Wartime resistance heroes.

Berlin -- In a sermon at the Berlin Cathedral, Germany's leading Protestant Bishop, Wolfgang Huber, honoured dissident army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Only recently have Germans begun to understand that the men and women who resisted Hitler are their true heroes.

On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, a Catholic, and three others carried a bomb into Hitler's bunker in East Prussia intending to kill him, but it misfired and Hitler escaped death. The plotters and everyone related to them or in contact with them were executed in Berlin.

Current German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, paid tribute to them in June 2004 when he became the first German Chancellor to attend D-Day celebrations in France.

Meanwhile, Monsignor Helmut Moll of the Archdiocese of Cologne has suggested that the student martyrs belonging to the Munich group "The White Rose," who stood up to Nazism would make good models for participants in World Youth Day 2005. The White Rose group circulated leaflets in 1942 in German cities denouncing the deportation of the Jews. They signed the leaflet with a white rose. When they were discovered, they were all executed.

Said Monsignor Moll, "Our society is poor in Christian models.... These martyrs ale real models of faith who have something to say to all our young people" (The Globe and Mail, July 19, 2004).