Members of German High Command including Hermann Goering and Martin Bormann survey damage to room at Adolf Hitler’s HQ bunker
Young Wehrmacht officer who survived a failed plot to kill Hitler and after the war became a publisher
An army officer from an old Pomeranian family, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was regarded as being the last survivor of the group involved in the failed plot to kill Hitler at his Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia on July 20, 1944.
His own father, also Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, had been from early days active in resistance to Hitler, whose thuggish methods were loathed by the more high-minded aristocratic elements of the Wehrmacht, who formed the core of the plotters. Von Kleist Sr was to pay with his life, along with several thousand others including the plot’s prime mover, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, for his participation in the plot, from which Hitler emerged shaken but unscathed.
Von Kleist Jr, who had not been at Rastenburg on the occasion but was at the plotters’ Berlin HQ, also came under suspicion of being complicit in the events and was imprisoned. But nothing was proved against him, and he was later released to continue his army service until the end of the war.
The July 20 attempt was not his first involvement in a plot to kill Hitler. He had previously been selected to execute a suicide attack on the Führer in January 1944. But Hitler’s habit of cancelling arrangements at the last moment had eventually foiled this.
Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was born in 1922 on the family estate, Gut Schmenzin, at Schmenzin in Pomerania (now in Poland). At home he grew up in an atmosphere of sharp loathing for Hitler, even before the elections of March 1933 which brought the Nazis to power. His own father had criticised Nazi ideology in print as early as 1929.
In 1940, at 18, the young Kleist joined the Army and was commissioned into an infantry regiment. While recuperating from wounds in January 1944 he was approached by Stauffenberg, who had been appalled at the mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine in 1942, and had formed an ad hoc resistance group among disaffected officers of Army Group Centre.
The plan to assassinate Hitler, unfolded to Kleist by Stauffenberg, was very much a repeat of the Operation Overcoat plot of November 1943, in which another young officer, Axel von dem Bussche (obituary, January 29, 1993), had been chosen to model a new army greatcoat for the Führer. Its pockets were to contain hand grenades which the young officer would detonate as Hitler made his inspection, killing them both. In the event, after many changes of time and venue by Hitler, who had a legendary sixth sense of impending danger, an Allied air raid had finally thrown the arrangements for this fashion show into terminal disarray, since bombs wrecked the train bringing the greatcoats to Rastenburg.
In spite of this failure Stauffenberg clung to the idea of a suicide attack on Hitler as being the most likely to succeed, particularly given the Führer’s great personal interest in the aesthetics of uniforms, and his love of displays of military apparel. The attempt was to be at a parade of new uniforms at Rastenburg in January 1944. This time the officer, Kleist, demonstrating to the Führer the merits of the designs would have his bombs in a briefcase, while his men wore the uniforms.
Some years later in a TV documentary Kleist admitted that he was not at first keen on the idea of such a martyrdom. But his father sternly adjured him to do as bid by Stauffenberg. In the event Operation Overcoat, was also foiled when Hitler finally cancelled the display.
By this time, after the failure of several more plots by Stauffenberg, the much more ambitious Wolfsschanze attempt was being scheduled for July 1944, which, if it succeeded, would involve not just the death of Hitler at his East Prussia headquarters, but combine it with a simultaneous coup to seize power from the Nazis in Berlin and elsewhere. With the war going badly on all fronts, support for their actions was sought by the conspirators quite high up in the ranks of the armies in the field and their greatest success came early in July when they enlisted the support of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox” of the North African campaign and the most illustrious and popular senior officer on the North West Europe front.
At Rastenburg Stauffenberg’s aim was to plant a bomb in a briefcase in Hitler’s conference room, set its timer running and then leave the room, to wait for the explosion. On hearing it he would then fly immediately to Berlin to assist the plotters there. It is assumed that on the fatal day a staff colonel who was standing near Hitler inadvertently moved the briefcase with his foot, after Stauffenberg had left the room, pushing it behind a leg of the conference table. In any event the worst of the blast was deflected from Hitler (though the colonel, two other officers and a stenographer died).
Stauffenberg fled and flew to Berlin as planned, but by that time news of Hitler’s survival had reached the city and the support of officers on the reserve could no longer be counted upon. The Berlin plot to seize power collapsed as did ancillary plots to seize power from the Nazis in occupied France. Stauffenberg was very quickly arrested and shot. Kleist’s father was also arrested, tried and found guilty, though his execution at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin did not take place until April 1945.
Some 5,000 conspirators and other suspects are thought to have perished at the hands of the Nazis. Kleist Jr was arrested on July 21 and taken for interrogation at the Gestapo HQ. He later recalled his sensations on entering those dread portals: “I thought of the lines from the Divine Comedy: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’.”
But, somewhat surprisingly, although he was jailed for several months, charges against him were not proved, and on December 21 he was released and allowed to return to a combat unit.
Unable to return to his home after the postwar frontier adjustments which left Pomerania, Silesia and Prussia under Polish and Soviet administration, he became a book publisher, founding his own company, Ewald von Kleist Verlag, in Berlin. In 1962 he founded the Wehrkundetagung, an influential annual international conference on security issues held in Munich, and attended by politicians, industrialists and senior military figures. Kleist presided over its deliberations until 1998. Over the years he had appeared in several television documentaries about the July 20 plot.
Kleist and his wife, Gundula, had a son and daughter.
Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, plotter against Hitler and publisher, was born on July 10, 1922. He died on March 8, 2013, aged 90
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
