Stauffenberg's Response To Nazi Germany

When John W. Wheeler-Bennett published his book on the German army in the twentieth century in 1953 his previous stance regarding those who were part of the resistance changed, though only slightly. While he still insisted that the resistance did not promote democracy, he did concede that the coup was more than a military revolt and that the resisters believed Germany to be in peril which they hoped to avoid by removing Hitler from power. Once the Allied nations provided these new assessments in an attempt to rehabilitate Germany and make it their ally against communism, the Allies seemed to have lost interest in the German resistance, leading the subject to only be investigated by academics for the remainder of the twentieth century.

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While the vast majority of the conservative and military resistance to Hitler were suspicious of the Soviet Union and did not want to treat with them, Stauffenberg stated he was prepared to negotiate with Stalin’s government in order to end the war and return Europe to peace. This statement and the earnestness in which it was made resulted in Stauffenberg being deemed acceptable to East German leaders, and in an article published in East Germany in 1979, the author, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, stated that while Carl Goerdeler and other conservatives belonged to the capitalist Washington D.C., Brussels, and Bonn, Stauffenberg belonged to the communist Berlin and in the pantheon of Communist heroes alongside Karl Marx and the founding leaders of the German communist party, Karl Liebknecht, and Ernst Thalmann. By the late 1980s the roles of other members of the conservative and military resistance began to be reevaluated and were spoken of more positively, however this occurred only briefly as the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany meant that the story of the resistance accepted in the west became the official narrative, though there have been scholars who continually revise what Theodore S. Hamerow called the “orthodox hagiography” of the resistance. For the most part though the resisters have continued to be the official martyrs and heroes of modern-day