Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg Totally Explained

Everything about Claus Von Stauffenberg totally explained

Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (15 November 1907 – 21 July 1944) was a German army officer and Catholic aristocrat who reached the rank of colonel and one of the leading officers of the failed July 20 plot of 1944 to kill German dictator Adolf Hitler and seize power in Germany.

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. Among his (Protestant) maternal ancestors were several famous Prussians, including Field Marshal August von Gneisenau.
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. (See also Bamberg Horseman.) 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(External Link

). The work outlines a new form of society ruled by hierarchical spiritual aristocracy. George rejected any attempts to use it for mundane political purposes, especially Nazism.
Claus was commissioned as a Lieutenant (second lieutenant) in 1930. In his military career, Stauffenberg 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 part of 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 expressed support for the way the occupation of Poland had been handled by the Nazi regime and for the use of Poles as slave workers to achieve German prosperity and systematic German colonisation of Poland.

World War II

Nazi Party's ideology repugnant; although he agreed with its nationalistic aspects, he never became a member of the party. Moreover, Stauffenberg remained a practicing Catholic; the Roman Catholic Church had signed the Reichskonkordat in 1933, the year Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, but soon the Nazi government violated this agreement and German Catholic bishops and the papacy protested against these violations, culminating in the papal encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Anxiety") of 1937. On top of this, the growing systematic maltreatment 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.
   After Operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of the Soviet Union) was launched in 1941, 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 Phony War, preceding the military actions of the Battle of France (1939-40), he'd 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 (POWs) from the Caucasus region which had been captured by Heeresgruppe A. The Soviet Union hadn't signed the Geneva Convention (1929). However, a month after the German invasion in 1942, an offer was made for a reciprocal adherence to the Hague convention. This 'note' was left unanswered by Third Reich officials. Stauffenberg didn't 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 a time 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 on a general staff (Oberstleutnant i. G. (im Generalstab)), and was sent to Africa to join the 10th Panzer (tank) Division as its Ia or "First Officer in the General Staff." 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 by 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" (Home Army), located on 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 prepared to become the means, after Hitler's death, of sweeping the rest of his regime from power.
   For after the suicide assassination to be committed by Axel von dem Bussche in November 1943 a detailed military plan was developed not only to occupy Berlin but also to take the different headquarters in East Prussia by military force. Stauffenberg had von dem Bussche transmit these written orders personally to Major Kuhn once he'd have arrived at Wolfsschanze. The assassination plan of von dem Bussche failed. Kuhn hid these compromising documents in the nearby OKH under a watch tower. (Kuhn became a POW of the Soviets after the July 20 plot. He led the Soviets to the hiding place of the documents in February 1945. In 1989 Gorbachev returned these documents of the resistance against Hitler as a present to the then German chancellor Dr Helmut Kohl.). These documents are of importance because having been produced in 1943 they're evidence of the materially uninterested motivation of the resistance group, which had been doubted and matter of discussion for years in Germany after the war.
   As also several other assassination attempts organised by Stauffenberg ( von dem Bussche, von Kleist, von Gersdorff, von Breitenbuch ) failed because of the unpredictable behavior of Hitler, the tide during 1944 was increasingly turning against the conspirators; they were forced to switch from meticulous planning to conspiratorial improvisation.
   Stauffenberg had long been convinced of the criminal nature of the Hitler regime, but from 1942 onwards he believed that Hitler's policies were totally ruining Germany and costing millions of innocent lives. Like many of his associates, he felt that there had to be an attempt on Hitler's life. From early September 1943, Stauffenberg was actively involved in the plot and became its driving force. Later, following several failed attempts by others to kill Hitler, Stauffenberg decided, in July 1944, to personally kill Hitler. By then he'd great doubts about the possibilities of success. His friend Tresckow convinced him to attempt the plot 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 to demonstrate by this act that not all Germans supported the regime.
   In June 1944 the Allies had landed in France on D-Day. Like most German military professionals, Stauffenberg had absolutely no doubts that this war was lost. Only an immediate armistice could avoid more unnecessary bloodshed and further damage to Germany, to its people and to most of the other European nations. However in 1943, he'd 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. Other demands included Germany maintaining 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 southern direction 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.
   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 in a meeting late 1943: "Let's be blunt, I'm 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..."). 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 July 21, 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg was the driving force behind the plot. His resolve, his organisational (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 Henning von Tresckow, he united the conspirators and drove them into action.

July 20 plot

Stauffenberg's part in the original plan required him to stay at the Bendlerstrasse offices in Berlin, from where he'd 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 (for example 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 would, 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 July 20, 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 July 20, 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.
   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 7 p.m., three and a half hours after he'd landed in Rangsdorf airport south of Berlin at around 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 wasn't passed on.
   After his arrival at Bendlerstrasse in Berlin around 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 less fortunate 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 didn't 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 the Discovery Channel Unsolved History series from ca. 2005, 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 [2ndbomb, stronger shelter, moving briefcase to the other side of the strong table leg].

Execution

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 General Olbricht, Lieutenant von Haeften, and Oberst Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim were shot before 01:00 a.m. that night (July 21, 1944) by a makeshift firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which was lit by the headlights of a truck. 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's 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.
One generation later, 35 years after the end of the war, 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 July 21, 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, one of whom was adopted: Berthold, Heimeran, Franz-Ludwig, Valerie and Konstanze. Konstanze was born in the concentration camp where Nina was interned after her husband's execution. Not told of what their father had done, Berthold, Heimeran, Franz, 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. She died aged 92 on April 2, 2006, at Kirchlauter near Bamberg and was buried there on April 8. 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.
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."

Assignments, promotions and decorations

Assignments

01.Jan.1926 17th (Bavarian) Cavalry Regiment, Bamberg
17.Oct.1927 Infantry School, Dresden
01.Oct.1928 Cavalry School, Hannover
30.Jul.1930 Pioneer Course
18.Nov.1930 Mortar Course
01.Oct.1934 Cavalry School, Hannover / Adjutant
06.Oct.1936 War Academy, Berlin
01.Aug.1938 1st Light Division (18.Oct.1939 renamed 6th Panzer Division) / Second Staff Officer (Ib)
31.May.1940 OKH / General Staff / Organization Branch / Section Head II
15.Feb.1943 10th Panzer Division / Senior Staff Officer (Ia)
07.Apr.1943 Seriously wounded in Tunisia, assigned to Officer Reserve Pool
01.Nov.1943 OKH / General Army Office / Chief of Staff
20.Jun.1944 OKW / Chief of Replacement Army / Chief of General Staff
04.Aug.1944 (Posthumous) Expelled from Wehrmacht by the Führer at recommendation of the Army Court of Honour

Promotions

18.Aug.1927 Fahnenjunker-Gefreiter

15.Oct.1927 Fahnenjunker-Unteroffizier

01.Aug.1929 Fähnrich

01.Jan.1930 Leutnant

01.May.1933 Oberleutnant

01.Jan.1937 Rittmeister (from 01.Nov.1939 Hauptmann i.G.)

01.Jan.1941 Major i.G.

01.Jan.1943 Oberstleutnant i.G.

01.Apr.1944 Oberst i.G. Decorations & Awards

17.Aug.1929 Sword of Honour

02.Oct.1936 Distinguished Service Badge, IVth Class

01.Apr.1938 Distinguished Service Badge, IIIrd Class

31.May.1940 Iron Cross, Ist Class

25.Oct.1941 Royal Bulgarian Order of Bravery, IVth Class

11.Dec.1942 Finnish Liberty Cross, IIIrd Class

14.Apr.1943 Wound Badge in Gold

20.Apr.1943 Italian-German Remembrance Medal

08.May.1943 German Cross in Gold

In popular culture

German movies

1955: movie IMDB

1989: Stauffenberg. 13 Bilder über einen Täter von Hans Bentzien und Erich Thiede, Eine Dokumentation, DDR

1990: Stauffenberg – Verschwörung gegen Hitler

2004: Die Stunde der Offiziere Semi-documentary movie IMDB

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2004: Stauffenberg (Film) by IMDB

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2005: Stauffenberg (Fernsehdokumentation) TV documentary

Other media

Eduard Franz played Stauffenberg in the film which starred James Mason as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel another leading figure in the plot. He is shown as missing his right eye, when in fact it was his left.

Gérard Buhr played Stauffenberg in the film "The Night Of The Generals" (1967), which included as a subplot a recreation of the July 20th bomb plot.

Stauffenberg was played by Brad Davis in the television film The Plot to Kill Hitler (1990).

In the episode of the British TV sitcom Red Dwarf entitled Timeslides, Lister steals Hitler's briefcase, which inside, a "package" from von Stauffenberg is found.

Von Stauffenberg was portrayed by German actor Sky du Mont in the 1988 television miniseries version of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance, which included a dramatization of the July 20 plot.

Stauffenberg was a character in a 1997 episode of .

Tom Cruise is set to play Stauffenberg in the movie Valkyrie or sometimes also called Rubicon which is based on the plot and events leading up to the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler. The film is slated for a 2009 release, will be directed by Bryan Singer and will co-star Kenneth Branagh. Referring to Cruise in an interview for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Stauffenberg's eldest son Berthold, a retired German Bundeswehr general stated, "He should leave my father alone. He should go climb a mountain or go surfing in the Caribbean. I don't give a hoot as long as he keeps out of it.". One of the family's principal objections is Cruise's support for the Church of Scientology. Filming started almost on the exact anniversary of the failed assassination, on 19 July 2007 in Brandenburg .

Projekt recording artist Thanatos on the An Embassy To Gaius album has a song called "Von Stauffenberg" as the first track on the CD.

Melodic death metal band Heaven Shall Burn dedicated Von Stauffenberg and the German Resistance in a song from their 2008 release of entitled A Quest For Resistance.Further Information

Get more info on 'Claus Von Stauffenberg'.

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