An alternative history

On 20 July, Germany’s political elite recalls the day in 1944 when Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg exploded a bomb intended to kill Hitler, and ran an abortive coup which ended in his own death and that of other plotters. To mark the anniversary, a military band in Berlin will thump out ‘Prussia’s Glory’, whereupon Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen will urge massed recruits to emulate the rebels’ ethics.

Many of us know these events from the 2008 film Valkyrie with Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg and Kenneth Branagh as co-conspirator General Henning von Tresckow. But in Germany, the ‘Berlin republic’ will be celebrating nothing less than itself, for the failed coup is at the core of the new narrative it has crafted to explain the country’s Nazi past.

This tale holds that a group of Nazi fanatics led by Hitler captured the state, so the German people were victims rather than accomplices. The story of how the frondeurs tried to remove the Führer richly animates the idea of an oppressed German Volk resisting the evil Nazis. Uncomfortable truths (the plotters were a tiny band, most had been Nazis or enthusiastic supporters) have not been allowed to get in the way. Much more unpalatable, but yet to be absorbed, are discoveries which the archives are still yielding. They show the full extent to which key players, such as Stauffenberg himself, were full-blown Nazi criminals before they ever came to oppose the regime.

A reckoning with such facts will be tough. After all, the Ministry of Defence is in the Stauffenbergstrasse in Berlin, the army schools officers at its Stauffenberg barracks in Dresden, and the Bundeswehr runs global missions from the Tresckow base near Potsdam. There will be repercussions in the EU, too, for the new Teutonic tale has fed the Union’s own historical revisionism.