The Question of Conscience

Fifteen years ago last week. Soviet armies were pressing into Poland, the Western Allies were about to break through at St.-Lo, and no one around the heavy oak table at the Fuhrer's headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, was able to offer much encouragement. "Do you know where the Russian Panzer armies are?" demanded Hitler, and got no answer. "Again no information from aerial reconnaissance . . .?" As the dreary conference droned on that sweltering July 20, 1944, a trim, distinguished colonel named Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg strolled into the room and, after being greeted by Hitler, casually placed his thick briefcase under the table, as close to the Fuhrer as possible. A few minutes later, the colonel was called outside to the telephone. At 12:50 p.m., his briefcase exploded.

Had it not been for the fact that an officer, who found the briefcase in his way, had just shoved it a few inches to a place behind the thick base of the table and thus provided Hitler with a shield against the blast, World War II might have ended within a few days. As it was, Hitler suffered only a burst eardrum and a bruised arm, was well enough to meet Mussolini at the station that very afternoon. But though the plot of July 20 failed, it later began to haunt the Germans. Were the plotters traitors or heroes? Last week West Germany showed it had finally, officially, made up its mind.

Films for the Fuhrer. The July 20 plotters--a network of diplomats, politicians and clergymen, working with disillusioned generals and colonels--had paid dearly for their pains. As soon as the news went out that Hitler was alive, the Gestapo began its dragnet Operation Thunderstorm, which brought the number of Germans arrested that year to 33,000. Stauffenberg was shot, and every other man, woman and child by that name was ordered arrested. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel chose suicide by poison. At least 600 men were either guillotined or strangled by piano wire suspended from meat hooks, and their final agonies were filmed and sent to the Fuhrer.

But in spite of the sweep of Operation Thunderstorm, the Allies, still wedded to the notion of unconditional surrender, took the position that the July 20 plot was the work of a few desperate Prussian Junker "reactionaries" bent opportunistically on salvaging what they could from a hopeless situation. And even Germans who agreed that Hitler was a menace were appalled at the idea of killing off a commander in time of war.

The question of motive became important. As the years passed, 15 books, including one by Allen Dulles (then in charge of U.S. espionage against Germany), were written to show that to an unsuspected extent, the plot was a sincere and patriotic attempt to save the honor of a nation. Postwar German courts absolved the plotters of treason, and each July 20, German newspapers have published eulogies of the conspirators. But the old argument about unquestioning loyalty in wartime lived on among diehard anti-July 20 officers, while the rest of the country preferred to forget the incident along with everything else connected with the last years of Hitler. Finally, last March, President Theodor Heuss delivered a speech before the Bundeswehr Officer Training Academy of Hamburg in which he flatly declared the July 20 plot to be part of the Bundeswehr's "new tradition."

"Our Models." Last week the very man who was briefing Hitler at the time the bomb went off--former Chief of Operations Adolf Heusinger, who survived both the bomb and arrest in Operation Thunderstorm to become inspector general of the new Bundeswehr--signed an appeal to be read to all troops. He praised the men of July 20 for "their Christian-humanist sense of responsibility," added that "their spirit and their attitudes are our models." It is now defense-force doctrine that a German officer may break his oath of loyalty when his commander in chief sets himself above the law.

In Bonn, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer observed July 20 by laying a wreath at a monument to the victims of the Nazis. In West Berlin, officers of the new Bundeswehr, who had to wear civilian clothes because of the city's quadripartite occupation status, gathered to honor July 20 at the old headquarters of the Wehrmacht on what is now, in memory of the day, called Stauffenbergstrasse. To the Communist East Berlin Neues Deutschland, this was "dirty-dog hypocrisy." Snapped West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt "Over there, they have good reason to fear a 'rebellion of conscience.' "

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