Germans Mark Glimmer of Nazi Resistance

In the stone courtyard of the Nazi army headquarters where four officers were executed after a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the German government on Wednesday celebrated the one day in a year of World War II anniversaries in which this country could take pride.

This was to be nothing less than reunified Germany’s “Shining Day,” as the Berliner Morgenpost called the 50th anniversary of July 20, 1944, when a young colonel of the General Staff, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, placed a bomb in Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters that injured the Fuehrer but failed to kill him.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl, excluded from last month’s Allied D-day ceremonies, personally led the nationally televised commemoration of the “other Germany”--the courageous individuals who actively opposed Nazi tyranny.

“July 20th became the epitome of German resistance against National Socialist barbarism,” Kohl said solemnly. “The men and women of July 20th helped us Germans to find our way back into the community of free peoples soon after the war.”

Yet, as usual when Germany addresses its tortured history head-on, the shine was off the day long before sunrise, as controversy and passionate polemics overshadowed the celebration.

Kohl was accused of exploiting the occasion for his reelection campaign by giving the commemorative speech himself--instead of allowing the president to do so as on the 40th anniversary--and by excluding the opposition Social Democrats, who were among those most persecuted by Hitler, along with Jews, Gypsies and Communists.

At the same time, on television and in the national press, the country engaged in an intense debate over who should be considered the rightful heirs of German resistance: Could conservative officers be heroes if they had initially supported Hitler’s Nazism and did not turn against him until the war was all but lost? What about the Communist opposition--why should it be included among the honorable resistance if members fought from the safety of exile and turned out to be Stalinists?

Each side accused the other’s resistance fighters of having been undemocratic and, therefore, ineligible for hero status.

And, meanwhile, there was one sad, indisputable fact underlying this occasion: The resistance had been minute. There was no mass movement against Hitler. Rather, most Germans supported the Nazis or at least went along with them. Few had the will or courage to fight; those who did were ineffectual.

The “other Germany” is perhaps best illustrated in a sepia-toned photograph at the German Resistance Memorial Center in the old army headquarters. The photo shows row after row of shipyard workers in 1936 with arms raised in a Nazi salute; hidden among them is a lone soul whose arms are folded across his chest in defiance.

To the government’s credit, the photograph leads its traveling exhibition titled “Against Hitler: German Resistance to National Socialism, 1933-1945,” which opened this week at the Library of Congress in Washington. The exhibit will move to Los Angeles in October.

“We are not trying to exonerate Germany or to say we were a people of resistance,” said Ekkehard Klausa, who oversees the memorial for the state of Berlin. “Certainly we were not. But you have to see both sides. July 20th is a symbol of the other Germany. . . . Tens of thousands of people went to concentration camps early on (for their opposition), were driven into exile or were members of the resistance.”

The center’s permanent exhibit includes the range of opposition: conservatives and Communists, Protestants and Catholics.

Most controversial among rightists is an exhibit on the resistance-in-exile. It includes two photographs of the former East German Stalinist leaders Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht.

But the memorial primarily emphasizes the July 20th attack, which Klausa says was the most important single act of resistance, although those officers also represented a minority. Out of 2,000 generals, only 22 were certainly involved in the resistance.

On July 20, Stauffenberg, 36, who had lost an eye and his right hand on the Russian front, planted a briefcase full of explosives in Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters, where the Fuehrer and officers were gathered for a military briefing.

Stauffenberg had time to activate only half of the explosives he brought with him; the bag was pushed under a solid oak table that protected Hitler from the blast. Four people died and the room was destroyed, but Hitler lived.

Stauffenberg rushed back to Berlin to organize a coup, but that effort failed. SS troops soon surrounded the army headquarters, and, shortly after midnight, Stauffenberg was executed along with three co-conspirators. In the attack’s aftermath, about 200 other people were executed and 5,000 were arrested.

Some historians have argued that the officers’ plot does not deserve such honor since the men were essentially authoritarians and anti-Semites who believed in an imperial Germany and supported Hitler until the country’s defeat at Stalingrad. Two days before the ceremony, unidentified protesters occupied the memorial center saying the tribute to military officers who had been Nazis fed German nationalist sentiments.

Meanwhile, Stauffenberg’s son, Franz Ludwig, argued that Communists such as Ulbricht and Pieck should be excised from the memorial because they were “the worst scoundrels of German history” and that his father did not deserve to be in “the ugly company of tyrants.”

Organizers of the memorial argue that active opposition or resistance to Hitler alone qualifies Germans to be in the memorial, not their democratic credentials.

But Kohl disagreed in the speech Wednesday that is likely to fuel the national polemic. Before a largely conservative crowd, including many German aristocrats, Kohl painted Stauffenberg and his cohorts as forefathers of German democracy, pursuers of truth and justice. And he argued that Communists had no place in the historical resistance memorial.

“To entirely understand the lasting meaning of German resistance for the present and future, we may not limit ourselves to the question of what it was aimed against,” he said. “We have to ask ourselves what the people who took part in it were for. The inheritance lies in the what for.”