Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager
Valkyrie

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1917, the fifth of nine children. He was raised with a liberal education, strong moral and religious values, and a love of hunting. In 1938, he enlisted and was placed in the cavalry regiment. He rose to the rank of commanding lieutenant, only to join the German resistance in 1941. His participation in Valkyrie went undetected, and he lived to be the last surviving member of the plot. In 2003, France awarded von Boeselager the Legion of Honor. He died on May 1, 2008.

Florence Fehrenbach is the granddaughter of Karl von Wendt, a coconspirator and close friend of Philipp von Boeselager. She and her husband, Jérôme Fehrenbach, convinced Boeselager, at the age of eighty-nine, to recount his experience.

Philipp von Boeselager is a rare person. He can provide testimony about his experience and development that is precious for our time. That is the purpose of this book.

Were it not for a few traces of the wounds he received in combat, one would never guess that this old man who radiates an impression of inner peace experienced the interminable nightmare of the Second World War—and especially, that he lived in a state of perpetual anxiety resulting from his participation in the conspiracies against Hitler. To be a conspirator was to plan a crime. In the eyes of other Germans, it was to betray one’s country and hasten its final destruction. It was, finally, to carry on a double life, a difficult task for a man who had been brought up only to be a horseman.

To mention Philipp von Boeselager here without also mentioning his brother Georg would make no sense. They were inseparable in their childhood games and in the rigors of the war, and they both carried the secret of the conspiracy. No doubt they did so out of a sense of duty, a way of being and thinking that is illustrated by an episode—anecdotal with respect to history—that will be recounted in the afterword.

Von Boeselager agreed to participate in long conversations about the period that provided the subject matter for this book. He does not like to talk about these matters. Every reference to them elicits memories that are almost always painful. Even after the war, his participation in the plots against Hitler was a difficult secret to bear. At first he did not even share this with his wife. But he is the last one of the conspirators who is still alive, and since Boeselager does not believe in chance, he knows that he has survived in order to testify.

Florence and Jérôme Fehrenbach
Saint-Chaffrey, France
,
August 16, 2007

My brother Georg was born in August 1915, I in September 1917. We were the fourth and fifth in a family of nine children.

My family had settled in Heimerzheim, in the Rhineland, in 1910, leaving our old home in Bonn, which in the eighteenth century had been one of the residences of Prince-Archbishop Clemens August of Bavaria.
¹
With its network of canals and moats, its great central building—white, gabled, and flanked by corner towers—Heimerzheim stood on an island reached by a succession of bridges, like a summer palace in ancient China. Its immense grounds were left in a half-wild state where deer peacefully grazed and the familiar mixture of mystery and nature on the doorstep made Heimerzheim seem to us like a fairy-tale castle. Nothing was easier there than to
retreat into a secret world. Imagination and children’s games could hardly have found a more propitious place to develop.

We had a liberal upbringing at Heimerzheim, something that always surprised the guests who passed through—and they were many, since our mother believed that those who had the good fortune to live in a great residence should keep an open house. But for all that, our upbringing was not permissive. Life was very clearly structured, framed by a few strictly defined moral principles: for example, it was forbidden to torture animals. Within this framework, we enjoyed a great deal of latitude.

My father, Albert von Boeselager, was a cultured man of letters. His mother’s side of the family hailed from Brussels, and he considered the European nobility a unitary body. He hunted all over the Continent and spoke four or five languages.

Because of this, he attached particular importance to learning how to make proper use of freedom—and the capacity for Christian discernment that was for him its corollary—and also to hunting. Georg received his first rifle as a Christmas present in 1928, when he was only thirteen years old. At fifteen, my brother’s list of kills already included some 150 head of game. His passion was such that he managed to sneak a disassembled rifle into our boarding school in Bad Godesberg—with my complicity, I must admit. When the housemaster Father Strasser
made the rounds of the bedrooms to check the students’ bags, we were forced once again to engage in a ruse. Each of us slipped part of the rifle into his shorts—Georg the barrel and I the stock—while the inspection took place. The maneuver was acrobatic, because it was strictly forbidden to put our hands in our pockets, but we somehow had to prevent the parts of the rifle from slipping out.

It was hunting that truly shaped our behavior in nature, and profoundly influenced our way of life. Georg, in particular, learned to find his way in the forest even before the sun came up; to creep up to within a few meters of a woodcock without scaring the bird away; to slip through the bushes without making the leaves rustle so as not to frighten the deer; to disappear into the vegetation, perfectly camouflaged; to wait patiently, silent and inactive; and to act at the right fraction of a second. In a word, hunting, practiced in a group or in the course of long solitary hikes, with that passion for animals that marks true nature lovers, made Georg a real Indian. He remained one. He was later to find this training extremely valuable.

Hunting was not only a way of hardening the body. It prepared us, without our being aware of it, for the laws of life, for the struggles of existence: saving one’s strength, fleeing from an adversary, recovering, knowing how to use cunning, adapting to the enemy, assessing risk. We learned how to keep our sangfroid in the tumult of dogs excited by the battle, how to cut the throat of a stag or a
boar in the coup de grâce and look without revulsion at the dark red fluid bubbling out of mortal wounds. We did not shiver upon seeing the brown trickle running down the pale pelt of a young deer, or the bloody foam staining the chops of an animal exhausted by the chase. We withstood the glassy stare of the dead animal and, finally, collected these bloody, damp trophies, the
spolia opima
of modern times. Hunting also accustomed us to the laws of violent death, internalized the notion of an offering. Yes, hunting was a preparation for the supreme sacrifice—the sacrifice of life.

The education we received at Godesberg did not differ from what we were taught at Heimerzheim, which I would call relaxed Catholicism. My family was profoundly Catholic, with a centuries-old history linked to that of the German Catholic princes. In the seventeenth century, our ancestors, the Heyden-Belderbusches, from whom we had inherited the Heimerzheim castle, had been ministers of the powerful archbishop of Cologne. During the same period, the Satzenhovens, from whom we had inherited the Kreuzberg estate, had served the prince electors of Mainz.