Philip Freiherr Von Boeselager - Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager
Valkyrie

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1917, the fifth of nine children. He was raised with a liberal education, strong moral and religious values, and a love of hunting. In 1938, he enlisted and was placed in the cavalry regiment. He rose to the rank of commanding lieutenant, only to join the German resistance in 1941. His participation in Valkyrie went undetected, and he lived to be the last surviving member of the plot. In 2003, France awarded von Boeselager the Legion of Honor. He died on May 1, 2008.

Florence Fehrenbach is the granddaughter of Karl von Wendt, a coconspirator and close friend of Philipp von Boeselager. She and her husband, Jrme Fehrenbach, convinced Boeselager, at the age of eighty-nine, to recount his experience.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2010

Translation copyright 2009 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in France as Nous voulions tuer Hitler: Le dernier survivant du complot du 20 juillet 1944 by Perrin, Paris, in 2008. Copyright 2008 by Perrin. This translation originally published in Great Britain in slightly different form as Valkyrie: The Plot to Kill Hitler, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a Hachette Livre UK company, London, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2009.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All images are from the authors personal collection, with the exception of three images: January 1942 image inside Hitlers headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia, Ullstein Bild; July 9, 2004, image of Philipp von Boeselager AFP (Agence France-Presse); July 20, 2004, image of Philipp with his wife, Rosy, AFP (Agence France-Presse).

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Boeselager, Philipp Leopold Antonius Hubertus, Freiherr von, 19172008.
[Nous voulions tuer Hitler. English]
Valkyrie / Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager with Florence and Jrme
Fehrenbach; translated by Steven Rendall.1st American ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: Paris : Perrin, c2008, under title Nous voulions tuer Hitler : le dernier survivant du complot du 20 juillet 1944.
1. Hitler, Adolf, 18891945Assassination attempt, 1944 (July 20). 2. GermanyPolitics and government19331945. 3. ConspiraciesGermanyHistory20th century. 4. Boeselager, Philipp Leopold Antonius Hebertus, Freiherr von, 19172008. 5. SoldiersGermanyBiography. I. Fehrenbach, Florence. II. Fehrenbach, Jrme. III. Title.
DD256.35.B6413 2009
943.0864092dc22
[B] 2008055539

eISBN: 978-0-307-77353-1

Author photograph AFP (Agence France-Presse)

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To my comrades in the Tresckow group, who made their motto

Etiam si omnes, ego non!

Philipp von Boeselager is a rare person. He can provide testimony about his experience and development that is precious for our time. That is the purpose of this book.

Were it not for a few traces of the wounds he received in combat, one would never guess that this old man who radiates an impression of inner peace experienced the interminable nightmare of the Second World Warand especially, that he lived in a state of perpetual anxiety resulting from his participation in the conspiracies against Hitler. To be a conspirator was to plan a crime. In the eyes of other Germans, it was to betray ones country and hasten its final destruction. It was, finally, to carry on a double life, a difficult task for a man who had been brought up only to be a horseman.

To mention Philipp von Boeselager here without also mentioning his brother Georg would make no sense. They were inseparable in their childhood games and in the rigors of the war, and they both carried the secret of the conspiracy. No doubt they did so out of a sense of duty, a way of being and thinking that is illustrated by an episodeanecdotal with respect to historythat will be recounted in the afterword.

Von Boeselager agreed to participate in long conversations about the period that provided the subject matter for this book. He does not like to talk about these matters. Every reference to them elicits memories that are almost always painful. Even after the war, his participation in the plots against Hitler was a difficult secret to bear. At first he did not even share this with his wife. But he is the last one of the conspirators who is still alive, and since Boeselager does not believe in chance, he knows that he has survived in order to testify.

Florence and Jrme Fehrenbach
Saint-Chaffrey, France,
August 16, 2007

My brother Georg was born in August 1915, I in September 1917. We were the fourth and fifth in a family of nine children.

My family had settled in Heimerzheim, in the Rhineland, in 1910, leaving our old home in Bonn, which in the eighteenth century had been one of the residences of Prince-Archbishop Clemens August of Bavaria.retreat into a secret world. Imagination and childrens games could hardly have found a more propitious place to develop.

We had a liberal upbringing at Heimerzheim, something that always surprised the guests who passed throughand they were many, since our mother believed that those who had the good fortune to live in a great residence should keep an open house. But for all that, our upbringing was not permissive. Life was very clearly structured, framed by a few strictly defined moral principles: for example, it was forbidden to torture animals. Within this framework, we enjoyed a great deal of latitude.

My father, Albert von Boeselager, was a cultured man of letters. His mothers side of the family hailed from Brussels, and he considered the European nobility a unitary body. He hunted all over the Continent and spoke four or five languages.

Because of this, he attached particular importance to learning how to make proper use of freedomand the capacity for Christian discernment that was for him its corollaryand also to hunting. Georg received his first rifle as a Christmas present in 1928, when he was only thirteen years old. At fifteen, my brothers list of kills already included some 150 head of game. His passion was such that he managed to sneak a disassembled rifle into our boarding school in Bad Godesbergwith my complicity, I must admit. When the housemaster Father Strasser made the rounds of the bedrooms to check the students bags, we were forced once again to engage in a ruse. Each of us slipped part of the rifle into his shortsGeorg the barrel and I the stockwhile the inspection took place. The maneuver was acrobatic, because it was strictly forbidden to put our hands in our pockets, but we somehow had to prevent the parts of the rifle from slipping out.

It was hunting that truly shaped our behavior in nature, and profoundly influenced our way of life. Georg, in particular, learned to find his way in the forest even before the sun came up; to creep up to within a few meters of a woodcock without scaring the bird away; to slip through the bushes without making the leaves rustle so as not to frighten the deer; to disappear into the vegetation, perfectly camouflaged; to wait patiently, silent and inactive; and to act at the right fraction of a second. In a word, hunting, practiced in a group or in the course of long solitary hikes, with that passion for animals that marks true nature lovers, made Georg a real Indian. He remained one. He was later to find this training extremely valuable.