Unity

From Unity, 14 March 2009

A complex mixture

by W. Owl

The recent Hollywood film Valkyrie is about the “Officers’ Plot” of July 1944 to kill Adolf Hitler and deals mainly with the central character, Colonel Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg.
    This particular event has received more attention than any other act of German resistance to Hitler. At the same time very little seems to have been said or written about the man who planted the bomb that was intended to blow Hitler to kingdom come but in the event failed to do so.
    Richard Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, gives some idea of Stauffenberg’s beliefs in an article in the March edition of Searchlight. He states that Stauffenberg found “moral guidance in a complex mixture of Catholic religious precepts, an aristocratic sense of honour, ancient Greek ethics, and German romantic poetry.” Above all he was influenced by a poet named Stefan George, whose ambition was to revive a “secret Germany” that would “sweep away the materialism of the Weimar Republic and restore German life to its true spirituality.” Definitely a complex mixture.
    Evens makes the point that these influences set Stauffenberg apart from other members of the military resistance who had plans to overthrow Hitler as early as 1938, because of their belief that any forthcoming war was unwinnable. Evans adds that it was this rather than any fundamental opposition to Nazism that motivated them. In the case of Stauffenberg, Evans claims that “he was markedly more sympathetic to National Socialism than were many more senior officers.”
    Evans also makes the point that whilst he was later to lose altogether his enthusiasm for it, “he never lost his contempt for parliamentary democracy. This alone would make him ill-fitted to serve as a model for the conduct and ideas of future generations.”
    Stauffenberg's earlier enthusiasm for Nazism led him to support Hitler in the presidential elections of 1932 and to welcome Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor.
    Stauffenberg never joined the Nazi party but he did consider that they were leading a movement of “national renewal” that would sweep away the “shabby parliamentary compromises of Weimar.”
    Evans also says that Stauffenberg believed that the “purifying” of the German race and “eliminating Jewish influences” was an essential part of this renewal, although he did regard anti-Semitic violence with “distaste.” He writes that the only time he protested was when the anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer accused Stefan George’s poetry of being Jewish in character.
    Like many others, any doubts he had about starting a European war were quelled by the early stunning successes. He himself was to lose an eye and an arm while serving in North Africa.
    The turning-point was the war in the east. The military defeats were bad enough, but the mass killings of civilians led him to the conclusion that the Nazi regime was “recklessly squandering the good will that it had initially met among the peoples it had freed from Stalin’s yoke.” It was betraying his idea of “a new Europe under the benevolent rule of the Reich.” He went as far as to believe that it was “betraying the ideals of National Socialism itself.”
    He believed such acts in the east were “perverting military values and implicating the Armed Forces in terrible crimes.” This was his “moral conviction,” whereas others were more concerned with total military defeat after the disaster at Stalingrad.
    Stauffenberg’s redeeming feature is that he was prepared to plant the bomb. If he had succeeded it is quite possible the war would have ended sooner, at least in Europe.
    Evans, however, states that Stauffenberg was “anti-democratic, elitist and nationalist; he had nothing to offer the politics of the coming generations, still less the politics of today.”
    We should never forget those Germans who resisted and did have something “to offer the politics of the coming generations,” and in many cases paid the price with their lives.

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