Plotting Hitler's Death

It had been a trying time for Hitler, too, who also thought that all was lost, his life’s work in ruins. But he set about searching relent­lessly for ways to recoup the situation. That was the crucial differ­ence.

4. FROM MUNICH TO ZOSSEN

While the opponents of the regime were in the throes of depression, wondering whether it was possible to take moral stands in such a fallen world or whether those who did so inevitably ended up looking like fools, Hitler forged resolutely ahead. Although still disappointed with the Munich agreement, he realized that an opportunity had arisen to resolve the smoldering conflict with the army once and for all.

Only two weeks after the Wehrmacht had marched into the Sudetenland through the cheering throngs in the second of its “flower wars,” Hitler presented the OKW with the outline of an executive order that was dressed up in the form of an “Appeal to Officers.” It denied military leaders the right to form political judgments, de­manding instead “obedience,” “rock-solid confidence,” and “faithful, aggressive determination.” The principle that the general staff should share in political decision making was eliminated, as was the traditional practice, extending back to the era of the kaisers, of registering dissenting views in writing. To the extent they could agree on anything, the generals had joined together from the very beginning in warning against virtually every political decision Hitler had made- and they had been proved wrong time and again. Now the Fuhrer informed the commanders in chief, “I don’t want any more caution­ary memoranda.”¹

Under the pressure of this dispute, a split developed within the officer corps for the first time, or at least more visibly than before. On the whole, the officer corps had preserved a surprising degree of internal solidarity over the previous few years and possibly for this reason had managed to maintain a certain self-confidence despite all the setbacks. Hitler had long hoped to break this cohesion; he tested it with the sudden expansion of the Wehrmacht after 1935, which also enabled him to push a greater number of ideologically reliable of­ficers into leadership positions in the military. For much the same reason, the exact responsibilities of the army, navy, and air force were never clearly defined. In addition, Hitler purposely sowed conflict between the high command of the armed forces (OKW), which re­ported directly to him, and the high command of the army (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH), led by the obstinate old of­ficers’ caste. Despite all this, internal cohesion remained solid. The only exception had occurred early in the year when Admiral Erich Raeder, commander in chief of the navy, rejected an appeal to help with the rehabilitation of Fritsch: “That’s a mess that the boys in red pants got themselves into,” he said, “and they can get themselves out of it.”²

In the light of Hitler’s foreign policy successes, however, the ranks now began to waver. For the first time, senior officers endorsed his rebuke of the army high command. They lamented the lack of faith and loss of confidence the OKH showed in the Fuhrer. The full extent of the split is evidenced in a letter written by OKW general Alfred Jodl in which he describes the OKH as the “enemy side.” The consequence was that no resistance was offered when Hitler took advantage of the situation to reshuffle personnel for a second time, dismissing a number of generals whose skeptical attitudes boded ill for the sort of unconditional obedience he now expected, including Wilhelm Adam, Hermann Geyer, and Wilhelm Ulex. Nevertheless, despite all the traps Hitler attempted to set within the officer corps and despite the tensions that did arise, the traditional esprit de corps remained quite strong. Those who opposed Hitler or even conspired against him over the ensuing years were generally safe from denunci­ation by their fellow officers. Among the rare exceptions to this rule were Erich von Manstein, who informed on Tresckow early in 1944; Wilhelm Keitel, who threatened to denounce any officer who criti­cized the Fuhrer, “including on church or Jewish questions”; and Heinz Guderian, who only refrained from denouncing a fellow officer when he was similarly threatened in return.³

The success of Hitler’s initial attempt to repress army interference in political affairs soon became apparent. On the night of November 9-10, 1938, which has come to be known as Kristallnacht, “spontane­ous demonstrations,” as Joseph Goebbels phrased it in his directive, were organized all over Germany. Synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned stores demolished, and large numbers of Jews arrested; some were killed. It was plain to see that the government was as responsi­ble as the hordes of SA men were for the arson, plunder, and murder of that night. People were horrified and shamed but remained quiet. Their feelings, however, were soon given voice at a conference of army commanders, where a number of generals did not hesitate to express their outrage. General Fedor von Bock even asked his fellow officers excitedly whether someone couldn’t just “string up that swine Coebbels.”⁴

Walther von Brauchitsch, the army commander in chief, remained immovable. After all the disputes and unpleasantness of the previous weeks, he simply shrugged his shoulders at demands that he lodge a protest. Raeder, on the other hand, backed the formal protests of a number of senior naval officers, among them Admiral Conrad Patzig and Captains Gunther Lutjens and Karl Donitz, and sought an audi­ence with the Fuhrer. The only response Raeder received, however, was that the SA district leaders had gotten out of control, a fabrication that satisfied him.⁵ Meanwhile, at a general meeting in the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht sharply condemned the events. In addition, the senior SA commander and prefect of the Berlin police, Count Wolf-Heinrich Helldorf, who had been absent from the city that night, summoned high-ranking police officials to a meeting immedi­ately upon his return and bitterly reproached them for having obeyed the order to stand by and do nothing. If he had been in Berlin, he told them, he would have issued orders to fire on the SA mobs. In the gloomy silence of those November days, the sound of another voice rose for the first time, that of a young captain named Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who criticized the officer corps as seeming dumbstruck, adding that not much more could be expected from people who had already had their backbones broken several times.⁶

Hitler rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate to those he had defeated the full extent of their loss. On the morning of March 15, 1939, he finally fulfilled his dream of taking Prague, sending motor­ized units into the city through swirling spring snow. He kept the officer corps in the dark about his exact plans until the last possible minute, however, at times going so far as to mislead it with placating words. Even the devoted Keitel, chief of the OKW, later complained that he knew nothing of Hitler’s intentions and was left to guess.

The opposition to Hitler failed to realize the significance of the occupation of the western provinces of Czechoslovakia. Most thought of it as another Munich, confirmation of all they had learned about the weakness and perfidy of the Western powers. In reality, though, Prague was the turning point. Hitherto, Hitler had always justified ripping up treaties and breaking solemn promises by invoking the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles. He had defended German incur­sions by citing the right to self-determination of those territories un­der foreign occupation-a right that had been proclaimed by the Western powers themselves. Now, for the first time, he emerged clearly as an aggressor, going beyond anything he had done in the past. The occupation of Prague, therefore, provided an excellent op­portunity for a coup. The opposition groups remained scattered, how­ever, and instead of a revolt there was widespread rejoicing over the Fuhrer’s latest stroke of genius. Diaries and memoirs of the period record that even some opposition figures felt patriotic pride as well as depression at Hitler’s latest success. Like Mussolini during the turbu­lent days of Munich, some even began to believe, though without his feeling of contempt, that the democracies were by their nature weak-willed and easily intimidated.

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Scarcely had Hitler annexed western Czechoslovakia when he let it be known that he now intended to settle scores with Poland. This time-as if he had somehow sensed the previous fall’s conspiracy to overthrow him if he went to war-he seemed very much at pains not to provide the generals with opportunities for collusion. He concealed his decision to go to war, which had long been firm, and assured those around him that he would resort to force only if all attempts failed to reach an amicable settlement. “We have to be good now,” he told a visitor.⁸

And so the conspirators remained passive, clinging to the idea that a coup would only be justifiable if Hitler expressed a clear determina­tion to go to war and issued the corresponding orders. Under pres­sure from Oster, Goerdeler, Gisevius, Hassell, and others, Beck now attempted to involve Halder, his successor as chief of the army gen­eral staff, in new plans. At a meeting in Beck’s home in Lichterfelde, the two conspirators readily agreed on the basic nature of the regime, Hitler’s thinly veiled determination to provoke war, and the need to overthrow him. They disagreed sharply, however, on when to strike. Halder remained convinced, as he had been before Munich,