Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for Germany, used the incident as a pretext to launch a pogrom against Germany’s Jews.  On November 9^th, 1938, Nazi hooligans went on a rampage throughout Germany destroying over seven thousand Jewish stores and two hundred synagogues in what has become known as “Kristallnacht” or the Night of Broken Glass.  For Stauffenberg, this marked the breaking point.  “To his military colleagues, he commented only on the purely pragmatic repercussions:  The damage done to Germany’s honor and reputation in the eyes of the world.  His primary objections, however, were personal.  His own brother, Alexander, was now married to a woman of Jewish ancestry…Jewish members of George’s (Stefan George) circle, some of them among his closest friends, were now under threat.  The government and the fuhrer to whom he had sworn his oath of allegiance was suddenly beginning to appear ugly in the extreme." [9]

Acts of violence against minorities was not all that bothered Stauffenberg about Hitler.  Since he became the leader of Germany Hitler had sought to rearm Germany with aspirations of retaking lands lost by the Versailles Treaty as well as adding lands from the countries created by it.  In 1936 Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland, which although part of Germany, had become a buffer zone between Germany and the rest of Western Europe after the First World War.

Unopposed by the League of Nations vis-à-vis the annexation of the Rhineland, Hitler then set his sights toward his two southern neighbors, Austria and Czechoslovakia.  Austria was annexed in early 1938 after a plebiscite in the country voted for the “Anschluss” or annexation of Austria into Germany.  Hitler followed up that bloodless conquest with the annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.  This action almost pushed the world into another war but the crisis was averted by the Munich Agreement which once again gave Hitler everything he wanted.  It is important here to note that had the British and/or French challenged Hitler at any point until the Munich Agreement the chances are that Hitler would have been deposed quite easily for Germany still remembered the price in blood that it had paid twenty years earlier.  Allowing Hitler to get exactly what he wanted only encouraged his lust for farther reach in Europe.  As Stauffenberg remarked about the chain of events, “The fool (Hitler) is bent on war and is prepared to squander the flower of Germany’s manhood twice in the same generation.”[10] His premonition was to be proven correct for Hitler continued to demand more from Europe than it was willing to give. 

When Hitler demanded a corridor from East Prussia to the traditionally German city of Danzig the great powers of Europe refused and warned that any attack on Polish soil for such a purpose would be deemed an act of war.  Hitler didn’t believe England or France and on September 1^st, 1939 sent his armies marching across the Polish Frontier.  Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany and the Second World War began.

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