A Good German

The Early Life of Count Claus von Stauffenberg

Jettingen, 15 November 1907: boy twins are born to Caroline, Countess von Stauffenberg, at one of the family's several country properties in the province of Swabia in south-western Germany. Very unusually, this is the second set of male twins that the countess has borne her husband, Count Alfred von Stauffenberg, Lord Chamberlain to the king and queen of the small state of Württemberg. Just over two years before, on the Ides of March 1905, one year after their marriage, and on the anniversary of Julius Caesar's assassination, she had presented her husband with another pair: Alexander and Berthold. As they grew up, Alexander would be merry and musical, but smaller in stature and academically less gifted than his brilliant twin. Berthold, whose salient physical feature was his luminous, penetrating eyes, would grow up closer to his younger brother Claus in their good looks, keen intellects and in their courageous, mystically chivalrous temperaments.

Sadly, of Countess Stauffenberg's second set of twins, only one survived: Konrad died the day after his birth, but Claus grew to be the family's favoured Benjamin: tall, dark and handsome, with a natural ease of manner and grace that charmed almost all those who entered his circle. The Stauffenbergs were a noble family who had lived among the rolling wooded hills of Swabia for centuries, and traced their ancient lineage, and family name – Schenk – back to the Middle Ages.

The first record of a Stauffenberg – the name derives from a long-vanished Swabian fortress on a conical hill near Hechingen – is of a certain 'Hugo von Stophenberg' in 1262. From 1382, the family can be traced in an unbroken line of descent. The Stauffenbergs followed professions suitable to their status: there were many soldiers, including warriors who served on Germany's ever restive eastern borders with the Teutonic Knights or the Knights of St John. Other family members, however, showed more spiritual than temporal inclinations, and the family produced a number of clerics and university scholars. In Claus von Stauffenberg the two strains – worldly and mystic, military and ecclesiastic – united in one commanding, towering personality, just as he inherited his handyman father's practical capability, alongside his mother's contrasting dreamy literary tendencies.

In 1698 one Stauffenberg became a hereditary baron, and a century later in 1791, to reward the staunchly Catholic family's loyalty to the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors who reigned in Vienna, another Stauffenberg was promoted to become a hereditary imperial count (Graf). Claus von Stauffenberg's title of count had been granted to his great-grandfather, Baron Franz von Stauffenberg, by Ludwig II, the unstable, castle-building king of Bavaria, in 1874. Over the centuries the family had acquired extensive estates on the borders of Bavaria and Swabia, including Claus's birthplace, Jettingen, and the 'castle' (Schloss) – in reality a small manor house at Lautlingen in the 'Swabian Alps' hills – where the brothers would do much of their growing up. Their early childhood was spent at the Alte Schloss (Old Castle), an ancient royal residence in the heart of the Swabian capital Stuttgart, long the seat of their royal masters, the monarchs of Württemberg.

The boys' father, Alfred, was appointed Lord Chamberlain in 1908, a year after Claus's birth. Valued for his practical, no-nonsense skills in running the royal estates as well as his own – he was not above wallpapering a room, or taking the family gardens in hand personally – Alfred's position gave his family the run of the royal residences and a familiarity with casually superior aristocratic ways that were to become second nature to them. The boys affected a casual, even eccentric style of dress that in Claus's case would lead to charges of slovenliness when he joined the army. The attitude of not caring what others thought extended to the family table, where guests were astonished by their habit of communicating in growls and grunts rather than words, a private language they called 'signalling'.

Countess Caroline was a complete contrast to her gruff, unsentimental husband, both in her background and in her unworldly, languorous character. Where he was a south German and Catholic in religion, she was a Lutheran Protestant from Germany's harsh north-eastern coast. Born Caroline Üxküll-Gyllenbrand, she was descended from the notable soldier Field Marshal August von Gneisenau, who had galvanised Prussian resistance to Napoleon. Fluent in French and English, the countess loved art and the theatre, and enthused her three sons with her passion for literature and languages. All the boys were precocious learners, though their interests diverged: Alexander was silent, sedate and philosophical; Berthold fiercely intellectual and academic; whileClaus was the fearless warrior: riding horses and scrambling up rocks from an early age. When confronted with a problem Claus always sought a solution, even if it was a 'quick fix'. All three brothers loved the outdoor pursuits that came with their cultivation of the family estates: haymaking, riding, skiing and walking the high Alpine pastures came as easily to them as knocking on doors and running away did to city boys.

Lautlingen, 31 July 1914: the Stauffenberg family were enjoying their annual summer holidays at Schloss Lautlingen when the news came through that would disrupt their rural idyll – and that of the rest of Europe – forever. Germany was mobilising for war. Already, her forces were moving according to pre-arranged timetables, crowding onto trains carrying them across the Rhine into Belgium and France, an invasion that would bring Britain into the conflict, and turn a European struggle into the First World War. In the east huge Russian armies were moving into the Teutonic heartland of east Prussia – the area of the Masurian Lakes around Rastenburg that Claus von Stauffenberg would one day come to know all too well.

The following day, 1 August 1914, Countess von Stauffenberg decided to follow her husband back to the family apartments on the second floor of the Old Castle in Stuttgart. An air of excitement, even hysteria had swept over the nation. Even the sleepy Swabians, a people mocked by other Germans for their placid, cautious nature, were caught up in the prevailing excitement.

Within days came the first news of the fighting: on 13 August 1914 a cousin, Clemens von Stauffenberg, was reported killed;...