Philipp von Boeselager's sleep is troubled by furtive chats with conspirators, concealed bombs and a desperate horseback ride from the battlefield on the day he and his friends tried to kill Hitler.
In his dreams, the 86-year-old baron talks to friends and co-plotters -- high-ranking German military officials -- who tried to blow up Adolf Hitler with a bomb on July 20, 1944 and who were killed or committed suicide when the attempt failed.
"If you are the only one among some 100 who is still alive, that makes you think. I feel they are watching me and I have a certain responsibility towards them," Boeselager said in Paris, where he received the prestigious Legion of Honor medal.
"I call on young people to get politically involved, to feel responsible for their country. If that's not happening and if someone like [Nazi propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels appeared today -- as millions are unemployed -- I would be very scared," he said.
In postwar Germany, the July 20 attack has become a famous symbol for German resistance to the Nazi regime, discussed in school lessons and honored in museums.
Army officer Boeselager was only 25 when he was asked to join a secret team of officers who planned to kill the dictator -- and who were ready to sacrifice their own lives.
"We were convinced that even if July 20 had been successful, we would have been hanged because the mass of Germans believed Hitler. They would have said: `If Hitler was still alive, we would have won the war,'" he said.
criminal state
Boeselager, an elegant man dressed in a dark suit who wears his hair carefully combed back, said the wish to halt the Nazis mattered more to the men than the danger of death.
"Each day that 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 realized I lived in a criminal state. It was horrible. We wanted to end the war and free the concentration camps," he said.
Boeselager and his brother Georg belonged to a group of plotters around Colonel Henning von Tresckow on the Eastern Front, who used his access to senior officers to try to recruit them for his idea. Several planned attacks failed before 1944.
Boeselager, who worked in an explosives team, was charged with organizing a bomb for July 20.
"One day, my brother called and said: `They want explosives' -- I knew exactly what for," he said.
In his brown leather suitcase, Boeselager smuggled several British bombs -- "I realized English ones were the best" -- to General Hellmuth Stieff at Army High Command.
"Getting out of the plane, I was limping, because I had been injured in the leg. Several young soldiers came up to me, offering to carry my suitcase.
"But I refused. I thought they would notice at once that the suitcase was far too heavy," he said.
As Stieff was in a meeting when Boeselager arrived, he went to a cinema to wait.
"They were showing a comedy but I didn't pay attention. I was worried someone would trip over my suitcase," he said.
On July 20, 1944, Hitler met officials at his so-called Wolf's Lair headquarters in today's Poland, a secluded area in the woods, tightly watched and protected by thousands of mines, but to which one leading conspirator had access.
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