SECRET GERMANY: Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, Random House, London, 1994. Paperback, 450 pages, £8.99. ISBN 9780099490061

I remember as a young National Service soldier in Berlin learning about the abortive plot against Hitler, and visiting the Plötzensee prison where many of the conspirators were hanged. For me then the personal qualities of such a man as Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg seemed like a blazing beacon of moral rectitude in a sea of evil, madness and fanaticism. What I only learned later was the very significant extent of the resistance to the regime of the Third Reich from within Germany itself, a resistance that is, from a variety of motives, still hardly spoken of in some quarters.
    Baigent and Leigh, in a work which, on the surface, is quite unlike others they have written, explore the roots of the greatest of the many conspiracies to rid Germany of its fanatical dictator. Stauffenberg and his brothers and other co-conspirators, as protégés and disciples of the greatest German poet of his age, Stefan George, came to know, to understand and to espouse a nobility of spirit and a morality, so far removed from the evils of the dictatorship, as to be unrecognisable as being of the same nation. Goethe, over two hundred years before, had eulogised his hero Götz, thereby ‘rescuing the memory of one of the most noble Germans’; so have these authors ensured that the code of honour of a great hero will not be forgotten.
    One of the consequences of the failed plot was that accusations of foolhardiness of action and amateurishness and naivety of approach were made, but at the end we are left humbled in admiration at such heroism and selflessness. Even when the conspirators knew that there was no hope and that they would surely die, they comported themselves with that nobility of spirit and moral certainty that their cause was just. As the authors point out, it was not important what had happened at half past three on this or that afternoon, but rather that the spirit which generated the attempt to right the wrong was a live spirit, and not to be so easily extinguished. An inspiring and uplifting account of true heroism in the face of stupendous odds.
    Julian Rees