Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, 1917-2008

Catholic Nobleman, Forester, Knight of Malta, Plotted to Kill Hitler

Philipp Freiherr (Baron) von Boeselager, the last surviving member of the conspiracy of anti-Nazi German officers, has died at 90 years of age. The freiherr‘s background and upbringing were distinctly Catholic. The Boeselagers are a Rhenish family with Saxon origins in Magdeburg. Philipp was the fourth of eight children and was educated by the Jesuits at Bad Godesborg. His grandfather had been officially censured by the Imperial German goverment for publically taking part in a Catholic religious procession.

Boeselager had most intimately been involved in the March 1943 plot to assasinate Hitler and Himmler when the the Fuhrer and the SS head were visiting Field Marshal Günther von Kluge on the Eastern Front. Boeselager, then a 25-year-old cavalry lieutenant under the Field Marshal’s command, was to shoot both Hitler and Himmler in the officers mess with a Walther PP. Himmler, however, neglected to accompany Hitler and so the Field Marshal ordered Boeselager to abort the attempt fearing that Himmler would take over in the event of Hitler’s death, changing nothing.

«Each day Hitler ruled, thousands died unnecessarily — soldiers, because of his stupid leadership decisions. And later, I learned of concentration camps, where Jews, Poles, Russians — human beings — were being killed.»

«It was clear that these orders came from the top: I realised I lived in a criminal state. It was horrible. We wanted to end the war and free the concentration camps.»

Boeselager later procured the explosives for the famous July 1944 plot (the subject of the upcoming film “Valkyrie“), under the cover of being part of an explosives research team. He handed a suitcase with the explosives on to another conspirator. When the bomb exploded in Hitler’s conference room, Boeselager and his 1,000-man cavalry unit made an astonishing 120-mile retreat in under 36 hours to reach an airfield in western Russia from where the aristocrat would fly to Berlin to join the other conspirators.

At the airfield, however, he received a message from his brother (Georg von Boeselager, a fellow cavalry officer who was repeatedly awarded for his consistent bravery on the battlefield) saying “All back into the old holes”, the code signifying the failure of the coup. Even more astonishingly than his swift retreat was his return, with his unit, to the front quickly enough not to raise any eyebrows. As a result, he was not known to be part of the conspiracy and escaped the gruesome tortures and executions dealt to many of his fellow conspirators.

After the war, his role in the plot was revealed and Philipp von Boeselager was awarded the Legion d’honneur by France and the Great Cross of Merit by West Germany. He joined the Order of Malta in 1946, eventually co-founding Malteser Hilfdienst, the medical operation of the German knights of the Order, and helping coordinate German pilgrimages to Lourdes.

The greater part of his post-war years was spent in forestry, and Boeselager served as head of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Waldbesitzerverbände (the coordinating body of private and cooperative forest-owners) from 1968 to 1988. Coincidentally, he was succeeded in that post by Franz Ludwig Schenk Count von Stauffenberg, the son of the July ’44 plot mastermind.

“Brideshead” Regurgitated

Well, the trailer for the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel “Brideshead Revisited” is out, and the film is slated for a summer release here in the States. (Trailer | Official Site). Waugh fans can but lament that, whereas Waugh said the book was essentially about “the operation of divine grace”, the screenwriter of this adaptation openly admitted that the script “turns God into a villain”.

Rather than being bold and creating a genuine work of cinematic art to match the novel, they’ve decided to take the easy and conformist route and do a God-hating rompy flick. (Because we can’t have too many of those!). A shame, of course, but entirely predictable. Shall we at least have a look at the cast?

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New Yorker Elected Mayor of London

Congratulations to that most-honoured son of the Empire State, Mr. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson MP, more commonly known as Boris, on his election to the mayoralty of Greater London. Mr. Johnson was born on these sacred shores some forty-four years ago on a pleasant June day. Boris has politics in the blood as his father Stanley is a former Conservative MEP, but let us hope he does not take after his great-grandfather, Ali Kemal Bey, who made enough unfortunate decisions during his brief tenure as interior minister of the Ottoman Empire that he was knicked from the barber shop of the rather-smart Tokatlian Hotel in Constantinople and lynched shortly thereafter.

Strangely enough, this is not exactly the closest connection New York and London have ever had. Sir Gilbert Heathcote, 1st Baronet was Lord Mayor of London in 1710 while his brother Caleb Heathcote was Mayor of the City of New York, exhibiting how interconnected our transatlantic British world was in those days. Caleb Heathcote was also Lord of the Manor of Scarsdale, which is just five minutes north of here on the train. Created in 1703, Scarsdale was the last manor granted in the entire British Empire. There were about a dozen manorial lordships here in New York, bringing the proud heritage of feudalism to the New World. The Manor of Gardiner’s Island survives to this day as the only manor in America in which the land is still entirely owned by the descendants.

The bulk of manorial privileges (incorporating the pre-existing patroonships from the olden Dutch days) were, alas, abolished in the 1840s, with the final holdouts taken care of in some legislation of 1911, but the Lord of the Manor of Pelham was presented with a fatted calf each St. John’s Day from the City Council of New Rochelle (honoring the Huguenots’ agreement purchasing the land from the Pells) well into the twentieth century.

The Heathcote name survives, in Derbyshire I believe, but not in America. Caleb Heathcote married the daughter of Col. William Smith, Chief Justice of the Province of New York, but had only daughters.

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Herald-Tribune Drops Iconic ‘Dingbat’

Famous Emblem from 1886 is Dropped in Move to ‘Modernize’

The International Herald Tribune has unceremoniously dumped its unique 142-year-old nameplate logo, affectionately known as the “dingbat”. The graphic made its first appearance in the New York Tribune on April 10, 1866. The Tribune later merged with the New York Herald to become the New York Herald Tribune. The Herald had previously founded a separate European edition based in Paris. While the New York newspaper died in 1967, its weekly New York supplement survives as New York magazine and the Paris edition became the International Herald Tribune, jointly owned by the Whitney family and the New York Times. The Whitneys sold their stake to the Washington Post, which in turn ran the paper in alliance with the Times until 2002, when the New York Times Company became the sole proprietor of the IHT.

The Paris-based newspaper’s executive editor Michael Oreskes said he hoped that dropping the dingbat would make the front page “cleaner, more modern, more streamlined”. Vanessa Whittall, the Herald Tribune‘s communications manager, meanwhile said “by removing the traditional ‘dingbat’ graphic between Herald and Tribune we have created a more contemporary and concise presentation that is consistent with our digital platforms.”

The New York Times Company has been beset with problems in recent years, with both profits and circulation falling; one Manhattan outlet reported seeing an 80% drop in sales of the Sunday New York Times. Shareholders have claimed that the general downturn for newspapers has only been exacerbated by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.’s poor management. The decline of the Times has been mirrored in the IHT, which it now markets as its international edition.

Under the Times‘s control, the IHT has been seen to become more of a newspaper for Americans abroad than an American newspaper for an international audience. The blogger of “Think!: The blog for readers of the International Herald Tribune” questioned the prominence the paper devotes to American stories: “How a piece about baseball in the Netherlands (where I lived for three years) got more play directly next to an article about a cyclone in Burma that has killed around 100,000 people is a little hard to follow.”

Above, the traditional nameplate. Below, the ‘modern, streamlined’ nameplate.

The decision to remove the dingbat certainly has its critics. Juan Antonio Giner, the founder of a media consulting group and blogger at Innovationsinnewspapers said the move was “not a big revolution or a smart strategic decision for a dying newspaper”. Mr. Giner compared the management’s decision to “play with such a traditional, magnificent, beautiful, well-done logo” as “like moving the chairs on a sinking Titanic”.

The original dingbat, above, with the most recent incarnation below.

In “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune”, the definitive history of the deceased journal, Richard Kluger described the dingbat:

“in the middle of the crudely drawn tableau is a clock reading twelve minutes past six – no one knows why (conceivably it was the moment of Horace Greeley’s birth); to the left, Father Time sits in brooding contemplation of antiquity, represented by the ruin of a Greek temple, a man and his ox plowing, a caravan of six camels passing before two pyramids, and an hourglass; to the right, a sort of Americanized Joan of Arc, arms outstretched beneath a backwards-billowing Old Glory, welcomes modernity in the form of a chugging railroad train, factories with smoking chimneys, an updated plow, and an industrial cogwheel (over which the incautious heroine is about to trip); atop the clock, ready to take off into the boundless American future, is an eagle – all for no extra cost.”

“It was a baroque snapshot of time arrested,” Mr. Kluger continued, “an allegorical hieroglyph of the newspaper’s function to render history on the run”.

The deputy managing editor Robert Marino said of the dingbat, “I’m kind of sorry to see it go, but that’s progress.” Many of the Herald Tribune‘s readers will remain unconvinced.

Slot Zeist

A country house in the Province of Utrecht

Utrecht is the smallest of Dutch provinces, being little more than a remnant of the once-powerful Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht. The city of Utrecht is the province’s capital and namesake, not to mention the primatial see of all the Netherlands. Just outside the provincial capital is the town of Zeist with its splendid little ‘palace’, Slot Zeist. The house was built from 1677 to 1686 on the ruins of Kasteel Zeist, the castle of the von Zeist family which died out in the fourteenth century (or survived through the Borre van Amerongen family, depending on how you look at it).

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The myths of Simon Blackburn

(I will now be contributing to Taki’s Daily over at Taki’s Magazine regularly).