‘You must do it’ When the plan was proposed by Stauffenberg, Kleist asked for a day to consult his father on the family estate in Pomerania (now part of Poland). “My thinking was that parents love their children, so I would ask my father, and he would surely say: ‘Don’t do it’.”
But he had underestimated the old man, a passionate monarchist and anti-Nazi. “The answer came in seconds: ‘You must do it,’ he said. ‘If you refuse at a moment like this, you will never be happy again in your lifetime’.”
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