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BERLIN - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder marked the 60th anniversary of an army plot to kill Adolf Hitler by honoring the country's small Nazi resistance, giving Germany a chance Tuesday to remember its few heroes of that era as the nation increasingly sheds the debilitating legacy of the Third Reich.
Speaking at the former Nazi military headquarters in Berlin where the leading plotters were executed after Hitler survived the July 20, 1944, coup attempt, Schroeder cited their courage as an emphatic example of why Germany belongs in the European community.
Commemorations focused on Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic Nazi army officer whose attempt to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb placed under a conference table failed because an aide moved the briefcase. But Schroeder also recalled the labor and church leaders, leftist politicians and students who opposed Hitler - and often paid with their lives.
"Only today, 60 years later, can we make this European legacy of the resistance a reality," he said. "The struggle for freedom and justice, against tyranny and military aggression is the most important foundation for what unifies us in Europe."
However, Schroeder - at 60, the first German leader with no personal memory of World War II - also acknowledged that the resistance never gained popular support among Germans.
The July 20 bombing killed four people but only superficially wounded Hitler. Immediately after World War II, Germans widely viewed the plotters as traitors, a label that stuck for many years. Even now, historians still argue about their motives and - given their conservative views and early support for Hitler - their commitment to democracy.
But Germans have increasingly accepted the day's significance as wounds over the war heal and the rest of Europe grows comfortable with Germany's place in the continent.
"It has arrived in the collective memory of the Germans," said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial center, who noted that the many streets across Germany named after von Stauffenberg would once have been unthinkable.