How Traitors Became Heroes

On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler cheated death when military officers planned an assassination attempt. It took a long time until the Germans came to honor those who took part in the coup attempt.



In the summer of 1951, the Allensbacher Institute took an important survey. The pollsters wanted to know what German citizens thought about the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Only a third of respondents had a positive opinion about the men and women who had tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the Nazi regime. And in 1956, the majority of citizens opposed naming a school after Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Hitler's failed assassin.



For a long time, Germans struggled to honor the resistance against the Nazi dictatorship. What now seems obvious, "is actually the result of a long and often contradictory process," Johannes Tuchel, head of the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin wrote recently. "Much has been ignored, repressed, forgotten."







Theodor Heuss persuaded Germans



The assassination attempt was the most important coup attempt in the Nazi era. The resistance fighters came mainly from the German aristocracy and the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht. At Hitler's headquarters, the "Wolf's Lair," Officer Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler with a suitcase bomb. But the dictator survived; the coup failed. Stauffenberg was executed the same night, and in the days and weeks that followed, hundreds of people who had been associated with the scheme were rounded up and executed.







The resistance members were portrayed as traitors who had broken the oath of allegiance they had sworn to Adolf Hitler. This opinion was shared by many Germans even after the end of the Second World War. But Theodor Heuss, West Germany's first postwar president, played a key role in persuading Germans that the resistance against Hitler was not treason and Stauffenberg's insubordination was even honorable.



"The oath of allegiance was paid to a man who formally, legally, morally and historically had many cases of perjury behind him," Heuss said in 1954, the tenth anniversary of the attempted assassination. It was the first official memorial service for the resistance fighters of July 20.



German culture of memory



"Theodor Heuss' speech triggered a turnaround in the perception of the German resistance," Rüdiger Voss said in an interview with