Assassinating Hitler : Ethics and Resistance in Nazi Germany

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Ships from the UK. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 15905923-20

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Reseña del editor: Assassinating Hitler is an attempt to understand the moral imagination of those soldiers and civilians who, on 20 July 1944, attempted, in what they called "Operation Valkyrie," to kill Adolf Hitler, seize power, and bring about an end to the Second World War. This book attempts not to uncover new sources, but to provide a new reading of old materials in an effort to reexamine an old question: When love of country and love of virtue collide, how shall we know what to do, and even when we know what to do, how do we muster the courage? In answering this question, author Robert Weldon Whalen not only excavates the conspirators' moral world, but embeds it in the density of their own experience.
Exploring the moral imagination of the July 20 Conspirators is no easy task. The plotters deceived and were themselves deceived; they compromised their honor, and killed to regain it. The July 20 Conspiracy encourages and yet provokes. Protean, it not only changes with the perspectives of the observer, but it also changes the perspectives of the observer. The student of the conspiracy can only sympathize with the anonymous Gestapo bureaucrat who observed five decades ago: "This 20th of July thing is getting beyond us. We can't control the thing any longer."
In chapter 1, Whalen narrates the climactic event of the July 20 Conspiracy - Operation Valkyrie - the assassination and coup attempt. The second chapter outlines the often angry debate that has raged since 1945 about the meaning of Valkyrie. The remaining chapters explore the dimensions of the conspirators' moral imagination: the conspirators' personalities, their family relationships, their distinctive understandings of honor, moral evil, and Christian ethics. The book's epitaph explains the price the Nazis exacted of the conspirators, and concludes the analysis.
The conspirators' moral imagination might seem peculiar at first, but it is well to remember that it was shaped by peculiar times. The anti-Nazi underground was unavoidably textured by the Third Reich; entry into the underground was dangerous, movement through its labyrinths treacherous, and exit all but impossible. Assassinating Hitler seeks to remind us that this drama was no literary fantasy; it happened in our own time, only a generation ago. A thoroughly interdisciplinary study, drawing on history and theology, ethics and psychology, this book achieves much in the effort to understand the moral imagination of the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler.