undress, then climb into the pit where a layer of convulsing bodies was already lying: obeying orders, they had to lie face down on the murdered victims and were then shot in the back of the head.” Until then, the career officer von dem Bussche had felt bound by the personal oath to Adolf Hitler. After these events, he asked himself and a small circle of like-minded individuals in the regiment (to which Richard von Weizsäcker, later elected President of Germany, also belonged), why he should still be bound by this oath, which is based on respect and reciprocity, when the Führer had already broken it with the crimes he had ordered. Three months after his traumatic witnessing of the mass execution, Bussche's decision was clear: it could no longer be a question of sacrificing one's own life on the battlefield, but of using it for Germany against Hitler. This experience, from which he never recovered until his death many years later, motivated him to consciously join the resistance group around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg against the Hitler regime through the mediation of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. In October 1943 he traveled to Lieutenant Colonel von Stauffenberg in Berlin. Von dem Bussche, who had been promoted to captain and now worked as a battalion commander in the 9th Grenadier Regiment, was deeply impressed by the encounter with Stauffenberg. He later spoke of "the bright glow of this man's assured composure". Bussche explained that in view of the crimes he witnessed involuntarily, there were only three ways for an officer to protect his honor “by joining the group of victims" — i.e. to die in battle, to desert, or to rebel against the government that had ordered this and all other massacres. Von dem Bussche was initiated into the conspiracy plans against Hitler by Stauffenberg. When Stauffenberg asked him, he agreed without hesitation to sacrifice his life in a suicide attack on Hitler. He later justified his intention to kill with the emergency aid paragraph of the German penal code (§ 32 StGB), which he had had to memorize as a recruit in Potsdam. Attempted assassination of Hitler In November 1943 von dem Bussche volunteered to carry out a suicide bombing to kill Hitler. The principal difficulty for any would-be Hitler assassin was getting near Hitler with a weapon or explosives. Henning von Tresckow, who came from the same regiment