Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Mrs. von Stauffenberg, rest in peace

Name sound familiar? It should. As a teenager, I found Col. von Stauffenberg a quasi-hero/moral touch-stone of mine. One of the first military benchmarks that forced me to think, "What would I have done in his situation?" I take them where I can find them. I don't know what happened to Mrs. von Stauffenberg and her children after the war, besides they managed to be brought back together.
Nina von Stauffenberg, the widow of the aristocratic Nazi army officer who tried to kill Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb, died. She was 92.

Her death was announced by Peter Kirchner, the mayor of Kirchlauter, in the southern state of Bavaria, where she lived. He gave no further details. Her husband, Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, led the failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, when a bomb was placed under a conference table. Four people died in the bombing, but an aide had moved the briefcase before it exploded, and Hitler was only superficially wounded.

Colonel von Stauffenberg and other members of the internal German resistance were shot and their families arrested by the Gestapo.

Ms. von Stauffenberg, who was pregnant with their fifth child at the time, was held in a camp in Frankfurt an der Oder, while the four other children were kept in an orphanage under false names. The children were reunited with their mother and new sibling after the war.
I hope Germany and her people gave them the respect their family deserves after the war. She had a long life, too bad her husband didn't.

No comments: