Claus Behrendt (11 June 1907 – 21 August 1944) was a leader of the anti-Nazi German Resistance.
Biography[]
Claus Behrendt was born on 11 June 1907 in Marburg, Hessen, German Empire. He grew up in a society that was divided between the far-right Nazi Party and Freikorps and the far-left Spartacists and Bavarian Soviet Republic, and he was opposed to the Nazi policy of massacring Jews, non-Germans, communists, and other minority groups in the country. During World War II, he joined the German Resistance and helped in freeing Jews from the Wehrmacht and cutting telegraph lines, wounding the Nazis from the inside. He helped in the Operation Valkyrie bomb plot on 20 July 1944 against Adolf Hitler's life, supplying weapons to regular Wehrmacht troops who defected to the plotters. On 21 August 1944, he was arrested and executed by Horst Bucher and the Gestapo for his role in the bomb plot against Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives-like purge of all enemies of the Nazi Party.