Germany remembers bid to assassinate Hitler

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Tuesday hailed German Nazi officers who tried to assassinate Hitler 60 years ago for their huge legacy which helped spawn a peaceful Europe with common values.
"On July 20, 1944, another Germany showed its face," Schroeder said at the commemoration in the former Nazi war ministry. "It is therefore one of the most important days in the history of the new Germany. It is an enormous legacy."
The high-profile ceremony on the anniversary of the attack reflects a shift of opinion in Germany, where the conspirators were long seen as traitors by a battered people in the post-war period.
Sixty years ago, a group of Nazi officers planted a bomb under a table in Adolf Hitler's eastern headquarters in East Prussia, which detonated as he was studying maps.
Hitler escaped with slight injuries because an officer had moved the briefcase with the bomb behind a leg of the oak table.
The main plotter of the attack, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, was present when the blast occurred. Assuming Hitler was dead, he flew back to Berlin to lead a coup. Betrayed, he was executed the same night. More than 100 of his co-conspirators were shot or slowly tortured to death, and thousands arrested.
Schroeder quoted Stauffenberg himself, who warned "whoever dares to do anything must realise that he will go down in German history as a traitor".
"I think that the fact the attackers were prepared to sacrifice themselves in very difficult conditions underlines once again the human and political enormity of their actions," Schroeder said.
"In the totalitarian society of National Socialism, it was not possible to create a wider, patriotic popular resistance."
But Schroeder cautioned against comparing German efforts to oust Hitler to resistance movements in France, the Netherlands and other countries occupied by the Nazis.
"The German resistance had to fight against the leadership of their own country," he said at the Bendlerblock, where von Stauffenberg was shot and which today houses part of the defence ministry.
Schroeder said next month's anniversary of the August 1, 1944 Warsaw uprising against Nazi occupation of Poland was also a key date in the eventual fall of Hitler.