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Show 157 might have been Spared. Britain might have been Spared much V-bomb destruction. On the other hand, it is possible to argue that the Nazi regime might have been replaced with one which could have triedtx>prolong the war by playing off the East against the west, which would have tried(kantauffenbergvs and Goerdelerls own admission) to retain Austria, Posen, the Polish Corridor, Sudetenland, and Upper Silesia, could have defeated the Allies: and which aim of depriving Germany of sufficient military and economic power to insure that it would never again wage aggressive war. Such, at any rate, was the thinking in Allied circles, and it explains the cool, almost callous indifference to the annihilation of the Valkyrie conspirators. Winston Churchill remarked that it was just "Germans killing Germans" and so much the better. Were the sacrifices made in the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life totally in vain, then? Not according to Pastor Harald Poelchau, the Protest- ant minister who accompanied more than 1,000 victims of the ensuing purge to the gallows. "It created some reSpect for us in the world," he believed.13 13Associated Press diSpatch by John 0. Koehler, Berlin I July 19, p. 5. 1964, published in Salt Lake Tribune, July 20, 1964, |
