Graf von Stauffenberg - Evil?

[Scott Smith]

[Split from the "Nasty Nazi" thread]


I'd say Graf von Stauffenberg.

[R.M. Schultz]

What the fuck does Scott Smith
mean by naming Stauffenberg?
Graf von Stauffenberg was a g'damn hero!

[Marcus]

What the fuck does Scott Smith
mean by naming Stauffenberg?
Graf von Stauffenberg was a g'damn hero!

Scott does not agree and he seems to think it is funny to provoke people by bringing that up in this kind of threads.

/Marcus

[michael mills]

What the fuck does Scott Smith
mean by naming Stauffenberg?
Graf von Stauffenberg was a g'damn hero!

Most of the Wehrmacht officers involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler had served on the Russian Front, particularly in Army Group Centre, and many had been participants in repressive actions that could qualify as war-crimes, eg the shooting of civilians during anti-partisan operations.

The German leftist historian Christian Gerlach has a chapter on the involvement of the conspirators in war-crimes in his book "Kalkulierte Morde". He criticises the cult of Stauffenberg and the other plotters in modern Germany as concealing the fact of the willing co-operation of large numbers of them in crimes against civilians.

I think the point that Scott Smith was trying to make is that the Wehrmacht officers who tried to kill Hitler were not primarily motivated by a moral revulsion against the atrocities committed by the German Government, since they themselves had to a large extent been willing participants in them, but rather because Hitler was losing the war. They believed, mistakenly, that if they killed Hitler, they would be able to negotiate a peace with the western Allies that would enable Germany to keep most of its conquests in the East.

[Scott Smith]

What the fuck does Scott Smith
mean by naming Stauffenberg?
Graf von Stauffenberg was a g'damn hero!

Most of the Wehrmacht officers involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler had served on the Russian Front, particularly in Army Group Centre, and many had been participants in repressive actions that could qualify as war-crimes, eg the shooting of civilians during anti-partisan operations.

The German leftist historian Christian Gerlach has a chapter on the involvement of the conspirators in war-crimes in his book "Kalkulierte Morde". He criticises the cult of Stauffenberg and the other plotters in modern Germany as concealing the fact of the willing co-operation of large numbers of them in crimes against civilians.

I think the point that Scott Smith was trying to make is that the Wehrmacht officers who tried to kill Hitler were not primarily motivated by a moral revulsion against the atrocities committed by the German Government, since they themselves had to a large extent been willing participants in them, but rather because Hitler was losing the war. They believed, mistakenly, that if they killed Hitler, they would be able to negotiate a peace with the western Allies that would enable Germany to keep most of its conquests in the East.

The Cult of Stauffenberg and other worms promoted by the modern-day Bundestablishment and opportunistic postwar memoirists in order to distance themselves from the NS era is indeed obscene.

Somebody told me the other day that Secretary of Defense Colin Powell lectured Germany's "Sponti" Leftist Foreign Minister "Joka" Fischer on his visit to the United States saying that we forgave them for Nazism. What irony. What idiocy.

Here's an interesting debate between Zionist Interventionist Richard Perle and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, "Sponti" Green Party Leader:

Blessed Are the Warmakers?


Sorry about the off-topic, but NO, I don't think Stauffenberg is a hero.

[R.M. Schultz]

NO, I don't think Stauffenberg is a hero.

All right, let’s get clean on Stauffenberg. Let me start by saying that the war years are not my area of primary interest or expertise (that would be the NSDAP from its re-founding to the Blood Purge), and while I know a good deal more than the average lay-man I am not as well versed as may forum participants, so I am open to new information about these issues.

Please, let’s limit this discussion to Stauffenberg and leave out his co-conspirators, various generals from Army Group Center, and the Bundestablishment. I don’t know anything about these groups, their involvement in the plot, or their taste for atrocities.

According to “The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich” (edited by Christian Zentner and Friedemann Bedürftig, Da Capo Press, N.Y.C., 1997), Klaus Schenk graff von Stauffenberg was born in 1907, became a cavalry officer in 1926, and served in the Polish, French, and initial Russian campaigns with distinguished bravery. In Russia he was associated with the Smolensk Committee which tried to organize Russians against Stalin and proposed an honorable peace at the conclusion of the war. Thereafter he was transferred to North Africa, was severely wounded, and next saw service with the Reserve Army in Germany. All of this sounds like admirable service.

Personally, he was a long-time associate of the poet Stefan George, a high recommendation indeed.

Politically, he was socially conservative while economically leftist (like the Edelfaschisten, the Tat Kries, or Möller van den Bruck’s June Club). An initial interest in the National Socialist movement soured sometime before Kristallnacht and was replaced with “deep mistrust and growing abhorrence.”

Believing that the war was lost, that Hitler’s policies were morally repugnant, and that a coup was only possible with Hitler dead, Stauffenberg resolved to assassinate him. I find this to be commendable.

Now — am I mistaken as to the facts about Stauffenberg? Are we interpreting his behavior differently? Are your standards of conduct so much higher than mine? Where exactly does our difference of opinion lay about Stauffenberg?

[Scott Smith]

NO, I don't think Stauffenberg is a hero.

Believing that the war was lost, that Hitler’s policies were morally repugnant, and that a coup was only possible with Hitler dead, Stauffenberg resolved to assassinate him. I find this to be commendable.

Stauffenberg was an ultranationalist pious Prussian Junker, and basically his problem was that the war was lost. If the war had been won he would have been just another fawning ultranationalist pious Junker who fought the good fight against the Godless Bolshevist hordes. And instead of morally repugnant, Hitler's policies would have been remembered in the hymnals.

Now — am I mistaken as to the facts about Stauffenberg? Are we interpreting his behavior differently? Are your standards of conduct so much higher than mine? Where exactly does our difference of opinion lay about Stauffenberg?

Assassins usually are cowards and that certainly applies to von Stauffenberg, who dropped off his package, scuttled away and killed and maimed his fellow German officers. (But the Graf's co-conspirators were even less brave and any number of them could have simply shot Hitler dead if they had been willing to put their own skins on the line for a cause that was mostly invented in the minds of postwar Germans.)

Stauffenberg's worst fear was that the Prussian Army institution would be reduced to irrelevance or abolished altogether by a second and more punitive Versailles. For them the Army was a sacred institution and Hitler was just a impious peasant in officer's boots. (Even Bavarian Catholic Halder didn't quite fit in, but he strove to at least look like a imperious Prussian schoolmaster.)

Stauffenberg believed that by killing Hitler he would save all Christendom and end the war with the Wehrmacht indispensible to the Western Allies as the bulwark against the Red tide. I might believe a lot of things but that doesn't make it my duty to kill the Head of State.
:roll:

[R.M. Schultz]

Let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom of this Stauffenberg business. After the last reply I went and reread what Shirer had to say (William L. Shirer, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” Simon and Schuster, New York City, 1960. )

Stauffenberg was an ultranationalist pious Prussian Junker, and basically his problem was that the war was lost. If the war had been won he would have been just another fawning ultranationalist pious Junker who fought the good fight against the Godless Bolshevist hordes. And instead of morally repugnant, Hitler's policies would have been remembered in the hymnals.

Shirer would have us believe that Stauffenberg was a Bavarian Catholic aristocrat, not a Prussian Junker. Far from being an ultra-nationalist, he insisted that the Kreisau Circle (the shadow government of the conspirators) include socialists Julius Leber and William Leuschner. Shirer also says: “… most of them [the conspirators], including Stauffenberg, were ‘Easterners’ — pro-Russian though anti-Bolshevik. For a time they believed it would be easier to get a peace with Russia … than with the Western Allies who harped only of ‘unconditional surrender.’” [Shirer, p. 1033.] There is simply nothing about Stauffenberg being a rabid nationalist, far from it Shirer finds Stauffenberg’s character and motivations to be exemplary, and I would like you to cite some sources that I can check for myself.

Assassins usually are cowards and that certainly applies to von Stauffenberg, who dropped off his package, scuttled away and killed and maimed his fellow German officers.

Assassins are usually cowards? I can think of many assassins who were idealists (Sirhan, Brutas), nut cases (Czolgosoz and virtually all of his anarchist ilk), fanatics (the Feme murderers, southern white supremacists, Princip), mercenaries (James Earl Ray, Zangara), “Manchurian candidates” (Oswald, Agca), and ambitious (virtually all the “palace coup” assassinations), but aside from the cabal that killed Rasputin I really can’t think of any distinguished by cowardice. As for Stauffenberg himself, his record of battle-field heroism is simply too well documented to dismiss him as a coward.

Do you mean that assassination is moral cowardice? This is quite a different matter and since antiquity it has usually been the Western viewpoint that the assassination of Tyrants is a very different matter than the killing of a lawful ruler. (Surely, you are not saying that Hitler, though “head of state” as you put it, came to power by lawful means?)

As for “scuttling away” are you saying that Stauffenberg had a moral duty to stay and be blown up with the others? As I recall, Stauffenberg proved to be one of the few effective leaders of the coup, and it came closest to success only where he was on the spot and able to get things moving. Stauffenberg was the prime mover to such a degree that one cannot even imagine the chance of success without him. In hindsight, we might concede that if he had stayed in the conference room, detonated the bomb in person, and thus been certain of killing Hitler, this might have been wiser, but I don’t think we can call it cowardice to have done otherwise.

True, the conspirators seem to have been a sorry lot, especially if there were any among them who could have had a clean shot a Hitler that they didn’t take, but Stauffenberg’s role seems to have been heroically better than his associates. If your sources tell a different story, then please cite them so I can check for myself.

[Scott Smith]

Well, Mr. Schultz, I don't really have time or inclination for Saint-busting right now and you seem to want me to deconstruct his Lordship, von St. with the same sources that have canonized him.

I will say that I was wrong in that I remembered him being of the Lutheran faith and Prussian. A quick check shows that he only had Prussian ancestry and was descended from a long line of military aristocrats but was in fact a Catholic Swabian. Among the General Staff this would put him in less traditional company as far as his province along with Rommel (also a Swabian, who was unusual also as an infantry officer). Perhaps Stauffenberg's checkered background helps explain why this scion was such a good conspirator among many disparate and disaffected factions from the extreme Right and extreme Left. He's hard to pin down.

Nonetheless, I stand by my opinion that he was fundamentally a coward and that the plotters were basically ultranationalist opportunists whose primary problem with the regime was that it was losing the war and marshalled by a "Bohemian Corporal" to boot. (I'm talking about the generals here, not necessarily Goerdeler and the Kreislau circle, Bonhoeffer, etc.)

I realize that this view stands at odds with those who wish to lionize our humble count and attribute less prosaic motives that play well upon modern ears such as anti-anti-Semitism, anti-racism or supposed horror over atrocities committed. In the event, he and his gang were quite prepared to sacrifice Germany upon the altar of Unconditional Surrender, which is indeed not ultra-nationalism (as you say) but merely treason.

You claim that tyrannicide is a noble Western tradition, but other than Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, I can think of few "historical" examples of this, and in fact High Treason was always prosecuted more severely by all regimes than any other crime save perhaps witchcraft. I can't think of many heroes to emerge from gunpowder plots. Let's not turn Stauffenberg into Gandhi on a hunger strike. No, planting a bomb and scuttling away was the act of a coward not a "G'damn hero."

A hero will sacrifice his life for his comrades. Stauffenberg killed and maimed his fellow General Staff officers with his attempted coup. And anyone who plants a dumb-bomb, not knowing exactly what will happen other than a big boom is just yellow.

Nor does being maimed in war count as a real act of heroism either; anyone can do that just by stepping on a landmine. It is a noble and unfortunate sacrifice to make for one's country but it is not an act of heroism.

John Wilkes Booth had more courage that von Stauffenberg. Our Goodly Graf could not fire a gun but he could have flipped a switch and command-detonated his "present for the Führer" like a man, and insured that Hitler would get killed by ending his own life. It is still, in my opinion, the act of a madman, but that would (at least) be a heroic act. He would have sacrificed himself for the cause he believed in--if he believed in a cause greater than himself...

Of course, you and I will differ on what the "cause" he believed in was: You might say that it was tyrannicide to save Germany and Europe, which would not be incompatible with martyrdom; while I would say that it was merely opportunism and monomania, rather more like Mr. Booth. Hence scuttling away from the scene of the crime makes perfect sense to his admirers. One cannot be a Christlike figure unless one is resurrected from the scene to lead the restoration, right? Stauffenberg was soooo very important to save Germany from the abyss that his hide was just too precious to lose. He would plant his bomb at his Führer's feet and leave before soiling his underpants.

But since the Bomb Plot did fail, the Graf's ensuing unintended martyrdom nicely allows for posthumous canonization, which certainly fits the postwar political culture--if not somewhat hypocritically, as has been pointed out by critics of the Cult of Stauffenberg.

Perhaps we will have to agree-to-disagree. Suffice it to say that Shirer's opinions don't cut much ice with me.

Best Regards,
Scott

[Helly Angel]

I´m agree with Scott Smith.

I don´t think the colonel Stauffenberg was a hero.

Why he don´t put the bomb in 1940 when Hitler was winning the war?

[von G]

The Fuehrer must share top honors with Stauffenberg as the most evil man in the Third Reich. Hitler did, after all, murder the head of state.

Richard

[Scott Smith]

The Fuehrer must share top honors with Stauffenberg as the most evil man in the Third Reich. Hitler did, after all, murder the head of state.

Richard

I didn't know Röhm was the Head of State.

[Gareth Collins]

I personally feel that because Stauffenburg wanted to kill Hitler does not automatically make him a hero. I believe he, and his co-conspirators were a bunch of aggrieved servicemen with theire own grudge to bear for personal and political reasons, NOT because they believed Germany was fighting on the morally wrong side. He planted a bombv in a suitcase in an operations room that contained not only Hitler but several other officers, his comrades. For the greater good and the end justifies the means are two arguments that could be used here but if this was done earlier, even before the war started then I would probably have a differing opinion. Killing Hitler in 1944 really wouldn't have made that much of a difference. By then it was too late for a conditional surrender, there is no way the Americans never mind the Soviets would have settled for that, and everyone knew it. So from 1944 it was fight or complete surrender, German Officers would, of course, fight in defence of their homeland and the Allies would attack.
This plot was simply to get a different government full of these aggrieved officers and grudge-bearing Civil Servants that would have to continue to fight the same war they were fighting under Hitler. Stauffenburg and the Clique were not heros, they were not villians, they were just a group of German Upper Class Officers and Civilians who longed for the Aristocracy and Imperial Germany back to the fore.
Not everyone who longed for Hitler's demise should automatically be branded a good guy, one only has to look at that bushy moustached fella from Georgia to understand that.

[Scott Smith]

The General Staff had plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1938 during the Munich crisis, a conspiracy led by Beck. This was before the war, and since this opportunistic gang of wannabe assassins did not have a crystal ball to see the future they could not have had altruistic motives other than to preserve the privileges of their caste that Hitler and the Nazi Party had restored for them but proceeded to jeopardize with what they now saw as a reckless foreign policy. It was this same nucleus that plotted against Hitler when the war was now lost; only this time, since they still didn't have the nerve for such Aktionpolitik, they got some disfigured nutjob German Count to make the attempt and he bungled it.

As Gareth Collins succinctly noted, anybody who tries to kill a Nazi, even Hitler, is not necessarily a good guy.

But a Widerstand-mythology centered on von Stauffenberg allows the Bundestablishment to distance itself from its Nazi past. Only the German Left (like Gerlach, as Mr. Mills notes) can criticize the Cult of Stauffenberg. For the Right it would merely be seen as a crass effort to rehabilitate Nazism and would therefore be illegal.

[Qvist]

Scott Smith:

Stauffenberg was an ultranationalist pious Prussian Junker, and basically his problem was that the war was lost. If the war had been won he would have been just another fawning ultranationalist pious Junker who fought the good fight against the Godless Bolshevist hordes. And instead of morally repugnant, Hitler's policies would have been remembered in the hymnals.

Stauffenberg was not even Prussian, he came from Swabia, where his forefathers had been serving in official capacities for centuries (his mother though did come of Prussian stock) . As for piousness, he was not even an active christian. OK, I see you adress this further down. There also is plenty to suggest that the imminent loss of the war was not the sole or main point in turning him decisively against Hitler, though it certainly played a part.

Stauffenberg's worst fear was that the Prussian Army institution would be reduced to irrelevance or abolished altogether by a second and more punitive Versailles. For them the Army was a sacred institution and Hitler was just a impious peasant in officer's boots. (Even Bavarian Catholic Halder didn't quite fit in, but he strove to at least look like a imperious Prussian schoolmaster.)

Sorry, but this is just stereotype nonsense. If you would bother to make a serious study of von Stauffenberg, you would see that this is one bill he simply does not fit.

Schultz:

Shirer would have us believe that Stauffenberg was a Bavarian Catholic aristocrat, not a Prussian Junker. Far from being an ultra-nationalist, he insisted that the Kreisau Circle (the shadow government of the conspirators) include socialists Julius Leber and William Leuschner. Shirer also says: “… most of them [the conspirators], including Stauffenberg, were ‘Easterners’ — pro-Russian though anti-Bolshevik. For a time they believed it would be easier to get a peace with Russia … than with the Western Allies who harped only of ‘unconditional surrender.’” [Shirer, p. 1033.] There is simply nothing about Stauffenberg being a rabid nationalist, far from it Shirer finds Stauffenberg’s character and motivations to be exemplary, and I would like you to cite some sources that I can check for myself.

I must agree with Scott that Shirer does not appear to have understood much of Stuffenberg, though I agree with his conclusion. Stauffenberg was not Bavarian. Nor was catholicism central to his outlook. He was in favour of including the Kreisau circle (which did in fact consist to a large extent of Prussian Junkers) and figures like Leber, but he certainly also was very much a nationalist, though his nationalism was differently anchored than that of Hitler and most army figures. He was not an "Easterner".

GarethCollins:

I believe he, and his co-conspirators were a bunch of aggrieved servicemen with theire own grudge to bear for personal and political reasons, NOT because they believed Germany was fighting on the morally wrong side.

Well, you are wrong, at least as far as von Stauffenberg is concerned. He did believe Hitler had not only brought Germany to the point of losing the war, but also that he had embarked Germany on a fundamentally evil venture. The two are to an extent intertwined, bearing in mind Stauffenberg's strongly nationalistic-idealistic outlook. To him, the disposal of the nation's destiny was a moral task of the highest order in itself, so the fact that Germany was heading for material collapse as well as moral abyss were essentially complementary factors, both reflecting Hitler's fundamental treachery against Germany. He had no personal grudge to bear as far as I know.

Stauffenburg and the Clique were not heros, they were not villians, they were just a group of German Upper Class Officers and Civilians who longed for the Aristocracy and Imperial Germany back to the fore.

It is a fundamental mistake to regard Stauffenberg as a reactionary in the Hindenburg mould, longing for the days of the Kaiserreich. Far more important to his outlook was a keen nationalist outlook anvhored partly in an ethic of devotion to state service and partly in the spiritual vision of a "geheimes Deutschland" he acquired in the George circle, to which both he and his brothers had a lifelong affiliation.

Scott Smith:

As Gareth Collins succinctly noted, anybody who tries to kill a Nazi, even Hitler, is not necessarily a good guy.

This is of course true, and Stauffenberg should really be a more problematic figure as a present-day hero than he is, because the political and spiritual values he represented are in themselves rather removed from the liberal values on which most states are founded today. But he was a good guy who acted on highly laudable motives, even from the point of view of someone who does not share his outlook.

This was before the war, and since this opportunistic gang of wannabe assassins did not have a crystal ball to see the future they could not have had altruistic motives other than to preserve the privileges of their caste that Hitler and the Nazi Party had restored for them but proceeded to jeopardize with what they now saw as a reckless foreign policy. It was this same nucleus that plotted against Hitler when the war was now lost; only this time, since they still didn't have the nerve for such Aktionpolitik, they got some disfigured nutjob German Count to make the attempt and he bungled it.

Jeez, why don't you spare us this sort of simpleton ra-ra beerhall rhetoric?

cheers