Scholz honored the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid tribute to the conspirators who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944.
The attack was organized and paid for by Wehrmacht officer Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.
“78 years ago, the men and women around Colonel Stauffenberg risked their lives to overthrow Hitler’s regime. I admire their courage and the courage of all those who stood up to the Nazis. Their sacrifices force us to always stand in defense of democracy,” Scholz wrote on Twitter.
The head of the opposition Christian Democrats, Friedrich Mertz, also tweeted that the anniversary of the attack “reminds us that we must stick to our values”.
Stauffenberg wanted to end World War II by killing Hitler. He brought a bag with a bomb to a meeting at the headquarters in Poland, the so-called Wolf’s lair, and left it under the conference table.
He managed to get out of the meeting and did not know that one of the participants then moved the bag – this was enough to protect the criminal from the direct impact of the explosion and survive the attack.
The coup attempt in Berlin also failed and the war dragged on for almost another year, until the following May.
Stauffenberg was shot with three accomplices the same evening in Berlin, and the purge and killing of a wider circle of conspirators took weeks.
In total, the Nazis executed about 90 conspirators and their sympathizers.