Top German bishop salutes men who tried to kill Hitler

Germany's main Protestant bishop paid tribute yesterday to the dissident army officers who tried to blow up Adolf Hitler in an unsuccessful coup 60 years ago, calling them an example to the country.

The sermon was part of the buildup of anniversary events honouring Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg and other high-ranking soldiers from the German aristocracy, who were executed in Berlin after the July 20, 1944, briefcase bombing.

"Our society, and also our church, struggled for a long time to honour the plans and the daring" of the Nazi resistance, Lutheran Bishop Wolfgang Huber said at the Berlin Cathedral.

"Those who sacrificed their lives during those days did not die in vain. Their example lives on."

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is to lead an official commemoration tomorrow of the best-known attempt to assassinate Hitler. The 60th anniversary has generated a swell of public interest for months in advance, driven by a new feature film on Col. Stauffenberg, plus books and TV documentaries.

The coverage has also confronted younger Germans with the uncomfortable fact that even though the Nazis surrendered at the end of the Second World War, many ordinary citizens had viewed the plotters as traitors just a year earlier.

Historians have questioned the conspirators' motives, saying they were more concerned about saving Germany than the millions of Jews who died at the Nazis' hands. But Bishop Huber said Germany should be proud of the "men and women of July 20" because they stood up for universal values.

"They saw: Where remaining idle would result in complicity, resistance is an ethical duty. All of them, in their own way, took a stand in the cause of human dignity."

Mr. Schroeder will honour the plotters at the former Nazi army headquarters, where Col. Stauffenberg and three others were executed by firing squad. Hours earlier, Hitler had survived the bomb he had planted at the Fuehrer's lair in East Prussia, now in Poland. Two generals were given the chance to take their own lives, one did.

A ceremony also is planned at Berlin's Ploetzensee prison, where the Nazis hanged some of the plotters on meat hooks.

The bomb killed five people. Col. Stauffenberg, who had left the building before the explosion and watched from outside, was convinced of the mission's success and raced back to Berlin's army headquarters to help manage the transfer of power. As word spread that Hitler was alive, the coup crumbled.