The last of the Valkyrie...

Philipp, Freiherr (Baron) von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the inner circle of German Army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb on 20 July 20 1944, died in May 2008.

He was 90.

Before he died he wrote a memoir, called Valkyrie, of the resistance within the German Army which culminated in the attempt on the life of the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Boeselager was born into a Roman Catholic family in Burg Heimerzheim, near Bonn. After graduating from Aloysius College, a Jesuit secondary school in Bad Godesberg, he intended to study law and enter the foreign service, but not wishing to join the Nazi Party he instead enlisted in the army, as did his brother Georg, who also took part in the plot.

Boeselager was first approached in 1942 to shoot both Hitler and Heinrich Himmler at close range.

“It was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes” he said.

On 13 March 1943, with a Walther PP pistol in hand, Boeselager prepared to assassinate both men, who were scheduled to hold a strategy session with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge for whom he was then ADC, also a conspirator. When Himmler decided not to attend, von Kluge called off the mission.

In 1944, it was Boeselager’s brother Georg who gave him the signal to move forward. “One day, my brother called and said, ‘They want explosives,’ he said. “I knew exactly what for”.

Philipp von Boeselager as a Cavalry officer
during the war when he joined the plot to kill Hitler

His book is redolent with his love and admiration for his brother, Georg, who, it soon becomes quite clear, was a most extraordinary military genius of immense moral courage, integrity and inner resources.

Georg von Boeselager, Philipp's brother

Philipp supplied the bomb that Stauffenberg used. He and Georg come from another ancient German Catholic family and were, like Stauffenberg, cavalry officers, both joining the 15th Paderborn Cavalry Regiment. Georg was an astonishingly able officer, later commanding a Cavalry Brigade at the age of 29 before being killed in battle on the Eastern front. Philipp was, himself, wounded no less than 5 times, all seriously.

The army controlled the front and backward for some 200-300 kilometres but the rear area was in the hands of the Reichskommissariat, the SD and SS. It was only when there was a need for the army to liaise with the rear area to co-ordinate defence against the partisan groups that they started to come into contact with the Nazi extermination policy against Jews, gypsies and others.

This was what turned them into conspirators against the regime and Hitler's life. Boeselager describes an "encounter with the demon" in the form of SS-Obergrueppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski who, asked to explain what was meant by "special treatment" of the gypsies in the area, candidly stated that they were all shot.

Boeselager and his boss, the Commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, were appalled and aghast and demanded that steps be taken to arrest the culprits. The diabolical Bach-Zelewski replied that the gypsies were eliminated as "enemies of the Reich" and that such was to be the fate of all such enemies, a thinly-veiled hint directed now at von Kluge.

Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, Commander of Army Group Centre
and a co-conspirator in the anti-Hitler plot. Boeselager was his ADC.

Philipp also recounts going with von Kluge to the Fuehrerhauptquartier and seeing men of no military standing poncing about in gaudy uniforms, guzzling champagne and planning seedy night excursions with women.

He overheard Bormann refusing to send a telelgram on the 70th birthday of Archduke Joseph of Austria because Joseph had married a Catholic (of the Bavarian Royal family), Bormann clearly being too dense to realise that the Habsburgs are Catholics par excellence. Bormann even confronted Boeselager when he walked out at this comment but Boeselager stood his ground against this Nazi thug.

Had the assassination succeeded, Boeselager was supposed to lead 1,200 of his cavalrymen back to Berlin and take part in a general uprising against the Nazi regime, code-named Operation Valkyrie.

Most of the approximately 200 conspirators, including Colonel von Stauffenberg, were rounded up and executed, and many others were later accused and executed. Boeselager heard that the plot had failed and turned his cavalrymen round and got them back to the front. There was sufficient chaos at the front that he managed to get them back unnoticed and so managed to see out the war without being discovered.

Philipp von Boeselager in later life

After the war, he studied law and economics and served as an adviser in creating the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of West Germany. In 1948 he married Rosa Maria, Countess von Westphalen zu Fürstenberg. One of his daughters married a Stauffenberg.

Boeselager's book explodes many myths peddled by Lefties in the West.

As one progresses through the book one realises quickly that one is reading of men of the highest moral calibre and spiritual integrity faced with some of the most calamitously impossible moral dilemmas that men ever had to face and emerging from them morally unscathed in a way that the vast majority of men would have been unlikely to do.

Yet these are the outstandingly noble men that English Leftists like Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Deputy Head of PWE, wrote in a minute that the SS and Gestapo were doing the Allies a "favour" in killing. He had been friends with some of the German anti-Hitler conspirators before the war but turned his coat against them when the war started. Words simply cannot readily describe the sickening hypocrisy of such a view.

Unlike the Allies, these German officers were fighting totalitarianism on 2 fronts, at home and against the Soviets. They were right to do so. Let Boeselager describe their views:

"When the fighting on the Eastern Front began, German officers felt that they represented civilisation in a battle against a barbarous nation. What is barbarism? First of all, it is complete disrespect for the rights of individuals, brutality in human relationships, savagery in the actions of everyday life, and finally indifference to all the achievements in culture and comfort, to everything that centuries of labour and the progress of the human spirit have produced that is beautiful. These communists whose agents shot down without hesitation soldiers who had retreated, these officers without consciences who, in order to exhaust German munitions, sent ragtag groups of women, old men and children gathered together in haste towards us to be mown down by our machine guns; these enemies who systematically killed the wounded, put out the eyes of prisoners, and didn't deign to bury their own dead - they all seemed barbarians to us. We had heard many stories of this kind, and we had seen many macabre proofs that they were true."

He also gives the lie to that persistent myth put about by some English liberals, bending over backward to believe Soviet propaganda, that these German officers only joined the plot at the last minute to save themselves or that they intended to keep all the territorial gains made by the Nazis and would not accept other terms.

Boeselager notes this view and comments on it saying that he wishes categorically to deny it. He then gives examples of how it is an entirely false view.

Philipp von Boeselager during the war

It is perfectly clear, to any unbiased and reasonable mind, that these men were prepared to risk death and torture to bring down the Nazi government of the Third Reich and that they had the courage of their very noble convictions.

It is an unpleasant characteristic of modern liberals that they expect the highest standards of others whilst accepting very sloppy ones for themselves. They rail against racism but then practice a most blatant form of racism against Germans who, under extreme and trying conditions, opposed the Third Reich.

Whilst evidencing not a jot of courage to stand up against the tide themselves, these liberal hypocrites claim the right to criticise some exceedingly heroic men for not "doing more" to oppose Hitler. I cannot help the feeling that there is a special place in Hell for such unworthy critics of men who risked all to save others.

Maiorem hac dilectionem nemo habet ut animam suam quis ponat pro amicis suis

"Greater love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friends"

[John 15:13]

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Stauffenberg: lines of descent and divine destiny...

The ancestry and lineage of Colonel Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, show him to have been seemingly ordained by heaven for his dangerous and courageous task.

His family are amongst the most eminent and noble families of Bavaria, with close connections to the Royal House of Wittelsbach, which family is, for Jacobite Legitimists, the senior legitimate line of succession of British royalty.

Two nieces of the Duke of Bavaria are married to two brothers, first cousins twice removed both of Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and of his wife Baroness Elisabeth Magdalena von Lerchenfeld, Countess Monika von Waldburg zu Zeil und Trauchburg to Count Christoph Schenk von Stauffenberg and Countess Maria-Anna von Quadt zu Wykradt und Isny to Count Alexander Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Another niece of the Duke of Bavaria, Countess Walburga von Waldburg zu Zeil und Trauchburg is married to Baron Carl von Lerchenfeld, first cousin of the aforementioned brothers Counts Christoph and Alexander Schenk von Stauffenberg.

The Lerchenfelds are direct descendants of Lord Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, son of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, by his second marriage.

St Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel was the only son of the latter's first marriage.

St Philip Howard,
Earl of Arundel and martyr for the Catholic Faith.
Countess von Stauffenberg (born von Lerchenfeld) was a kinswoman of the great English saint.

Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, though a Protestant, was executed for his alleged involvement in the Ridolfi plot, for proposing marriage to Mary I, Queen of Scots (and de jure II of England and Ireland). The Royal Pedigree of the Duke of Norfolk is well attested.

The Lerchenfelds also have impeccable Scottish pedigree, from the Royal Stewarts (via King Robert II of Scotland and his wife, Euphemia, daughter of the Earl of Ross) and from very many Scottish noble families.

Biography and portrait of Nina, Countess von Stauffenberg,
born Baroness von Lerchenfeld

Count Claus Stauffenberg's granddaughter, Countess Sophie Schenk von Stauffenberg is married to Baron Marcus Berchtolsheim, the Chancellor of the Duke of Bavaria and himself a descendant of the Royal Stuarts, through the brother of the Royal nephews, and Cavaliers during the English Civil War, "Prince Rupert" and "Prince Maurice of the Rhine", Edward, Count Palatine (Pfalzgraf) of Simmern, who became a Catholic on his marriage to Anna Gonzaga, heiress of the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua.

His grandson, Count Hans Caspar Schenk von Stauffenberg is married to Gräfin Josefa von Waldburg-Zeil-Hohenems, a Habsburg, Bourbon and Royal Stuart (Charles I) descendant.

It is as if the hand of God were on Stauffenberg ordaining him to make the attempt on the life of the Nazi Antichrist.

The wedding day of Count and Countess von Stauffenberg, the union of too great and ancient Bavarian families with many ancient connections and roots with the greatest Catholic families of Europe.
On this happy day doubtless the newly-weds could hardly have foreseen then that he would be the one man in Germany who would get closest to ridding the world of the leading Nazi Antichrist.

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Valkyrie: Stauffenberg and the sacred Germany against the profane Germany...

"Es lebt unser heiliges Deutschland!"

"Long live our sacred Germany!"

These are reputedly the last words of 37-year-old Bavarian Catholic aristocrat and cavalry officer, Colonel Claus, Count Schenk von Stauffenberg, before he was summarily shot in the courtyard of German Army Headquarters in Bendlerstrasse, Berlin, for his attempt upon the life of murderous Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Accurately, the film released yesterday in Britain, and titled Valkyrie, includes this memorable and dramatic scene, played well by American actor, Tom Cruise, as Colonel Count Stauffenberg.

The film is, in my humble view, an excellent portrayal of this true story of patriotic German officers, civilians, politicians, aristocrats and commoners alike, who opposed the Hitler regime and took courageous action to overthrow it from within, risking their lives so to do.

I have followed the Stauffenberg story for decades and got to know his son, Major-General Berthold von Stauffenberg, when he was German military attaché in London.

It is my belief that the film is an accurate portrayal, well handled and well presented. It is also a gripping story presented with all the excitement and drama that it so well deserves.

A clip from the film Valkyrie

Hollywood's homage to the men who risked - and lost - their lives in this courageous attempt is long overdue but now it has come and it will, I am sure, have a considerable impact on the way many cynical moderns view the story of Germany and its people who found themselves governed by a brutal tyranny.

Numerous famous actors play the parts of the key figures in the plot (from left standing) Carl Goerdeler, the Mayor of Leipzig, Stauffenberg, Colonel-General Ludwig Beck (who had resigned in 1938), Major-General Henning von Treskow, (seated) Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, Lieutenant-General Friedrich Olbricht and one other.

What was the "sacred" or "holy" Germany which Stauffenberg cried allegiance to?

Quite simply it was the holy empire which had placed Germany and Germans at the centre of a Christian, Catholic Europe for 1,000 years and which had built up, lead, governed, protected and enhanced European Christian civilisation for most of its history.

We are apt to forget this when we lump the thousands of years of German history into those very few short years when, after a period of anarchy, the political elite turned its back on the past and installed a new and diabolical ideology in place of the Christian past.

That ideology was a materialist, Socialist, racist, secular, anti-monarchist and anti-Catholic creed called National Socialism.

Goering surveys the bomb damage

As is crystal clear from his early autobiography, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), its devilish leader hated all that was associated with the Catholic and Habsburg empire of the past whilst he - schizophrenically and contradictorily - claimed to be restoring the ancient, thousand-year old, empire of the past, albeit in a new and "modern" guise.

The real, thousand-year old, empire of the past was, in truth, the Holy Roman Empire, a Catholic, not a Socialist, empire sometimes called Das heilige römische Reich der deutschen Völker or "The Holy Roman Empire of the German People".

This empire was begun in what later became France by the Emperor Charlemagne, a Frank, a race of people who were ancestors of both French and German people.

Later the Empire was restored to glory by the Emperor Otto the Great and gradually became centred upon what is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Northern Italy and parts of France, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary.

This Empire was Roman and Catholic. Its Emperor - successor to the Roman emperors of old - was the first Catholic layman of Christian Europe and recognised as such by all Christian countries and political leaders. This Empire and its rulers recognised their duty of allegiance to the Roman Pontiff as their spiritual superior.

And for this reason it was called "holy" or "sacred". It was titled Sacrum Romanum Imperium and recognised as such by all the popes who ever ruled.

This was the "sacred" or "holy" Germany to which Stauffenberg referred and which he had come to realise was - and must always be - implacably opposed to the dirty little Social Darwinist, secularist tyranny that Hitler and the National Socialists had imposed upon a once noble Germany.

Stauffenberg (left) with Colonel Albrecht, Ritter (Knight) Mertz von Quirnheim, a fellow army officer and co-conspirator in the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler. He was shot with Stauffenberg outside Army HQ.

The decline and fall of religion in Germany, partly a by-product of the Protestant Reformation, had finally sapped all the life out of the true Germany and the vacuum had been filled with a legion of devils from Hell who inspired this new and grotesque National Socialist ideology, said to be based upon science but actually based upon the spurious findings of a entirely perverse, modern science, based upon Darwinism, among other ideas.

Many were opposed to Hitler - Social Democrats, liberals, Jews, Communists, Evangelicals, conservatives - but only one man summoned up the skill, courage, tenacity, perserverance and commanding personality to hatch a plan to deliver Germany and the world from the tyrant and, moreover, was willing to carry it out himself.

That man was Claus von Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg with 2 of his children

He came from a noble family of a line 700 years old. That gave him a certain upbringing, education, moral formation and self-possession as well as a sense of responsibility arising from his family background.

His father was the last Oberhofmarschall of the Kingdom of Württemberg and Claus, from an early age, had had impressed upon him that his family heritage was not merely a social status but imposed a solemn duty to serve God, nation and conscience above self.

Interestingly, it was the aristocrats who really showed determination and courage to stand up to the tyrant.

Above all, however, let it not ever be forgotten what most went to make up the core beliefs of Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and what was his source of strength, discernment and loyalty, as well as courage, and to which he turned for counsel before making his final decision to carry out his plans.

Before deciding to take part in the plot and lay the bomb, Stauffenberg went to confession.

It was his religion, first and foremost, that gave him the tools for reason, emotion and decisive action. His religion was one truly worthy of the name.

And that was because Colonel Claus, Count Schenk von Stauffenberg was a traditional Roman Catholic.

Banner of the Holy Roman Empire



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What does a martyr look like? These men gave testimony of faith in the modern world...

Colonel Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Count von Stauffenberg (15 November 1907–21 July 1944), pictured left, was a German cavalry officer and Roman Catholic aristocrat who was one of the leading officers of the 20 July plot of 1944 attempting to assassinate Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power in World War II Germany.

Stauffenberg was the third of three sons of Alfred Schenk Count von Stauffenberg, the last Oberhofmarschall of the Kingdom of Württemberg, and Caroline Schenk Countess von Stauffenberg, née Countess von Üxküll-Gyllenband.

Claus was born in the Stauffenberg castle of Jettingen between Ulm and Augsburg, in the eastern part of Swabia, at that time in the Kingdom of Bavaria. The von Stauffenberg family is one of the old and distinguished aristocratic Roman Catholic families of southern Germany.

In 1926, he joined the family's traditional regiment, the 17th Bavarian Cavalry Regiment (the Bamberger Riders) in Bamberg.

Stauffenberg found some aspects of the Nazi Party's ideology repugnant; and he remained a practicing Catholic. On top of this, the growing systematic ill-treatment of Jews and suppression of religion had offended Stauffenberg's strong personal sense of religious morality and justice. While his uncle, Nikolaus Count von Üxküll, had approached him before to join the resistance movement against the Hitler regime, it was only after the Polish campaign in 1939 that Stauffenberg's individual conscience and his religious convictions made him consider joining.

In 1943, Stauffenberg was promoted to Oberstleutnant-iG (lieutenant-colonel on the general staff) and was wounded serving in North Africa, losing his left eye, right hand, and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand.

He was later posted to Army HQ in Bendlerstrasse and one of his superiors was General Friedrich Olbricht, a committed member of the resistance movement. Stauffenberg was now fully committed to the resistance himself.

From the beginning of September 1943 until 21 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg was the driving force behind the plot. His resolve, his organizational abilities, and his radical approach put an end to inactivity caused by doubts.

On 20 July 1944 he planted a bomb in the conference room in which Hitler was attending a military conference. The bomb went off but did not kill Hitler who was protected by a heavy oak table. If, as was expected, the conference had been held in the bunker of his Wolfshanze (Wolf’s Lair), Hitler could not have survived. But he did and Goebbels quickly restored control.

The conspirators were tracked to their Bendlerstrasse offices and were overpowered after a brief shoot-out, during which Stauffenberg was shot in the shoulder.

In a futile attempt to save his own life, the co-conspirator Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, present in Bendlerstrasse, to save himself charged the other conspirators, held an impromptu court martial, and condemned the ringleaders of the conspiracy to death. They were shot that night (21 July 1944) by a makeshift firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which was lit by the headlights of a truck.

As his turn came, Stauffenberg spoke his last words: "Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!" ("Long live our holy Germany!").

Fr Alfred Delp SJ
before the Nazi People's Court
martyred for the Faith in 1945

Rev Alfred Delp, SJ (15 September 1907 – 2 February 1945 ) was a German Jesuit priest born in Mannheim, Germany, to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father.

After matriculation – in which he came out top of his class – he joined the Society of Jesus in 1926.

He was later appointed rector of the St Georg Church, part of the Heilig-Blut (Holy Blood) Parish in the Bogenhausen neighbourhood in Munich. He preached both at Heilig-Blut and at St Georg, and also secretly helped Jews who were escaping to Switzerland through the underground.

Outspoken opposition to the Nazis by individual Jesuits resulted in harsh response from government officials, including imprisonment of priests in concentration camps. The government takeover of church property, the so-called "Klostersturm", resulted in the loss of valuable properties and limited the work of the Jesuits in Germany.

It was Augustin Rösch who introduced Delp to the Kreisau Circle. As of 1942, Delp met regularly with the clandestine group around Helmuth James Count von Moltke to develop a model for a new social order after the Third Reich came to an end. Delp's role was to explain Catholic social teaching to the group, and to arrange contacts between Moltke and Catholic leaders, including Archbishop (later Cardinal) Preysing of Berlin.

After the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler failed, a special Gestapo commission arrested and interrogated all known members of the Resistance. Delp was arrested in Munich on 28 July 1944 (eight days after Claus von Stauffenberg's attempt on Hitler's life), although he was not directly involved in the plot. He was transferred to Tegel Prison in Berlin. While in prison, he secretly began to say Mass and wrote letters.

On 8 December 1944, Delp received a visitor, Franz von Tattenbach SJ, and made his final vows to the Jesuit Order.

He was tried, together with Count von Moltke, Franz Sperr, and Eugen Gerstenmaier, before the Volksgericht (the Nazi People's Court), the odious monster, Court President Roland Freisler, presiding. All were sentenced to death by hanging for high treason.

While he was in prison, the Gestapo offered Delp his freedom in return for his leaving the Jesuits, but he rejected it. Of all prisoners, only Delp had to wear chains and leg irons up to his execution. The sentence was carried out on 2 February 1945 at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.

As with many of those tried, his body was cremated and his ashes strewn over manure fields.

Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell
before the Nazi People's Court
martyred 1944.

Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell (12 November 1881–8 September 1944) was a German nobleman and diplomat during World War II.

A member of the German Resistance against Hitler, Hassell was executed in the aftermath of the failed 20 July plot to assassinate Der Fuehrer, spearheaded by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg.

Hassell was born in Anklam, Pomerania, the son of an Army officer from a Protestant family. Hassell, between 1899 and 1903, studied law and economics at the University of Lausanne, the University of Tübingen and in Berlin. He was active in the Corps Suevia Tübingen (a Student society). He began in 1909 to work as a graduate civil servant (Assessor) in the Foreign Office.

In 1911, Hassell married Ilse von Tirpitz, the daughter of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. The couple had four children. In 1911, he was named Vice-Consul in Genoa.

In the First World War, Hassell was wounded in the chest in the First Battle of the Marne on 8 September 1914. Later in the war, he worked as Alfred von Tirpitz's advisor and private secretary. He also later wrote his father-in-law's biography.

After the war ended in 1918, Hassell returned to the Foreign Office and worked until the early 1930s in Rome, Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Belgrade. In 1932, Hassell was made Germany's ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy.

In 1933, Hassell favoured Western-Christian unity in Europe rather than the Nazi-Soviet pact. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Hassell took part in plans to overthrow Hitler.

Hassell's main function was to be a liaison between the conservative opposition groups centred around Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Ludwig Beck and the younger Kreisau Circle. After 1943, he took a background role and played no part in the plot to kill Hitler.

Nevertheless, on 29 July 1944, Hassell was arrested by the Gestapo for his involvement in the July plot, something that he had foreseen. On 8 September, after a two-day trial at the People's Court, over which presided the monstrous Court President Roland Freisler, he was sentenced to death. He was executed the very same day at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.

Dr Hermann Josef Wehrle
curate at Holy Blood Church, Munich,
martyred for the Faith in 1944

Rev Hermann Josef Wehrle (26 July 1899-14 September 1944) was a Catholic priest who was also tried by the People's Court and executed..

Born in Nuremberg, in his early childhood his family moved to Frankfurt, which was still an independent city and regional seat at that time. There he grew up and went to the school. In the First World War, from 1917, he took part in the war but thereafter studied Catholic theology in Fulda, finishing his studies in 1922.

He studied philosophy and history in Frankfurt, and attained a doctorate in 1928. In 1942 he was ordained a priest and was appointed curate at Munich/Bogenhausen.

On 13 December 1943 Wehrle was asked by cavalry Major Ludwig Baron von Leonrod, in a private spiritual conference effectively under the seal of the confessional, whether it was a sin to know about an assassination attempt plan and not to reveal it. Wehrle answered this question in the negative after consulting the Encyclopaedia of Theology and the Church on the issue of the assassination of tyrants.

On 18 August 1944 Wehrle was arrested on the accusation of having knowledge of the 20 July assassination plot against Hitler’s life and was brought before the People's Court under its odious Court President, the brutal monster Roland Freisler. Despite his intelligent and well-argued defence, calmly, courageously and even amusingly delivered before the court, and which showed that he had committed no crime, Fr Wehrle was nevertheless condemned to death on 14 September, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

He was hanged on the same day in the state prison of Berlin in Plötzensee, along with other victims of the terror that followed the failure of the 20 July plot.

Major Ludwig Freiherr (Baron) von Leonrod
Cavalry officer and devout Catholic aristocrat
martyred for the Faith in 1944

Major Ludwig Freiherr (Baron) von Leonrod was the oldest child of Wilhelm Baron von Leonrod and his wife Clara, born Baroness von Sazenhofen.

His father was a personal aide at the Royal Court.

After Matriculation in 1926, Ludwig Baron von Leonrod chose the career of an Army officer, following family tradition. His career began in Bamberg in the 17th Bavarian Cavalry Regiment, where he came to know Claus von Stauffenberg, a brother officer.

In 1930 he was promoted second lieutenant, in 1933 to first lieutenant and in 1937 to captain of cavalry. In 1941 whilst a major and commander of a Reconnaissance unit, he was awarded the Iron Cross. After being gravely wounded by a mine at the beginning of 1942, he was transferred to Munich to the VIIth Military District. In March 1943, he married Monika, Baroness von Twickel (born 1908).

In the autumn of 1943, von Stauffenberg sought co-conspirators from within the military districts.

He told Leonrod of his plans in December but Leonrod was opposed. He wanted to support his friend, but, for reasons of conscience, was unsure about the morality of the planned attack. A believing Catholic, he accordingly asked, on 13 December 1943, in a spiritual conference with the parish curate, Rev Dr Hermann Josef Wehrle, whether concealing his knowledge regarding the assassination attempt plan was a sin. Wehrle answered this in the negative after consulting theological works.

Leonrod played no part in the plot during its whole operational sequence.

A training posting sent him to Army HQ in Bendlerstrasse (now Stauffenbergstrasse) so that he was present on 20 July when the plot was put into execution.

In the evening he returned to his training course accommodation, but found himself arrested on the following day. On 14 August he was dishonourably discharged from the armed forces following the decision, on 2 August 1944, of a Court of Honour, so that the Reich Court Martial was no longer responsible for sentencing him.

Instead, on 21 August 1944, he was taken before the People’s Court, under the deeply odious monster, Court President Roland Freisler. After a show trial he was sentenced to death.

Judgement was carried out on 26 August in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. On 14 September, Fr Wehrle was hanged also.

In Bamberg Cathedral a memorial tablet commemorates the memory of Major Ludwig Baron von Leonrod and the five former members of the 17th Cavalry Regiment who lost their lives in the fight against the brutal Nazi regime.

Hail Christian martyrs of Catholic Bavaria
and the old, once Christian, Germany!

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