Another intriguing character: Wilhelm Kube, the Gauleiter (Nazi viceroy) of White Russia. He was not only a Nazi (and at the same time very active in the German Lutheran Church, trying to push it into a more “racial” direction) but enthusiastically supported the anti-Jewish “actions”. Until (this story is told in Hans Höhne’s history of the SS, “The Order of the Death’s Head”) he saw shipments of German Jews arrive, including decorated WW I veterans — and started vigorously protesting. He was later assassinated by partisans, and a reprisal killing of 1,000 civilians took place, but Himmler (y”sh) was privately satisfied that he was gone.
As Hoehne puts it, Kube appears to have had a “red line”. It was morally arbitrary, and it was very high, but it appears to have been there. And once crossed, it turned him against the regime.
There are two traps to be avoided in this debate. The one is false black-white dichotomy (“1-bit moral grayscale”), where Stauffenberg was either a white knight in shining armor or no better than Hitler y”sh himself. The other one is false moral equivalence where everybody (including Hitler y”h himself) becomes medium gray (“0-bit moral grayscale”). If you have enough “bit depth” in your moral grayscale, you see that Stauffenberg may be even a dark gray character, but still morally greatly superior to the midnight black represented by Hitler (y”sh).
