Henning von tresckow biography of william
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My life is solely devoted to worry, to working for my people. Faced with this awkward information, one must struggle to remember that Henning had a long-term aim, which would have been impossible to achieve had he been removed from his staff post—and if he had refused to sign the order, he would probably have been removed straight away. He finally resolved it by turning against Hitler.
There were thousands of young officers who got all the way through the war—or anyway all the way to an early death—without realizing that the Jewish business was at the very least a mistake. For a time he sympathized with National Socialism, but later opposed the Hitler régime and became the heart and soul of the conspiracy among army officers fighting on the eastern front.
After July 20, 1944, the Gestapo included several of the young aristocratic officers on their list of conspirators who had confessed to having rebelled because of Nazi policies towards the Jews. The only reason the bomb did not go off was that the Czech-made fuse was of a type sensitive to temperature. He knew that the coup d’état scheduled to follow the July attempt was so sketchily organized that it would probably come apart even if Hitler was killed, but he thought the attempt should go ahead because the sacrifice would mean something in itself.
He had a right to say so.
They knew how to talk freely to one another. We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it. Nor had he always been in the background. He had been plugging away at them since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, and had been winning the allegiance of the junior officers since well before that.
Before the starting whistle blew in June of that year, he had recruited Schlabrendorff, Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff, Hans Graf von Hardenberg and Berndt von Kleist. After the plot failed, Claus von Stauffenberg, who delivered the bomb to Hitler’s forward headquarters, was the name popularly associated with the attempt; but really Henning, the mastermind in the background, was the man who mattered.
He was awarded the German Cross. A baritone aria on the theme of “Let the Russians freeze first” would make a mess of Act One.
Henning von Tresckow
Generalmilitary
German General who was one of the leaders of the July 1944 plot against Hitler. On March 13, 1943, only a month after the Stalingrad defeat, Henning got a bomb on the four-engined Focke-Wulf Condor carrying Hitler back from Smolensk to Rastenburg in East Prussia.
He was one of the main organizers of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in Smolensk on March 13, 1943 when a disguised package bomb was placed on the Führer's plane, which failed to explode due to a faulty detonator. Superfically, he had all the characteristics of the ideal hero. Most of the names were from the Almanach de Gotha, and some of them had a romantic notion of making peace in the west so that the more dangerous enemy could be fought in the east: but on the eve of the invasion of Russia they were all capable of realizing that the most dangerous enemy was a single German.
For an opera libretto, Henning’s conversations with the young officers would provide tempting opportunities for duets, trios, quartets and so on, with the additional attraction that everyone was in Wehrmacht uniform, with no SS insignia in sight: a stage full of fresh-faced idealism.
His family members faced repression as a result.
In modern Germany, von Tresckow is considered a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, and a barracks of the Bundeswehr is named in his honor.