Germans still split over plot to kill Hitler
Philipp von Boeselager has not had a proper night's sleep for 60 years, not since the day his brother Georg sent him a coded message saying: "All back to the holes." It meant, quite simply, that an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler had failed.
Boeselager, as a member of the team involved in the now legendary Stauffenberg plot of July 20, 1944, had to flee.
He had two roles. He was the man who provided a suitcase full of English-made explosives for the bombs. He also commanded 1,000 men whose role was to round up senior Nazis in the German capital. Instead, the 25-year-old fled eastwards out of Berlin, forced to abandon the plan when Hitler survived.
These are the hours that still haunt the dreams of the 86-year-old - the last of the estimated 200 plotters to survive.
"My dreams are stressful affairs in which I have conversations with my former friends and plotters, in which we discuss how to get rid of Hitler or in which I think, should I have shot him when I met him?" he said at a friend's home in Munster.
Six decades on, the noble but failed attempt by Count Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow collaborators to assassinate Hitler still resonates in the popular memory. Tomorrow's anniversary is being marked by a series of ceremonies, television documentaries, book publications and reunions of plotters' families, who are now spread around the world.
Feature films have reconstructed the events surrounding the moment when Stauffenberg, a colonel in the German army and fierce opponent of Hitler, planted a bomb in a suitcase under a table in Hitler's Wolf's Lair in what is now Poland. The bomb exploded, but Hitler escaped with little more than a burst eardrum.
Stauffenberg and about 5,000 other people - only a tiny fraction of whom were involved in the plot - were executed in the following days.
It was not until the 1950s that Germany first commemorated the event but the process accelerated and 300 streets across the country are now named after Stauffenberg.
Yet it is clear that Germans are still ambivalent about the significance of the plot.
"Again and again there are attempts to disparage the assassination attempt," the former chancellor Helmut Kohl wrote in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in a passionate defence of Stauffenberg and his men. "The plotters were trying to free Germany from Hitler from within. They were working on behalf of all the German people."
The Allies, determined to force a German surrender, had mixed feelings. Keenly aware of the men's pasts in the German war machine, Churchill described the assassination attempt as "nothing but a dog-eats-dog affair".
That still pains those such as Clarita von Trott zu Solz who has been trying to clear the name of her husband, Adam. He was executed in August 1944 for his involvement in the plot as part of the resistance group the "Kreisau Circle".
Mrs von Trott zu Solz, now 87, has struggled to clear her husband of accusations that he was a traitor, not least in Britain where he had studied at Oxford and had many friends.
"After my release from prison and concentrating on bringing up our two daughters rather than putting my energy into grieving, it was very important for me to focus on clearing his name of suggestions that he betrayed his country," the retired psychoanalyst said at her Berlin flat. "Adam was full of wonderful ideas of how Germany could be once the Nazis had been defeated. He threw all his energies into this.
"He argued with other members of the resistance who believed it was too late to try to kill Hitler and that defeat was round the corner anyway.
"He argued that the crimes committed by the Nazis were of such extreme cruelty that they had to be stopped as soon as possible - that it was never too late to kill Hitler."
There were 42 assassination attempts against Hitler. None succeeded, leading even some of his hardiest opponents to believe that he was somehow invincible.
Debates and conspiracy theories are still rife about why he survived, with questions frequently asked about how strong the will to kill him really was, why the resistance fighters took so long to implement their plans, and why the man chosen to plant the bomb in the Wolf's Lair was so unsuited for the job, having only one eye and the use of only one hand.
That meant that in the short time available to him, he could place just one of two bombs. Two would certainly have killed Hitler.
"The point is the resistance was not a mass movement, and no one pretends it was," said Johannes Tuchel, director of the Memorial Centre of German Resistance.
"To be sure, there were officers there who should have managed to plan it better from a technical viewpoint but there were so few people prepared to get involved it is amazing they were able to achieve anything at all."
Mr Boeselager, one of the few men to escape torture and execution by the Nazis but who carried a cyanide capsule on him until the end of the war, is still troubled by what went wrong.
"Yes, I'm sure Stauffenberg was not the right man for the job," he said bluntly. "But the truth is he was the only one who had the courage to do it."
Later this month at a state ceremony in Berlin, 93-year-old Freya von Moltke plans to honour the memory of her husband Helmuth von Moltke who headed the Kreisau Circle and was executed in January 1945.
"The resistance was weak," she said at her home in America. "And it was fruitless.
"Our husbands died but it was surely worth it. "These men were acting on behalf of humanity."
It was not until the 1950s that Germany first commemorated the event but the process accelerated and 300 streets across the country are now named after Stauffenberg.
Yet it is clear that Germans are still ambivalent about the significance of the plot.
"Again and again there are attempts to disparage the assassination attempt," the former chancellor Helmut Kohl wrote in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in a passionate defence of Stauffenberg and his men. "The plotters were trying to free Germany from Hitler from within. They were working on behalf of all the German people."
The Allies, determined to force a German surrender, had mixed feelings. Keenly aware of the men's pasts in the German war machine, Churchill described the assassination attempt as "nothing but a dog-eats-dog affair".
That still pains those such as Clarita von Trott zu Solz who has been trying to clear the name of her husband, Adam. He was executed in August 1944 for his involvement in the plot as part of the resistance group the "Kreisau Circle".
Mrs von Trott zu Solz, now 87, has struggled to clear her husband of accusations that he was a traitor, not least in Britain where he had studied at Oxford and had many friends.
"After my release from prison and concentrating on bringing up our two daughters rather than putting my energy into grieving, it was very important for me to focus on clearing his name of suggestions that he betrayed his country," the retired psychoanalyst said at her Berlin flat. "Adam was full of wonderful ideas of how Germany could be once the Nazis had been defeated. He threw all his energies into this.
"He argued with other members of the resistance who believed it was too late to try to kill Hitler and that defeat was round the corner anyway.
"He argued that the crimes committed by the Nazis were of such extreme cruelty that they had to be stopped as soon as possible - that it was never too late to kill Hitler."
There were 42 assassination attempts against Hitler. None succeeded, leading even some of his hardiest opponents to believe that he was somehow invincible.
Debates and conspiracy theories are still rife about why he survived, with questions frequently asked about how strong the will to kill him really was, why the resistance fighters took so long to implement their plans, and why the man chosen to plant the bomb in the Wolf's Lair was so unsuited for the job, having only one eye and the use of only one hand.
That meant that in the short time available to him, he could place just one of two bombs. Two would certainly have killed Hitler.
"The point is the resistance was not a mass movement, and no one pretends it was," said Johannes Tuchel, director of the Memorial Centre of German Resistance.
"To be sure, there were officers there who should have managed to plan it better from a technical viewpoint but there were so few people prepared to get involved it is amazing they were able to achieve anything at all."
Mr Boeselager, one of the few men to escape torture and execution by the Nazis but who carried a cyanide capsule on him until the end of the war, is still troubled by what went wrong.
"Yes, I'm sure Stauffenberg was not the right man for the job," he said bluntly. "But the truth is he was the only one who had the courage to do it."
Later this month at a state ceremony in Berlin, 93-year-old Freya von Moltke plans to honour the memory of her husband Helmuth von Moltke who headed the Kreisau Circle and was executed in January 1945.
"The resistance was weak," she said at her home in America. "And it was fruitless.
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