Despite the setbacks suffered by the resistance during these weeks, Oster remained undaunted. The clearer it became that Hitler was leading Germany straight into another war, the more numerous and open his opponents became. The opposition circles that had formed in the Foreign Office and in Military Intelligence were now joined by Hans Bernd Gisevius, a former assistant secretary in the Ministry of the Interior with an extensive knowledge of all the cliques and coteries in the corridors of power; Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, an assistant secretary to the Reich price commissioner; and Helmuth Groscurth, chief of the army intelligence liaison group on the general staff. All of them had friends in whom they confided as well as superiors and subordinates whom they informed and drew into opposition circles. Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, for instance, won over the prefect of police in Berlin, Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf; even more importantly, Oster revived his old connections with Erwin von Witzleben, the commander of the Berlin military district. Witzleben was a simple, unpretentious man with clear judgment. During one of his conversations with Oster in the summer of 1938, he did not hesitate to declare himself ready for action: “I don’t know anything about politics, but I don’t need to in order to know what has to be done here.”12
Beck was continuing his efforts and for the first time he began to break out of the realm of mere counterproposals. At a meeting with Brauchitsch on July 16, he suggested that the generals join together to form a united opposition front. If this failed to sway Hitler and he continued on a course toward war, the generals should resign enmasse. “Final decisions” needed to be made, Beck wrote, arguing that if the officer corps felled to act its members would incur a “blood guilt… . Their soldiers’ duty to obey ends when their knowledge, their conscience, and their sense of responsibility forbid them to carry out an order. If their advice and warnings are ignored in such a situation, they have the right and the duty before history and the German people to resign.”13
Brauchitsch summoned the generals to a meeting on Bendlerstrasse on August 4. It soon became apparent that all the commanding generals believed that a spreading war would prove catastrophic for Germany. Busch and Reichenau, however, did not think that an attack on Czechoslovakia would necessarily lead to war with the Western powers, and as a result the tormented Brauchitsch did not even mention Beck’s proposal that the generals attempt to pressure Hitler by threatening mass resignation. At the end of the meeting Brauchitsch did, however, reconfirm their unanimous opposition to a war and their conviction that a world war would mean the destruction of German culture.14 Shortly afterwards, Hitler was informed about the meeting by Reichenau and he immediately demanded Beck’s dismissal as chief of general staff. To show his displeasure he invited neither Beck nor Brauchitsch to a conference at his compound on the Obersalzberg on August 10; there he informed the chiefs of general staff of the armies and the air force that he had decided to invade Czechoslovakia.
Eight days later Beck submitted his resignation. This step and the way in which it was taken revealed once again the submissiveness and political ineptitude of the officer corps. After the Fritsch affair Beck had declared that he must remain at his post in order both to work for the rehabilitation of his humiliated superior and to prevent the reduction of the army to a mere tool of the Führer. His ensuing dispute with Hitler, however, which took the form of a series of memoranda opposing the Führer’s plans for war and for the reorganization of the high command, proved to be the “final battle” of the officer corps in its struggle to maintain a say in decisions of war and peace.15 Now Beck cleared himself out of Hitler’s way, as it were, becoming merely an outraged, and later despairing, observer without position or influence.
Only a few days earlier Erich von Manstein, his chief of operations, had written him a letter urging that he remain at his post because no one had the “skill and strength of character” to replace him. Beck’s authority was indeed widely acknowledged throughout the officer corps. He was a clear, imaginative, rigorous thinker of great integrity. Even Hitler could not shake the aura of easy superiority Beck projected in every word and deed. During the Fritsch crisis the Führer had confided in a member of his cabinet that Beck was the only officer he feared: “That man could really do something.”16 Later Beck effortlessly assumed a leadership role in the opposition. No one doubted that if a successful putsch was launched he would become chief of state. “Beck was king,” a contemporary recalled.17 If there was a flaw in his cool, pure intelligence, it lay in his lack of toughness and drive. He was “very scholarly by nature,” one of his admirers commented. Other opposition figures also found that he provided more analytical acuity than leadership at crucial moments.18
Beck was also probably less of a political strategist than the situation required and was certainly not conversant with the kinds of maneuvers and ploys at which Hitler was so adept. That is why he readily acquiesced to Hitler’s request that his resignation not be made public lest it provoke an unfavorable reaction. As a result, the decision he had made after so much painful reflection had no public impact. Beck later admitted that he had made a mistake, adding a revealing justification that illustrates the helplessness of his position: it was not his way, he said, to be a “self-promoter.”19 Hitler did not even bother to grant him an audience when he took his leave.
Nonetheless, upon his departure Beck commended his successor, Franz Halder, to all those with whom he was on confidential terms. Indeed, only a few days after assuming his new post, Halder summoned Hans Oster to an interview. After a few exchanges of views about Hitler’s foreign designs, Halder asked his guest point-blank how the preparations for a coup were progressing. More clearly than Beck, Halder recognized that the ingloriously abandoned plan for a “generals’ strike” would only make sense as the first step in a coup; otherwise it was better left undone. Hitler could easily have found replacements for all the seditious generals and knew far too much about power and how to keep it simply to back down in the face of such opposition. The historian Peter Hoffmann quite rightly points in this regard to Manstein’s comment at the Nuremberg trials that dictators do not allow themselves to be driven into things, because then they would no longer be dictators.20
Halder was a typical general staff officer of the old schooclass="underline" correct, focused, and outspoken. Observers also noted a certain impulsiveness, which, for the sake of his career, he had learned to control, if not overcome. Not long after his meeting with Oster he spoke with Gisevius for the first time, soon turning to concrete questions about plans for the coup and describing Hitler as “mentally ill” and “bloodthirsty.”21 Here and elsewhere, he proved that he was a man far more capable of action than Beck, who immersed himself in philosophical contemplation. Halder had resolved the conflict between the loyalty traditionally expected of a soldier and the need to topple Hitler and no longer felt inhibited from taking action by his oath to the Führer. As early as the fall maneuvers of 1937, he had encouraged Fritsch to use force against Hitler, and after Fritsch’s treacherous removal he had pressed for “practical opposition.” More clear-sighted than most of his fellow conservatives and less compromising in his values, he realized that Hitler was a radical revolutionary prepared to destroy virtually everything. Despite the adoring crowds at Hitler’s feel, Halder considered his rule highly illegitimate because it stood outside all tradition: truth, morality, patriotism, even human beings themselves were only instruments for the accrual of more power. Hitler, in Halder’s view, was “the very incarnation of evil.” By nature a practical, realistic man, meticulous to the point of pedantry, Halder was not, however, cut out for the role of conspirator and the very perversity of the times can be seen in the fact that such a man felt driven to such un undertaking. He later said he found “the need to resist a frightful, agonizing experience.”22 Halder refused to be a party to any sort of ill considered action and insisted that a coup would only be justifiable as a last resort.