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Would-Be Hitler Assassin Has Died

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The Associated Press

Published: May 3, 2008

BERLIN - Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, 90, thought to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, died Thursday.

A former army major, von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers but escaped the blast when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force.

Almost immediately afterward, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings that saw some hanged by the neck with piano wire.

Though many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the hopes they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager's name was never divulged and he was never found out.

Still, he carried a cyanide capsule with him until the end of the war in case his secret was revealed.

Von Boeselager told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview that was published Friday that he knew that Jews were being systematically killed and that Germany was waging a war of annihilation along the Eastern Front with Russia.

By 1942, he said that "It was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

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