OT(?) Celebrating July 20, 1944: Hitler Assassination Attempt

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Each year, I notice this date.

(BTW, I most admire Martin Luther King, and Gandhi and the principles of nonviolence. But even Gandhi told his followers, if you cannot carry out peaceful satyagraha with courage, then it is better to fight violently than to live in chains.)

These brave Germans stay in my memory and I hope in the memory of others. The White Rose, not part of any assassination plot, sacrificed their lives to persuade others to end the war.

"Operation Valkyrie", the assassination plot, took place, and failed, on July 20th 1944. A heavy wooden table leg blocked the full blast of the bomb from killing Hitler.

"But even worse than failure is to yield to shame and coercion without a struggle." -Count von Stauffenberg (who carried the bomb into Hitler's meeting)

http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/rgerman.htm

Resistance Inside Germany

Despite the high risk of being caught by police with the help of their many informers, some individuals and groups attempted to resist Nazism even in Germany. Socialists, Communists, trade unionists, and others clandestinely wrote, printed, and distributed anti-Nazi literature. Many of these rebels were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.

There were many plots to assassinate Hitler during the war. After the important Soviet victory at Stalingrad in early 1943, when it looked as though the tide was turning against the German army, a serious assassination attempt was planned by a group of German military officers and carried out in 1944. Hitler escaped the bomb blast with minor injuries. The four leaders of the conspiracy were immediately shot. Later, 200 other individuals convicted of involvement in the plot were executed.

Of the Germans who opposed Hitler's dictatorship, very few groups openly protested the Nazi genocide against Jews. The "White Rose" movement was founded in June 1942 by Hans Scholl, a 24-year-old medical student at the University of Munich, his 22-year-old sister Sophie, and 24-year-old Christoph Probst. Although the exact origin of the name "White Rose" is unknown, it clearly stands for purity and innocence in the face of evil. Hans, Sophie, and Christoph were outraged that educated Germans went along with Nazi policies. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and painted slogans like "Freedom!" and "Down With Hitler!" on walls of the university. In February 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught distributing leaflets and arrested. Together with their friend Christoph, they were executed four days later. Hans's last words were "Long live freedom!"

God bless you all in your struggles on all fronts. y2k forces us to think in terms like wartime, and asks ordinary people to be willing to do heroic things. Hopefully, the pollies will be right, and then we'll only see if we've learned something in this year that we can carry forward into better lives because of the thinking we've done together.

A society grown up around collective selfishness (false community) totters; we opt out into what often looks to us like individual (or family) selfishness. Maybe we find the building blocks of real community?

-- jor-el (jor-el@krypton.uni), July 21, 1999

Answers

I was born on the first anniversay of Hitler's suicide. Consequently, I can't claim to have any personal knowledge of all the horrible things that happened in Germany during WWII. But cause of the randome coincidence of my birthday, I've always paid close attention to reports likey yours. Thanks for focusing our attention on it again.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (still.lutking@newmexico.com), July 21, 1999.


More about Hans & Sophie. . .

Early in 1943 there was one spontaneous uprising in Germany which, though small in itself, helped to revive the flagging spirits of the resistance, whose every attempt to remove Hitler had been thus far thwarted. It also served as a warning of how ruthless the Nazi authorities could be in putting down the least sign of opposition.

The university students in Germany, as we have seen, had been among the most fanatical of Nazis in the early Thirties. But ten years of Hitler's rule had brought disillusionment, and this was sharpened by the failure of Germany to win the war and particularly, as 1943 came, by the disaster at Stalingrad. The University of Munich, the city that had given birth to Nazism, became the hotbed of student revolt. It was led by a twenty-five-year-old medical student, Hans Scholl, and his twenty-one-year-old sister, Sophie, who was studying biology. Their mentor was Kurt Huber, a professor of philosophy. By means of what became known as the "White Rose Letters" they carried out their anti-Nazi propaganda in other universities; they were also in touch with the plotters in Berlin. (The ones who planted the bomb that went off but failed to kill Hitler--Hardliner)

One day in February 1943, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, to whom the Gestapo had brought a file of the letters, convoked the student body, announced that the physically unfit males--the able-bodied had been drafted into the Army--would be put to some kind of more useful war work, and with a leer suggested that the women students bear a child each year for the good of the Fatherland.

"If some of the girls, " he added, "lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will assign each of them one of my adjutants. . .and I can promise her a thoroughly enjoyable experience."

The Bavarians are noted for their somewhat coarse humor, but this vulgarity was too much for the students. They howled the Gauleiter down and tossed out of the hall the Gestapo and the S.S. men who had come to guard him. That afternoon there were anti-Nazi student demonstrations in the streets of Munich, the first that had ever occurred in the Third Reich. Now the students, led by the Scholls, began to distribute pamphlets openly calling on German youth to rise. On February 19 a building superintendent observed Hans and Sophie Scholl hurling their leaflets from the balcony of the university and betrayed them to the Gestapo.

Their end was quick and barbaric. Haled before the dreaded People's Court, which was presided over by its president, Roland Freisler, perhaps the most sinister and bloodthirsty Nazi in the Third Reich after Heydrich, they were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. Sophie Scholl was handled so roughly during her interrogation by the Gestapo that she appeared in court with a broken leg. But her spirit was undimmed. To Freisler's savage browbeating she answered calmly, "You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won't admit it?"

She hobbled on her crutches to the scaffold and died with sublime courage, as did her brother. Professor Huber and several other students were executed a few days later.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, pp. 1327-1328

-- Hardliner (searcher@internet.com), July 21, 1999.


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