Paddy Ashdown - Nein!

Beck was now on territory which was dangerously close to rebellion. Writing to his superior Werner von Fritsch in January 1937, he insisted, ‘All hope is placed in the army. The Wehrmacht will never permit adventure – for able and clever men are its head. Total responsibility rests [on us] for future developments. There is no escaping that.’

It did not take long for Beck to be cruelly disabused of these elaborate niceties.

Hitler’s long-term intentions had for some time been strongly hinted at for those with ears to hear. As early as May 1935, Beck, as chief of staff, had been ordered to start planning for Operation Schulung, an ‘imaginary’ invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the first months of 1937, responding to the mood in Hitler’s Chancellery, Beck began considering how he would implement an order to bring Austria into the German fold.

On 5 November 1937, Hitler finally made plain what had so far only been implied. In a long monologue delivered at a secret meeting with his key military leaders, the chancellor announced that his intention was indeed to go to war with his neighbours: ‘The first German objective … should be to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia simultaneously … the descent upon the Czechs [should be carried out] with lightning speed [and might take place] as early as 1938.’ Hitler stressed that he was not predicting a short conflict – his long-term aim, he warned, was to acquire more ‘living space’ ( Lebensraum ) for Germany’s population by 1943.

Any hope that the army would act as Beck’s hoped-for ‘emergency brake’ on what was now plainly revealed as Hitler’s headlong dash to war vanished in the early months of 1938, when the German army suffered a double blow to both its prestige and its power. It began with a carefully engineered ‘scandal’ which on 27 January ended the career of the then minister of war and commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. Eight days later the head of the army, Colonel General Fritsch, the man to whom Beck had written a few weeks earlier asserting that the army would never permit ‘adventure’, was forced to resign because of an alleged, but entirely manufactured, homosexual encounter with a male prostitute in a backstreet close to a Berlin railway station. The army, in which Beck had invested ‘all hope’, stood silently by and uttered not a squeak of protest at these public crucifixions of two of its most respected officers, or at the step-by-step emasculation of its power and position which ensued. On 4 February, Hitler, seeing this weakness, seized direct personal control of Germany’s military machine, declaring, ‘I exercise henceforth immediate command over the entire armed forces.’

Following the Fritsch affair and Hitler’s takeover of the army, whispered talk began to circulate about the possibilities of taking direct action. Carl Goerdeler lobbied some generals to initiate a coup d’état by using the army to seize Gestapo headquarters. But Ludwig Beck had not yet crossed the Rubicon. Asked at a meeting about this time if he had any comment on the recent events, he responded that the question was improper: ‘Mutiny and revolution are words which will not be found in a German soldier’s dictionary.’

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Beck, still failing to understand the true nature of Hitler’s demonic will, continued to believe that he could divert the coming war by persuasion and legal means.

Again, he was soon proved wrong.

Hitler swiftly consolidated his mastery of the German machine by appointing his most loyal acolyte, Wilhelm Keitel, as chief of the newly created high command of the armed forces, and Joachim von Ribbentrop as his new foreign minister. Then, following the annexation of Austria in March, he convened a secret meeting with his generals on 30 May, and proclaimed: ‘It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.’

For Beck, this was the last straw. In a minute to his superior, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, he wrote: ‘The Führer’s remarks demonstrate once again the total insufficiency of the existing military hierarchy at the highest level … If the lever is not applied here soon … the future fate … [of] peace and war and with it the fate of Germany … can only be seen in the blackest colours.’

Now at last Ludwig Beck understood that all attempts to alter Hitler’s ‘unalterable resolve’ were in vain. If war was to be prevented, the time had come, the philosopher general concluded, to pass from protests to the preparation of coups and assassinations.

*The motto is taken from a song of this title that from 1797 to 1945 was played every hour by the bells of Potsdam’s Garrison Church, the burial place of Frederick the Great. The words, by the eighteenth-century poet Ludwig Hölty, were set to the tune of Papageno’s song ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute . The motto became closely associated with Prussian values and the creed of Freemasonry.

At a little before eight o’clock on the morning of 2 January 1935, a slight and rather unprepossessing man with sad china-blue eyes and prematurely white hair for a forty-eight-year-old walked through the front door of Tirpitzufer 72–76, an imposing five-storey granite building a kilometre or so from Hitler’s Chancellery. Standing by the small concierge’s kiosk just inside the front door, a casual observer not in the know (the visitor’s presence that day was a state secret) would not have marked the small figure down as anyone of particular importance. True, his admiral’s uniform and his complexion, ruddy with the lash of salt breezes, told of a life at sea. But senior military figures were two a penny in Berlin these days. This man’s dress looked ‘shop-soiled and old’, and his bearing far from military, so that the observer might have imagined that he was perhaps retired, rather than someone at the very top of Chancellor Hitler’s hierarchy. ‘He gave the impression of a civilian, rather than a senior German officer,’ said one commentator.

The admiral walked up a flight of steps set between two fluted Doric pillars and across the glistening tiled floor of the Tirpitzufer entrance hall to a creaky lift with a reputation for breaking down, positioned to one side of a balustraded stairway sweeping down from the first floor. He entered the lift and, pressing the button for the third floor, was duly deposited in front of a pair of heavy oak doors which led through an outer office to an empty, high-ceilinged room, which echoed to his footsteps. Looking around, the newcomer would have noted to himself, with the habit of a man used to taking over other people’s jobs, that his predecessor had taken all the furniture.

Wilhelm Canaris’s journey to his new post as head of the Abwehr, *Germany’s principal foreign intelligence service, had been a long and romantic one. It had taken an inexperienced young naval officer and made him into what a contemporary described as ‘one of the most interesting phenomena of the period … a combination of disinterested idealism and of shrewdness such as is particularly rare in Germany. In Germany one very seldom finds the cleverness of a snake and the purity of a dove combined in a single personality.’

Born to a wealthy industrialist near Dortmund on 1 January 1887, Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a few years younger than both Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler. According to family legend he was a descendant of the nineteenth-century Greek admiral, liberation hero and politician Constantine Kanaris. Canaris liked to repeat this story in preference to the truth, which was that his ancestors were the Canarisi family from the area around Lake Como in northern Italy, who took their winemaking skills to the Mosel region of Germany in the late seventeenth century. There was indeed something not quite German – something more of the south – about Wilhelm Canaris. In later life he would express a dislike of cold northern climes, and a preference for the warmth, charm and easy living of the south. His personality too seemed more in tune with the sinuosity and subtlety of the Mediterranean than with the eternal search for logic, resolution and mastery of the Atlantic races.