On 20 July 1944, a 36-year-old German army officer, Col Claus Schenk
Graf von Stauffenberg, arrived at a heavily guarded complex hidden in a forest
in East Prussia. His mission was to kill Adolf Hitler.
The Wolfsschanze, or Wolf's Lair, was Hitler's secret headquarters on
the Eastern Front. Stauffenberg was attending the daily briefing between the
Fuhrer and Germany's high command - but in his briefcase, he carried a bomb.
"We were standing around and Hitler came in, and then the
conference began," recalled German army officer Gen Walter Warlimont in a
BBC interview in 1967.
"Suddenly the door opened again, and I happened to turn around, and
I saw that a colonel came in... he made a very deep impression on me, because
his right eye was covered by a black patch and one arm was amputated, and he
stood there quite erect, and he seemed to me to be the picture of a classical
soldier."
"Hitler turned around and looked at him without any kind of
benevolence and [Gen] Keitel introduced him."
Stauffenberg was an aristocratic, Catholic, career army officer.
"Everyone says my father was extremely good looking - dark hair, blue
eyes, slightly wavy hair, tall. He was a very cheerful man, he used to laugh a
lot and we thought he was absolutely wonderful," says his son, Berthold
Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who's now 80 years old.
In 1943, Stauffenberg was badly injured while serving in Tunisia - he'd
lost an eye, his right hand, and two fingers from his left hand.
"You know wounds were so commonplace at the time and having lost an
arm, having lost an eye, was quite normal. It was really a relief that he was
alive," says Berthold... To be continued tomorrow..
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