GERMANY: Germany marked the 60th anniversary yesterday of the failed plot to kill Hitler as the day, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said, "another Germany showed its face".
Hitler survived the bomb blast and ordered the arrest and execution of the plotters, praised yesterday as martyrs to the cause of German freedom.
"It is one of the most important days in the history of the new Germany. It is an enormous legacy," said Mr Schröder in Bendlerblock Prison in Berlin, where the ringleaders were executed 12 hours after their failure.
The anniversary has prompted a huge re-examination in Germany of the plot and its ringleader, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic colonel who planted the briefcase bomb inside Hitler's fortified Wolf's Lair headquarters in what is now Poland.
Only one of the two bombs inside the briefcase detonated, killing four men but leaving Hitler almost unscathed. Von Stauffenberg flew back to Berlin immediately, convinced the dictator was dead, setting in motion a doomed coup that would end in front of a firing squad. In post-war Germany, the conspirators were viewed as traitors, something von Stauffenberg foresaw this before his death when he wrote: "Whoever dares to do anything must realise that he will go down in German history as a traitor. But if he fails to act, he would be a traitor to his own conscience." But the plot and its organisers were rehabilitated in the 1950s and are today seen as heroes in Germany, with over 300 von Stauffenberg streets around the country.
There remains voices of dissent, however, pointing out that the plotters were nevertheless high-ranking Nazis and that the plot was hopelessly ill-planned. Der Spiegel magazine called the failed plot "one of the great tragedies of the 20th century", pointing out that the final year of war saw the deaths of over 4 million German soldiers, 1.5 million Red Army and hundreds of thousands of British and US troops as well as concentration camp prisoners.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung went as far as to suggest yesterday that, for Germans, the failed plot was a bitter but necessary blow.
"Maybe the Germans had to drink from the bitter cup of defeat down to its last dregs in 1945, so that National Socialism's seductive power was broken."