Hitler (108 page)

But the afternoon of September 27 again dampened his euphoria. In order to test and increase the populace's enthusiasm for war, Hitler had ordered the second motorized division to pass through the capital on its way from Stettin to the Czechoslovak border and to roll down the broad East-West axis, through Wilhelmstrasse past the chancellery. Perhaps he hoped the military spectacle would bring people pouring into the streets and awaken a fighting spirit which, whipped up by a last appeal from the chancellery balcony, could be converted into a general “cry for violence.” What actually happened has been recorded by the American journalist William Shirer in his diary:

 

I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them.... But today they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence.... It has been the most striking demonstration against war I've ever seen.

... I walked down the Wilhelmstrasse to the Reichskanzlerplatz, where Hitler stood on a balcony of the Chancellery reviewing the troops.... There weren't two hundred people there. Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed.
⁸⁸

 

The sobering effect of this incident was reinforced by a flood of bad news indicating that France's, England's, and Czechoslovakia's preparations for war were going further than expected and the strength of these Allies evidently surpassed by a good deal Germany's potentialities. Prague alone had mobilized a million men and together with France would be able to commit three times as many troops as Germany. In London air raid shelters were being dug and hospitals evacuated. The population of Paris was leaving the city in droves. War seemed inevitable. In the course of the day Yugoslavia, Rumania, Sweden, and the United States issued warnings declaring in favor of Germany's adversaries. And since the deadline Hitler had set expired in a few hours, the either-or mood in the chancellery began to swing around. During the late evening hours of September 27 Hitler started to dictate a letter to Chamberlain that struck a definitely conciliatory tone, offering a formal guarantee for the continued existence of Czechoslovakia and ending with an appeal to reason. But in the meantime other things had been happening which promised to give developments an unexpected twist at the last moment.

 

A plot had been forming and had made considerable progress in the course of the preceding year. The conspirators were a small but influential group, for the first time people from all political camps. Their joint initial purpose had been to prevent war; but the boldness with which Hitler was heading toward a conflict caused them to raise their own sights, until they arrived at plans for assassination and rebellion. The motive force and the middleman for all the groups was the head of the Central Section of the Abwehr (Army Counterintelligence), Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster. If it is true that German military tradition has always been entirely divorced from political opposition, and that the German character, too—as Bernardo Attolico, the Italian ambassador in Berlin, remarked at the time—lacks all conspiratorial qualities such as patience, knowledge of human nature, psychology, tact, or the capacity for hypocrisy, then Oster was one of the exceptions. A curious mixture of morality and cunning, ingenuity, psychological calculation and loyalty to principles, he had early taken a critical attitude toward Hitler and Nazism. For some time he had tried vainly to persuade his fellow soldiers to share his views. The officer corps was a group of narrow specialists wedded to inaction. But they finally began to stir when they could no longer blink at the fact that Hitler was headed toward war, and when the Fritsch affair had roused their caste pride. Other groups, too, began to be mobilized; and Oster consistently drew them in. Covered by the apparatus of the Abwehr and its chief, Admiral Canaris, he succeeded in forming a widely ramified resistance group.

The resistance had realized that a totalitarian regime, once entrenched, could be overturned only by the combined action of internal and external enemies. On this principle, representatives of the German opposition made virtual pilgrimages to Paris and London, trying to contact influential figures. Early in March, 1938, Carl Goerdeler was in Paris urging the French government to take an uncompromising position on the Czechoslovakian question. A month later he set out once more, but both times he received only noncommittal replies. His visit to London brought similar results. It throws significant light upon the complex of problems involved in this and subsequent missions that Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic advisor to the British Foreign Secretary, exclaimed in consternation to his German visitor that what he was saying was actual treason to his country.
⁸⁹

Much the same reception was accorded Ewald von Kleist-Schwenzin, a conservative politician who had long ago retreated in disgust to his Pomeranian estates, but now used his connections with England to urge the British government to stiffen its resistance to Hitler's expansionist plans. Hitler would not be content with the Anschluss of Austria, he warned; there was reliable information that his plans aimed far beyond the annexation of Czechoslovakia and that he was striving for nothing less than world dominion. In the summer of 1938 von Kleist himself went to London. Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck had given him a kind of assignment: “Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked, and I will put an end to this regime.”
⁹⁰

Two weeks after von Kleist, the industrialist Hans Böhm-Tettelbach went to London on the same mission; and no sooner was he back from his trip than several new efforts were undertaken on the part of a resistance group in the Foreign Office headed by State Secretary von Weizsäcker, who used Embassy Councillor Theo Kordt in London as his intermediary. On September 1 Weizsäcker himself asked Danzig High Commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt to urge the British government to use “unambiguous language” toward Hitler. Probably the most effective step, he told Burckhardt, would be to send a “blunt, plainspoken Englishman, a general with a riding crop, for instance.” That might make Hitler sit up and listen. “At the time Weizsäcker spoke with the candor of a desperate man who is risking everything on the last card!” Burckhardt wrote at the time.

Meanwhile, Oster was pressing Theo Kordt's brother Erich, who worked in the Foreign Ministry as chief of the Ministeramt, to somehow produce threats of intervention from London. The problem was to make London use the kind of language that would impress a “half-educated and ruffianly dictator.” A flood of information and warnings about Hitler's intentions poured into London and Paris. All to no avail. Although such envoys as von Kleist had told Vansittart that they were coming with, as it were, “a rope around their necks,” all pleas were ignored. The appeasers were too eager to make concessions, or too suspicious, or crassly uncomprehending. A high-echelon British intelligence service officer responded to the initiative of a German staff officer, who had come to London as “a damned impudence,” and Vansittart's astonished remark about treason demonstrated how hard it was for these people of fixed ideas to grasp the conspirators' motives.

To be sure, some of these emissaries did not exactly make a good case for themselves. Some showed monarchist tendencies or made revisionist demands not unlike Hitler's. The German conservatives and the army circles, for whom almost all the emissaries were speaking, were also under suspicion of having kept their traditional openness toward the East. For England and France, there was an odor of faint unsavoriness about that lot: there had, after all, been the Rapallo treaty (of rapprochement between Russia and Germany in 1922) and all those years of co-operation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army, which had persisted up to the time Hitler put an end to it. It was therefore inevitable that a good many of the foreign diplomats should think that the reactionary monarchist forces of old Germany, the Junkers and the militarists, were reforming in the resistance movement. Thus the choice looked like “Hitler or the Prussians,” and few were prepared to opt for the spirit of yesterday as against the crude but at least uncompromisingly Western-oriented dictator. “Who will guarantee that Germany will not become Bolshevistic afterwards?” Chamberlain retorted when French Chief of Staff Gamelin spoke to him on that dramatic September 26 of the plans of the German resistance movement. What Chamberlain meant was that Hitler's guarantees were more reliable than those of the German conservatives. Once again it was the old anti-Russian bias, the nightmare of the West, which Napoleon on St. Helena had evoked more than a century earlier and which French Premier Daladier now quoted anxiously: “The Cossacks will rule Europe.”

Oppositionist activities at home ran parallel to the efforts abroad. In the nature of things these activities were conducted primarily by the military. In a series of memoranda of increasing sharpness, Ludwig Beck tried to oppose Hitler's determination for war. He was most emphatic in his memorandum of July 16, which once again warned against the perils of a major conflict, referred to the persistent weariness of the German population, and underlined Germany's meager defensive strength to the West. Beck summed up all the political, military, and economic objections in the conclusion that Germany would in no way be able to survive the “life and death” struggle which was bound to follow from Hitler's challenging behavior. Simultaneously Beck urged Field Marshal Brauchitsch to persuade the higher officers to act collectively. He wanted them to stage a kind of “general strike of the generals” and force an end to the preparations for war by threatening to resign in a body.

Brauchitsch at last seemed to yield to Beck's expostulations. He convoked a conference of generals on August 4, at which he had Beck's July memorandum read aloud and called on General Adam to report on the weakness of the west wall. By the end of the conference almost everyone present had been brought around to Beck's point of view. Only Generals Reichenau and Busch raised a few objections. Brauchitsch himself, on the other hand, declared his complete agreement. But to Beck's astonishment he did not make the speech that had been drafted by Beck and was to culminate in a call for a joint protest. Instead, he had Beck's memorandum presented to Hitler, thus exposing his chief of staff. When on August 18 Hitler, at a conference in Jüterbog, announced that during the next few weeks he would solve the Sudeten question by force, Beck resigned.

Like Brauchitsch's perfidy, this resignation was a product of the characteristic timidities of the German military leadership. But it was also a reaction, and perhaps an understandable one, to the success Hitler was having with his aggressive foreign policy. Beck gave up his struggle partly because it had proved impossible to extract more resolute language from the Western powers. Unless the British Prime Minister or the French Premier were ready to stand up to Hitler, the German resistance was bound to be halfhearted.

Nevertheless, under Beck's successor, General Halder, the conspirators did not suspend their efforts. Even as he assumed office, Halder told Brauchitsch that he rejected Hitler's war plans just as firmly as his predecessor and was determined “to utilize every opportunity for the struggle against Hitler.” Halder was no
jrondeur;
rather, he was the typical meticulous, sober General Staff officer. But Hitler, whom he hated in a rather special way, denouncing him as a “criminal,” “madman,” and “bloodsucker,” left him no choice. He himself spoke of the “compulsion to opposition,” and called it a “terrible and agonizing experience.” More coolheaded than Beck, and more consistent, he immediately expanded the ratiocinations of the conspirators into a plan for a
coup d'état.
On Oster's suggestion he negotiated with Hjalmar Schacht and had concluded all the preparations before September 15.
⁹¹

The plan was keyed to the outbreak of war. At the moment war was declared a sudden coup would be led by General von Witzleben, commander of the Berlin defense district. Hitler and a number of leading functionaries of the regime would be arrested and subsequently brought to trial in order to expose to the whole world the Nazis' aggressive aims. In this way the participants hoped to avoid creating a new stab-in-the-back legend and to win support for their undertaking against an enormously popular Hitler, whose popularity was at this moment further swelled by nationalistic fervor. Thus they hoped to avert the danger of civil war. What counted was not the ideas and moral categories of a small elite, Halder thought, but the assent in principle of the population. Reichsgerichtsrat Hans von Dohnanyi, a high official in the judiciary, had been keeping a secret file since 1933 in preparation for a trial of Hitler. Oster had also drawn the police commissioner of Berlin, Count Helldorf, into the plot, and the vice-commissioner, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. He had established close contact with various commanders in Potsdam, Landsberg an der Warthe, and Thuringia, with such leading Socialists as Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber, and with Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, psychiatric director of Berlin's Charité Hospital, who in one variant of the putsch plan was to function as chairman of a committee of doctors who would declare Hitler mentally ill. Meanwhile, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, former leader of the Stahlhelm, was planning a kind of “conspiracy within the conspiracy.” He had been assigned the task of recruiting young army officers, workers, and students to reinforce the shock troop of the army corps staff headquarters, which at the proper moment was to invade the chancellery. But Heinz considered the idea of trying Hitler and the plan of incarcerating him in a mental hospital completely unrealistic. Hitler alone, he told Oster, was stronger than Witzleben with his entire army corps. Consequently, he gave his men secret instructions not to arrest Hitler but to shoot him down at close quarters without more ado.
⁹²