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GERMAN OF THE WEEK

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‘We wanted to end the dreadful crimes’

Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, a former German army lieutenant who took part in a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, has died at the age of 90. The last surviving member of the "20th of July" plot is The Local's German of Week.

Published: 14 March 2013 06:04 CET
'We wanted to end the dreadful crimes'
Photo: DPA

Kleist, who was arrested and sent to a concentration camp after the 1944 bid to remove Hitler, died last Friday in Munich, a spokesman for the Munich Security Conference said on Wednesday.

Under the “20th of July” plot, German army officers teamed up with members of the resistance including trade unionists to try to blow up Hitler at Rastenburg, in Eastern Prussia, now part of Poland.

Among the key plotters was Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg – played by US actor Tom Cruise in the 2008 film “Valkyrie” about the failed assassination – who had personally recruited Kleist.

Kleist was 22 at the time and volunteered to wear a suicide vest at a meeting with Hilter. But the plot failed and Hitler survived although he was injured in the blast. Leading members of the plot were arrested shortly afterwards and executed.

Kleist was imprisoned at the Bendlerblock building in Berlin where the plot had been hatched and today is used by the defence ministry, before he was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

After the Second World War, he studied law and economics and went into publishing.

He was also a co-founder of the Munich Security Conference, which annually brings together global defence and foreign policy chiefs.

“We lost a great German, a great security policy maker,” Oliver Rolofs, spokesman for the conference told news agency AFP.

During a 2010 commemoration of the failed plot, Kleist said “we wanted to end the dreadful crimes” of the Nazi regime, which continued for nearly another 10 months after the assassination attempt.

AFP/mry

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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