Joachim Fest - Plotting Hitler's Death

But once again, his schedule was disrupted. Britain reacted to the German war preparations with stoical equanimity and, after months of negotiations, transformed its provisional support for Poland into a formal pact. Amid the blizzard of entreaties, bulletins, and miscommunications, Halder told the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, “You have to strike the man’s hand with an ax.” Great Britain now moved to dispel any lingering doubts about its determination to fight. On the afternoon of August 25 a message arrived from Mussolini reminding Hitler that their agreements stated that a war would not be launched until later and informing him that Italy was regrettably not prepared to open hostilities at this time. Again Hitler hesitated; after brooding nervously for a short spell, he came to a decision that left everyone agape: the order to attack was rescinded. “Führer rather shaken,” Halder noted in his diary. 10

As the order to attack was being canceled, Schacht, Gisevius, and General Georg Thomas were on their way to the Military Intelligence building on Tirpitzufer to pick up Canaris, with whom they intended to drive to general staff headquarters in Zossen, east of Berlin. There, in a final, desperate act, they planned to force Brauchitsch and Halder to choose between arresting the three of them or arresting Hitler and the government. Determined to stop at nothing, they had agreed to exert extraordinary pressure on the commanders: if Brauchitsch and Halder chose to arrest them, they would deem themselves re­leased at that moment from their pledge of loyalty to their fellow officers and would reveal the army chiefs’ involvement in the resistance.

When the three arrived at Tirpitzufer, they encountered Oster. “Shaking his head” and “laughing heartily,” he told them that the order to attack had been rescinded. Gisevius, the eternal man of action, argued yet again that this provided a unique opportunity to eliminate Hitler. The others, however, could scarcely believe that he wanted to carry on. The normally implacable Oster maintained that a “war lord who can rescind within a few hours as far-reaching an order as that for war or peace is done for.” In any case, Oster felt, the generals would no longer back Hitler. Only days earlier he had instructed the members of Friedrich Heinz’s special task force to prepare themselves once again for the storming of the Chancellery. Now any such action would be superfluous, he thought, in view of the dramatically changed circumstances. Canaris, too, was in an exuber­ant mood and declared that peace was assured “for twenty years.” Everything would unfold as desired if just allowed to develop, and there was no need in the meantime to raise the generals’ hackles by making rash demands. 11

Despite all that can be and has been said about Oster’s surprise about-face, there is no minimizing the enormous sense of relief that must have been felt by all after so many months of continuous pres­sure. Not only Oster but Canaris, Hassell, and many others were so jubilant that peace had been preserved that their judgment was dulled. Even in the Chancellery it was “clear to everyone,” as an officer on duty there noted, “that Hitler had suffered a major diplo­matic defeat.” 12

But anyone who understood the Führer’s obsession with prestige over the years should have realized that he would quickly go to what­ever lengths necessary to repair the damage. “Führer still hopes to sock it to Poland,” wrote Colonel Eduard Wagner, a general staff departmental head, in his diary. 13The belief that war had been avoided was totally misguided, and Gisevius was clearly right. Indeed, the ensuing days brought the very situation the conspirators had al­ways dreamed of. In their exhaustive debates, they had always come to the depressing conclusion that Hitler’s victories were psychologi­cally as disarming as his defeats. What they had therefore always hoped for (in various scenarios) but what never seemed to occur was a serious setback that could be blamed on Hitler alone and that ex­posed to all the world his unwavering determination to go to war.

During their debates, they also concluded that the time that elapsed between Hitler’s order for an invasion and the actual onset of hostilities was of decisive importance. They worried that the interval might not be long enough for them to decide on a coup and carry it out. In the days before the Munich agreement, Halder had already sought to allay such fears, assuring his fellow conspirators that Hitler could never deceive him on this score: the order would have to be given at least three days before an attack. Now the conspirators had the luxury of an even longer time span. But nothing had been pre­pared, and nothing was done. Of course, the abortive September plot of the previous year had had a devastating effect on the conspirators’ resolve. The written plans for a coup had gone up Witzleben’s chim­ney in smoke, and another draft was at best in the early planning stages. Nevertheless the impression remains that for most of the con­spirators waiting had itself become a kind of strategy. Commingled with their immense relief that the peace had been saved was a sense of deliverance from actually having to do anything.

After such misguided elation, the descent to reality was all the more devastating when, on August 31, Hitler reissued the invasion order for the following morning. That afternoon Gisevius ran into Canaris on a back staircase at army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. “So what do you think now?” asked the admiral. When Gisevius failed to find the appropriate words, Canaris added in a flat voice: “This means the end of Germany.” 14

The outbreak of hostilities in the early hours of September 1, 1939, was an enormous setback for the military and civilian opposition, whose desperate efforts had all been directed at preventing war. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, confirming the predictions of the countless analyses, memoranda, and warnings that had been drafted by the regime’s opponents. But all their activity had been in vain. Hitler had scarcely noticed the reports, and to the extent that the documents were intended for the opposition, little had been achieved, because the coup they were supposed to justify never got off the ground. Nothing so damaged the credibility and reputation of the regime’s opponents in the eyes of their foreign contacts as their failure to take action on September 1.

All will to resist seemed to disappear for an extended period after the war began, in part because of the deep, irrational feelings of loyalty that the outbreak of war always arouses, regardless of right and wrong or whether the conflict is willfully unleashed in contravention of existing treaties. Considerations such as these may leave some lin­gering doubts, but once war breaks out, all efforts and activities focus on responding to the challenge and bringing the conflict to a success­ful conclusion. Customs and traditions play a role, of course, as do the powerful emotions surrounding such notions as patriotism, loyalty, duty, obedience, and their counterpart, treason. Although the world that generated such sentiments had become distant under the Nazis, people still felt them strongly even in the face of reason. Typical was the behavior of General Georg von Sodenstern, who ten days before the outbreak of war had conferred with Witzleben over far-reaching plans to topple Hitler. But in September, when war had been declared, he turned “to the military duties incumbent upon him and away from any thought of a violent uprising.” 15Because such re­sponses were by no means unusual, the resistance lost much of its strength after war broke out.

The professional pride that many officers took in their work also tended to dampen their hostility toward the government. Even so steadfast an opponent of the Nazis as Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, writing in his diary at the beginning of the Polish cam­paign, expressed virtually daily his pride at the way countless individ­ual orders fit together perfectly to produce a grand, victorious campaign. Oster, Henning von Tresckow, Rudolph-Christoph von Gersdorff, and others were caught up in the same dilemma. Many memoirs from the time illustrate how much easier it was to solve this conundrum in one’s thoughts than in real life. For some, there was no way out of it.