Stefan George (1868–1933) wrote "Geheimes Deutschland" in 1922 and dedicated it to Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, whose younger brother Claus led the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler.
Berlin, July 20, 1944: the capital has extinguished all its lights as air raid sirens warn of a British bombing. That afternoon a bomb had exploded in a meeting of Adolf Hitler and his military leadership, killing four men and only injuring Hitler. An execution is about to take place. Inside the courtyard of the Army's High Command building, ten armed soldiers raise their rifles at a mound of dirt, lit by a truck's headlights. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg steps in front of the mound and shouts — but just as the shots ring out, his aide, unable to watch his leader die, jumps in front of the bullets and is killed. Stauffenberg dies next. He is buried with military honors, but the S.S. digs up his body, cremates it, and scatters the ashes over a sewage field so that no grave is left for commemoration.
The men executed that night had tried, and failed, to do what the world outside Nazi Germany had hoped for through the whole war: kill Hitler, and end it.
Read in order, the three poems form an arc George didn't design but his readers assembled anyway: a warning that goes unheard ("The Poet in Times of Confusion"), a diagnosis of the false prophet who proves the warning right ("Der Widerchrist"), and a hidden alternative to both ("Secret Germany"). George wrote them across fifteen years without that sequence in mind. Stauffenberg's circle read them as one argument anyway — and acted on it.
That's the real difficulty here. The same vocabulary — a hidden elite, a purified few, a restorer who "fastens the true device upon the nation's banner" — reads as proto-fascist in one direction and as the language of the only armed resistance to Hitler from inside the German officer corps in the other. George himself refused the Nazis and died in Swiss exile in 1933. His poems didn't settle the argument. They just gave both sides something to quote.