Death of a hero

The New York Times today ran an article, an obituary, in fact, with a familiar name.

Philipp von Boeselager, Who Attempted an Assassination of Hitler, Dies at 90

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: May 3, 2008

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of German Army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944, died on Thursday. He was 90 and lived in Altenahr, in the Rhineland-Palatinate.

His death was announced by the German Defense Ministry, which gave no other details.

Mr. von Boeselager, disturbed by the Nazi campaign of extermination against the Jews and by German atrocities that he witnessed as a lieutenant on the Eastern Front, joined an anti-Hitler conspiracy in 1942 and later took part in the plot being organized by Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who, as chief of staff to Gen. Friedrich Fromm of Reserve Army Headquarters, routinely attended meetings at which Hitler was present.

Mr. von Boeselager, assigned to an explosives research team, was able to acquire top-grade English explosives. On July 20, Colonel von Stauffenberg carried a briefcase stuffed with plastic explosives and a timed detonator into a conference being held in the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, and placed it under a table being used by Hitler and more than 20 officers.

After making an excuse, Colonel von Stauffenberg left the room. In his absence, Col. Heinz Brandt, trying to get a better look at a map on the table, moved the briefcase, blunting the impact of the explosion. It demolished the conference room and mortally wounded three officers (Colonel Brandt among them) and a stenographer, but Hitler escaped with minor injuries.

Had the assassination succeeded, Mr. von Boeselager was supposed to lead 1,200 men back to Berlin and take part in a general uprising against the Nazi regime, code-named Operation Valkyrie. The bomb plot is the subject of the unreleased film “Valkyrie,” in which Tom Cruise plays Colonel von Stauffenberg. Mr. von Boeselager described his role in the wartime resistance in a recent interview with The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Most of the approximately 200 conspirators, including Colonel von Stauffenberg, were rounded up and executed, while others committed suicide. No one revealed Mr. von Boeselager’s role in the plot, which is described in detail by the historian Peter Hoffmann in “The History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945.” As a result, he did not need to use the cyanide capsule he kept on hand. Fearing exposure, he kept the cyanide for the rest of the war.

Mr. von Boeselager was born into a Roman Catholic family in Burg Heimerzheim, near Bonn. After graduating from Aloysius College, a Jesuit secondary school in Bad Godesberg, he intended to study law and enter the foreign service, but not wishing to join the Nazi Party he instead enlisted in the army, as did his brother Georg, who also took part in the July 20 plot.

Mr. von Boeselager was first approached in 1942 to shoot both Hitler and Heinrich Himmler at close range. “It was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in a recent interview.

On March 13, 1943, with a Walther PP pistol in hand, Mr. von Boeselager prepared to assassinate both men, who were scheduled to hold a strategy session with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, Mr. von Boeselager’s commanding officer and also a conspirator. When Himmler decided not to attend, Mr. von Kluge called off the mission.

In 1944, it was Mr. von Boeselager’s brother Georg who gave him the signal to move forward. “One day, my brother called and said, ‘They want explosives,’ ” he told Reuters in a 2004 interview. “I knew exactly what for.”

When he stepped off an airplane to deliver the explosives to Gen. Hellmuth Stieff at Army High Command, however, the plan nearly came unraveled.

“Getting out of the plane, I was limping, because I had been injured in the leg.” he said in the interview. “Several young soldiers came up to me, offering to carry my suitcase. But I refused. I thought they would notice at once that the suitcase was far too heavy.” As for the failure of the assassination attempt, Mr. von Boeselager said, “Stauffenberg was the wrong man for this, but no one else had the guts.”

After the war, Mr. von Boeselager studied law and economics and served as an adviser in creating the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of West Germany. He founded several charities and welfare organizations, and often spoke at schools about German resistance to the Third Reich and the importance of taking an active part in politics. In 1948 he married Rosa Maria Gräfin von Westphalen zu Fürstenberg. The couple had four children, Albrecht, Georg, Maria-Felicitas Schenk von Stauffenberg and Monica Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden.

Two weeks before his death, Mr. von Boeselager took part in a documentary, “The Valkyrie Legacy,” to be shown on the History Channel in spring 2009.

Mr. von Boeselager said that the decision to call off the 1943 plot had continued to haunt him. “I always see Hitler from here to the fireplace in front of me and think, ‘What would have happened if you had shot him?’ ” he told a reporter, indicating with his hands a distance of about two feet.

Here is MAJ Boeselager's Wiki Bio. (And please note that it was the New York Slimes which referred to MAJOR Boeselager as "Mister" throughout...)

Turns out the name is familiar due to his brother, Georg, also party to the plan to kill Hitler, and mentioned in the above article. (Wiki bio here.)

And the reason I knew about COL Boeselager is that I remembered hearing about an Armored Reconnaissance ("Armored Cavalry", to the US) competition the Bundeswehr sponsored for NATO forces, the "Boeselager Cup", until 1998 when the OpTempo for NATO got too high, what with nation-building in the Balkans and all.

I don't remember whether the article I read in whatever magazine said anything at all about the competition's namesake; I think not. I remember thinking that it would have been cool if there had been a similar competition for MI geeks, but then who would we have told about it? And that one of the neat things about these things, besides the opportunities to party with soldiers from other nations, and (possibly illegally) swap uniform items and other gear, was that they can force you to try new techniques--US Armored Cav units do not routinely haul SCUBA gear around but I recall that one of the events called for a scout to don a wet suit and swim across a lake.

In another, similar event I was on the periphery of, held in Wales by the British Army for scout units, we sent a Long Range Surveillance Detachment team, which was a logistical challenge, since one of the events was of General Purpose ("Medium") Machine Gunnery, and LRSD units at that time didn't even have Squad Automatic Weapons, let alone GPMGs! (Surveillance is passive, and if you need a crew served weapon your mission has utterly failed.) Now, since these guys were all Airborne Rangers, they were quite capable of firing the M60 machine gun (piece of crap that it was), but we had to hand receipt for a couple from other units.

The best part of these multi-national events is the parties, though.

Anyway. I look forward to this documentary on Operation Valkyrie. (Whether I want to see a movie starring Tom Cruise as Count Von Stauffenburg is another question...)

I have put The History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945 on hold at the King County library. (ISBN is 0262080885 for anyone who is interested.)

I am rather surprised that the Germans don't make a bigger deal of any anti-Hitler resistance.