On 20 July, German potentates and families will gather in the court of the Bendlerblock, which – today as during the Second World War – houses Germany’s Ministry of Defence. In this very court, Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, Werner von Haeften, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, Friedrich Olbricht and Ludwig Beck were executed by firing squad hours after their failed coup against Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944.

In subsequent years, these exceptionally courageous men and their fellow coup participants were posthumously denigrated by the Nazis and their memory uncomfortably buried by ordinary Germans eager to forget their own cowardice. Eighty years later, such is the respect for the 20 July participants that there’s not even enough space in the Bendlerblock for the commemoration ceremony’s invited guests.

Von Stauffenberg, von Haeften, Mertz von Quirnheim, Olbricht, Beck, Carl Goerdeler, Ulrich von Hassell, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Ulrich-Wilhelm Graf von Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Henning Treschow, Hans Oster, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Josef Wirmer, Caesar von Hofacker, Berthold Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, Klaus Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans von Dohnanyi, Rüdiger Schleicher and the other participants in what culminated in the 20 July coup attempt could have given up long before. They had, after all, painstakingly planned several other coup attempts, which naturally involved the assassination of Adolf Hitler, only to see the mercurial dictator change his plans at the last moment and thus evade death. The young officer Axel von dem Busche, for example, prepared to blow himself up during a presentation of new military uniforms in November 1943, only for the presentation to be cancelled because the Führer changed his mind. Countless hours of meticulous planning, made all the more difficult by the need to maintain complete secrecy, had been in vain. At that point, as at previous moments when coup plans failed, the plotters could have decided that they had done their part for their country’s honour and future and that it was others’ turn to try to remove the dictator (and risk their lives by doing so).

Instead, the 20 July plotters kept going. Though Hitler was becoming more and more mercurial and elusive, which made it harder to know when he might be in a place that one of them might have access to, they resolutely kept looking for options. On 20 July 1944, they carried out the attempt despite knowing that the odds of it succeeding were small and that they would face certain death sentences if it failed. Their wives, too, knew the general outlines of what they were planning and supported it. After the executions of Stauffenberg and the four others in the Bendlerblock that very same night, the other participants were mercilessly rounded up by the Nazi authorities and sent to concentration camps, prisons and to the murderous court of Roland Freisler, where death was certain along with the butcher-judge’s rage and venom. (Watch Schwerin von Schwanenfeld valiantly trying to explain his motivations to Freisler here.)

And because the Nazis practiced collective punishment on families, scores of wives and adult children, too, were put in prisons and concentration camps, their children delivered – under different names – to orphanages and regime-supporting families. Corrado and Roberto Pirzio-Biroli, von Hassell’s half-Italian grandsons, were sent to an Austrian family. Von Hassell’s fearless widow, Ilse, tracked the boys down and rescued them. ‘So before I was proud of my grandfather, I was proud of my grandmother, because she saved us,’ Corrado told me in 2014.

On this 20 July as on every 20 July, such children will be filling the seats in the Bendlerblock. Today they are elderly: the oldest is one of Stauffenberg’s sons, now in his 90s. But they will be joined by countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the plotters, along with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other potentates. Such is the interest in honouring the 20 July men (and their equally courageous wives) that far from every family member can participate.

What a change from the early postwar years. ‘Once, my mother mentioned to my maths teacher that my father had been a member of 20 July. “Well, then it’s no surprise that he’s bad at maths”, my teacher responded. “He’s the son of a traitor”,’ Axel Smend told me ten years ago. His father, the young officer Günther Smend, had played a small part in the coup and paid for it with his life. It was convenient, back then, for Germans to discuss the 20 July participants as traitors or simply to ignore their bravery. For most Germans, acknowledging the 20 July participants’ bravery would have meant having to examine their own failure to try to stop Hitler, a decidedly painful exercise. Instead, many Germans opted to malign the 20 July members or pretend they didn’t exist.

Today, the 20 July participants rightly inspire enormous respect. We contemporary Europeans, too, would do well to examine our consciences. Would we stand up to tyranny, even if it didn’t come in the extreme form of Hitler and the Nazis? Most of us, I suspect, would not. That’s why the 20 July members’ courage matters so much: they were brave on behalf of a whole nation.