Operation Valkyrie Remembered

There have been a number of articles commemorating the 60th anniversery of the July 20 plot by a group of German military officers to assassinate Adolph Hitler (Reuters, AFP, AP).

The plot is not remembered because it was unique (there were more than 300 attempts on Hitler's life), but because it came the closest to success. From the AFP story:

It was on July 20, 1944 that high-ranking Nazi officer Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg carried a bomb in a briefcase into a meeting with Hitler at the dictator's war headquarters in East Prussia.

He placed it on the floor before leaving the room, saying he had to make a phone call. He flew immediately back to Berlin, where he and co-conspirators hoped to stage a coup.

But an officer moved the briefcase behind a leg of the solid oak table at which Hitler was studying maps, saving Hitler's life. The explosion killed five of the 24 people in the room but the Fuehrer was only slightly injured.

Such stories of German resistance to the Nazis, especially resistance within the establishment and the military, should serve as a reminder that the Nazi period was not a monolith of hate and prejudice, but a complex time when emotions were manipulated by a party employing sophisticated propaganda and techniques of social control. One can imagine the effect of an Iraqi Stauffenberg bringing a like-rigged briefcase into a meeting with Saddam Hussein. Such an event would have been better than a CIA-planned straight-out assassination, for as we are now seeing, much of the violence may have been avoided if the coup came from within rather than an occupation from without.