German army officer who plotted to kill Hitler.

Born September 6, 1917; Died may 1, 2008

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, who has died aged 90, was believed to be the last surviving member of the group of German officers who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, with a briefcase bomb.

Von Boeselager supplied the explosives for the operation, led by Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers, but the Nazi leader escaped the blast when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force.

Almost immediately afterwards, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings. Some were hanged with piano wire. Although many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the hope they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager's name was never divulged and he was never found out. Nevertheless, he carried a cyanide capsule with him until the end of the war in case his secret was revealed.

Von Boeselager, who lived in Altenahr, near Bonn, was first recruited by von Stauffenberg co-conspirator Major General Henning von Tresckow in 1942. In a newspaper interview conducted three weeks before his death and published the day after, he said he knew that Jews were being systematically killed and that Germany was waging a war of annihilation along the eastern front with Russia, and that he never considered declining taking part in the plot. By 1942, he said, it was "no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes".

Von Boeselager was assigned to the army high command as an aide to co-conspirator Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge. The plotters first arranged for von Boeselager to try to shoot both Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler at a meeting in 1943. Von Kluge, who committed suicide a month after the 1944 attempt on Hitler, called off the assassination at the last minute after learning that Himmler would not be at the meeting.

Von Boeselager followed Kluge's orders, but said the decision never ceased to haunt him. "I always see Hitler from here to the fireplace in front of me and think, What would have happened if you had shot him?"' he said in the interview, describing a distance of about two feet.

For the plot to blow up Hitler, von Boeselager recommended English-made explosives as the best, and - as part of his assignment to an explosives research team - was able to acquire them without drawing any suspicion. He delivered them to Major General Helmuth Stieff, packed into a suitcase. Stieff was later executed for his role in the plot.

Von Boeselager said that in the years immediately after the war, he spoke with his wife, Rosa, about his role in the resistance, but otherwise said little else. "There was nobody one could talk with about it," he said. "They were all dead, and with others it would just have been bragging."

There was also the fact that, immediately after the Second World War, the plotters were widely viewed as traitors, a label the Nazis gave them that stuck for years. "For a long time, it was not believable to normal Germans that the government was criminal," he said. "And as soon as one thought they had pushed that out of the way, then people just didn't want to know."

The von Stauffenberg plot is the basis for the upcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, in which the American actor plays the aristocratic colonel. In a 2007 interview, von Boeselager weighed in to the controversy in Germany of casting a prominent Scientologist as Germany's most famous anti-Hitler plotter, saying he had no objections so long as the film was not used by Cruise to lobby for the church.

"But in general there is nothing one can say against a huge actor playing von Stauffenberg - for the resistance and spreading knowledge of it, that can only be good," he said.

Von Boeselager never met von Stauffenberg himself, explaining that it would have been too dangerous for them to speak with one another. "I saw him a couple of times, and we shared a nod and a wink with one another, but never said one word," von Boeselager said. "Not even good day.'"