Afterword

with Count Berthold Schenk von Stauffenberg

15 November 2008 marked the centenary of Claus von Stauffenberg’s birth. The anniversary was the signal for a series of commemorative celebrations. The events included a Bundeswehr exhibition in the Count Stauffenberg Barracks at Sigmaringen; the foundation of a memorial association in Stuttgart and Albstadt-Lautlingen on 25 October; a military tattoo of the Bundeswehr at Jettingen in Bavarian Swabia, Stauffenberg’s birthplace; the opening of an exhibition at Lautlingen and a memorial ceremony attended by the German defence minister at the Bendlerblock.

These events reflect the fact that in Germany today Stauffenberg is rightly regarded as a national hero and that more than sixty years after the war, the events of 20 July 1944 remain a source of fascination for people worldwide. Indeed, as this book is being published, trailers for a new film on the subject are being screened and the release of the film, starring Tom Cruise in the lead role, is imminent. The historian Guido Knopp is also working on a documentary on the subject. There will doubtless be many other attempts to re-tell the story to new audiences over the coming years.

One aspect of the plot’s aftermath that has not been explored by writers or filmmakers is the extent to which conspirators’ families were persecuted. Perhaps surprisingly, the Nazis did not carry out their Sippenhaft, or ‘Detention of kin’ policy, thoroughly or consistently.

In 1944, Stauffenberg’s family was living in Bamberg, in the house of his wife Countess Nina’s parents. Although this was a Catholic town through and through, it was entirely in the grip of the Nazis. At school, as well as the compulsory ‘Heil Hitler!’ at the beginning of each day, there were weekly National Socialist ‘prayer meetings’ conducted by elderly and retired teachers who wore the party badge and were greeted on the streets with the compulsory Nazi salute and a ‘Heil Hitler!’ Nazi propaganda was becoming much more strident and noticeable. Posters were pasted everywhere with the slogan: ‘The enemy is listening too.’

Count Berthold Schenk von Stauffenberg, eldest son of Claus.

Even as late as 1944 Bamberg did not suffer air raids: only twice, a couple of bombs fell on the town’s outskirts. Nevertheless, air-raid sirens sounded incessantly, and the ‘Drahtfunk’ – a sort of cable radio transmitted over the telephone network – was constantly switched on. Most children’s exams were held in the underground air-raid shelters. And the casualty lists of the fallen were growing ever longer. Many schoolchildren – including many bomb evacuees, mostly from Hamburg – were already war orphans and their numbers increased inexorably.

The Stauffenberg family were only together for a few periods. In 1943, Claus returned home to Lautlingen on convalescent leave. After that, his children saw him just three more times: for two days at Christmas 1943, at the funeral of his father in January 1944, and for a week’s holiday in June 1944.

The children had no idea what their father was planning and preparing, neither did they know that their mother knew what was due to take place. Nina had to conceal her real opinions, and let fall no hint of her opposition to the Nazis, which was not an easy task. One knew in general terms, even if not specifically, what could happen if one did not co-operate with the authorities. The newspapers were full of reports about the special trials for those caught listening to enemy broadcasts, or illegally slaughtering animals, and similar ‘crimes’, which mostly ended with death sentences. The family knew that concentration camps existed but no one knew what happened in them, and no one wanted to know either.

In mid-July 1944 the family – Nina and her four children – left Bamberg for Lautlingen and their annual summer holidays with their paternal grandmother. Berthold von Stauffenberg, the eldest of Nina’s children, has recalled, ‘We now know my father was not in accord with our holiday plans, but my mother no longer wished to change them.’

On 21 July, the day after the plot, according to Berthold, ‘I heard on the radio about a criminal attack on the Führer, but my questions about this were answered evasively, and the adults tried to keep me and my next-youngest brother Heimaren away from the radio.

‘My great-uncle, Count Nikolaus von Üxküll, a former General Staff officer in the Imperial and Royal Austrian Habsburg Army, was deputed to take us on a long walk, during which he told us about his adventures as a big game hunter in Africa. Naturally we didn’t know then that he too was a member of the conspiracy, and I ask myself today what was really going through his head on that walk.’

On 23 July, Nina explained to her children that it was their father who had carried out the attack on Hitler. ‘To my question as to why he had wanted to kill the Führer, she said that he had believed that he had to do it for Germany. She also told us that she was expecting another child. For me the news was a shattering shock – the end of my world. We had loved our always cheerful father unconditionally and above everything. He was an absolute – if often absent – authority, and now this!

‘From this moment until early in 1945 I was unable to think clearly, and simply absorbed the blows that would fall on us. And they fell quickly and hard.’

On 23 July, Üxküll and Nina were arrested and taken to Berlin. The next night, Nina’s mother and her sister, who was a senior official in the Red Cross, were also arrested and detained in the local court jail in Balingen. Nina’s sister was soon released, but not allowed to return to Lautlingen. Nina’s mother was freed in November but kept under house arrest. The village stood by her, and there never were so many repairs carried out in her house – the repairs being a pretext for people to see her, despite an official ban on such visits.

The children stayed on alone at their house with their nanny and grandmother’s housekeeper, along with two Gestapo officials. On the radio and in papers there were reports about the conspiracy and the first conspirators’ trials before the People’s Court. Berthold recalled, ‘It was fortunate that we were now in Lautlingen, since the village for the most part stood opposed to the regime, albeit in secret. Nevertheless we felt ourselves to be outcasts, and this is a feeling that I will never forget.’

On 16 August came the order that the children – Berthold, ten years old; Heimeran, eight; Franz-Ludwig, six, and Valerie, three and a half; along with their cousins, aged six and five – were to be taken to a children’s home. The few belongings they had were quickly packed. The housekeeper took the children to the priest who gave the children his blessing. The priest warned them that bad times probably awaited them, but that we should never forget why their father had done what he had. Only later did the family realise how courageous these words were.

The next morning the children were taken to Stuttgart, which had been heavily bombed the night before. That evening, accompanied by a female Gestapo official, they boarded the night train for Berlin, changed in Erfurt, and at about noon arrived at Nordhausen. From here they were taken by car to the children’s home in Bad Sachsa in the south Harz mountains. The home, at Bornetal on the town’s outskirts, with its Black Forest style wooden houses seemed picturesque and idyllic. It had been founded by the Bremen businessman Daniel Schnackenberg, and in 1936 had been taken over by the Bremen Nazi party as the ‘Bremen’ children’s home.

Apart from its working and administrative buildings, the home consisted of seven wooden houses, each equipped to hold about thirty children, divided by age group and gender. The location may have been selected for its position – it was a secure, easily sealed-off area that lay just outside the administrative district boundary. Moreover, the staff came mainly from Bremen and were not tied to the locality. The political background made the choice comprehensible too, since Bad Sachsa was the most proudly Nazi-supporting area in the entire district of the Hohenstein/Nordhausen county, to which it belonged at that time.

Stauffenberg’s children were the first arrivals. Berthold found himself alone in Haus # 1, the house for boys over ten; his brothers and his cousin were in House # 2 for boys of six to nine years. His sister and his cousin were in the house for girls of two to five years. Since the houses were isolated and widely spaced apart they met only occasionally and by chance. In the days and weeks that followed more children arrived but the houses were never filled to capacity.

Looking back, Berthold said, ‘I have no bad memories, nor have my brothers. We were well, even lovingly, treated; we were taken care of and our lives seemed very simple and, given the material shortages of the time, we were no worse off than the mass of the German population. Unlike hundreds of thousands of our contemporaries, we were spared air raids and the terrors of enforced flight, exile and Soviet conquest – even our home village of Lautlingen suffered more than we did from the depredations of the French-Moroccan troops.’

By Christmas 1944 there were so few children being held that they were concentrated together in a single house. Early in 1945 the home was taken over by the Wehrmacht, and it became the top-secret ‘Unit 00400’, the staff headquarters for the nearby V-weapons rocket programme.

Bad Sachsa was very close to the notorious Mittelbau forced labour underground rocket factory and the Dora concentration camp. There were now only fourteen children remaining: six Stauffenbergs, with the children of Claus’s brother Berthold von Stauffenberg and his cousin Casar von Hofacker, who were both executed for their part in the conspiracy; along with the daughter of General Lindemann who was the same age as Berthold; two grandchildren of Carl von Goerdeler and two little girls, the daughters of Leuitenant-Colonels Robert Bernardis and Henke, step-daughter of the Abwehr conspirator Dr Captain Ludwig Gehr.

The children were all transferred to a former villa that had been converted to serve as a clinic called ‘Iso’. At Easter they were due to be taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where they had been informed their relatives were being held. They never reached the camp, because just as they were put in a Wehrmacht transport vehicle and reached the outer suburbs of Nordhausen – where they were due to be put aboard a train – a terrible air raid began. Along with the rest of the town, the railway station was completely destroyed. The children therefore had to return to Bad Sachsa and continue to live there as before.

Finally, on 12 April 1945, the Americans arrived. In the woods over in the Bornetal valley fighting continued until the German forces retreated. The Americans had threatened during negotiations to completely destroy the town unless it surrendered.

Berthold recalls, ‘Our house was thoroughly searched by the Americans, who naturally did not know what they would find there. Afterwards, things continued much as they had gone on before. We plundered booty from what had been left behind by Unit 00400, and were able to take longer walks in the neighbourhood.

‘After some time we were visited by the newly-appointed mayor, who explained to us that we were now free. He also, as I only discovered at a meeting in the year 2000, ensured that we were properly registered as local residents. Nothing else changed for us, though; as far as we were aware things continued as they had before. Our two remaining kindergarten nurses went home to Bremen, naturally travelling, in the absence of other means of transport, only by foot and by cadging lifts.’

Without warning, on 11 July 1945, the children’s Great Aunt Alexandrine arrived in a car with French number plates. She had been a prisoner, together with other Sippenhaft detainees and many other prominent prisoners of the Nazis.

Akexandrine organised transport by bus and drove the children back through a devastated Germany to Lautlingen, where they arrived on 13 June 1945. All the talk locally was of the occupation of the area by French-Moroccan troops, who were given free rein for one long day to plunder, during which time the local population, with the permission of their conquerors, were allowed to seek sanctuary in the castle garden and in the church in order to protect themselves from assault and rape.

Also in the castle was a small German-run clinic and a large number of evacuated Gestapo family members. The French pursued a harsh occupation policy, but had very little themselves, so there was a thriving black market. The neighbourhood was also made unsafe owing to the presence nearby, on the army exercise area known as ‘Heuberg’, of ‘liberated’ soldiers belonging to General Vlasov’s Russian army.

At the beginning of July 1945 the family discovered that Nina was stranded near Hof. After she had been taken into the initial investigative custody in July 1944 in the Berlin Police Presidium on Alexanderplatz, she had been taken to Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women, to an annex kept by the Gestapo.

For the birth of her fifth child Konstanze on 17 January 1945, Nina was brought to a maternity home in Frankfurt an der Oder. Soon after the birth she was forced to leave by the rapid advance of the Soviet army, and evacuated by hospital train. She and Konstanze picked up an infection and were therefore taken under false names and with Gestapo guards to a Catholic hospital in Potsdam.

After recovering their health they were escorted by a Feldgendarme – a military policeman – to join the other Sippenhaft prisoners, who were at that time in Schönberg. The policeman, who considered such a ‘political’ duty beneath him, wanted to go home, and so simply deposited Nina and Konstanze in a village near Hof after obtaining from Nina a written certificate that he had more then performed his duty. Shortly afterwards, the Americans arrived in the village and Nina, quite by chance, became the first of the Sippenhaft prisoners to be liberated.

The family were only able to return to their home in Bamberg in 1953. The house had been requisitioned by the SS, then vacated as the Americans approached and damaged the property with artillery fire and plundering. Nina had to fight hard not only to bring up her five children, but also to rebuild the house and to regain legal possession of it. The family jewels were first stolen by the Gestapo, and then by members of the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). They were only returned from the US in 1948.

Berthold chose to pursue a career in the army. Not surprisingly, he has been asked many times why he decided to become a soldier. The answer he has given was that ‘it was not for reasons of tradition, as we are not a particularly military family. It was also not because of my father; rather in spite of him, as naturally I knew that I would spend my entire career in his shadow. I simply thought that it was the right career for me, and that the burden of bearing the Stauffenberg name would be worth it. I was not disappointed. I have never regretted my choice of career for a single day.’

It is true, however, that he came to hate the awkward question, ‘Are you your father’s son?’ but he has said, ‘I learned to live with it. And I must also live with 20 July. Contrary to the official “line” at the beginning this was by no means uncontroversial. No one ever uttered any criticism to my face, but naturally I heard nevertheless of plenty of outspoken mess-room discussions. Among other things there were discussions about the Oath of Allegiance that all soldiers had had to swear and which in 1934 had been changed from general loyalty to the Reich to personal allegiance to Hitler. Some used the argument that they had been bound by this oath in good faith, but with others I had the suspicion that they used it in order to have an alibi to excuse them from taking part [in the conspiracy].’

In 1999 the family were unexpectedly forced to confront the past again: the Sword of Honour, awarded to Claus in 1929 by the head of the army for being the best cavalry graduate of that year, reappeared. It had vanished after 20 July 1944, probably looted by the Berlin Gestapo. It then found its way by an unknown route to the hands of Max Reimann, the post-war chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). By the 1960s it was in the hands of the chairman of the (West) German Communist Party (DKP), Herbert Mies.

The Sword of Honour, awarded to Claus von Stauffenberg in 1929 by the Chief of Staff of the army for being the best cavalry graduate of that year.

Mies said he had never been able to locate a single member of the Stauffenberg family to return the sword. He eventually found such an opportunity, and at last the sword found its way back to Nina who treasured it as a precious memento until her death in 2006. It is now on display in the Stauffenberg exhibition in Stuttgart’s Old Castle.

Berthold has explained that, ‘In hindsight, the months from July 1944 to June 1945 marked me indelibly for the rest of my life, and for this reason I would not have missed them. The same goes for the materially even more difficult post-war time. Like most of my contemporaries, especially the war orphans, these times taught us the seriousness of life through our own eyes in a manner that today’s younger generation – on whom I would never wish it – must fail to understand.

‘We certainly grew up faster, and were continually aware that we had to stand on our own two feet rather earlier than normal. And that we did, yet from all of us something upright grew. I have been ever thankful since 1945 above all for one thing: that practically all our family were finally and happily re-united. We certainly mourned my grandmother who died in a concentration camp, even though she had never borne the name Stauffenberg; and also grieved for my shot-down aviator aunt, but we still came through it all. Among our regular evening prayers was the sentence: “Dear Lord, we thank thee that thou has reunited us again.”’