May 03, 2008	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 26, 1429

BERLIN, May 2: A former German army officer involved in two failed plots to assassinate Hitler, including one in 1944 when the Nazi leader narrowly survived a bomb explosion, died aged 90 on Thursday, his family said.

Philipp von Boeselager was one of eight officers, including his own brother, who planned to shoot Hitler and SS head Heinrich Himmler on March 13, 1943, on a visit to the eastern front.

But Himmler decided at the last minute not to attend and the conspirators called off the plot because they feared that what would follow would be a bloody power struggle between the SS and the army.

“That was the day when I should have shot,” von Boeselager had said in an interview in 2004, showing off the pistol that he would have used.

“Eighty million Germans believe in the Fuehrer compared to a small group convinced he had to go. It was hard not to have doubts about whether you were right,” he recalled.

The second plot, involving 200 conspirators convinced Germany was going to lose the war and sickened by the Holocaust, came closer.

On July 20, 1944, a bomb was planted under a table in Hitler’s eastern headquarters in East Prussia, in modern day Poland.

It was von Boeselager who supplied the explosives and he was also to play a key role in “Operation Valkyrie”, travelling from the eastern front to Berlin with 1,200 men once Hitler was dead.

In Berlin top members of the Nazi regime such as Himmler and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels were to be arrested.

The device exploded but Hitler escaped with slight injuries because an officer had moved the briefcase containing the explosives behind a sturdy leg of the oak table.

“I just got a message from my brother ... that the attack had not been carried out,” von Boeselager told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in his last interview.

“Then the news came through that the attack on Hitler had failed.”

Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and other conspirators were rounded up and executed by firing squad, and von Boeselager was convinced he was next.

“It was clear to me that I would be taking my cyanide pill the next morning,” he told the FAZ.

But no one ever came to arrest him and he remained undetected — but always kept his cyanide pill just in case.

The episode is currently being turned into a Hollywood movie with Tom Cruise playing von Stauffenberg.

Von Boeselager was the last surviving member of the group.—AFP