© Rex FeaturesCount Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg in March 1944
Stauffenberg and other co-conspirators were summarily executed after a bomb the army officer planted at Hitler's east Prussian HQ failed to kill him on July 20,1944.
The plot to kill him and overthrow the Nazi state called Unternehmen Walküre (Operation Valkyrie), which was made into a film starring Tom Cruise as the doomed nobleman, was hatched by disillusioned army officers who knew Germany had no chance of winning the war and who were disgusted by atrocities they witnessed on the eastern front.
Stauffenberg and several others were shot dead in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the army HQ in the centre of Berlin, in the hours following the coup attempt. Their last resting place was never found until now.
A former cemetery inspector at the Gueterfelde graveyard in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin left behind a will stating that he had been told of a "mysterious action" in the night of July 20 and 21, 1944 by his predecessor who died in the 50s.
This man told him how he was woken from his sleep by a detachment of "excited" SS men who asked to be "guided to an area where they could dig a grave big enough to take 10 bodies." After the cemetery inspector showed them where to dig he was dispatched back to his quarters and warned to "say nothing" of the night's proceedings. He was convinced, following news of the failed plot in the following days, that Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators had been buried there.
The German Military Grave Registration Service has no knowledge of the burial. But the Nazi state regarded the plotters as traitors anyway and wanted them to have no known grave.
An historical society said it will apply to disinter the victims in the coming months to ascertain whether they are those of Stauffenberg and his helpers. If so, they will be reburied with full honours.
These conspirators were the first of thousands to be executed in the aftermath of the plot. Most were hanged on piano wire in the Gestapo prison of Ploetzensee in Berlin, their death throes filmed for Hitler to view in private at his cinema at his Berchtesgaden mountain retreat.
Stauffenberg is a hero to the authorities in modern-day Germany with numerous streets and buildings named after him.
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