In popular culture, perhaps the most enduring image of the German aristocracy in the Third Reich is embodied by Tom Cruise in Valkyrie, the Hollywood version of the plot that failed to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944. At the end of the film, the man who planted the bomb, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, played by Cruise, stands, his head held high in front of an SS firing squad, and declares ‘Long live Secret Germany!’ Exhibiting aristocratic Haltung (‘bearing’), Stauffenberg paid tribute, so it is said, to the self-proclaimed aristocrat Stefan George, who preached of a secret realm accessible only to a privileged few. As Stauffenberg fell dead, a cabal of conspirators was being ruthlessly hunted down by the ‘new nobility’ of the SS.
Stauffenberg is a seductive image of the German resistance: a noble man losing his life for a noble cause. But, as Stefan Malinowski reveals in this intriguing investigation, this is misleading. After the First World War, the powerful German nobility became increasingly radicalised and many turned to the political right. Among the most notorious aristocratic backers of the plebian Adolf Hitler was Prince Wilhelm von Preußen, the last German Crown Prince. Hitler, as Malinowski shows, could not have won power in January 1933 without the connivance of the powerful ‘Cabinet of Barons’ led by Franz von Papen in the last days of the Weimar Republic. It was, of course, a Prussian nobleman Paul von Hindenburg who, as Reich President, delivered the German state into the hands of the Nazis.
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