A Hero Against Hitler Says Nazi Mentality Persists -- Survivor Of Hit Squad Boycotts Politicians Marking Anniversary

BERLIN - Otto John is the last one left, the last of the inner circle of conspirators who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944.

But he remains bitter even as the country marks the 50th anniversary of the event today as a day of pride.

When Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave his speech today, there was some glory for Otto John for his central role in the resistance to history's foulest tyrant.

Kohl praised the "the men and women of July 20 (who) helped Germany find a place once again in the community of free nations soon after the war.

"There were not many of them, but they were the best," he said in a 20-minute address broadcast live on television.

But John remains a hero without honor, a courageous man betrayed by ambivalent countrymen.

"It was all such a long time ago, and we failed," said John, 85, who visited Berlin from his self-imposed exile in Austria to break a long silence, also self-imposed.

Had the plot succeeded, it might have saved half of all those who eventually died in Europe during World War II.

Otto John was among those intellectuals who as early as the 1930s were nauseated by the thuggish new Nazi regime.

A lawyer, he worked for Lufthansa and was posted to Madrid and Lisbon. There he secretly established links to U.S. and British military intelligence. He was the chief liaison between resistance plotters on the Nazi general staff and Allied commanders.

The plot called for German Col. Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg, to pull the pin on Hitler.

John was summoned back to Berlin to await the attack, and was with the secret coup circle inside the Bendler Block; it was a fitting site for the plotters, this army high command headquarters where Hitler gave his famous "lebensraum" speech to launch World War II.

At 18 minutes before 1 in the afternoon of July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg planted a briefcase time-bomb next to Hitler at his Wolf's Lair hideaway in East Prussia, now part of Poland. Stauffenberg feigned a phone call, and left by plane for Berlin.

The blast killed four but not Hitler, who was saved by the caprice of a carpenter who designed the Fuehrer's table with thick oaken legs.

"We heard Hitler on the radio, and knew he was still alive," John said. "Stauffenberg told me, `Use your Lufthansa credentials and get out of Berlin at once. Tell the world what we wanted to do, and why we failed.' I left the Bendler Block just ahead of the Gestapo and the SS troops. Everyone else in the Bendler Block got shot."

Hitler used the pretext to execute 2,000 enemies; 5,000 more went to the camps.

One victim was John's brother Hans. Arrested. Tortured. Executed. The only keepsake returned to the family was his bloody underwear.

Cognizant of his impeccable resistance credentials, the U.S., British and French forces occupying western Germany after the war had John appointed president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a new internal security service, like the FBI.

Then, on July 23, 1954, 10 years to the week after the coup attempt, a government bulletin announced that John had vanished from West Berlin, the victim of kidnapping by communist agents. Within a week, though, the government amended that to accuse John of defecting.

"Once a traitor, always a traitor," was the verdict that day from Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, founder of Germany's postwar intelligence agency, which was the forerunner of the current German spy bureau here.

When John fled back to the West from East Berlin 15 months later, he was sentenced to four years in prison. As in the United States, Red-baiting and a local McCarthyism were sweeping Germany, but that did not hide the fact that all the magistrates who ruled on John's case held their judicial positions from the Nazi era, men who had for years enforced Hitler's criminal justice system.

Just this month, John asked to reopen his case, based on KGB documents recently released in Moscow. John's attorney says he has depositions from Lubyanka case officers in Moscow who confirm they plotted the kidnapping of Otto John - he was wooed to a meeting in East Berlin, where he was fed drugged coffee and cognac - to discredit West Germany.

As for these anniversary celebrations, John wants none of it, and even turned down an opportunity to join Kohl at the Bendler Block today.

"After the war, so many people pretended they were anti-Nazis," he said. "Of course, they weren't. It is the same thing today. All of these politicians and military leaders claim they would have acted like Stauffenberg, like the rest of us. I know; they would not have.

"Let the politicians speak. I don't care. All I know is one thing: The mentality of people who brought Hitler to power is not dead."

Information from Reuters is included in this report.