Plot survivor says Hitler should have been killed in 1943
KREUZBERG, July 18: One of the few remaining survivors of the plot to kill Adolf Hitler 60 years ago is still haunted by the memories of his fellow conspirators hanged or executed by firing squad in the aftermath of the failed coup.
The 60th anniversary on Tuesday of the attempt to blow Hitler up with a bomb hidden in a briefcase will have a special significance for Baron Philipp von Boeselager.
Now 86, he remembers the day he decided to join the plotters as if it were yesterday. In October 1942, at the age of 25, Boeselager was serving with Field Marshal Hans von Kluge, the commander of the central Nazi armies in the Soviet Union.
"I heard a telephone conversation between Kluge and Hitler in which Hitler sent Kluge his best wishes for his 60th birthday and promised him 250,000 Reichmarks as a present," Boeselager said.
"Kluge asked me what I thought and I told him I was against it. It is natural to accept a donation after winning a war, but not during one. "I went to ask Kluge's chief of staff, Henning von Tresckow, his opinion, and he said: 'The field marshal must not make himself dependent because we need him in the fight against Hitler.'"
Boeselager knew immediately that his loyalties were with the plotters. "I was in," he said. His mind was made up by the rumours of atrocities carried out by the SS in eastern Europe, by a massacre of 7,000 Jews in Ukraine and by a handful of words he had seen in an SS report: "Five gypsies specially dealt with."
In March 1943, Boeselager was called on for the first time to translate his convictions into action. Von Tresckow, who had become one of the leading plotters, wanted to assassinate Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler during a visit to the Eastern Front and Boeselager and his elder brother Georg were among the eight officers chosen to pull the trigger.
He was paralyzed with doubt in the days before the planned attack. "Eighty million Germans believed in the Fuehrer and we were just a handful who opposed him. That made you doubt whether you were doing the right thing."
The day before the planned attack, Hitler cancelled his visit. Kluge tried to dissuade the conspirators from any further attempt to kill Hitler. In his elegant house in Kreuzberg near Bonn, Boeselager still has the heavy old pistol he was supposed to use to kill Hitler, an act which could have cut two years off World War II and saved the lives of millions.
"That was the day that we should have pulled the trigger," he said. On July 20, 1944, the day that high-ranking Nazi officer Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg carried the bomb into a room in East Prussia where Hitler was reviewing maps of the Eastern Front, Boeselager's role in the coup was to lead 1,200 men from his regiment to Berlin to arrest Himmler and Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
"After two days of marching to reach the airport on the Russian front, a message was passed to me on the runway: 'All in old holes.'" It was the codename for a failed assassination attempt. Hitler had probably been saved by the leg of a sturdy oak table which absorbed some of the force of the blast. -AFP
