achieve German prosperity. Some claim he even endorsed this,[6][7] and the systematic German colonisation and exploitation of Poland. For example, in a letter from occupied Poland to his wife Nina, he wrote:

Die Bevölkerung ist ein unglaublicher Pöbel, sehr viele Juden und sehr viel Mischvolk. Ein Volk, welches sich nur unter der Knute wohlfühlt. Die Tausenden von Gefangenen werden unserer Landwirtschaft recht gut tun. (The population here are unbelievable rabble; a great many Jews and mixed folk. A folk that only feels good under the knout. The thousands of prisoners will be used well in our agriculture.)

The deeply-rooted belief common in the German aristocracy was that the eastern territories, populated predominantly by Poles, most of which were German territory before World War I, should be colonised as the Teutonic Knights had done in the Middle Ages. There is still significant controversy on the point if Stauffenberg really approved of the way this was achieved by the Nazi regime.[8] In any case it is certain that in the early stages of the war, he still held the usual aristocratic beliefs typical of late imperial times.

World War II

Stauffenberg found some aspects of the Nazi Party's ideology repugnant; although he agreed with some of its nationalistic aspects, he never became a member of the party. Moreover, Stauffenberg remained a practising Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church had signed the Reichskonkordat in 1933, the year Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. The Nazi government quickly violated this agreement, leading German Catholic bishops and the papacy to protest against these violations. This culminated in the papal encyclical"Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Anxiety") of 1937, which also condemned the ascendancy of racist ideologies. On top of this, the growing systematic ill-treatment of Jews and suppression of religion had offended Stauffenberg's strong personal sense of religious morality and justice; he felt, for instance, that the November 1938 Kristallnacht ("Night of the broken glass") had brought shame upon Germany. While his uncle, Nikolaus Graf von Üxküll, had approached him before to join the resistance movement against the Hitler regime, it was only after the Polish campaign in 1939 that Stauffenberg's individual conscience and his religious convictions made him consider joining. Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and Ulrich Schwerin von Schwanenfeld urged him to become the adjutant of Walther von Brauchitsch, then Supreme Commander of the Army, in order to participate in a coup against Hitler. Stauffenberg declined at the time, reasoning that all German soldiers had pledged allegiance not to the institution of the presidency of the German Reich, but to the person of Adolf Hitler due to the Führereid having been introduced in 1934.

Stauffenberg's unit was reorganized into the 6th Panzer Division, and he served as officer of its general staff in the Battle of France, for which he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. Like many others, Stauffenberg was impressed by the overwhelming military success, which was attributed to Hitler.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was launched in 1941. The resultant mass executions of Jews, Poles, Russians and others, as well as what he believed was an already apparent deficiency in military leadership (Hitler had assumed the role of supreme commander in late 1941 after sacking Hoepner and others), finally convinced Stauffenberg in 1942 to sympathize with resistance groups within the Wehrmacht, the only force that had a chance to overcome Hitler's Gestapo, SD, and SS. During the idle months of the so called Phoney War, preceding the Battle of France (1939-40), he had already been transferred to the organizational department of the Oberkommando des Heeres, the German army high command, which directed the operations on the Eastern Front. Stauffenberg opposed the Commissar Order, which Hitler wrote and then cancelled after a year. He tried to soften the German occupation policy in the conquered areas of the Soviet Union by pointing out the benefits of getting volunteers for the Ostlegionen which were commanded by his department. Guidelines were issued on 2 June 1942 for the proper treatment of prisoners of war from the Caucasus region which had been captured by Heeresgruppe A. The Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention (1929). However, a month after the German invasion in 1941, an offer was made for a reciprocal adherence to the Hague convention. This 'note' was left unanswered by Third Reich officials.[9] Stauffenberg did not engage in any coup plot at this time. Hitler was at the peak of his power in 1942. The Stauffenberg brothers (Berthold and Claus) maintained contact with former commanders like Hoepner, and with the Kreisau Circle; they also included civilians and social democrats like Julius Leber in their scenarios for an administration after Hitler.

In November 1942, the Allies landed in French North Africa, and the 10th Panzer Division occupied Vichy France (Case Anton) before being transferred to the Tunisian Campaign, as part of the Afrika Korps.

In 1943, Stauffenberg was promoted to lieutenant-colonel of the general staff (Oberstleutnant i. G. (im Generalstab)), and was sent to Africa to join the 10th Panzer Division as its First Officer in the General Staff (Ia). There, while he was scouting out a new command area, his vehicle was strafed on 7 April 1943 by British fighter-bombers and he was severely wounded. He spent three months in hospital in Munich, where he was treated by Ferdinand Sauerbruch. Stauffenberg lost his left eye, his right hand, and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand. He jokingly remarked to friends never to have really known what to do with so many fingers when he still had all of them. For his injuries, Stauffenberg was awarded the Wound Badge in Gold on 14 April 1943 and for his courage the German Cross in Gold on 8 May 1943.

For rehabilitation, Stauffenberg was sent to his home, Schloss Lautlingen (today a museum), then still one of the Stauffenberg castles in Southern Germany. Initially he felt frustrated not to be in a position to stage a coup himself. But by the beginning of September 1943, after a somewhat slow recuperation from his wounds, he was positioned by the conspirators, mainly Tresckow as a staff officer to the headquarters of the Ersatzheer ("Replacement Army" - charged with training soldiers to reinforce first line divisions at the front), located on the Bendlerstrasse (later Stauffenbergstrasse) in Berlin.

There, one of Stauffenberg's superiors was General Friedrich Olbricht, a committed member of the resistance movement. The Ersatzheer had a unique opportunity to launch a coup, as one of its functions was to have Operation Valkyrie in place. This was a contingency measure which would let it assume control of the Reich in the event that internal disturbances blocked communications to the military high command. Ironically, the Valkyrie plan had been agreed to by Hitler and was now secretly changed to sweep the rest of his regime from power after his death.

A detailed military plan was developed not only to occupy Berlin but also to take the different headquarters in East Prussia by military force after the suicide assassination to be committed by Axel von dem Bussche in late November 1943. Stauffenberg had von dem Bussche transmit these written orders personally to Major Kuhn once he had arrived at Wolfsschanze. However, von dem Bussche had left Wolfsschanze for the eastern front, after the meeting with Hitler was canceled and the attempt could not be executed. Kuhn hid these compromising documents under a watch tower of the OKW, located not far from Wolfsschanze.

Kuhn became a POW of the Soviets after the 20 July plot. He led the Soviets to the hiding place of the documents in February 1945. In 1989, Gorbachev presented these documents to the then German chancellor Dr Helmut Kohl. These documents, produced by Stauffenberg and his fellow officers 1943 in Berlin evidence the idealistic motivation of the resistance group. This had been doubted and was a matter of discussion for years in Germany after the war. Some thought the plotters wanted to kill Hitler in order to end the war and to avoid the loss of their privileges as professional officers and members of the nobility.

As all of the following assassination attempts organised by Stauffenberg (e.g. von Kleist, von Gersdorff, von Breitenbuch) failed mostly because of the unpredictable behaviour of Hitler, the conspirators were forced to switch from meticulous planning to conspiratorial improvisation.

In June 1944, the Allies had landed in France on D-Day. Stauffenberg, like most other German professional military officers, had absolutely no doubt that the war was by now absolutely lost. Only an immediate armistice could avoid more unnecessary bloodshed and further damage to Germany, its people, and most other European nations. However in late 1943, he had written out demands with which he felt the Allies had to comply as a condition for Germany to agree to an immediate peace. These demands included Germany retaining its 1914 eastern borders, including the Polish territories of Wielkopolska and Poznań.[10] Other demands included Germany keeping such territorial gains as Austria and the Sudetenland within the Reich, giving autonomy to Alsace-Lorraine, and even expansion of the current wartime borders of Germany in the south by annexing Tyrol as far as Bolzano and Merano. Non-territorial demands included such points as refusal of any occupation of Germany by the Allies, as well as refusal to hand over war criminals by demanding the right of "nations to deal with its own criminals". These proposals were only directed to the Western Allies—Stauffenberg wanted Germany only to retreat from Western, Southern and Northern positions, while demanding the right to continue military occupation of German territorial gains in the East.[11] After the allied landing von Tresckow and Stauffenberg had it clear, that their attempt now had only symbolic character. The war would be ended - however much earlier - by a unconditional surrender.

Stauffenberg was aware that by German law (then and now) he was about to commit high treason. He openly told young conspirator Axel von dem Bussche late 1943: "Let's be blunt, I am committing high treason with all my might and main...." ("Gehen wir in medias res, ich betreibe mit allen mir zur Verfügung stehenden Mitteln den Hochverrat...").[12] He justified his project to Bussche by reference to the right under natural law ("Naturrecht") to defend millions of people's lives from the criminal aggressions of Hitler ("Nothilfe").

From the beginning of September 1943 until 21 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg was the driving force behind the plot. His resolve, his organizational abilities, and his radical revolutionary approach put an end to inactivity caused by doubts and long discussions on hitherto military virtues made obsolete or not by Hitler's behavior. Helped by his friend Henning von Tresckow, he united the conspirators and drove them into action.[13] Stauffenberg decided, only after the conspiritor General Helmuth Stieff on 7 July 1944 had declared himself unable to assasinate Hitler on a uniforms display at Klessheim castle near Salzburg, to personally kill Hitler and to run the plot in Berlin. By then, Stauffenberg had great doubts about the possibility of success. Tresckow convinced him to go on with it even if it had no chance of success at all, as this would be the only way to prove to the world that the Hitler regime and Germany were not one and the same and that not all Germans supported the regime.

20 July Plot

Main article: 20 July plot

Stauffenberg's part in the original plan required him to stay at the Bendlerstrasse offices in Berlin, from where he would phone regular Army units all over Europe and the Reich in an attempt to convince them to arrest leaders of Nazi political organizations such as the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo. Unfortunately, he found himself forced to do both, to kill Hitler far away from Berlin and to trigger the military machine in Berlin during the office hours of the very same day. He was the only conspirator who had regular access to Hitler (during his briefing meetings) by mid 1944, as well as being the only officer among the conspirators who was considered to have the resolve and persuasive power to convince German military leaders to throw in with the coup once Adolf Hitler was dead.

Thus in 1944 Stauffenberg, who by this time was promoted to Oberst (colonel), agreed to carry out the assassination of the German Führer, Adolf Hitler himself — a need that became further apparent to him after several suicide attempts (e.g. the ones of Axel von dem Bussche and Ewald von Kleist) had failed. The attempt after several trials by Stauffenberg to meet Hitler, Göring and Himmler at the same time and at the same place, through chance, ultimately took place at a briefing hut at the military high command in Eastern Prussia called Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) near Rastenburg, East Prussia (today Kętrzyn, Poland) on 20 July 1944. Albert Speer had met Claus in some of the meetings near Berchtesgaden and in Eastern Prussia during summer 1944. He described the tall colonel in his memoirs as a person of "mystical good looks."

On 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg's briefcase contained two small bombs, each with a British-made pencil detonator that could be set with a ten to fifteen minute detonation delay once activated. After having traveled that morning from Berlin to Eastern Prussia (today, Poland) by a special plane, he entered the briefing room before Hitler had shown up. The meeting had unexpectedly been changed from the subterranean "Führerbunker" to the wooden barrack or hut of Speer. He told Hitler's butler that he needed to change his shirt and thus left the meeting room, taking his briefcase with him. Once in a small room Stauffenberg, in the presence of his aide-de-camp lieutenant Haeften, armed the first bomb with specially adapted pliers. The pliers were used to activate the pencil detonator, a task made difficult by Stauffenberg not having a right hand and only having three fingers on his left hand. A guard knocked and opened the door, urging him to hurry as the meeting was about to begin. As a result, Stauffenberg was able to arm only one of the two bombs, which he placed back into the briefcase. He left the small room, handing the second, unarmed bomb in the briefcase to his aide-de-camp Haeften and proceeded back to the briefing room, where he placed his briefcase under the conference table, as near as he could get to Hitler. After some minutes he excused himself, pretending to need to make an urgent phone call to Berlin, and left the meeting room. He waited in a nearby shelter until the explosion tore through the hut. From what he saw, he was fully convinced that no one in the room could have survived. Although four people were killed and almost all present were injured, Hitler himself was injured only slightly as he was shielded from the blast by the heavy, solid oak conference table.

Office at Bendlerblock

Stauffenberg and his aide-de-camp, Oberleutnant Werner von Haeften, who carried the second bomb, quickly walked away and talked their way out of the heavily guarded compound. They were driven to the nearby airfield. On their way to the airfield, passing through a small forest they got rid of the second bomb. Then they flew back to Berlin-Rangsdorf in the same Heinkel He 111 which had brought them in the morning. Stauffenberg only learned of the failure to kill Hitler at 19.00 (7 p.m)., three and a half hours after he had landed in Rangsdorf airport south of Berlin at around 15.30 (3:30 p.m). At Rangsdorf he was met by his brother Berthold. While he was still in transit, an order was issued from the Führer's headquarters to shoot Stauffenberg and Haeften immediately, but the order landed on the desk of a fellow conspirator, Friedrich Georgi of the air staff, and was not passed on.

After his arrival at Bendlerstrasse in Berlin around 16.30 (4:30 p.m.), Stauffenberg, who still mistakenly believed Hitler to be dead, immediately began to motivate his friends to initiate the second phase of the project: to organize the military coup against the Nazi leaders. A short time later however, Joseph Goebbels announced by radio that Hitler had survived an attempt on his life. At 19:00 Hitler himself personally broadcast a message on the state radio, and the conspirators realized at that point that the coup had completely failed. The conspirators were tracked to their Bendlerstrasse offices and were shortly thereafter overpowered in a short shoot-out during which Stauffenberg was shot in the shoulder.

Alternative possibilities

Some researchers have speculated that if Stauffenberg had placed the briefcase in a slightly different location the bomb might have had its intended effect on the primary target, since the bomb was supposedly placed behind a very thick leg of the heavy oak wood conference table. The leg apparently deflected the blast and prevented the force from reaching Hitler. This thesis is supported by the fact that others seated in different positions were killed or more seriously injured than Hitler. There is also speculation that had Stauffenberg left the second bomb in his briefcase, even without arming it, the detonation of the first bomb could have triggered the explosion of the second bomb (by sympathetic detonation) and the combined force of the two bombs going off nearly simultaneously might have killed Hitler. An alternate analysis is that the single bomb might have been effective had the meeting been held as originally planned in Hitler's reinforced and subterranean bunker (the "Führerbunker"), instead of the wooden hut that doubled as Speer's barracks and makeshift briefing room. Both compact bombs were designed to kill by expansion inside a room encased with reinforced walls. Speer's wooden hut with open windows did not correspond to these specifications, as it allowed a substantial amount of the blast force to escape to the outside by the open windows. Since some of the blast escaped the room, only those who were in the immediate path of the blast were killed or severely injured. In a 2005 episode of the Discovery Channel TV series Unsolved History, each scenario was simulated in a detailed reconstruction with test dummies. The results supported the conclusion that Hitler would have been killed had any of the three other scenarios occurred.

Execution

Death certificate

In a futile attempt to save his own life, the co-conspirator Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army present in the Bendlerblock (Headquarters of the Army), charged other conspirators, held an impromptu court martial, and condemned the ringleaders of the conspiracy to death. Stauffenberg and fellow officers Colonel General Olbricht, Lieutenant von Haeften, and Oberst (Colonel) Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim were shot before 01:00 a.m. that night (21 July 1944) by a makeshift firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which was lit by the headlights of a truck.

Memorial at Bendlerblock

As his turn came, Stauffenberg spoke his last words: "Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!" ("Long live our holy Germany!") Fromm ordered that the executed officers (his former co-conspirators) receive an immediate burial with military honors in the Matthäus Churchyard in Berlin's Schöneberg district. Today there is a stone in memorial of this event. The next day, however, Stauffenberg's body was exhumed by the SS, stripped of his medals, and cremated.

Another central figure in the plot was Stauffenberg's eldest brother, Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. On 10 August 1944, Berthold was tried before Judge-President Roland Freisler in the special "People's Court" (Volksgerichtshof). This court was established by Hitler for political offenses and Berthold was one of eight conspirators executed by slow strangulation (reputedly with piano wire used as the garrote) in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, later that day. More than two hundred (others speak of more than a thousand fellow conspirators) were condemned in mock trials and executed.

In 1980, the German government established a memorial for the failed anti-Nazi resistance movement in a part of the Bendlerblock, the remainder of which currently houses the Berlin offices of the German Ministry of Defense (whose main offices remain in Bonn). The Bendlerstrasse was renamed the Stauffenbergstrasse, and the Bendlerblock now houses the Memorial to the German Resistance, a permanent exhibition with more than 5,000 photographs and documents showing the various resistance organisations at work during the Hitler era. The courtyard where the officers were shot on 21 July 1944, is now a site of remembrance with a plaque commemorating the events and includes a memorial bronze figure of a young man with his hands symbolically bound which resembles Count von Stauffenberg.

Family

Stauffenberg married Nina Freiin von Lerchenfeld in November 1933 in Bamberg. They had five children: Berthold, Heimeran, Franz-Ludwig, Valerie and Konstanze. Konstanze was born in Frankfurt on the Oder after Stauffenberg's execution. Not told of what their father had done, Berthold, Heimeran, Franz-Ludwig, and Valerie were placed in foster home for the remainder of the war, but they were forced to use new surnames, as Stauffenberg was now considered unacceptable. Nina died aged 92 on 2 April 2006, at Kirchlauter near Bamberg, and was buried there on 8 April. Their eldest son, Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, became a general in West Germany's post-war army, the Bundeswehr, while his brother Franz-Ludwig became a member of both the German and European parliaments. Daughter Konstanze von Schulthess Rechberg wrote a book about her mother " Nina Schenk Graefin von Stauffenberg " in 2008, which has become a bestseller.

Stauffenberg's widow Nina described her late husband:

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.[14]

There is, however, the declaration of Stauffenberg's elder son that the children were informed by their mother about the assassination attempt and about their father's role in it.

Assignments, promotions and decorations

A German stamp of Stauffenberg and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke in commemoration of their 100th birthdays.

Assignments

Promotions

Decorations & Awards

In popular culture

Stauffenberg memorial site in Altes Schloss in Stuttgart

German movies

Other media

Notes

  1. ↑ Regarding personal names: Graf is a title, translated as Count, not a first or middle name. The female form is Gräfin.
  2. ↑ The family's original name was Stauffenberg, and they held the noble titles of Schenk and Graf (Count). After 1918, when the Weimar Republic abolished all noble titles, the Stauffenberg family, like the other formerly noble German families, added the words Schenk and Graf to their surname. Stauffenberg's formal surname was thus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, though by convention he is usually referred to in English simply as Count von Stauffenberg.
  3. ↑ Löttel, Holger (2007-07-22) (in German) (PDF), Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907-1944): Leben und Würdigung- Vortrag anläßlich der Gedenkveranstaltung zum 100.Geburtstag von Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Ketrzyn/Rastenburg, 22.Juli 2007, http://www.forschungsgemeinschaft-20-juli.de/downloads/vortraege/Loettel%20zu%20Stauffenberg.pdf, retrieved on 2008-02-07 
  4. ↑ Kiesewetter, Renate (in German), Im Porträt: Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, http://www.br-online.de/wissen-bildung/collegeradio/medien/geschichte/stauffenberg/manuskript/stauffenberg_manuskript.pdf, retrieved on 2008-02-07 
  5. ↑ Herbert Ammon: Vom Geist Georges zur Tat Stauffenbergs - Manfred Riedels Rettung des Reiches, in: Iablis 2007 at www.iablis.de
  6. ↑ Martyn Housden,"Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich" Routledge, 1997 page 100: "He was endorsing both the tyrannical occupation of Poland and the use of its people as slave labourers"
  7. ↑ [1] )
  8. ↑ "It is essential that we begin a systemic colonisation in Poland. But I have no fear that this will not occur". Peter Hoffman Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944; page 116; 2003 McGill-Queen's Press
  9. ↑ Beevor, Stalingrad . Penguin 2001 ISBN 0141001313 p60
  10. ↑ "Review of 'Claus Graf Stauffenberg. 15. November 1907-20. Juli 1944. Das Leben eines Offiziers. by Joachim Kramarz, Bonn 1967' by : F. L. Carsten International Affairs, Vol. 43, No. 2 (April 1967). "It is more surprising that, as late as May 1944, Stauffenberg still demanded for Germany the frontiers of 1914 in the east, i.e., a new partition of Poland."
  11. ↑ Martyn Housden,"Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich";Routledge 1997;page 109-110
  12. ↑ Joachim Fest; Hitler - Eine Biographie; Propyläen, Berlin; 2. Auflage 2004; Page 961; ISBN 3 549 07172 8
  13. ↑ Joachim Fest; "Hitler - Eine Biographie"
  14. ↑ Quoted from Burleigh (2000).
  15. ↑ dpa-Meldung Cruise schnappt Kretschmann Stauffenberg-Rolle weg bei nordclick.de
  16. ↑ vgl. Kretschmann stänkert gegen Cruise bei Spiegel Online

Literature

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Persondata
NAME Stauffenberg, Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Graf, Claus Philipp Maria Schenk
SHORT DESCRIPTION German army officer and Catholic aristocrat
DATE OF BIRTH 1907-11-15
PLACE OF BIRTH Jettingen, German Reich
DATE OF DEATH 1944-07-21
PLACE OF DEATH Berlin, Nazi Germany