Coronel stauffenberg biography definition

Stauffenberg hid the bomb in a briefcase and carefully positioned it on the floor while he left the room to take a pre-arranged phone call. The bomb exploded, killing four men. Hitler was injured but survived, apparently because the briefcase had been moved. The plot unravelled and the coup was not put into place. Stauffenberg was executed that night. Thousands of people thought to be implicated in the conspiracy were arrested, and nearly 5,000 were eventually executed.

Hitler survived to inflict far more pain on the world for a further 10 months. But would his death in July 1944 have proved even more catastrophic? Historians Roger Moorhouse and Nigel Jones debate the issue...

It is, perhaps, too much to suggest that we should be ‘glad’ that the July Plot failed. But I would argue that we should acknowledge that, for the greater political good, Stauffenberg’s brave attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 needed to fail, writes Roger Moorhouse.

Have no doubt, Stauffenberg was a courageous man, and Nazism was a thoroughly odious political system that richly deserved every insult hurled at it. But the problem for Stauffenberg was that Nazism was also a brutally effective political religion, which had succeeded in seducing and controlling a generation of Germans.

A key part of that seduction – and of the Nazi founding myth – was the ‘stab-in-the-back’: the idea that Germany had been betrayed at the end of the First World War by a shadowy cabal of Jews and socialists, who had brought about the collapse of the kaiser’s regime [that of German emperor Wilhelm II]. It was the ‘stab-in-the-back’ that fostered in the German people an alluring sense of eternal victimhood, a feeling that they were forever the playthings of ‘unseen forces’ and sinister conspiracies.

Fast forward to 1944, and whatever Stauffenberg’s chances of success in his undertaking, the wider point is that the attack on the German chancellor would only ever be interpreted by the German people

Melitta von Stauffenberg was shot down over the skies of Germany. Finally, we know who killed her.

Norbourn A. Thomas was a high school senior three weeks shy of his 18th birthday when he witnessed Japan attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His U.S. Army colonel father was stationed on Oahu, and just after their deeply religious Catholic family of five returned from early Mass that sunny Sunday morning, Japanese airplanes strafed near their house at Schofield Barracks. After gathering spent shell casings that fell from the attacking aircraft, “Norbie,” as his family called him, decided to become a fighter pilot. 

Three years and four months later, flying a mission over Bavaria in a camera-equipped F-6D reconnaissance model of the North American P-51 Mustang, First Lieutenant Norbourn A. Thomas became a central figure in a World War II air combat whodunit that German historians have debated for nearly 80 years. The mystery: Who shot down Melitta, Countess von Stauffenberg? The countess was an uncommonly talented aeronautical engineer, aviator, and a hero of the Third Reich. Had she been shot down by an Allied airplane? Or had her own government murdered her in retaliation for her brother-in-law’s role in an attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler?

Born Melitta Schiller in 1903, Melitta von Stauffenberg was 42 years old when she died. In the 1920s, she was one of the first German women to earn an engineering degree in flight mechanics and technology from the Technical University of Munich. In the ensuing decades, she earned every possible German pilot license, from gliders to multi-engine aircraft. She won flying competitions and performed an aerobatic display in a Heinkel He 70 Blitz monoplane at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. As a civilian engineer, she did fundamental research on propellers and radio-control technology. She also developed the habit of piloting her own flight tests—a rarity among engineers even today.

Schiller became Melitta

On July 11, 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer, transports a bomb to Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in Berchtesgaden, in Bavaria, with the intention of assassinating the Fuhrer.

As the war started to turn against the Germans, and the atrocities being committed at Hitler’s behest grew, a growing numbers of Germans—within and beyond the military—began conspiring to assassinate their leader. As the masses were unlikely to turn on the man in whose hands they had hitherto placed their lives and future, it was up to men close to Hitler, German officers, to dispatch him. Leadership of the plot fell to Claus von Stauffenberg, newly promoted to colonel and chief of staff to the commander of the army reserve, which gave him access to Hitler’s headquarters at Berchtesgaden and Rastenburg.

Stauffenberg had served in the German army since 1926. While serving as a staff officer in the campaign against the Soviet Union, he became disgusted at his fellow countrymen’s vicious treatment of Jews and Soviet prisoners. He requested to be transferred to North Africa, where he lost his left eye, right hand, and two fingers of his left hand.

After recovering from his injuries, and determined to see Hitler removed from power by any means necessary, Stauffenberg traveled to Berchtesgaden on July 3 and received at the hands of a fellow army officer, Major-General Hellmuth Stieff, a bomb with a silent fuse that was small enough to be hidden in a briefcase.

On July 11, Stauffenberg was summoned to Berchtesgaden to report to Hitler on the current military situation. His plan was to use the bomb, but Stauffenberg held back because Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler—also considered crucial targets—were not present as expected. Hitler was called away to his headquarters at Rastenburg, in East Prussia, and Stauffenberg was asked to follow him there. On July 16, a meeting took place between Stauffenberg and Colonel Caesar

Do-Gooder

Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg commonly referred to as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (November 15, 1907 – July 21, 1944), was a German army officer and aristocrat who was one of the leading members of the failed 20 July plot of 1944 to assassinate Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power. Along with Henning von Tresckow and Hans Oster, he was one of the central figures of the German Resistance movement within the Wehrmacht. For his involvement in the movement he was shot shortly after the failed attempt known as Operation Valkyrie.

Family name[]

Stauffenberg's given name was Claus Philipp Maria Justinian, with the noble title at the end. He was born in the Stauffenberg castle ofJettingen between Ulm and Augsburg, in the eastern part of Swabia, at that time in the Kingdom of Bavaria, part of the German Empire. He was the third of four sons including the twins Berthold and Alexander and his own twin brother Konrad Maria, who died in Jettingen one day after birth on 16 November 1907. His father was Alfred Klemens Philipp Friedrich Justinian, the last Oberhofmarschall of the Kingdom of Württemberg. His mother was Caroline Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg, née Gräfin von Üxküll-Gyllenband, the daughter of Alfred Richard August Graf von Üxküll-Gyllenband and Valerie Gräfin von Hohenthal.

The titles "Graf" and "Gräfin" mean count and countess, respectively. Schenk