A "Hero" From the Ashes

From Breitbart.com:

Filming started Thursday on a movie starring Tom Cruise as the real-life mastermind behind a plot to kill Adolph Hitler, amid German grumbling about the high-profile Scientologist playing a national hero.

A "national hero." That's rich. The Germans didn't think so then. Take another look at William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and you'll find plenty of instances where the German people in general, and the army brass in particular, had plenty of chances to bring Hitler down, yet didn't.

The film is going to follow the story of Count von Stauffenberg, the dashing Nazi officer of glorious Prussian stock (his great-grandfather fought against Napoleon). He would lose an eye, all of one hand, and a piece of another fighting the allies during WWII.

In 1944 he was shot as a co-conspirator in the plot to kill Hitler. He wasn't just any co-conspirator. He was the one who put the bomb under Hitler's table prior to a meeting, only to be thwarted by an army officer, General Brandt, who moved the bomb behind a table leg.

The assassination attempt lends itself to cinema: The bomb is inside a briefcase. Stauffenberg places it to the inside of one of the table's two end-supports. He then excuses himself from the room, while Hitler and other officers go over a map. Just then, General Brandt leans in to get a better look. His feet hit the briefcase. He tries to shove it aside with his foot, and finally picks it up and places it on the other side of the large table support. In doing so, he unknowingly saves Hitler's life. Moments later, the bomb goes off and Hitler is wounded but not killed. Brandt, his accidental saviour, dies, along with a few other officers. Stauffenberg and his accomplices are later rounded up and shot.

All well and good. But for the Germans to regard Stauffenberg as a national hero is a joke. Americans, Canadians, British, and other allies might give a tip of the hat to Stauffenberg on their way by, but the Germans have no right to claim him as a hero. The Russians certainly wouldn't.

Notice the date of the attempted assassination: July 20, 1944. Almost two months after D-Day. Stauffenberg and others involved in the attempted putsch didn't get around to their overthrow bid until the war was virtually lost.

While there is evidence that Stauffenberg was anti-Hitler, don't kid yourself in thinking that he was part of any German "resistance" (the Germans have the gall to call it this; at Bender Block, there is a memorial to these supposed, and fabricated, heroes). Stauffenberg was only anti-Hitler well after fighting in Poland and France. When he was shifted to the Eastern Front and saw the calamity there, he began to change his tune. Prior to that, as Shirer says, "he threw himself into [the war] with characteristic energy."

The results of a Stauffenberg-led overthrow make for interesting reading. It is not as heroic as the German revisionists would have us believe. In hero-dreamland, Stauffenberg would have assassinated Hitler, got the Allies on the phone and said, "We quit."

Not quite. The plan was to kill Hitler, install a social democratic government, and assure the Western Allies of a peace settlement under a new United States of Europe. That is, the lands that Germany had conquered would not be returned immediately and intact to their own deserving peoples, but would become a new state altogether. Further to that, the war in the East would continue, the conspirators believing that the Americans and British would aid them in their fight against Russian Bolshevism.

No unconditional surrender, no repayment to the conquered countries of Western Europe, and no end to the war in the East. These were the results the conspirators were after.

Some heroes. These were men who saw the end of the war coming, and that they might swing from a rope for all the trouble they'd caused. No matter what the German revisionists say now, these men were Nazis. They had been Nazis for years. They were an integral part of a German war machine that killed millions of men, women, and children. It was only after the war looked lost that they went into action. To suggest that they were anti-Nazi heroes is ridiculous. They were criminals looking for a plea bargain.

Today, some German people seem taken with the idea that they can pretend this is not their past. They can't. Calling an opportunistic Nazi a hero doesn't change a thing.

Only five years ago, German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin made an allusion to George W. Bush using the tactics of Hitler. Talk about the pot and kettle. I've got a line for her. It comes from Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland during WWII. He was hanged at Nuremberg. He said this:

"A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased."

Looks like it took only sixty. But its still a guilty history. Read it and weep.