Last of 20 July anti-Hitler plot members dies

Published on Friday 2 May 2008 23:37

PHILIPP Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last survivor of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, has died aged 90.

The German military said yesterday that the former army major died on Thursday night. It did not give a cause of death.

Von Boeselager was one of the group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on 20 July, 1944, supplying the explosives for the operation led by Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting aides and military advisers, but someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force.

Von Stauffenberg and many of his colleagues were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge. Many of those rounded up were tortured for information, but von Boeselager was not named and was never found out.

Von Boeselager, who lived in Altenahr, near Bonn, was recruited in 1942 by Major-General Henning von Tresckow, a von Stauffenberg co-conspirator, he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung three weeks ago, in an interview that was published yesterday.

He said he knew that Jews were being systematically killed and that Germany was waging a war of annihilation along the Eastern Front with Russia and that he never considered declining to take part in the plot.

He said that by 1942, "it was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes".

Von Boeselager was assigned to the army high command as an aide to co-conspirator Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge. The plotters first arranged for von Boeselager to try to shoot Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler at a meeting in 1943.

Von Kluge called the assassination off at the last minute after learning that Himmler would not be at the meeting.

Von Boeselager followed Kluge's orders, but told the newspaper the decision to do so never ceased to haunt him.

"I always see Hitler and think 'What would have happened if you had shot him?"' he said.

Von Boeselager told the newspaper that in the years immediately after the war, he spoke with his wife, Rosa, about his role in the resistance, but otherwise said little to anyone.

"There was nobody one could talk with about it," he said. "They were all dead, and with others it would just have been bragging."

After the war, the 20 July plotters were widely viewed as traitors, a label the Nazis gave them that stuck for years.