Berlin, July 20 (Reuters): Sixty years after a failed bid by German officers to kill Adolf Hitler, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder marked the growing recognition of the plotters by calling them patriots who tried to save Germany from moral ruin.

On July 20, 1944, they detonated a bomb inside Hitler’s eastern headquarters and tried to stage a coup d’etat in Berlin. Four died from the blast, but Hitler emerged almost unscathed, dooming the coup and its architects. The Nazi reprisals saw some 140 plotters executed and thousands of arrests.

Speaking in the “Bendlerblock”, the former headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Schroeder also hailed the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis that began shortly after but which was likewise brutally suppressed. “Europe has good reason to understand and honour these two dates — July 20 and August 1 — as flaming signals on the way to a true European community of shared values,” said Schroeder.

In the post-war years, the conspirators were regarded by many in West Germany as betrayers of the Fatherland, only to be dismissed by subsequent generations of Leftist students as conservatives who had collaborated with the fascist Nazi regime.

In East Germany, the plotters were seen as “reactionary forces”.

But July 20 is now seen as a day Germany can be proud of, one which proved there were Germans in positions of high authority ready to risk their lives to end the tyranny. Schroeder said the plot showed there was “a different Germany”.

The driving force of the assassination attempt was aristocratic colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who planted the bomb inside a briefcase in Hitler’s “Wolf's Lair” in what is now Poland and was executed by firing squad some 12 hours later.

Schroeder drew on Stauffenberg’s words to sum up the difficulties and internal conflict faced by the plotters in their attempt to overthrow the brutal regime which most Germans remained loyal to through years of warfare and genocide.

“He who dares to do something, must be aware that he will probably go down in German history as a traitor. But if he fails to act, he would be a traitor to his own conscience,” said Schroeder, quoting Stauffenberg.