dream_labyrinth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dream_labyrinth) wrote2004-07-20 11:51 am
dream_labyrinth) wrote2004-07-20 11:51 am
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patriots - July 20th, 1944
60 years ago today, a group of officers in the German army tried to kill Adolf Hitler. As many others who tried before, they failed and were executed.
Our newly elected president (yeah, Germany has a president, too, even though the head of the executive part of the government is our chancellor) said a few very interesting things in his speech about that event. He considers these men to be patriots, and I agree.
They were well educated men who loved their country. Some of them had agreed with Hitler for quite some time before deciding against him. Their actions were based on their moral values and ethics, telling them that what Hitler was doing was wrong. Still they felt bad about killing a person, even though they were soldiers and you'd think that wasn't a problem for them.
There are voice recordings of the trials that tells all there is to know about the officers and about the nazis. The judge, Freissler, was accusing them of high treason, and these men tried to explain what had brought them to their decision, unable to understand that this so-called judge didn't care, that it didn't matter what they said as they had been sentenced to death long before the trial started anyway.
The officers were brave men, but I think they lacked something all these suicide bombers in Israel have. Not the will to die for what they thought was right, but a certain ruthlessness and the disregard of other people's lives. They wanted to get rid of Hitler, and to kill as few other people as possible.
The other thing that comes into my mind is this: what kind of guardian angel does a man like Hitler have to survive all the attempts to kill him? Sometimes he leaves a room just minutes before the bomb blows it up, sometimes he's there but doesn't get hurt. There is no logical explanation for it. It doesn't make any sense at all.
But then again, it kept people from making a martyr out of him. And the fact that he killed himself in the end, leaving the mess he had created behind for others to clean up, not giving a damn about the country he had lead to destruction, says it all. I just found a line in an article in the "Zeit", I've tried to translate it as best as I could:
Hitler was - by the criminal code - the biggest criminal, his state a state of injustice. And there is no high treason possible against a state of injustice.
Our newly elected president (yeah, Germany has a president, too, even though the head of the executive part of the government is our chancellor) said a few very interesting things in his speech about that event. He considers these men to be patriots, and I agree.
They were well educated men who loved their country. Some of them had agreed with Hitler for quite some time before deciding against him. Their actions were based on their moral values and ethics, telling them that what Hitler was doing was wrong. Still they felt bad about killing a person, even though they were soldiers and you'd think that wasn't a problem for them.
There are voice recordings of the trials that tells all there is to know about the officers and about the nazis. The judge, Freissler, was accusing them of high treason, and these men tried to explain what had brought them to their decision, unable to understand that this so-called judge didn't care, that it didn't matter what they said as they had been sentenced to death long before the trial started anyway.
The officers were brave men, but I think they lacked something all these suicide bombers in Israel have. Not the will to die for what they thought was right, but a certain ruthlessness and the disregard of other people's lives. They wanted to get rid of Hitler, and to kill as few other people as possible.
The other thing that comes into my mind is this: what kind of guardian angel does a man like Hitler have to survive all the attempts to kill him? Sometimes he leaves a room just minutes before the bomb blows it up, sometimes he's there but doesn't get hurt. There is no logical explanation for it. It doesn't make any sense at all.
But then again, it kept people from making a martyr out of him. And the fact that he killed himself in the end, leaving the mess he had created behind for others to clean up, not giving a damn about the country he had lead to destruction, says it all. I just found a line in an article in the "Zeit", I've tried to translate it as best as I could:
Hitler was - by the criminal code - the biggest criminal, his state a state of injustice. And there is no high treason possible against a state of injustice.