Killing Hitler (16 page)

At this point, the conspirators received the news that they had been hoping for. The British were finally making a stand and would not be attempting to persuade the Czechs to accept the new German demands. Some days later, they sent Chamberlain’s advisor, Sir Horace Wilson, to Berlin formally to reject the terms that Hitler had set out at Bad Godesberg. After a heated discussion, Wilson delivered his message: “If, in pursuit of her treaty obligations, France became actively engaged in hostilities against Germany, the United Kingdom would feel obliged to support her.”
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That evening, in a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, Wilson heard Hitler’s response. In a “masterpiece of invective”
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the Führer focused his wrath on the Czech president, Edvard Beneš:

We shall not wait…. I demand that Herr Benes be forced to honesty…. He will have to hand over the territories on October 1…. He can either accept my offer and give the Germans their freedom, or we Germans will go and get it for ourselves. The decision is his now! Be it war or peace!
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The conspirators finally appeared to have what they wanted. Hitler’s mask had fallen. Rather than playing the reasonable statesman, he was issuing ultimatums and making immoderate demands. Moreover, the British had finally made a stand. Though certainly an improvement, their statement was still too equivocal for some. It still tied any British action to a French response and noted only that Britain would only “feel obliged” to support France, not that she would automatically do so. Nonetheless, Britain and Germany were now on the brink of war, and once again the plotters prepared for imminent action. Kordt expressed the feelings of many of them after a month or more of secret meetings and heightening tension. “For the first time in weeks,” he wrote, “a feeling of relief washed over me. The deliberations and discussions appeared to be over.”
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The mobilization order for the invasion of Czechoslovakia
was expected at 2 p.m. on 28 September. That morning, the plotters made their final preparations. In the Reich Chancellery, Kordt checked that no special security measures had been instituted. He also offered to ease the entry of the
Stosstrupp
by opening the Chancellery doors from the inside. He implored a colleague: “Don’t wait until this afternoon, or tomorrow. We must move now before we are discovered.”
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At army headquarters, Witzleben declared excitedly that “the time has come,” while Halder pleaded with the commander in chief, General Brauchitsch, to issue the order authorizing the coup.
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At the Abwehr, meanwhile, Oster remained at his desk, ready to give the order to Heinz to move. Gisevius noted that “the minutes passed into hours of unutterable suspense.”
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The tension was broken, this time, by news from Mussolini. The Italian dictator had sent his ambassador to urge Hitler to accept a final attempt to settle the Sudeten issue peacefully—a four-power conference between Germany, Italy, Britain, and France. Hitler initially reacted with fury. He had already rejected similar requests from Chamberlain, Roosevelt, and even Göring, but the pressure to pull back from the brink of war was now coming from all sides. He quietly informed the ambassador: “Tell the Duce that I accept his proposal.”
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The following day, Chamberlain again flew to Germany. At the Munich Conference, he was browbeaten into colluding in the bloodless dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. The border regions were ceded to Germany, leaving the remainder dangerously exposed and denuded of its fortifications. Chamberlain had helped Hitler to achieve his maximum objectives. Though he would publicly laud the Munich Agreement as “peace for our time,” he privately described the meeting as a “nightmare.” Munich was a humiliation for the Western powers. It was an abject surrender dressed as a negotiated peace. Gisevius noted bitterly that Hitler had “pocketed one of the neatest victories in diplomatic history.”
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For Churchill it was “the first foretaste of a bitter cup.”
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As one historian has pithily summarized: “Under pressure from the ruthless, the clueless combined with the spineless to achieve the worthless.”
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The plotters had been thwarted. They had been denied their trigger. The mobilization had been stayed and war had not been declared. Gisevius thought they might carry out the plan anyway, but he was shouted down. Witzleben explained that the troops would never revolt against Hitler in the hour of his greatest triumph. The plot, they conceded, was done for. Gisevius considered emigrating. Kordt took a holiday. Some days later, a small group of conspirators gathered around the fireplace at Witzleben’s home. Musing on their failure and “the calamity that had befallen Europe,” they “tossed [their] lovely plans and projects into the fire.”
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In the aftermath of the failure of the September Conspiracy, the circle of conspirators, disparate at best, soon began to disintegrate. Those from the military had largely lost their nerve, been transferred to new commands, or else been seduced by Hitler’s obvious successes. Beck, having resigned in protest in 1938, maintained contact with resistance circles but, as one historian put it, “retire[d] into an impenetrable cloud of glacial aloofness.”
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Witzleben continued to approach like-minded officers who were prepared to support a coup, but he had been transferred to the provinces and was out of touch. Halder was more typical. Torn between his moral responsibility and his military duty, he preferred to fulfill neither. He continued to believe that Hitler was evil and he knew that war had to be avoided, but he would never be able to bring himself to act again. Nervous and skittish at the best of times, he would later suffer a nervous collapse and confess to a colleague, with tears in his eyes, that “for weeks on end, he had been going to see Hitler with a pistol in his pocket in order to gun him down.”
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He prevaricated, as Gisevius noted, with “a hundred ifs and buts…[but] he simply lacked the will.”
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Some were driven in the opposite direction. The opposition circle within the Foreign Office around Ernst von Weizsäcker and Erich Kordt, for example, felt themselves drawn deeper into the growing resistance movement and became increasingly willing
conspirators. To facilitate their efforts, they engaged in a deliberate dispersal of like-minded personnel with the goal of creating a functioning resistance network within Germany’s foreign service.
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Some members of that network would become players in subsequent assassination attempts.

The Abwehr, meanwhile, carried on much as it had before. It continued officially to undermine Hitler’s enemies, while some of its senior personnel were unofficially undermining Hitler. Though perhaps 99 percent of its operatives were unaware of Oster’s “moonlighting,” a select few under his leadership remained wholly committed to treasonable activities.

When war loomed again in the autumn of 1939, Oster sought to resurrect his coup plan from the previous year. He sounded out the Vatican, recalled Heinz’s
Stosstrupp
to Berlin, and again approached the generals to secure their cooperation. This time, however, though war did indeed come, the order for the coup was not given. The generals were halfhearted, cowed by Hitler’s rage against them and fearing that their earlier conspiracy had been uncovered.
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Oster, too, was insufficiently prepared to capitalize on events. To his dismay, he found that the September Conspiracy could not simply be brought to life once again—too many pieces of the puzzle were missing, too many participants were unwilling or absent entirely.

Yet the opposition refused to give up. On the morning of the British declaration of war, 3 September 1939, Erich Kordt visited his Foreign Office colleague Ernst von Weizsäcker. They discussed the news. Weizsäcker then posed the rhetorical question: “Is there no way to prevent this war?” Kordt was gripped by the sense that he had to act. Two months later, as the proposed offensive against the West was imminent, he was given his chance when Oster asked him bluntly: “We have no-one who will throw a bomb to free our generals from their scruples. I’ve come to ask you to do it.”
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Kordt thought about the proposal for a while:

My conscience told me it was my duty. I considered the chances of success and concluded that mine were better than anyone else’s from our group. Entry into the Reich Chancellery was no problem for me. I could get to the ante-room of Hitler’s quarters with ease, unchecked. I couldn’t hope for a private meeting with him, of course, but didn’t he often come out into the ante-room to call visitors in or to give orders to his adjutants? Wouldn’t that present a possibility?
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Kordt agreed and was promised the necessary explosives by 11 November. He prepared the ground well, making more frequent, often unnecessary visits to the Reich Chancellery, partly as reconnaissance and partly to make the guards used to his presence. However, due to new restrictions introduced with the outbreak of war, Oster’s contacts were unable to supply the explosives. Kordt was enraged. As he complained to a colleague:

Along comes a civilian, such as myself, who is prepared to run the kind of risk that our gallant Prussian generals should themselves have run long ago, and these bloody professional heroes…are not even in a position to supply an uncompromising diplomat with something as simple as a small bomb.
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Kordt then suggested shooting Hitler, but Oster deterred him, commenting despairingly: “You would not have a chance.”
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Oster continued to resist but opted to change his tack. He appreciated that while Hitler and his military were all-conquering, he had little chance of motivating sufficient anti-Nazi sentiment to make an attempted coup feasible. Therefore, he adopted the so-called “setback theory” that had once been in vogue among the military conspirators.
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If German armies could suffer an unexpected defeat, he reasoned, then the shock on the home front might be sufficient to topple Hitler’s government.

In the autumn of 1939, therefore, with much trepidation, Oster began passing German military secrets to the Dutch military attaché in Berlin. He did not do so lightly. He confessed to his driver: “It is much simpler to take a pistol and shoot someone
down, or to run into a machine-gun burst…than to do what I have done.”
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He went on to give detailed information about the Norwegian and Danish campaigns, as well as the Western Offensive of 1940. Indeed, he was so confident that Hitler’s armies would suffer a setback during the French campaign that he made a bet with two of his colleagues. When Paris subsequently fell, he was obliged to treat them to a lunch of oysters and champagne in the Berlin Cavalry Guards Club.
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Though he accepted his own loss with good grace, he was devastated.

Oster knew that he had crossed a line. He knew that he was committing high treason and was risking innocent German lives. But he believed his actions could prevent a greater catastrophe. Most importantly, he made it abundantly clear that he had irrevocably broken with the spurious ties of honor and duty that still bound so many of his colleagues.

With over sixty years of hindsight, what conclusions can be drawn about the September Conspiracy? First, the respective roles of Oster and Canaris deserve closer inspection. Though Generals Ludwig Beck and Franz Halder are often correctly identified as the “kingpins” of the conspiracy
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—after all, the coup required their cooperation if it was to function at all—the godfather of the plot was undoubtedly Hans Oster. Oster served in a number of capacities. He was the virtual chief of staff of the resistance—the rock around which all of its disparate groupings moved—and he was the liaison man and go-between, setting up meetings, forging contacts, and sounding out potential recruits. But he also supplied the wellspring of impassioned and principled anti-Nazism that succored the waverers. His radicalism, like that of Gisevius, shocked some but was inspirational to others. He was, as one eminent historian has put it, the resistance’s “indefatigable driving force.”
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The role of his immediate superior, Wilhelm Canaris, is much more difficult to define. By 1938 at the latest, he had clearly become an opponent of the regime, but he could not or would not assume the active role that Oster had assumed for himself. He
supplied documentary evidence to the plotters, was on intimate terms with many of them, and was in broad agreement with their plan, but he took no active part in it himself.

Some have speculated on the reasons behind this apparent ambivalence. Canaris’s critics would refer to his deliberately enigmatic nature. He was a typical spymaster: mysterious, duplicitous, and dissembling to the last. His equivocal attitude toward the plotters, they would argue, was but one manifestation of this character. As one contemporary recalled:

Canaris played a double game; in the existing situation he could not help doing that. Nevertheless, I can scarcely say where the limits of that game lay. In general, in all that Canaris did or, as the case may be, omitted to do, it was very difficult…to recognize a clear and undeviating line. The role he played was conditioned, in this respect as in all others, by his peculiar personality.
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