A new biography of Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who tried to kill Hitler, has reignited a long-running historical debate. It says a lot about the German state of mind
At midnight on July 20, 1944, four men are escorted to the inner yard of the Bendlerblock, the headquarters of German Army in Berlin. The glaring headlights of military vehicles cast the scene in a ghostly atmosphere. The firing squad consists of 10 petty officers. They proceed to execute four conspirators, chief among them a high-ranking officer named Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.
Earlier that day, Stauffenberg had detonated a bomb at the Wolf’s Lair, Adolf Hitler’s Eastern Front military headquarters – a two-hour flight from Berlin. The dictator had survived the assassination attempt thanks to a series of flukes, but primarily because hot temperatures that day caused the venue for the tactical session to be moved from the bunker, where the bomb would have caused considerably more damage, to a lightly built shack nearby.
