The German Alibi

German journalist Ruth Hoffmann is author of the book The German Alibi: The Myth of the Stauffenberg Assassination Attempt — How July 20, 1944 is Romanticized and Politically Instrumentalized. Hoffmann’s work, which has sadly not yet been translated into English, was shortlisted for the 2024 German Nonfiction Book Prize.

The central thesis of the book is that Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, once it became part of the postwar public discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany, was put at the service of washing away Germany’s collective guilt for the crimes of Nazism. Initially seen as nothing but traitors, in postwar years Stauffenberg and his coconspirators were slowly taken up as proof that there had been a better Germany between 1933 and 1945: a Germany that opposed Hitler, and even better, one that could be identified with the armed forces.

It is obvious that there had, indeed, been a better part of German society. If not, the Nazis would not have already needed to fill prisons and concentration camps with political opponents in 1933, years before the deportation of Jewish people began. But the identification of the anti-Nazi opposition with the conspirators that tried to kill Hitler and take power in July 1944 has always been historically dishonest. The military was certainly not the group that had sacrificed most members in the resistance against Hitler. Instead, it was the necessary element in exporting Nazi crimes from Germany to the rest of Europe.

The historical context of postwar West Germany explains why Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt was quite so central the dominant public narrative about the resistance to Hitler. Dominated during the first two decades by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Federal Republic understood itself in opposition to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), an ally of the Soviet Union. During the first decades after the war, as Hoffmann explains, the early resistance to Hitler stemming from communist and social democratic circles was seen with great suspicion. While this was in fact the biggest resistance force, it was considered to have spearheaded the formation of a communist state in the east — and thus had to be ignored or erased.

Such a lopsided approach to the history of the resistance to Hitler also affected the understanding of the July 1944 plot itself. Stauffenberg and his military colleagues received the most attention, but civilians had also been involved in the coup plans. They included, for instance, the Social Democrat Julius Leber. Moreover, Stauffenberg explored contacts with underground communists to increase the coup’s chances of success. This information tended to be elided.

A New Era?

Although the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) had solid anti-Nazi credentials, in the postwar years it could hardly use them to its advantage in a West Germany that preferred to leave the past undiscussed. The first two postwar SPD candidates for chancellor had experienced concentration camps and exile. The third, Willy Brandt, was smeared in successive election campaigns by the CDU for having spent the war in exile after seeking protection in Norway. When he became chancellor in 1969, the first member of the SPD to reach the position since 1930, Brandt famously noted that “now Hitler has finally lost the war.”

The election of Brandt followed the student protests of 1968, in which many young Germans demanded that professors, judges, and other public servants complicit in the crimes of Nazism be removed from their positions. The 1970s were a period of relative opening in the Bonn Republic’s engagement with the past. The decade began with Brandt’s sorrowful kneeling at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto — a first for a West German politician of his rank — and ended with the arrival to Germany of the TV miniseries Holocaust. The US production reached around half of the adult population in Western Germany. It triggered new conversations in the country about its historical responsibility for the murder of six million Jews.

Meanwhile, a new generation of historians, including names such as Hermann Graml or Hans Mommsen, devoted new attention to the July 20 plot. Their conclusions directly contradicted the official narrative that portrayed Stauffenberg and his coconspirators as the forerunners of the postwar constitution and democratic order. The new historical research showed that most of the men behind the assassination attempt had been convinced followers of Hitler and had long supported Nazism before eventually turning against the regime as it started to rack up setbacks on the Eastern Front. It is impossible to ascribe a single motivation to the July 20 plotters. For a minority of them — Stauffenberg not included — the war crimes in the east and the Holocaust were an important factor, argues historian Peter Steinbach. One of the key objectives was to open peace negotiations with the United States and the UK. Still, historian Ian Kershaw notes that this diplomatic opening would probably have failed. The conspirators themselves had different ideas on what a future peace should look like.

That Stauffenberg and his coconspirators had long supported Hitler is, in itself, unsurprising. The majority of those who had openly resisted Hitler from the early hours were, by 1944, either dead, in concentration camps, or in exile. Meanwhile, in a letter to his wife from occupied Poland in 1939, Stauffenberg had described the Polish population as “an unbelievable rabble, very many Jews and very much mixed population.” Stauffenberg would later help plan the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Turning Back the Clock

With the election of the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl as chancellor in 1982, the July 20 assassination attempt received new political attention. During thirteen years of SPD chancellors, only Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had participated in the July 20 official commemoration events in Berlin, namely in 1979. But in his sixteen years in power, Kohl would do so three times.

July 20 occupied a central place in Kohl’s Geschichtspolitik (history politics). The CDU chancellor presented a version of the past that was meant to be comfortable to his compatriots. In his speech upon the fortieth anniversary of the assassination attempt, Kohl noted that the world had to be shown “that the Germans were not a nation of Hitler collaborators.” He added that the July 20 conspirators wanted to “prevent Germany from the anti-Hitler coalition’s plans for separation and subjugation.”

After surviving the assassination attempt, Hitler had defamed the July 20 conspirators as a “very small clique of ambitious officers.” Kohl’s references to the Nazi period, conversely, often conveyed the impression that it was the Germans who, between 1933 and 1945, had fallen prey to a small clique made up of Hitler and his closest followers.

This can be observed in the text that Kohl contributed, also in 1984, to a book on the July 20 assassination attempt. Kohl wrote that the Nazis’ efforts to transform Germany had failed because “Hitler did not succeed in dragging the German nation into the abyss of his immorality and cynicism.” He added that the German resistance had “saved German history from its perversion through the dictator.”

Remembering July 20 Today

In the 1990s, Germany’s media-political sphere took more serious steps to critically engage with the past. In 1998, and later in 2002 in a broader legislative effort, the German parliament declared null and void thousands of sentences against political opponents and military deserters. The rehabilitation of such deserters was, however, opposed by the Christian Democratic Union.

When Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005, she took a significantly different approach to July 20 and the Nazi period compared to her political mentor, Kohl. In her speech on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the assassination attempt, Merkel noted that Stauffenberg’s story “is not the only story of resistance — in the same way, July 20 does not mark the only act of resistance.”

She added that “from the beginning, there were brave people who stood up against the National Socialist regime.” These, reminded Merkel, remained a minority. The chancellor also said — in an apparent a call to stop idealizing Stauffenberg and his coconspirators — that after the war there were many misunderstandings about them, including certain “exaggerations.”

The history of the German resistance to Hitler also had protagonists who — unlike Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators — long saw the Nazis for what they really were. Most of them do not have the kind of spectacular history that gains Hollywood attention, as Stauffenberg did when Tom Cruise played him in the 2008 movie Valkyrie. At least one of them, however, does have such a history. Georg Elser was a carpenter and a member of a communist organization during the Weimar Republic. After hiding over multiple nights in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller beerhall, where Hitler was due to speak on November 8, 1939, Elser managed to set up a secret door close to the speaker’s rostrum. When the day arrived, he placed a bomb there. But it exploded a few minutes too late, as Hitler had decided to leave Munich sooner than expected and was no longer there at the time of the detonation. Interrogated by the Gestapo, Elser explained his goal had been to stop the war that had started two months before with the invasion of Poland.

Elser’s story did not find much resonance in the Federal Republic of Germany following World War II. His communist past made him too uncomfortable a hero. In his speech on the fortieth anniversary of the July 20 plot, Chancellor Kohl referred to Elser in passing as the “unsuccessful assassin.” He did not use the words “unsuccessful” or “assassin” even once in reference to the Stauffenberg plot or its leaders.

Today, the symbol of Stauffenberg and his coconspirators has become too powerful to ignore. The AfD and other smaller German far-right groups often present themselves as a form of modern-day “resistance” to an alleged “dictatorship” in Germany. The answer to this challenge is not to overlook the problematic past of Stauffenberg and his coconspirators, as has too often been the case. Nor should the story be merely left to the far right to exploit. In The German Alibi, Hoffman explains that, after being initially seen as traitors, Stauffenberg and his coconspirators were presented as heroes. But when we examine their real history, it’s hard to see how they can count as either.