More than a few were Christian and monarchist conservatives who deplored Hitler' s tendency toward self-deification. Almost all were devoted to the traditions of the German military and infuriated by Hitler's peremptory directives from on high. Sometimes, there was also a moral strain to their deliberations. Several of these men seemed to sense the full dimensions of the Holocaust. His pantheon also includes Helmut von Moltke, one of the leaders of the Kreisau Circle, a religious-philosophical group that spent most of its time imagining an ideal future German society.
History sometimes tells simple stories.
Hitler's death by his own hand cannot be counted as one of history's accidents. Germany could not imagine any other death for him. Related on the Web For an excerpt from Joachim Fest's Plotting Hitler's Death , click here . Here's a photo of Stauffenberg , courtesy of Columbia University. Harvard University Press plugs Hamerow's book .