Letters | 26 July 2018

The Stauffenberg plot

Sir: Matthew Olex-Szczytowski argues that the German officers who tried to kill Hitler did so only to save Germany from defeat, and were themselves Nazi war criminals (‘An alternative history’, 21 July). He is wrong on both counts. In fact, they tried to overthrow Hitler long before defeat was imminent. The first attempt to assassinate the Führer took place in 1938, one year before the war. The conspirators tried again in 1939 and 1940, when the Nazi regime was still triumphant. Many of them joined the movement in order to oppose Hitler’s genocidal policies. Their resistance to the Holocaust and the crimes against Poles and Russians is documented in wartime diaries, postwar testimonies, Gestapo documents and Soviet interrogation transcripts. Claus von Stauffenberg, the would-be assassin of Hitler, said in 1942 that ‘they are shooting Jews in masses. These crimes must not be allowed to continue.’ Germany could not and should not win the war, he thought, because that would allow Hitler to continue murdering Jews and committing other horrors.