Hitler’s would-be assassins weren’t war criminals
In a Spectator article, Matthew Olex-Szczytowski argued that the German officers who tried to kill Hitler, did so only to save Germany from defeat, and were themselves Nazi war criminals. The first argument is blatantly wrong. In fact, the conspirators tried to overthrow Hitler long before defeat was imminent. The first attempt to assassinate the Führer took place in 1938, one year before the war. The conspirators tried again in 1939 and 1940, when the Nazi regime was still triumphant. Many of them joined the movement in order to oppose Hitler’s genocidal policies. Their resistance to the Holocaust and the crimes against Poles and Russians is documented in wartime diaries, postwar testimonies, Gestapo documents and Soviet interrogation transcripts.
