Life of Countess von Stauffenberg the wife of the hero who tried to kill Hitler

1. Countess von Stauffenberg
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 05/04/2007
Nina Countess Schenk von Stauffenberg, who died on Sunday aged 93, was the widow of
the German officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in July 1944; along
with her husband's co-conspirators, she bore the brunt of the Führer's thirst for revenge in
the weeks after the attack.
She was born Elisabeth Magdalena, Baroness von Lerchenfeld, in Kaunas, then in Russia
but now in Lithuania, on August 27 1913. Her father was a diplomat and courtier, her
mother a German-speaking Balt.
She met Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg when she was just 16 and still at boarding school
near Heidelberg. Like him, her family was of the Bavarian nobility, although his was
Roman Catholic and rather more distinguished, numbering the Prussian Field Marshal
August von Gneisenau among its forebears. He was also six years her elder.
They became engaged on his birthday in 1930, and married in 1933. Stauffenberg was
noted among his peers for his dashing good looks and unorthodox opinions, but though he
was later to be romanticised by admirers of the German resistance movement, as a young
man much of his character was decidedly conventional. He had already chosen the army as
his career, and went to his wedding in uniform, since he believed that to marry was another
of his duties. He also, as one proud to be German, initially welcomed Hitler's rise to power.
By 1940, however, when he and Nina had had three sons and a daughter, his attitudes had
changed markedly, influenced in particular by Hitler's oppression of the Church. From the
autumn of 1943 onwards, when he was recuperating in Germany after losing seven fingers
and an eye in a strafing attack in North Africa, he became determined to kill the Führer, and
his dynamism animated a circle of like-minded officers, aristocrats and officials which had
hitherto offered only passive opposition to the regime. His elder brother, Berthold, joined
the conspiracy, but Nina Stauffenberg knew nothing of their plans.
On July 20 1944 Colonel Count Stauffenberg carried a bomb concealed in a briefcase into
the briefing room of the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. Another officer
moved it, so that it rested next to the massive wooden leg of the conference table and, when
it exploded, soon after Stauffenberg had left the room, Hitler was largely shielded from the
blast and suffered only ruptured eardrums.
Stauffenberg and the other plotters believed for a time that they had been successful, but by
that evening most of them had been rounded up. Stauffenberg was shot almost immediately
in the courtyard of army headquarters in Berlin.
Himmler, as security supremo, directed that all of Stauffenberg's relatives, from his infant
children to distant cousins, should be arrested and their property confiscated. Berthold
Stauffenberg was hanged a few weeks later, while Nina Stauffenberg, who was heavily

2. pregnant, was interrogated and imprisoned in Berlin. While there she comforted the wife of
Ernst Thalmann, the Communist leader, who had just learned that her husband had been
executed.
The Countess was then sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, as was her mother,
who subsequently perished in another camp run by the advancing Russians.
The four Stauffenberg children, of whom the eldest was aged 10, were placed in a state
orphanage in Thuringia and given a new surname, Meister. In January 1945 Nina
Stauffenberg gave birth in a Nazi maternity home to her husband's posthumous daughter,
Konstanze.
The separated family were much helped by the efforts of her sister-in-law, Melitta, the wife
of Berthold's twin brother, Alexander, who had also been interned. Although she was a
Polish Jew, Melitta had some influence with government officials because of her work on
the design of dive-bombers. Towards the end of the war, however, she was fatally wounded
when her aircraft was hit as she was returning from a visit to her nephews and niece.
By the war's end, the Countess was being held as a hostage in southern Germany. Although
her guards had orders to kill her, she was eventually liberated by Allied troops and reunited
with her children. Thereafter, she devoted herself to promoting understanding between
Germans and the occupying American forces.
In the last few decades, German knowledge of the homegrown resistance to the Nazis has
become much more widespread, with Stauffenberg coming to occupy a central place in that
understanding. The Bendlerblock, the HQ where he was executed, now houses the national
museum of resistance, and the street on which it stands has been renamed for him.
Like some of those involved in the plot, Nina Stauffenberg was of the view that the heroic
failure of the plan resonated more down the years than a successful coup might have done.
"On the whole," she once said, "what happened was probably best for the cause."
She is survived by her five children; her eldest son, Berthold, is a former general in the
German army.