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
Thus everything was prepared, more thoroughly and with seemingly greater chances of success than ever again. Heinz’s shock troop, well provided with arms and explosives, was in readiness in private houses in Berlin. All military and police measures had been arranged for. Plans for the smooth take-over of the radio were ready, and proclamations to the populace drafted. Halder had announced that the signal to strike would be given the moment Hitler issued the marching order against Czechoslovakia. Everyone was waiting.
With the London declaration of September 26 that in case of an attack on Czechoslovakia England would take her place at France’s side, the other side at last seemed to have taken that resolute posture that was so essential to the conspirators’ plans. In the course of September 27 they even succeeded in drawing the hesitating Brauchitsch into the operation. At noon Hitler issued readiness orders for the first wave of attacks and a few hours later ordered the mobilization of nineteen divisions. General mobilization was expected for the following day at 2 P.M. Erich Kordt was going to insure that the big double door behind the guard at the entrance to the chancellery was opened. Toward noon Brauchitsch went to hear Hitler’s decision. Witzleben’s group waited impatiently in the defense district headquarters on Hohenzollerndamm; the general himself was visiting Halder at army High Command headquarters. Heinz’s shock troop awaited orders in its quarters. At this point, with all in readiness, a courier brought word to Chief of Staff Halder that Hitler had, on Mussolini’s mediation, consented to a softer line and had agreed to a conference in Munich.
The news was a bombshell. Each of the participants in the plot instantly realized that the basis for the whole plan of action had been removed. Confusion and numbness gripped them all. Only Gisevius, one of the civilian conspirators, tried in a desperate torrent of words to persuade Witzleben to strike anyhow. The whole undertaking had been based too exclusively upon a single pivot in foreign policy; now, any chance for action was lost. This, strictly speaking, had been the crucial though perhaps inevitable dilemma of the project for a coup all along: it depended on certain moves of Hitler, on certain reactions of the Western powers. The conspirators were not mistaken about Hitler’s nature; their plan failed because they had not realized that England’s intentions had always been to give Hitler the chance, by concessions, “to be a good boy,” as Henderson put it. “We could not be as candid with you as you were with us,” Halifax regretfully told Theo Kordt after the Munich Conference.93
The shock had reverberations that extended far beyond the moment. Merely the news of Chamberlain’s flight to Berchtesgaden had had a paralyzing effect on the conspirators; now the resistance as a whole suffered a collapse from which it never again really recovered. Granted that it had all along been burdened by scruples, conflicts of loyalty and problems with the oath of allegiance. Granted, too, that the participants, in their protracted nocturnal discussions and private soul-searchings, had repeatedly come up against the limits forged by upbringing and reinforced by habit: the limits where the call of conscience ended and overthrow of Hitler seemed like betrayal. The entire history of the German resistance displays this conflict, which robbed the actors of that ultimate resolution without which they could not succeed. But now, in addition, the conspirators were forced to the belief that Hitler could master any situation, that fortune was with him, that history was on his side.
“It would have been the end of Hitler,” Goerdeler wrote to an American friend at this time. And though this statement leaves open a number of questions, the prediction that immediately followed was fulfilled to the letter: “In shrinking from a small risk, Mr. Chamberlain made war inevitable. The English and the French people will now have to defend their freedom with arms, unless they prefer a slave’s existence.”94