At 38, Colonel Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, Chief of Staff of the Reich Home Army, was a charismatic figure who was maimed when his staff car was shot up by allied aircraft in North Africa. With only one eye, two fingers and a thumb, he discharged himself from hospital after three months and leant to write with a crippled left hand, to drive, ride a horse, shot and lead a normal active life, through doctors had said he would never walk again. The circle with whom he conceived the plot to kill Hilter in July 1944 was called 'Secret Germany', as indeed was the esoteric circle in which Stauffenberg as a young man had been a disciple of the mystic anti-Nazi poet Stefan Georga Stauffenberg was said to be the only man who had stared down the Fuhrer until he averted his eyes. What motivated this extraordinary man with the good looks of a Hollywood idol who saw the bomb plot of July 1944 as not a political move but a moral, religious and spiritual necessity? What moulded the life of this professional soldier who became father confessor to many far older and of senior rank to himself? This book tells the untold story behind the attempt to assasinate Adolf Hitler.
