The German Protestant Evangelical Church Sunday honoured the memory of those involved in the unsuccessful July 20, 1944 bomb attack on Nazi leader Adolf Hitler with a special church service, at which the conspirators were described as models for future generations.
Aided by the aristocratic Claus von Stauffenberg a group of Wehrmacht (regular army) officers planted a bomb in a briefcase at a meeting with Hitler at the dictator's war headquarters in what was then East Prussia.
Von Stauffenberg 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 German dictator was only slightly injured.
Von Stauffenberg and three other plotters were executed by firing squad on the same night. Dozens more were sent to often agonisingly slow deaths.
"By their combat against National Socialism they stood up fearlessly against the false government," Wolfgang Huber, the president of the Evangelical Church in Germany, told a congregation at Berlin's cathedral.
"The conspiracy defended the dignity of human rights. It was staged by virtue of the ethical obligation to prevent the suffering of men of their time, the crimes against Jews and Russian civilians," he said.
"The rebels were not a uniform group, either in their origin or in their motivation. But together they recognised National Socialists were destroying human dignity."
The fact that the assassination attempt failed is regarded as one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.
Between July 20, 1944 and the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 killings in concentration camps continued, four million Germans, a million and half Soviet soldiers and more than 100,000 Allied servicemen lost their lives.
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