Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg came from a Swabian aristocratic family. Born in 1907, the youngest of three brothers, he grew up under the influence of Catholicism — though his family were non-practising — and of the youth movement. He became particularly attracted to the ideas of the poet Stefan George, then held in extraordinary esteem by an impressionable circle of young admirers, strangely captivated by his vague, neo-conservative cultural mysticism which looked away from the sterilities of bourgeois existence towards a new élite of aristocratic aestheticism, godliness, and manliness.45 Like many young officers, Stauffenberg was initially attracted by aspects of National Socialism — not least its renewed emphasis on the value of strong armed forces and its anti-Versailles foreign policy — but rejected its racial antisemitism and, after the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis of early 1938, was increasingly critical of Hitler and his drive to war. Even so, serving in Poland he was contemptuous of the Polish people, approved of the colonization of the country, and was enthusiastic about the German victory.46 He was still more jubilant after the stunning successes in the western campaign, and hinted that he had changed his views on Hitler.47
The mounting barbarity of the regime nevertheless appalled him. And when he turned irredeemably against Hitler in the late spring of 1942, it was under the influence of incontrovertible eye-witness reports of massacres of Ukrainian Jews by SS men. Hearing the reports, Stauffenberg concluded that Hitler must be removed.48 As some of his critics pointed out, it was, compared with others, somewhat late in the day that he was finally persuaded to join the oppositional conspiracy.49 Serving in North Africa with the 10th Panzer Division, he was (as we noted) badly wounded in April 1943, losing his right eye, his right hand, and two fingers from his left hand. Soon after his discharge from hospital in August, speaking to Friedrich Olbricht about a new post as chief of staff in the General War Office
By early September, Stauffenberg had been introduced to the leading figures in the opposition. So far as it can be deduced, his political stance, once he had come to join the resistance, had little or nothing in common with that of the national-conservatives — Goerdeler’s views he treated almost with disdain — and was closer to that of the Kreisau Circle.51 But, like Tresckow, Stauffenberg was a man of action, an organizer more than a theoretician. He deliberated with Tresckow in autumn 1943 about the best way to assassinate Hitler and the related but separate issue of organizing the coup to follow. As a means of taking over the state, they came up with the idea of recasting an operational plan, code-named ‘Valkyrie’, already devised by Olbricht and approved by Hitler, for mobilizing the reserve army within Germany in the event of serious internal unrest. The recouched plan began by denouncing not anti-Nazi ‘subversives’, but putschists
Unleashing ‘Valkyrie’ posed two problems. The first was that the command had to be issued by the head of the reserve army. This was General Friedrich Fromm, born in 1888 into a Protestant family with strong military traditions, a huge man, somewhat reserved in character, with strong beliefs in the army as the guarantor of Germany’s status as a world-power. Fromm was no outright Hitler loyalist, but a fence-sitter who remained noncommittal in his cautious desire to keep his options open and back whichever came out on top, the regime or the putschists — a policy which would eventually backfire upon him.54 The other problem was the old one of access to Hitler. Tresckow had concluded that only an assassination attempt in Führer Headquarters could get round the unpredictability of Hitler’s schedule and the tight security precautions surrounding him. The difficulty was to find someone prepared to carry out the attempt who had reason to be in Hitler’s close proximity in Führer Headquarters.
