Berlin - The German military honoured Monday officers who opposed Adolf Hitler, swearing in recruits at a ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of a failed plot to kill the Nazi dictator. Chancellor Angela Merkel told young army recruits giving their military pledge on the lawn outside Germany's parliament the plotters had set a good example.
"Sadly there were not many resisters, but the few that there were preserved our nation's dignity and honour," she said.
Politicians and soldiers also laid wreaths at the Bendler Block, a defence ministry office building where Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was executed alongside three fellow plotters on July 20, 1944.
Earlier that day in 1944, Stauffenberg had planted a bomb hidden in a briefcase in Hitler's eastern front headquarters, the Wolfsschanze, in what is now Poland. The blast was deflected by the leg of a table and Hitler received only minor injuries.
Stauffenberg had travelled back to Berlin and put in motion Operation Valkyrie, an attempt to overthrow the Nazi dictatorship.
The plotters were tried and executed as soon as their failed plan came to light. July 20 has since become a symbol of military anti-Nazi resistance in Germany. The story featured in a movie, Valkyrie, released late last year.
Victims of Nazi Germany were also remembered at Ploetzensee, a lake on the outskirts of Berlin where more than 2,500 people were killed between 1933 and 1945.
Anti-military demonstrators seized the opportunity to protest against war at a rally on Potsdam Square, out of earshot of the parliament building. Police had previously banned them from marching through Berlin's Tiergarten park.
The secretary-general of the Christian Democrats (CDU), Ronald Pofalla, said it was important for young soldiers to take their oat of allegiance in public. "In this way we Germans show that the army stands in the centre of our society," he said.
Earlier in the day, the parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, Reinhard Robbe, said the military received insufficient recognition in present-day Germany.
"In our society, too little attention is shown towards our soldiers," Robbe told German daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. This weighed heavily on German troops, the parliamentarian added.
Speaking at Ploetzensee, German Economics Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said resistance to Nazi Germany came from all areas of society, including trade unionists, politicians, scientists, public servants and members of the Jewish community.
"July 20 is a warning to the future, and not an annually recurring nostalgic event," Guttenberg said.
