OCR Text |
Show Pierre's Book Pierre Galante, a French l journalist, has published a book about the brave Germans who tried to kill Hitler and paid with their lives. It's titled "Operation Valkyrie." GALANTE TELLS the story of thousands executed after the final effort to kill Hitler on June 20, 1944. That was the bomb explosion at Hitler's headquarters, which killed several high officials but not Hitler. Galante's book benefits from extensive conversations with the former chief of operations opera-tions on the eastern front, Gen. Adolf Heusinger, of the German Ger-man Army (later high NATO official). Heusinger knew of the German generals' plot against Hitler, whom many of these aristocrats loathed, but didn't reveal its existence and he himself was badly injured in the blast. HE TELLS how Hitler dis-j dis-j trusted his greatest general, m Erich von Manstein, because he was s devout protestant. He explains how Protestant Prussia's Prus-sia's generals, with their great military tradition, were not so captivated by Hitler as Bavarians Bava-rians and Rhinelanders, perhaps to an extent because Hitler was the first Catholic head of state in Germany since Germany's unification. Galante tells the heroic and tragic story of the men and women of character who willingly will-ingly joined the effort to rid Germany of Hitler, and who were brutally executed and tortured, sometimes entire families, after July 20, 1940. It is good that we remember these patriots, whom the Nazis almost wiped out in ten months of ruthless retribution, until Allied armies overran Germany. Ger-many. IT IS sobering to ponder the thought that Prussia, which produced most of Germany's greatest generals and fighter aces, is in .communist hands today. |