July 20 attempt on Hitler's life

July 20 is the 60th anniversary of the nearly-successful attempt on Adolf Hitler's life by a group of conspirators which included senior military officers.  This attempt is remember today in Germany as a proud historical moment, a reminder that not all Germans accepted the monstrosities that the Hitler regime represented.

Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg is the man who planted the bomb that missed killing Hitler by a few feet, and the one whose name is most prominently associated with July 20.  There's a English-language biographical sketch of him here in Wikipedia:

Today, Claus von Stauffenberg is celebrated as a hero and symbol of the German resistance to the Nazi regime. Since the war the Bendler-Block [where Von Stauffenberg was executed] has become a memorial to the failed anti-Nazi resistance movement. The street's name was ceremonially changed from "Bendlerstrasse" to "Stauffenbergstrasse" and the Bendler-Block now houses a permanent exhibition with more than 5,000 photographs and documents showing the various resistance organisations at work during the Hitler era. The courtyard where the officers were shot is now a site of remembrance with a plaque commemorating the events and a memorial bronze figure of a young man with his hands symbolically bound.

The introduction on this BBC article is kind of fuzzy, but it gives some good information on the events and how they are remembered:  Emerging from the Nazi shadow? 07/19/04

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who on 20 July 1944 placed a bomb under Hitler's table which killed four but left the Fuehrer alive, has not always been a post-war darling.

After the capitulation, the allegedly amateurish way in which his attempt on Hitler's life was carried out came in for attack. Later his motives came in for scrutiny - Stauffenberg, some left-wing historians asserted, had distinctly authoritarian tendencies.

Now the aristocratic colonel is widely accepted to have acted heroically and has become the subject of a string of films and documentaries to mark the 60th anniversary of the attempt on Hitler's life.

On the day itself, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will lay a wreath at the spot where Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators were executed.

Here's another BBC piece on the July 20 events: 1944: Hitler survives assassination attempt 07/20/04.

And a bio from the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Von Stauffenberg.

This article notes the most famous of the plotters, General Erwin Rommel, although I'm not sure how many people realize he was involved in trying to overthrow Hitler: Germany Marks Anniversary of Failed Coup AP 06/25/04. 

One of the more prominent victims was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the general dubbed "the desert fox" for his daring campaigns in North Africa. Because Rommel had been approached by the plotters, the Nazis accused him of complicity in Stauffenberg's attack and forced him to commit suicide by swallowing poison in October 1944. ...

It also quotes Harold Marcuse, the grandson of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who I mentioned the other day.

After the war, recognition for the plotters was slow to come.

As Germans rebuilt, rearmed and emerged from international isolation in the 1950s, honoring the relatively few who resisted Hitler was not a natural reflex.

"The people who lived through it did not want to acknowledge that there were people who were bold enough to take a stand," said Harold Marcuse, a history professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. In East Germany, communist resistance fighters took center stage.

The German-language brochure from the German Foreign Office from 2002 honors those members of the diplomatic services who took part as "resistance fighters against National Socialism [Nazism]": Zum Gedanken.

Following are German articles from the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) on the theme, with a set of photos here:

Wenn der Tod auf ewig bindet 07/20/04
"Wir wollen keine Helden auf hohen Sockeln" 07/19/04
Der Mut des Gewissens 07/16/04
Der Widerstand und der Holocaust: Kriegsbedingte Erschießungen 07/10/04
Wie Hitler-Attentat und Staatsstreich scheiterten 07/16/04
Der Widerstand im Film der 50er: Citizen Canaris 07/16/04
Der Widerstand in der Wehrmacht: Die braune Pest  07/13/04
Das bessere Deutschland by Joachim Käppner 07/20/04

The FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) has a feature page on its Web site on the July 20 attempt: FAZ.NET-Spezial 20.Juli 07/20/04.

The Frankfurter Rundschau has a special page, as well: Der 20.Juli 1944.  They also provide a link to this page from the Deutsches Historisches Museum that has further (German) links to some of the key conspirators.