[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 95 (Wednesday, July 20, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
 COMMEMORATING THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT OF ADOLF 
                                 HITLER

  (Mr. DORNAN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include extraneous 
material.)
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I am looking forward to the Oxford Debate 
tonight as I hope is a good percentage of America.
  I missed a chance this morning to do a 1-minute on the 50th 
anniversary of the one glowing moment in the horrible reign of terror, 
Hitler's 12 years of the Third Reich, where noble people, just a 
handful, paid with their lives in what was called Operation Valkyrie, 
the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler at his Wolf's Lair command bunker in 
East Prussia. Claus von Stauffenberg, a count, a loyal Roman Catholic 
of an aristocratic family, came within a hairsbreath of destroying, 
with Stalin, one of the most evil men in all of recorded history. I 
will put in this excellent article from the Washington Post on the 
tributes being paid or that were paid a few hours ago to von 
Stauffenberg and the 5,000 or so officers and noble men who lost their 
lives in Hitler's vicious hanging, fake trials and then watching the 
movies of their death for hours on end at his Berchtesgaden hideaway.
  Mr. Speaker, sometimes God says no to good deeds. The war continued, 
millions more died, and Germany was turned into rubble. The Claus von 
Stauffenberg plot should have been hatched in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 
not 1944. That is the only cloud over the heroic deeds of Operation 
Valkyrie.
  Mr. Speaker, I include the article referred to in my remarks, as 
follows:

               [From the Washington Post, July 20, 1994]

                   Germany Honors Anti-Nazi Patriots

                           (By Rick Atkinson)

       Berlin--He is an unlikely martyr--a traitor whose courage 
     far exceeded his competence as an assassin, a conservative 
     aristocrat whose admiration for his Nazi superiors only 
     gradually yielded to revulsion and resistance.
       But Germany must take its war heroes where it finds them, 
     and thus Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg has been 
     elevated to demigod status for a noble failure--his botched 
     effort to kill Adolf Hitler and end the terror of the Third 
     Reich.
       Of the 2,077 days that passed from the beginning to the end 
     of World War II, Germans can revel in only one--July 20, 
     1944, the date of Stauffenberg's unsuccessful bombing of the 
     Fuehrer's East Prussian headquarters. In this long season of 
     50th anniversaries commemorating by-gone heroics Germany's 
     opportunity for fond remembrance has finally come around, and 
     the country is making the most of it.
       ``Nobody likes to celebrate a defeat, as Normandy was for 
     us. But the 20th of July is really something we're proud 
     of,'' said Cmdr. Joerg Duppler, a military historian at the 
     German Defense Ministry. ``My opinion is that it's the only 
     thing we can be proud of during World War II and the Nazi 
     regime.''
       Stauffenberg's attempted coup will be honored with a high-
     level ceremony in Berlin, as well as a traveling exhibition 
     titled ``Against Hitler: German Resistance to National 
     Socialism, 1933-1945,'' which opened last Thursday at the 
     Library of Congress in Washington. While extolling the virtue 
     of those, like Stauffenberg, whose righteous impulses cost 
     them their lives, the exhibit inevitably underscores how few 
     and ineffectual the resisters were.
       ``You shouldn't get the impression that Germans were 
     resistance fighters; certainly not,'' said Johannes Tuchel, 
     director of Berlin's Memorial to German Resistance. ``You can 
     point out that during this dictatorship a handful of people 
     resisted, but you cannot use them to counterbalance the 
     crimes of National Socialism. You can't diminish the 
     atrocities of the Third Reich.''
       As seems inevitable whenever the subject of World War II is 
     broached in Germany, controversy is not far afield. 
     Chancellor Helmut Kohl has grabbed the spotlight for the 50th 
     anniversary commemoration today and will be the featured 
     speaker at a ceremony on the site where Stauffenberg and 
     several co-conspirators were executed. Kohl's opponent in the 
     upcoming federal election, Social Democrat Rudolf Scharping, 
     has accused the chancellor of politicizing the event and 
     exploiting the sacred memory of German resistance.
       Moreover, Stauffenberg's son, Franz Ludwig, a businessman 
     and former member of parliament, has bitterly objected to 
     honoring Communists, socialists and other leftist opponents 
     of the Nazi regime. German Communists in particular ``not 
     only built a second terrible dictatorship in a part of 
     Germany after 1945, but also killed tens of thousands of 
     people and had hundreds of thousands incarcerated,'' Franz 
     Ludwig Stauffenberg, now 56, told Focus magazine.
       Stauffenberg's objections notwithstanding, the exhibition 
     in Washington and the Memorial to German Resistance in Berlin 
     remain unaltered. ``We can't manipulate the resistance today 
     and only show those things that please us,'' Tuchel said. 
     ``If we want to learn from history, we have to show 
     everything, whether it's painful or not. . . . And the truth 
     is painful.''
       In the same way that Steven Spielberg's movie ``Schindler's 
     List'' triggered soul-searching here about why so few German 
     citizens acted to prevent the extermination of Jews, so has 
     resurgent interest in the July 20 plot provoked discussion 
     about the obligation to resist tyranny.
       As the Library of Congress exhibition demonstrates, 
     resistance to Hitler was diverse but never deep. A few 
     clerics spoke out; most did not. Other opponents resisted 
     from a distance, such as author Thomas Mann and future 
     chancellor Willy Brandt, both of whom left Germany as Hitler 
     consolidated his chokehold on the country.
       Brutal Nazi repression of the Communists beginning in 1933 
     also spawned an underground resistance. Members of the Red 
     Orchestra, a Berlin-based cell made up largely of middle-
     class intellectuals, had some success in distributing 
     leaflets and passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. 
     Those caught by the Gestapo were summarily executed or, like 
     the late East German leader Erich Honecker, imprisoned for 
     years.
       ``The opportunities for resistance were severely limited 
     due to the terror and the effectiveness of political 
     measures, not least of all the streamlining of the 
     administration of justice that came after 1933,'' Peter 
     Steinbach, a professor of political history, wrote in a 
     recent essay.
       In the face of such odds, a few brave souls demonstrated 
     extraordinary valor. Students and teachers in a University of 
     Munich group known as the White Rose, including Hans Scholl 
     and his sister Sophie, distributed a pamphlet in February 
     1943 summoning ``the youth of Germany''; to rebel; they were 
     arrested and beheaded.
       Other groups often resembled secret debating societies 
     rather than havens for bomb-throwing insurrectionists. 
     Nevertheless, they kept alive the flame of decency and human 
     dignity in Germany's darkest hour. Count Helmuth von Moltke, 
     for example, summarized the values of the Kreisau Circle in a 
     1941 memo: ``The end of power politics, the end of 
     nationalism, the end of the racial concept, the end of the 
     state's power over the individual.''
       For Stauffenberg it all boiled down to one overriding goal; 
     the end of Hitler. A devout Catholic and loyal army officer, 
     Stauffenberg's enthusiasm for the Nazi regime quickly faded 
     following the 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht. 
     Wounded in Tunisia in 1942--he lost his right hand two 
     fingers on his left--the young colonel eventually returned to 
     Berlin as chief of staff in the General Army Office. There he 
     became deeply involved in conspiracy of officers and 
     political figures appalled at Germany's devastating combat 
     losses.
       ``Stauffenberg's single-minded determination and dynamic 
     personality quickly breathed fresh life into the cabal.'' 
     historians Anthony Read and David Fisher have written. ``By 
     the end of the year [1943] he had become its unquestioned 
     leader, dominating both the politicians and the generals.''
       Because of his wounds, Stauffenberg was unable to wield a 
     pistol, so he decided to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb. 
     His chance came on July 20, 1944, at a daily military 
     briefing for the Fuehrer at his ``Wolfsschanze'' headquarters 
     in East Prussia. After activating the fuse with a pair 
     pliers, Stauffenberg carried the briefcase into a wooden hut 
     and placed it beneath an oak table a few feet from where 
     Hitler was standing.
       At 12:37 p.m., Stauffenberg left the room on the pretext of 
     taking a phone call. Five minutes later, the building was 
     gutted in a roar of smoke and flame. Stauffenberg hurried to 
     the airfield and flew back to Berlin, convinced that Hitler 
     was dead.
       He was not. Another officer had unwittingly shoved the 
     briefcase behind a heavy oak table leg, which shielded the 
     Fuehrer from the blast. The open windows and flimsy wooden 
     walls of the building further diminished the power of the 
     blast. Although singed and a bit battered, Hitler was 
     essentially unhurt.
       In Berlin, the coup quickly collapsed. Stauffenberg and 
     three others were arrested and marched into a courtyard at 
     army headquarters. Shortly after midnight, they were executed 
     by firing squad. Before the fatal volley, Stauffenberg cried, 
     ``Long live our sacred Germany!''
       Hitler used the assassination attempt to purge the army and 
     impose a reign of terror that lasted until the end of the war 
     10 months later. An estimated 5,000 people, most of whom had 
     no connection to the July 20 plot, were executed after mock 
     trials. Many were strangled with piano wire suspended from 
     meat hooks.
       Since Germany's emergency from the ashes of the war, the 
     nation's military has sought to establish its spiritual ties 
     to Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators rather than to 
     the warmongers who became the instrument of Hitler's 
     ambitions.
       ``The 20th of July is a permanent legacy of our state and 
     our armed forces,'' said Duppler, the military historian. 
     ``For those of us in the Bundeswehr, the day is a chance not 
     only to honor the resistance fighters, but also a remdiner of 
     our duty, of the dichotomy between obedience and the superior 
     obligation to human rights.''
       Even so, the country long remained divided in its feelings 
     toward men who had violated their sacred oath to support the 
     Fuehrer unto death. A series of polls has tracked that 
     ambivalence for four decades. In 1951, for example, when 
     asked, ``How should the men of July 20 be judged?'' 45 
     percent said the conspirators should be considered favorably, 
     while 34 percent judged them negatively, and 21 percent had 
     no opinion.
       In a similar survey, respondents were asked, ``When you 
     hear of a soldier or an official who was a member of a 
     resistance group during the war, does that speak for or 
     against him?'' In 1964, 29 percent replied ``for,'' 32 
     percent ``against,'' and 39 percent were undecided. In 1985, 
     60 percent answered ``for,'' 12 percent ``against,'' and 28 
     percent were undecided.
       As the country celebrates the 50th anniversary of the plot, 
     most historians believe their fellow Germans now view the 
     resistance as a guiding light for ``this Western-oriented, 
     liberal democratic state that we have today,'' as Duppler put 
     it.
       Perhaps the most eloquent summation comes from a leaflet 
     distributed by the White Rose:
       ``It is not given to us to pass final judgment on the 
     meaning of our history. But if this catastrophe is to serve 
     in any way toward our salvation, then it can be only through 
     this: that we be cleansed by suffering, that we yearn for 
     light in the darkest night, that we rouse ourselves and 
     finally help cast off the yoke that is oppressing the 
     world.''

                          ____________________