The national hero dividing Germans (re: film "Valkyrie" on Stauffenberg)

[struggle4progress]

Page last updated at 11:52 GMT, Saturday, 24 January 2009

... In an opinion poll in 1956, only 20% of people agreed with the idea of naming a school after Stauffenberg ...

... Peter told me of a heart-stopping moment on the day of the Stauffenberg bomb. "I was a year old," he said, "and my mother took me to meet my father at the railway station, when he yelled 'Damn that bomb - why didn't it work?' Amazingly, neither of them was reported or arrested" ...

Dr Johannes Tuechel at the Memorial Centre puts it like this: "People are very interested in the resistance movement, because it helps them to ask themselves, 'If a murderous dictator took over your country, what would you do?' We can never stop asking that question."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7847581.stm

[acmavm]

1. Like here, I believe a lot of people do see things as they really are, they

just don't have what it takes to really do anything about it.

<snip>

"Stauffenberg was a royalist and a nationalist," he said. "The parties he supported originally backed Hitler and helped him form his first government. If my mother could see in 1933 how bad the Nazis were for Germany, why couldn't others?"

<snip>

I think that it was ultimately a good thing that this man came to see the truth about Hitler and his 1,000-year Reich.