Word: stauffenberg
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...STAUFFENBERG by Joachim Kramarz, translated by R. H. Barry. 255 pages. Macmillan...
History lavishes its attention on successful assassins; the failures usually get footnotes, at best. In the 23 years since his death by firing squad, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the German officer whose attempt to assassinate Hitler with a planted bomb was foiled by a freakish chance, has rarely rated more than brief references. Now German Historian Joachim Kramarz has pieced together the unfortunately sketchy materials on Count Stauffenberg's life and his daring plot in a readable full-length biography...
Little in Common. Where Adolf Eichmann sought to evade moral responsibility by claiming that he was following orders, Stauffenberg disobeyed orders in the name of moral responsibility. He had little in common with history's successful assassins. He was no envious leftist loser and loner like Lee Harvey Oswald, no anarchist fanatic like Czolgosz (the man who killed President McKinley), no tribal desperado like Princip (who shot Archduke Ferdinand and brought on World War I). He was rather an honorable officer and gentleman, a colonel on the general staff of the German army. Why, then, did he decide...
...central theme, it is a study in types of heroism, which are finally indistinguishable from what Mr. Gunn calls "modes of pleasure." On one side stand the byrnied and terrified warriors of the age of Ethelred and such perennial noblemen of the suicidal beau geste as Claus von Stauffenberg. Different only in degree are the tattooed and/or black-jacketed hoods, the "brave, terrible" queers, "fallen from/ The heights of twenty to middle age," such classic, superannuated hustlers as Rastignac, and "a few with historical/names"--Baudelaire, Caravaggio. Within them all persists the sullenness and flabby dignity of Shakespeare's besotted...
...network of diplomats, politicians and clergymen, working with disillusioned generals and colonels-had paid dearly for their pains. As soon as the news went out that Hitler was alive, the Gestapo began its dragnet Operation Thunderstorm, which brought the number of Germans arrested that year to 33,000. Stauffenberg was shot, and every other man, woman and child by that name was ordered arrested. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel chose suicide by poison. At least 600 men were either guillotined or strangled by piano wire suspended from meat hooks, and their final agonies were filmed and sent to the Fuhrer...