Nazi heroes we should honour: Anton Gill argues that the courage of German officers 50 years ago should not be diminished by the rivalries of today's politicians

TOMORROW the Germans will commemorate an act of heroism by a young colonel of the General Staff exactly 50 years ago. On 20 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb hidden in his briefcase during a strategy meeting at Hitler's East Prussian headquarters. The attempt failed and the coup that should have followed was stillborn. By midnight, von Stauffenberg had been executed in the courtyard of army headquarters in Berlin. In the following months, the Gestapo made 7,000 arrests, and of that number at least 4,500 had been executed by the end of the war. The show trials went on even as the Allies were bombing Berlin into the ground.

The anniversary comes at a sensitive time for German and European politics. It closely follows the commemoration of D-Day, the exclusion of the Germans from which threatened to cause diplomatic ructions, and will be followed in November by the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russians. It comes, too, when Germany has just taken over the presidency of the European Union, and has seen her candidate for the presidency of the European Commissionvetoed by Britain.

The Second World War still casts a shadow over relations between the countries of Europe, though the politicians who now occupy centre stage were - with the exception of Francois Mitterrand - children then. Helmut Kohl was in the Hitler Youth - but membership of that organisation became compulsory and does not automatically tar a person with the Nazi brush.

While it is not true, as some maintain now, that there were no Germans who were not Nazis, the mass of Germans did support Nazism, though it is not easy to explain why. Nazism had some good domestic policies; Hitler's first years in power were strewn with apparently effortless successes. That he was ruining the economy, few knew: that he was bent on a war that would be suicidal for Germany, few Germans perceived. This is to say nothing of the euthanasia programme, or the cruel policies against the Jews that would lead to the Final Solution.

But nothing in this is easy to explain, or even understand, and too often memories of the war are expressed in black-and-white terms. Too often, also, is the past judged in terms of the present.

Again, contrary to what is often thought now, there was also a resistance to Hitler in Germany. It was many-faceted in a police state rife with informers and it was small. The Communists and the Social Democrats made the mistake of seeing in each other the real enemy and underestimating Hitler and the power of Nazism.

Soon after seizing power, Hitler was able to outlaw all political opposition. The KPD and the SPD fought on, underground - their weapons were pamphlets and occasional acts of sabotage; during the war, they continued a limited effect from exile. From 1933 on, though, thousands of intellectuals chose to leave. Staying on to resist seemed futile - such action would only lead to arrest. A by-product of Nazism was the great hole carved in Europe's intellectual tradition - to America's gain. Europe has not yet recovered from that.

The Church stood up against Hitler - at least, many heroic clergymen, both Catholic and Protestant, did so - but the body of the Church was ultimately as cowed as the body of the people. There was student resistance - notably represented in the pamphleteering campaign of the 'White Rose' group at Munich University. Hans and Sophie Scholl, aged 24 and 21, its leaders, were tried in February 1943, as American bombs fell on the city, and guillotined on the day of their sentence. The Nazi machine continued in its savagery long after everyone knew that the war was lost.

Of the German armed forces, the air force was a new organisation and essentially Nazi-controlled; the navy had shot its revolutionary bolt in 1918 and 1919. The only body with the executive means to carry on positive resistance to the Nazis was the army, which stood to one side of politics, but saw itself as the ultimate custodian of Germany. Its officers were traditionalists, but not stupid. Its General Staff was the envy of the world.

Yet Hitler managed to subdue it, too. By a system of patronage and bribery, threats and cajolery, he soon had senior officers eating out of his hand. He promoted young men who had grown up and been educated under Nazism, so that they would outnumber and dilute the old Officer Corps. Out of 2,000 generals, only 22 were positively involved in the resistance, and many of them had already been pensioned off.

The men at the heart of the July plot to dislodge Hitler were a diverse group. Ludwig Beck, the eminence grise, was a retired Chief of the General Staff; von Stauffenberg was a young aristocrat (36 in 1944) and brilliant officer. In the secret service, Admiral Canaris, its head, protected the activities of General Hans Oster, who warned the Belgian and Dutch military attaches of Hitler's plan to invade their countries. Had they reacted, tens of thousands of German soldiers would have died, but Oster felt this would have been the lesser of two evils. A coup planned for September 1938 foundered when Neville Chamberlain gave way at Munich and Hitler returned home smelling of diplomatic roses. Many wavering generals sided with him then.

Among civilians of the resistance, the social-democrat journalist and politician Julius Leber, the lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi and the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, were three of the political luminaries lost to a post-war Germany. Their policies and hopes may seem unrealistic now, but they did look forward to a European community with Germany at its head - a fact that requires no comment here.

And yet the commemoration of the von Stauffenberg plot is muddied. Frank Stern, a Tel Aviv historian, spoke recently at a symposium in Potsdam about the 20 July assassination attempt. His stance was that there had been no German resistance to Hitler. 'The only hope for the Jews was left-wing anti-fascism.' The 20 July plot was carried out by members of the 'Generals' caste' - war criminals and anti-Semites. Stern intended to be provocative; but his audience of former East Germans was quite relieved to hear the 'conservative' resistance lambasted - however foolishly. The Communist resistance has often been neglected.

Since reunification, however, there have been suggestions that Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht be celebrated alongside von Stauffenberg and Beck. Pieck and Ulbricht spent the war in Russia and were to a great extent pawns of the Soviet regime; but they did oppose Nazism. One of von Stauffenberg's sons, the lawyer and MEP Franz Ludwig Graf von Stauffenberg, has objected to the inclusion, in the permanent exhibition devoted to the resistance in Berlin, of the National Committee for Free Germany. This was an anti-Nazi organisation formed during the war among German PoWs and encouraged and developed by the Russians with the aim of creating a post-war Communist Germany - a goal in which they half-succeeded. These men, the argument runs, were not true patriots in the sense that von Stauffenberg and Beck were. In what was East Berlin, the organisation of former Communist freedom fighters would not agree. Many of them were members of the National Committee for Free Germany; and there was nothing unpatriotic about their contribution to the German Democratic Republic, which was as much a German nation as the Federal Republic.

Now there is a contretemps over whether Chancellor Kohl or the new President, Roman Herzog, will make the main speech at the commemoration. Kohl, remembering the popularity that accrued to Richard Weizsacker (himself the son of a resistance politician) at the 40th anniversary, wants to make the speech himself. Convention awards the right to Herzog.

'The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.' It is sad to think that we cannot put aside present political considerations and partisan interests to honour a group of men who risked everything in a struggle they knew had almost no chance of success, but which they pursued to show the world that there were Germans willing to give their lives to bring down a regime that dishonoured not only Germany but humanity.

(Photograph omitted)

The author's book, 'An Honourable Defeat: a history of the German resistance to Hitler', is published by Heinemann, pounds 16.99.