Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member - Softcover

Boeselager, Philip Freiher, Von; Fehrenbach, Florence; Fehrenbach, Jerome

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307454975 ISBN 13: 9780307454973

Verlag: Vintage, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

When the Second World War broke out, Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, then 25-years-old, fought enthusiastically for Germany as a cavalry officer. But after discovering Nazi crimes, von Boeselager’s patriotism quickly turned to disgust, and he joined a group of conspirators who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. In this elegant but unflinching memoir, von Boeselager gives voice to the spirit of the small but determined band of men who took a stand against the Third Reich in what culminating in the failed “Valkyrie” plot—one of the most fascinating near misses of twentieth-century history.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1917, the fifth of nine children. He was raised with a liberal education, strong moral and religious values, and a love of hunting. In 1938, he enlisted and was placed in the cavalry regiment. He rose to the rank of commanding lieutenant, only to join the German resistance in 1941. His participation in Valkyrie went undetected, and he lived to be the last surviving member of the plot. In 2003, France awarded von Boeselager the Legion of Honor. He died on May 1, 2008.

Florence Fehrenbach is the granddaughter of Karl von Wendt, a coconspirator and close friend of Philipp von Boeselager. She and her husband, Jérôme Fehrenbach, convinced Boeselager, at the age of eighty-nine, to recount his experience.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Taste for Freedom My brother Georg was born in August 1915, I in September 1917. We were the fourth and fifth in a family of nine children. My family had settled in Heimerzheim, in the Rhineland, in 1910, leaving our old home in Bonn, which in the eighteenth century had been one of the residences of Prince-Archbishop Clemens August of Bavaria. With its  network of canals and moats, its great central building—white, gabled, and flanked by corner towers—it stood on an island reached by a succession of bridges, like a summer palace in ancient China. Its immense grounds were left in a half-wild state where deer peacefully grazed and the familiar mixture of mystery and nature on the doorstep made Heimerzheim seem to us like a fairy-tale castle. Nothing was easier there than to retreat into a secret world. Imagination and children’s games could hardly have found a more propitious place to develop. We had a liberal upbringing at Heimerzheim, something that always surprised the guests who passed through—and they were many, since our mother be-lieved that those who had the good fortune to live in a great residence should keep an open house. But for all that, our upbringing was not permissive. Life was very clearly structured, framed by a few strictly defined moral principles: for example, it was forbidden to torture animals. Within this framework, we enjoyed a great deal of latitude. My father, Albert von Boeselager, was a cultured man of letters. His mother’s side of the family hailed from Brussels, and he considered the European nobility a unitary body. He hunted all over the Continent and spoke four or five languages. Because of this, he attached particular importance to learning how to make proper use of freedom—and the capacity for Christian discernment that was for him its corollary—and also of hunting. Georg received his first rifle as a Christmas present in 1928, when he was only thirteen years old. At fifteen, my brother’s list of kills already included some 150 head of game. His passion was such that he managed to sneak a disassembled rifle into our boarding school—with my complicity, I must admit. When Father Strasser made the rounds of the bedrooms to check the students’ bags, we were forced once again to engage in a ruse. Each of us slipped part of the rifle into his shorts—Georg the barrel and I the stock—while the inspection took place. The maneuver was acrobatic, be-cause it was strictly forbidden to put our hands in our pockets, but we somehow had to prevent the parts of the rifle from slipping out. It was hunting that truly shaped our behavior in nature, and profoundly influenced our way of life. Georg, in particular, learned to find his way in the forest even before the sun came up; to creep up to within a few meters of a woodcock without scaring the bird away; to slip through the bushes without making the leaves rustle so as not to frighten the deer; to disappear into the vegetation, perfectly camouflaged; to wait patiently, silent and inactive; and to act at the right fraction of a second. In a word, hunting, practiced in a group or in the course of long solitary hikes, with that passion for animals that marks true nature lovers, made Georg a real Indian. He remained one. He was later to find this training ex-tremely valuable. Hunting was not only a way of hardening the body. It prepared us, without our being aware of it, for the laws of life, for the struggles of existence: saving one’s strength, fleeing from an adversary, recovering, knowing how to use cunning, adapting to the enemy, assessing risk. We learned how to keep our sangfroid in the tumult of dogs excited by the battle, how to strike the throat of a stag or a boar in the coup de grâce and look without revulsion at the dark red fluid bubbling out of mortal wounds. We did not shiver upon seeing the brown trickle running down the pale pelt of a young deer, or the bloody foam staining the chops of an animal exhausted by the chase. We withstood the glassy stare of the dead animal and, finally, collected these bloody, damp trophies, the spolia opima of modern times. Hunting also accustomed us to the laws of violent death, internalized the notion of an offering. Yes, hunting was a preparation for the supreme sacrifice—the sacrifice of life. The education we received at Godesberg did not differ from what we were taught at Heimerzheim, which I would call relaxed Catholicism. My family was profoundly Catholic, with a centuries-old history linked to that of the German Catholic princes. In the seventeenth century, our ancestors, the Heyden-Belderbusches, from whom we had inherited the Heimerzheim castle, had been ministers of the powerful archbishop of Cologne. During the same period, the Satzenhovens, from whom we had inherited the Kreuzberg estate, had served the prince electors of Mainz. As children, Georg and I were very close. Only two years apart, we were like Castor and Pollux—natural playmates, and accomplices in the same practical jokes. But this intimacy, which made us almost a separate unit among our siblings, did not prevent us from developing different qualities; nor did it diminish the natural ascendancy of the elder child over the younger. As a duo, we complemented each other. Georg was physically more robust, more athletic, more intuitive, and instinctively perceptive regarding people, situations, and things. I, on the other hand, was more reflective and analytical. Two anecdotes from our early childhood clearly show our difference in character. At Heimerzheim, the grounds were full of wild deer. The animals sometimes came quite close to the house. One day, our older brothers Antonius and Hermann, who were then not quite ten, were amusing themselves by throwing pebbles at one of the deer, trying to provoke it. Sitting behind a stone bench, Georg was watching carefully. The roebuck, suddenly responding to the little devils’ challenge, was about to attack. Georg reacted with lightning speed; all of five years old, he seized the rifle that Antonius had left leaning against the bench and shot at the animal. Ka-boom! Bowled over by the rifle’s recoil, Georg fell backward. Fortunately, he was not injured. But the explosion had frightened away the roebuck. As for me, when I was four years old I distinguished myself at a family dinner. Our cousin zu Stolberg-Stolberg had been seriously wounded in the head during the Great War. The surgeons had installed a silver plate on his skull to close the hole left by enemy fire, and he lived until the 1960s. I had heard about this extraordinary operation and wanted to see the result for myself. Climbing silently onto a chair, I leaned over my cousin’s head and began to examine, discreetly and carefully, the bald area where the precious metal shone. They say that I then cried, disappointed, “That’s not silver! There’s no hallmark!” As a reward for this impertinent observation, I received a couple of slaps. To tell the truth, our father never took much interest in his children’s scholastic progress. After several years of taking lessons at home, however, the boys had to be subjected to modern education. “School,” our father said, sighing, “is an obligation these days. It’s very boring, but you’ve got to do it!” So we were enrolled in the Aloïsius Jesuit secondary school in Godesberg, on the outskirts of Bonn. As it turned out, entering boarding school was not very traumatic. Heimerzheim was then less than an hour’s drive from the school. The Jesuit tuition at Aloïsius did not seek to train priests, but to reconcile the sacred and the profane in human beings, and to keep alive the flame of faith amid the chaos of the world. The practice of religion was not supposed to be an end in itself; it was intended to slip naturally into the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vintage
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307454975
• ISBN 13: 9780307454973
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 211
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien