A Higher Responsibility

STAUFFENBERG by Joachim Kramarz, translated by R. H. Barry. 255 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

History lavishes its attention on successful assassins; the failures usually get footnotes, at best. In the 23 years since his death by firing squad, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the German officer whose attempt to assassinate Hitler with a planted bomb was foiled by a freakish chance, has rarely rated more than brief references. Now German Historian Joachim Kramarz has pieced together the unfortunately sketchy materials on Count Stauffenberg's life and his daring plot in a readable full-length biography.

Little in Common. Where Adolf Eichmann sought to evade moral responsibility by claiming that he was following orders, Stauffenberg disobeyed orders in the name of moral responsibility. He had little in common with history's successful assassins. He was no envious leftist loser and loner like Lee Harvey Oswald, no anarchist fanatic like Czolgosz (the man who killed President McKinley), no tribal desperado like Princip (who shot Archduke Ferdinand and brought on World War I). He was rather an honorable officer and gentleman, a colonel on the general staff of the German army. Why, then, did he decide to organize and lead a conspiracy against the life of the chief of state to whom, as an officer, he had sworn an oath of fidelity?

Stauffenberg was a Roman Catholic, an aristocrat, a family man, and a person of culture in the traditional German romantic, almost mystical mold. His Swabian antecedents were landowners and officials ennobled in Wurttem-berg for services to the state. He was regarded by military men, including a chief of staff of the Wehrmacht, as a "natural commander." Even in intellectual circles, he was recognized as having a peculiar distinction of spirit. His face mirrored both the mystic and the soldier. Although a Catholic, Stauffenberg found an added outlet for his private form of religion in the "circle of Stefan George," named for a poetteacher-prophet who preached a new order. StaufFenberg thus epitomized faith in traditional religion, the aristocracy and culture--all anathema to the Nazis' new order.

Angel of Destruction. For a time Stauffenberg tried to serve that new order. Fighting for his Fuhrer in the Afrika Korps, he lost his right hand and two fingers of his left, and was posted to the general staff. His work at the highest level convinced him at last that he was serving a vicious criminal cause Rapidly he found himself one of a number of German officers and influential civilians who felt that German honor --not to speak of Europe itself--could survive only if Hitler were overthrown and peace negotiated. Stauffenberg personally enlisted many friends in a conspiracy to this end.

When it was finally attempted, the assassination was thoroughly bungled Stauffenberg selected himself as the an-?el of destruction; it was his crippled hand that placed the briefcase stuffed with plastic explosives at Hitler's feet in a briefing hut in East Prussia on July 20, 1944. The outcome is an old tory. A chance gesture pushed the bomb out of killing range of Hitler, "thirteen officers were wounded; Hitler was only mildly inconvenienced. Staufenberg, thinking that Hitler had been killed, flew back to Berlin to help di--direct the coup that was to have followed. Before midnight on July 20, he was seized, condemned to death by a ummary court-martial, and executed in the courtyard of the Wehrmacht's headquarters under the glare of headlights from lorries that were driven up to illuminate the scene. As the shots rang out, he uttered one last cry.

Nobody is exactly sure of what he said, but many historians believe it was Long live our sacred Germany."

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