a mistake, adding a revealing justification that illustrates the helplessness of his position: it was not his way, he said, to be a “self-promoter.”19 Hitler did not even bother to grant him an audience when he took his leave.
Nonetheless, upon his departure Beck commended his successor, Franz Halder, to all those with whom he was on confidential terms. Indeed, only a few days after assuming his new post, Halder summoned Hans Oster to an interview. After a few exchanges of views about Hitler’s foreign designs, Halder asked his guest point-blank how the preparations for a coup were progressing. More clearly than Beck, Halder recognized that the ingloriously abandoned plan for a “generals’ strike” would only make sense as the first step in a coup; otherwise it was better left undone. Hitler could easily have found replacements for all the seditious generals and knew far too much about power and how to keep it simply to back down in the face of such opposition. The historian Peter Hoffmann quite rightly points in this regard to Manstein’s comment at the Nuremberg trials that dictators do not allow themselves to be driven into things, because then they would no longer be dictators.20
Halder was a typical general staff officer of the old school: correct, focused, and outspoken. Observers also noted a certain impulsiveness, which, for the sake of his career, he had learned to control, if not overcome. Not long after his meeting with Oster he spoke with Gisevius for the first time, soon turning to concrete questions about plans for the coup and describing Hitler as “mentally ill” and “bloodthirsty.”21 Here and elsewhere, he proved that he was a man far more capable of action than Beck, who immersed himself in philosophical contemplation. Halder had resolved the conflict between the loyalty traditionally expected of a soldier and the need to topple Hitler and no longer felt inhibited from taking action by his oath to the Fuhrer. As early as the fall maneuvers of 1937, he had encouraged Fritsch to use force against Hitler, and after Fritsch’s treacherous removal he had pressed for “practical opposition.” More clear-sighted than most of his fellow conservatives and less compromising in his values, he realized that Hitler was a radical revolutionary prepared to destroy virtually everything. Despite the adoring crowds at Hitler’s feel, Halder considered his rule highly illegitimate because it stood outside all tradition: truth, morality, patriotism, even human beings themselves were only instruments for the accrual of more power. Hitler, in Halder’s view, was “the very incarnation of evil.” By nature a practical, realistic man, meticulous to the point of pedantry, Halder was not, however, cut out for the role of conspirator and the very perversity of the times can be seen in the fact that such a man felt driven to such un undertaking. He later said he found “the need to resist a frightful, agonizing experience.”22 Halder refused to be a party to any sort of ill considered action and insisted that a coup would only be justifiable as a last resort.
Upon assuming his new post on September 1, Halder informed Brauchitsch that, like his predecessors, he opposed the Fuhrer’s plans for war and was determined to “exploit every opportunity that this position affords to carry on the struggle against Hitler.” If this comment illustrates Halder’s own character, the reaction of the overly pliable commander in chief, who felt himself forced from one horror to the next, was perhaps even more revealing: as if in gratitude, Brauchitsch spontaneously seized both Halder’s hands and shook them.23 A series of discussions soon ensued that included Witzleben; Hjalmar Schacht; Beck; the quartermaster general of the army, Colonel Eduard Wagner; and, most important, Hans Oster, the indefatigable driving force and go-between of the opposition. The necessary preconditions for a coup were spelled out and the aims more precisely defined.
In the course of these discussions a perhaps unavoidable rift emerged between the methodical, deliberate chief of general staff and Oster’s immediate associates. Halder was primarily concerned with finding ways to justify a coup morally and politically, not only for himself but also for the army and the general public. A coup would only be warranted, in his view, if Hitler ignored all warnings and issued final instructions to launch a war. At that point, but not before, Halder said, he would be prepared to give the signal for a putsch. Oster and the impetuous Gisevius, on the other hand, were far more radical in their thinking and no longer had any patience for tactical considerations. In their view the regime had to be struck down by any means possible. Hitler’s warmongering may have provided an inducement and opportunity, but it was not the primary reason for taking action. Although this basic difference of opinion surfaced now and then, it was never really resolved, leading one of the more resolute opponents of the Nazi regime to speak, with some justification, of a “conspiracy within the conspiracy.”24
This basic difference of opinion came to the fore only once, when Gisevius tried to persuade Halder to strike immediately rather than wait for an opportune moment. Halder was as convinced as Gisevius that Hitler meant war but insisted nevertheless on proof; he was incensed by Gisevius’s suggestion that evidence of these plans and countless further indications of the regime’s hideous nature could easily be obtained by seizing Gestapo and SS files. Gisevius believed that it was preferable to attack the regime on criminal grounds rather than on political ones and to produce “a few dozen airtight arrest warrants” rather than all sorts of tortuous political rationales. No army officer worth his salt, in Gisevius’s view, could resist a command to restore order in the face of murder, illegal confinement, extortion, and corruption. To advance moral and political rationales would simply invite a lengthy debate over the legality of the coup.
This proposal, and indeed Gisevius’s entire attitude, struck Halder as far too adventurist, smacking more of mutiny and unsoldierly willfulness than of responsible action. Under no circumstances would he lend the army to such an operation. Only when Hitler issued orders to attack, thereby revealing himself to the public as the “criminal” that Halder had long considered him to be, could the signal for a military putsch be issued. A few days later an impatient Gisevius accompanied Hjalmar Schacht uninvited to a meeting Schacht had arranged at Halder’s apartment. He hoped to urge his plan on the chief of the general staff once again, but Halder lost all patience and thereafter refused to receive Gisevius.25
Soon afterwards Halder asked Oster to work out a detailed plan for a coup, and with Oster’s participation the rather aimless and rancorous activities of the conspirators gained a focal point and took on a more concrete shape. The web of conspirators grew rapidly and many loose ends were tied up, creating a much more solid organization. Halder made contact with Ernst von Weizsacker-although direct communications between the Foreign Office and the general staff were explicitly forbidden-and with Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of Military Intelligence. In August Halder met in Frankfurt with Wilhelm Adam, the commander in chief of Army Group 2. Both men were concerned that Hitler was headed for war. When Halder “abruptly” stated that if Witzleben, the commander of the Berlin military district, were to “strike, the commanders in chief of the Reich would have to go along with him,” Adam replied, “Go ahead, I’m ready.”26 Then, on September 4, Halder met with Schacht, who agreed to become provisional head of the new government in case of a successful coup. At the same time, Halder was in contact with Oster, Oster with Gisevius, Gisevius with Schulenburg, and virtually everyone with everyone else in a continuous round of discussions, to plan movements during the coup and to coordinate and review possible scenarios. Witzleben visited Schacht at his country estate near Berlin, parting with the comment that this time they would go all the way.27
In the meantime Witzleben had won over to the cause a subordinate of his, Count Walter Brockdorff- Ahlefeldt, commander of the Potsdam Division. This unit was regarded not only as a “model division” but it was also the strongest military force in the Berlin area and therefore crucial to the success of the coup. Halder arranged to have the First Light Division, commanded by Erich Hoepner, which was on maneuvers in the border region between Thuringia and Saxony, put on alert to block the path to Berlin of SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the SS troop that acted as Hitler’s bodyguard. Just before midnight on September 14, after all operations had been spelled out yet again-especially the plans to seize police stations, radio transmitters, telephone installations, repeater stations, the Reich Chancellery, and key ministries as rapidly as possible-and after Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt had personally inspected all pivotal positions, including even the transmitters in Konigs-Wusterhausen near Berlin, Witzleben declared all military preparation completed for a coup.28
One major question was what to do with Hitler himself. Gisevius and a small group of predominantly younger conspirators felt that he should he killed without further ado. Witzleben, Beck, and most of the other conspirators, including Canaris, who was on the fringes of this attempt, believed that Hitler should be arrested and put on trial. By using the legal system to expose the crimes of the regime, they hoped to avoid either making a martyr of Hitler or igniting a civil war. Halder pointed out that it was not the moral judgments of the elite that counted but the support of the general population, most of which was still very much in thrall to the Hitlerian myth. Hans von Dohnanyi and Oster argued that after Hitler was arrested he should be brought before a panel of physicians chaired by Dohnanyi’s father-in-law, the celebrated psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer, and declared mentally ill. Halder, for his part, hesitated. He was not opposed to eliminating Hitler, he informed his fellow conspirators,
