Conflict has been part of Andy Bielenberg’s life. For decades, the University College Cork (UCC) professor has mapped the story of Cork before, during and after the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War.
On Friday, Bielenberg along with UCC colleagues Helene O’Keefe and John Dorney gave a presentation to the West Cork History Festival near Baltimore on research that maps every death during the Civil War from June 28th, 1922, to May 24th 1923.
Twenty-four hours later, Bielenberg had his own family’s role in world history to remember, namely the execution 80 years ago of his grandfather, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, one of those who tried to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20th, 1944.
Schulenberg was executed after a Berlin show-trial, when he and seven others were taken hours later to an execution cell in Plotsenzee jail on the outskirts of Berlin, stripped to the waist and slowly strangled with piano wire from meat-hooks.
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The first of 5,000 to be executed, the deaths of Schulenberg and the others were filmed on Hitler’s orders, with the reels sent to him for his own private viewing. Long before the end of the executions, the camera crews had downed tools, refusing to record.
Bielenberg shares his grandfather’s final words to his family: “We have undertaken this act to protect Germany from nameless misery. I know I will be hanged for this, but I don’t regret my deed .”
“We’re all obviously very proud of what he did,” says Bielenberg, whose paternal grandmother was Christabel Bielenberg, the English-born author of The Past is Myself, who lived for decades in Co Carlow.
The echoes of the 1930s are evident today, he believes: “Now, we have people smashing in the shop windows of immigrant families, that to me looks very much like the 1930s all over again. The ignorance, the intolerance, the ‘fake news’ surrounding minorities.
“There’s something going very badly wrong. To me, that looks very frightening, given the way things turned then,” says the UCC academic, noting that the anniversary of the assassination plot was marked last month by German chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Schulenberg, who came from a landed Prussian family “that had made its money fighting as mercenaries for Venice in the centuries before”, was convinced by 1938 that Hitler had to be killed.
The legacy left by his grandfather remains important, Bielenberg believes. Relatives of those involved travel to Berlin for the annual commemoration hosted by the German authorities, though the children of those involved are in the late stages of their lives.
“A lot of them have already died, or they are too old to go to the commemoration,” says Bielenberg, noting Scholz’s declaration that the July 20th plot was “a reminder not to resign in the face of history”.
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