July 20, 1944, found the Stauffenberg family gathered, as they had so many summers before, at their rambling country house in the village of Lautlingen, in the rolling Swabian Alps of southern Germany. With the war in its fifth year and taking an increasingly ominous turn for Germany, most of the adult male members of the aristocratic Catholic clan—twins Alexander and Berthold, and their brilliant younger brother Claus—were absent. Presiding over the household of six boisterous children were Claus's wife, Nina; the children's grandmother, Caroline, and their great-aunt Alexandrine; and their great-uncle Nikolaus Üxküll, known to all as "Uncle Nux." Only he knew that their lives were about to be shattered.
"By then the war was getting uncomfortably close," Claus's eldest son, Berthold, recalled in a recent interview—which made the escape from their house in Bamberg, some 130 miles to the northeast, especially welcome. "Even in that provincial backwater there were constant air raids and raid alarms, and I had to sit my school exams in an underground shelter. The continual memorial services for those who had fallen at the front—at which I often served as a Catholic altar boy—were another grim reminder of the war. Nevertheless, Nazi control was still absolute. We were fed a constant diet of propaganda promising us Endsieg, or 'final victory,' in the state-controlled press and radio, which I naturally believed."
So keen a young Nazi was the then-10-year-old boy that he was bitterly disappointed to be just three days too young to join that year's intake of the Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth. "My dearest wish was to march through Bamberg carrying a Nazi banner at the head of a youth parade," said Berthold. "Fortunately my mother who, unknown to me, shared my father's anti-Nazi views, prevented this."
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