20-07-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
‘For a better Germany': leaders mark failed Hitler assassination plot 81 years ago
Top politicians and civil society representatives on Sunday commemorated those behind a failed attempt to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler 81 years ago, and warned against historical amnesia amid a rise of the far-right.
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'July 20 became a symbol of resistance against injustice, for justice and conscience, for a better Germany,' said Defence Minister Boris Pistorius in front of around 250 recruits in the Bendlerblock, the headquarters of the Defence Ministry in Berlin.
Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and three other Wehrmacht officers were shot dead in the courtyard just hours after their failed attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb planted in his military headquarters on the eastern front on July 20, 1944.
Marking the events that unfolded about a year before the end of World War II, Pistorius stressed the day did not stand for failure, but for a new beginning.
Speaking at a commemoration ceremony at the Plötzensee memorial in Berlin, where
Germany's wartime Nazi dictatorship carried out many executions, the son of former chancellor Willy Brandt warned Germans against forgetting the atrocities committed by the regime.
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'We are seeing it again today, including in election results, how the poison of hatred, racism and exclusion is penetrating and shows itself in social coarsening,' Matthias Brandt said.
He cited a number of racist terms used by the Nazis, noting they were increasingly being used again. Doing nothing to counter this was a decision to let things run their course, he warned.
