July 20



GERMANY:

Overdue honor for Hitler plotters


Germany's culture minister has praised those Germans who actively opposed
Nazi tyranny, saying all acts of resistance deserve recognition, 60 years
after the most famous plot to kill Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb.

Speaking at the opening of a new exhibit on the Nazi resistance, Christina
Weiss said Germans had come a long way in developing admiration for the
army officers around Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg who tried
to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944.

"The slogan promoted by the Nazis that they were 'traitors' had a
long-lasting effect," Weiss said.

But a recent poll by Der Spiegel magazine found that 33 percent of Germans
now admire the Stauffenberg plotters and another 40 percent hold them in
high esteem, she noted.

Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room with Hitler. But when
the Nazi leader escaped the blast, the aristocrat and his cohorts were
arrested and executed.

The attempt on Hitler has been memorialized in a new feature film as well
as documentaries and books.

The street outside the World War II army headquarters in Berlin, now a
national memorial to the Nazi resistance, carries Stauffenberg's name.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will lead the official anniversary
commemorations there on Tuesday.

But the July 20 plot is just one example of anti-Nazi resistance by
Germans, Weiss said.

Stauffenberg co-conspirators Major General Henning von Tresckow and Major
General Hans Oster were already plotting as early as 1934 to bring Hitler
down.

In Munich, students formed The White Rose movement, distributing pamphlets
urging "passive resistance" starting in 1942. Helmuth James von Moltke's
so-called Kreisau Circle started working in secret to end the dictatorship
in 1940.

"July 20 was definitely the high point of the fight against tyranny,"
Weiss said.

But it began in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, she said, long before
the German defeat by the Soviet army in the 1942-43 battle of Stalingrad
or the 1944 Allied landing in Normandy on D-Day.

Like Stauffenberg, von Tresckow, Oster, von Moltke and the principals of
The White Rose were either executed by the Nazis or committed suicide.

"The victory of freedom and justice, this goal, bound the German
resistance with the resistance fighters in the occupied European
countries," Weiss said.

"Today's ... peaceful and just Europe was also a vision of the German
resistance."

In a separate ceremony, German President Horst Koehler hailed the July 20
plotters as "patriots."

"They did what they did for Germany, for the self-respect of our country
and for a better future," he said.


*****************

Germany's Schroeder Honors Nazi Resistors


Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder honored Germany's Nazi resistance Tuesday on
the 60th anniversary of the most famous plot to kill Adolf Hitler, saying
the army officers, civic leaders and citizens who frequently sacrificed
their lives for the movement were heroes.

On July 20, 1944, aristocratic Nazi Col. Claus Graf Schenk von
Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb placed under a
conference table. Hitler escaped and Stauffenberg and several other key
conspirators were executed by firing squad that night.

Speaking at the World War II army headquarters where Stauffenberg was
killed, Schroeder said July 20 is a reminder to Germans to ``defend again
and again the values of freedom and tolerance that we consider so
self-evident today.''

Germany increasingly is shedding the debilitating legacy of the Third
Reich, as evidenced by Schroeder's invitation to D-Day ceremonies in
France last month. The 60-year-old Schroeder is the first German leader
with no personal memory of the war.

Schroeder said those Germans who opposed Hitler from the first also were
members of the resistance.

``Resistance against the dictatorship began already in 1933, when the
Nazis had seized power,'' he told the ceremony.

The commemoration also underscored the fact that the German resistance
never gained popular support for an uprising against Nazi rule, unlike
similar movements in France or the Netherlands.

German President Horst Koehler laid a wreath before a plaque honoring the
assassination plotters at the Bendlerblock building, now the Defense
Ministry. Later Tuesday, Schroeder was to attend the swearing-in of new
German army recruits there -- an annual tradition meant to highlight the
resistance to Hitler from within the military.

Overnight in the central city of Goettingen, vandals sprayed apparent
neo-Nazi slogans on a Stauffenberg memorial, police said.

Schroeder said Germans need to keep on asking themselves: ``How could the
dictatorship rely for so long on a broad mass base? It was not possible
for the resistance to mobilize something of a natural patriotism against
the National Socialists.''

Some answers, he suggested, lie in the all-encompassing Nazi police state,
Hitler's survival of repeated assassination attempts and the fact that
even the army coup plotters and other elites who became resistors long
wavered between loyalty to the Fuehrer and their conscience.

Also at Tuesday's ceremony was Freya von Moltke, who, with her husband,
gathered other enemies of Hitler at their castle, forming a group known as
the Kreisau Circle. Helmuth James von Moltke was arrested before the
Stauffenberg bombing and executed in 1945.

His widow remembered the euphoria sweeping Nazi Germany in 1940 -- Poland
and France had fallen, and it looked like the invasion of Britain could
happen at anytime. Despite the victories, she and her husband never
wavered in their opposition to the Nazis, launching their resistance group
the same year.

``At the high point of Hitler's success, that's when the circle began,''
the spry, white-haired 93-year-old told a crowd at a Berlin church Monday.
``I'm proud.''

After the war, the resistors were largely shunned in Germany.

``The slogan promoted by the Nazis that they were 'traitors' had a
long-lasting effect,'' German Culture Minister Christina Weiss said.

Not only was it hard for Germans to overcome more than a dozen years of
Nazi indoctrination, but many former Nazis still influenced policy after
the war's end in 1945, said Johannes Tuchel, director of the resistance
memorial.

``After the war, there were still many Nazis in politics, in industry and
in media in the 1950s and '60s and they minimized the resistance,'' he
said.

Popular culture has given the memory of the German resistance a boost,
with books, documentaries and a new feature film on Stauffenberg.

Freya von Moltke said the new respect finally gives her satisfaction.

``Even though we had no success and even though we were weak, we kept
European humanity alive in Germany -- and I mean all who stood against
Hitler,'' she told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

(source for both: Associated Press)


********************

Germany Remembers Plot to Kill Hitler


Tuesday marks the 60th anniversary of Claus Schenk Graf von
Stauffenberg's attempt to assassinate Hitler. While some debate whether he
acted out of personal interest or altruism, most Germans are taking a
positive view.

On July 20, 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic
colonel in the Nazi army, took the fate of the German people into his own
hands. Increasingly disillusioned with Adolf Hitler, Stauffenberg and
numerous other co-conspirators within the German military, including
Friedrich Olbricht and Henning von Tresckow, plotted to assassinate the
dictator and seize the reins of power.

Shortly after noon on a hot summer day, Stauffenberg smuggled an
explosives-filled briefcase into a meeting at Hitler's "Wolf's Lair"
hideaway (in what is today Poland), where the dictator was seated around a
large wooden table with 22 other Nazi officials.

Stauffenberg placed the briefcase under the table, made an excuse to
leave, and watched the explosion from afar as he raced towards his getaway
car. Confident he had completed his mission and an impending coup would
soon place him and like-minded co-conspirators in power, Stauffenberg made
haste to return to Berlin.

But, in what is largely viewed as one of the greatest tragedies in
history, things did not work out that way. Miraculously, Hitler survived
the blast that killed four others, and the opposition's poor planning,
lack of support and hesitation at crucial moments played into the Fhrer's
hands.

By midnight -- just twelve hours later -- Hitler had regained the upper
hand and squashed the rebellion. Stauffenberg and three others were
executed by firing squad in Berlin. In the coming weeks, an additional 140
people implicated in the plot were killed and more than 5,000 conspirators
and political opponents were rounded-up.

Hero or traitor?

Had Stauffenberg been successful, the final phase of the war would
certainly have gone differently. The fact remains that more people died
between the July assassination attempt and the end of the war than in the
four-and-a-half years prior to that. Few doubt that Hitler's demise would
not have seriously affected the German army's ability to go on fighting,
if not ended hostilities sooner and saved thousands of lives. Yet,
Stauffenberg's place in history as a hero of the German resistance has not
been so easily established.

In the initial decade after the end of the war, the German public largely
viewed him as a traitor. His wife was denied a pension, and no memorials
were erected to mark the bravery of those within Hitler's own military
establishment who risked their lives to set the country on a different
course.

In the 1960's, as a younger generation of Germans confronted their parents
over their country's Nazi past, Stauffenberg was not necessarily
rehabilitated into an honorable symbol of the German resistance. Some were
suspicious of his motives, accusing him of acting more out of self-interest,
and less out of benevolent concern for the plight of the Jews and other
victims of Nazi war crimes.

A surge of new interest

But as the 60th anniversary of the assassination attempt approached, a
number of new films, documentaries and books enlivened the debate and once
again drew attention to Stauffenberg and his band of subversives. German
public broadcaster SWR produced a film by director Jo Baier entitled
"Stauffenberg," which topped prime time ratings with a 23 percent audience
share. Another German broadcaster produced a four-part documentary
entitled "They Wanted to Kill Hitler," which proved equally popular.
Numerous new autobiographies and books chronicling the event hit the
shelves in bookstores.

Along with this surge of interest, the German public's view, it seems, has
also shifted. According to a recent poll in the German news weekly Spiegel
more than 75 percent of Germans surveyed said they esteem or admire
Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators.

In what is perhaps a final nod of approval, German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder presides over a ceremony on Tuesday to mark the 60th anniversary
of the assassination attempt.

Perspectives change over time

The German public's growing esteem for Stauffenberg and company begs the
question: what's changed? According to Johannes Tuchel, Director of the
German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin, most Germans were --
implicitly, at least -- Hitler supporters, and those in the resistance
were in the minority.

"After the war, Germany did not change its population," he said in an
interview with DW-WORLD. "Now we have a new generation, and they are
interested in what happened on July 20, 1944."

That interest has manifested itself in the spate of recent movies and
books. Many are drawn to the material in the hopes of learning how a group
of military officers changed their view of Hitler radically enough to plot
a coup.

For that question, however, there is no easy answer. "They had a broad
spectrum of motivations," says Tuchel of those involved in the plot. "Some
were social democrats, some former labor union activists, some had
authoritarian goals."

Two things, according to Tuchel, united them: they wanted to re-establish
the rule of law and end the war. In the case of Stauffenberg, Tuchel says
historical evidence proves that a growing disgust for Nazi war crimes was
his primary motivating factor.

The German resistance

Academics have long debated whether the guilt for Nazi crimes should be
borne individually, by those who committed the crimes, or collectively, by
the German people. In the 1997 book "Hitler's Willing Executioners," US
historian Daniel Goldhagen (photo) argued in favor of the theory of
collective guilt. Not surprisingly, his theory proved highly controversial
in Germany. It's no wonder that the German public is fascinated by more
inspiring tales of resistance.

The German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin features exhibitions on
Stauffenberg, as well as others like the "White Rose" student movement
which sprung up in Munich. But Tuchel is careful not to exaggerate the
size of the resistance, pointing out that Hitler's opponents -- those
willing to take action -- were always in the minority. "This was such a
small operation, that the same man (Stauffenberg) who planted the bomb,
had to run back to Berlin on the same day to help organize the coup," he
said.

On Tuesday afternoon, Schroeder will urge Germans to remember Stauffenberg
and his network of co-conspirators. How they choose to recall the event
will remain a matter of ongoing debate.

(source: Deutsche Welle)









BELARUS:

Monument to Jewish Holocaust victims in Belarus inaugurated


Jewish leaders, local officials, and Western diplomats on Sunday
inaugurated a monument of more than a thousand stones, commemorating the
Jews killed by the Nazis outside a Belarussian town on a single day in
World War II.

The monument near Gorodeya, 100 kilometers southwest of the capital Minsk,
consists of a concrete sculpture of a burned, battered house surrounded by
1,137 stones, honoring each of the Jews massacred in a field outside their
town on June 17, 1942.

"On this day, the fascists brutally destroyed practically the entire
Jewish community. They shot the men and knifed women and children," said
Leonid Levin, president of the Union of Belarussian Jewish Public
Organizations and Communities and designer of the monument.

"The Jews of Gorodeya shared the fate of dozens of towns and villages
destroyed by the fascists in Belarus," he said. Some 800,000 Jews were
killed in Belarus during World War II. The pain of each of the dead rests
in these stones," he said.

US Ambassador George Krol, speaking in Belarussian, said the monument
"warns against the repetition of the terrible tragedy" of the Holocaust.
The German and French ambassadors also attended the ceremony, along with a
Polish diplomat.

The monument's opening comes amid rising anti-Semitism in Belarus a
phenomenon local Jews say law-enforcement authorities have not done enough
to combat.

The local administrative district helped finance the monument's
construction. Its chief, Fyodor Privalov, said authorities "feel
responsible for the memory of people who died on our land."

Most of the financing came from Western donors by way of a Belarussian
committee working to preserve the memory of Holocaust victims. Committee
chief Yuri Dorn said the group plans to build monuments this year at the
sites of three other massacres.
Belarus was home to a substantial Jewish minority before the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution, but the community has dwindled to some 28,000 after
a century that brought pogroms, the Holocaust and widespread emigration.

(source: Associated Press)