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.