Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, 1922–2013

The wounded Lt. Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was recuperating in Berlin in 1944 when he received a telegram recalling him to his Wehrmacht unit. But instead of ordering him back to the Eastern Front, his superiors wanted him for a more important mission: the assassination of Adolf Hitler. Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of a resistance group within the German army, asked von Kleist to model a new uniform for an inspection by the führer. That uniform would be loaded with explosives. Von Kleist agreed to join the plot, even though it meant certain death. “I don’t think it was a question of courage,” he said. “There is such a thing as conscience.” Before the plan could be carried out, though, the inspection was canceled, and the plotters had to come up with another idea.

Born to an aristocratic Prussian family, von Kleist “grew up in an atmosphere of sharp loathing for Hitler,” said The Times (U.K.). His father hated the Nazis’ thuggish methods and was repeatedly arrested for resistance activity. As a boy, von Kleist turned against Hitler following the “Night of the Long Knives,” in 1934, when the Nazis murdered their political enemies. His father, said The Washington Post, narrowly escaped being killed in that episode. Nonetheless, von Kleist joined the German army in 1940, and was wounded in 1943 while fighting on the Eastern Front.

Following the failure of the uni-form plot, von Stauffenberg hatched a plan to leave a bomb under a table during a meeting of Hitler and his aides at the führer’s military headquarters. Von Kleist and other officers “were instructed to be ready in Berlin to stage a coup once the plot had been successful,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The bomb went off, but Hitler survived, and von Stauffenberg was executed along with some 5,000 others implicated in the conspiracy, including von Kleist’s father. Von Kleist himself spent four months in a concentration camp before being released and sent back to the front line.

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Von Kleist, who founded a publishing house after the war, said that he owed his life to his fellow plotters who refused to give up his name under torture. “The older I get,” he reflected last year, “the more it surprises me that I survived.”