Schroeder honours Germans who resisted Nazis

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder honoured Germany’s Nazi resistance today on the 60th anniversary of the most famous plot to kill Adolf Hitler.

He said the army officers, civic leaders and ordinary people who usually paid with their lives were heroes who showed it was possible to oppose the Nazi regime.

Germans should remember not only Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic Nazi army officer who tried to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb placed under their conference table on July 20, 1944, Schroeder said at the Second World War army headquarters in Berlin where Stauffenberg was executed by firing squad the night Hitler survived the bomb.

“Resistance against the dictatorship began already in 1933, when the Nazis had seized power,” he told the ceremony.

“Tens of thousands of them were deported to prisons and concentration camps, driven into exile or killed,” he said. They included labour and church leaders, Social Democratic and Communist politicians, and students.

Schroeder said July 20 is a reminder to Germans to ”defend again and again the values of freedom and tolerance that we consider so self-evident today.”

But the remembrance also underscored the fact that, unlike in countries like France or the Netherlands, the German resistance never gained popular support for an uprising against Nazi rule.

Schroeder said Germans need to keep on asking themselves: ”How could the dictatorship rely for so long on a broad mass base? It was not possible for the resistance to mobilise something of a natural patriotism against the National Socialists.”

Some answers, he suggested, lie in the all-encompassing Nazi police state, the fact that Hitler survived repeated attempts to kill him, and that even the army coup plotters and other elites who ultimately became resistors long wavered between loyalty to the Fuehrer and their conscience.

Also at today’s ceremony was Freya von Moltke, who with her husband gathered other enemies of Hitler at their castle, forming a group that became known as the Kreisau Circle. Helmuth James von Moltke was arrested before the Stauffenberg bombing and executed in 1945.

His widow remembered the euphoria sweeping Nazi Germany in 1940 – Poland and France had fallen, and it looked like the invasion of Britain could happen at anytime. Despite the victories, she and her husband never wavered in their opposition to the Nazis, launching their resistance group the same year.

“At the high point of Hitler’s success, that’s when the circle began,” the spry white-haired 93-year-old told a crowd at a Berlin church yesterday. “I’m proud.”

Even her husband’s arrest and execution did not break her resolve. “I was a woman of conviction,” she said.

Later today, Schroeder was to attend the swearing-in of new German army recruits at the site – an annual tradition designed to highlight the importance of the resistance to Hitler from within the military.

After the war, the resistors were largely shunned in Germany.

“The slogan promoted by the Nazis that they were traitors had a long-lasting effect,” German Culture Minister Christina Weiss said. She noted a recent poll by Der Spiegel magazine found that 33% of Germans now admire the Stauffenberg plotters and another 40% hold them in high esteem.

Not only was it hard for Germans to overcome more than a dozen years of Nazi indoctrination, but many former Nazis still influenced policy after the war’s end in 1945, said Johannes Tuchel, director of the resistance memorial.

“After the war, there were still many Nazis in politics, in industry and in media in the 1950s and ’60s and they minimised the resistance,” he said.

Popular culture has given the memory of the German resistance a boost, with a new feature film on Stauffenberg released to coincide with the 60th anniversary as well as documentaries and books.

Freya von Moltke said the new respect finally gives her satisfaction.

“Even though we had no success and even though we were weak, we kept European humanity alive in Germany – and I mean all who stood against Hitler,” she said.