Background
Henning von Tresckow was born in Magdeburg on 19 January 1901.
Henning von Tresckow was born in Magdeburg on 19 January 1901.
An officer during World War I and subsequently a successful stockbroker, von Tresckow rejoined the Reichswehr in 1924. 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.
At the beginning of World War II, von Tresckow was General Staff officer of an infantry division in East Prussia and distinguished himself in the Polish and French campaigns. Promoted to Major General, he later served as Chief of Staff of the Army Group Centre on the Russian front and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Generals von Kluge and Fedor von Bock to join in a military coup in which Hitler would be arrested and brought to trial. Determined to end the war before the German armies collapsed on the eastern front, von Tresckow began to plan an independent assassination attempt at the end of 1942.
On 13 March 1943, assisted by his aide Fabian von Schlabrendorff, he enticed Hitler to Smolensk and smuggled a time bomb into his aircraft which failed to go off on the return flight. Von Tresckow also played a leading role in the plans for several other attempts on Hitler’s life during 1943 and in October of the same year joined forces with Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who now became the central figure in the conspiracy.
The Allied invasion of Normandy gave a new urgency to their plans and von Tresckow stressed to those who still hesitated the need to prove to the world and future generations ‘that the German Resistance movement dared to take the decisive step and hazard their lives on it’.
The failure of von Stauffenberg’s attempt on 20 July 1944 convinced von Tresckow to commit suicide rather than endanger other conspirators by revealing information under torture. A Prussian conservative and a man of unusual integrity, von Tresckow took his own life with a hand grenade on 21 July 1944.
Before taking final leave of his friend von Schlabrendorff, his last words denounced Hitler as ‘the arch-enemy of Germany . . . the arch-enemy of the world'. He recalled the Biblical promise to Abraham to spare Sodom if there were ten just men in the city.
Quotations:
‘He will, I hope, spare Germany because of what we have done and not destroy her. None of us can complain. Whoever joined the Resistance put on the shirt of Nessus. The worth of a man is only certain if he is ready to sacrifice his life for his convictions.’
(about Hitler)