The success of Hitler’s initial attempt to repress army interference in political affairs soon became apparent. On the night of November 9-10, 1938, which has come to be known as Kristallnacht, “spontaneous demonstrations,” as Joseph Goebbels phrased it in his directive, were organized all over Germany. Synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned stores demolished, and large numbers of Jews arrested; some were killed. It was plain to see that the government was as responsible as the hordes of SA men were for the arson, plunder, and murder of that night. People were horrified and shamed but remained quiet. Their feelings, however, were soon given voice at a conference of army commanders, where a number of generals did not hesitate to express their outrage. General Fedor von Bock even asked his fellow officers excitedly whether someone couldn’t just “string up that swine Coebbels.”4
Walther von Brauchitsch, the army commander in chief, remained immovable. After all the disputes and unpleasantness of the previous weeks, he simply shrugged his shoulders at demands that he lodge a protest. Raeder, on the other hand, backed the formal protests of a number of senior naval officers, among them Admiral Conrad Patzig and Captains Günther Lütjens and Karl Dönitz, and sought an audience with the Führer. The only response Raeder received, however, was that the SA district leaders had gotten out of control, a fabrication that satisfied him.5 Meanwhile, at a general meeting in the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht sharply condemned the events. In addition, the senior SA commander and prefect of the Berlin police, Count Wolf-Heinrich Helldorf, who had been absent from the city that night, summoned high-ranking police officials to a meeting immediately upon his return and bitterly reproached them for having obeyed the order to stand by and do nothing. If he had been in Berlin, he told them, he would have issued orders to fire on the SA mobs. In the gloomy silence of those November days, the sound of another voice rose for the first time, that of a young captain named Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who criticized the officer corps as seeming dumbstruck, adding that not much more could be expected from people who had already had their backbones broken several times.6
Hitler rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate to those he had defeated the full extent of their loss. On the morning of March 15, 1939, he finally fulfilled his dream of taking Prague, sending motorized units into the city through swirling spring snow. He kept the officer corps in the dark about his exact plans until the last possible minute, however, at times going so far as to mislead it with placating words. Even the devoted Keitel, chief of the OKW, later complained that he knew nothing of Hitler’s intentions and was left to guess.
The opposition to Hitler failed to realize the significance of the occupation of the western provinces of Czechoslovakia. Most thought of it as another Munich, confirmation of all they had learned about the weakness and perfidy of the Western powers. In reality, though, Prague was the turning point. Hitherto, Hitler had always justified ripping up treaties and breaking solemn promises by invoking the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles. He had defended German incursions by citing the right to self-determination of those territories under foreign occupation-a right that had been proclaimed by the Western powers themselves. Now, for the first time, he emerged clearly as an aggressor, going beyond anything he had done in the past. The occupation of Prague, therefore, provided an excellent opportunity for a coup. The opposition groups remained scattered, however, and instead of a revolt there was widespread rejoicing over the Führer’s latest stroke of genius. Diaries and memoirs of the period record that even some opposition figures felt patriotic pride as well as depression at Hitler’s latest success. Like Mussolini during the turbulent days of Munich, some even began to believe, though without his feeling of contempt, that the democracies were by their nature weak-willed and easily intimidated.
Scarcely had Hitler annexed western Czechoslovakia when he let it be known that he now intended to settle scores with Poland. This time-as if he had somehow sensed the previous fall’s conspiracy to overthrow him if he went to war-he seemed very much at pains not to provide the generals with opportunities for collusion. He concealed his decision to go to war, which had long been firm, and assured those around him that he would resort to force only if all attempts failed to reach an amicable settlement. “We have to be good now,” he told a visitor.8
And so the conspirators remained passive, clinging to the idea that a coup would only be justifiable if Hitler expressed a clear determination to go to war and issued the corresponding orders. Under pressure from Oster, Goerdeler, Gisevius, Hassell, and others, Beck now attempted to involve Halder, his successor as chief of the army general staff, in new plans. At a meeting in Beck’s home in Lichterfelde, the two conspirators readily agreed on the basic nature of the regime, Hitler’s thinly veiled determination to provoke war, and the need to overthrow him. They disagreed sharply, however, on when to strike. Halder remained convinced, as he had been before Munich, that they could not act unless the Führer was clearly headed for war. As to Hitler’s present designs on the port city of Danzig, it was a German city, as even the British allowed, and it was still quite possible that the negotiations with the Poles would be concluded peacefully.
By now Beck had come to see things quite differently. He was no longer willing to stand by while Hitler scored piecemeal successes, for he saw that they hastened the inevitable catastrophe. War would come at some point, making a coup even more difficult to carry out. Once hostilities began, “other irrational, ‘patriotic’ laws” would be implemented. Time was therefore short. Halder and Beck were engaged in the same dispute that had divided Halder and Gisevius a year earlier, but this time it was inflamed by the tensions and strained personal relationship between the current chief of general staff and his proud but isolated predecessor, their mutual professional admiration notwithstanding. When the two parted, both felt deeply irritated, with Halder having detected accusations of indecisiveness in virtually everything Beck had said.
Although the core conspirators gradually came back together, they soon got bogged down in their passionate debates on a welter of issues that were better resolved by decisiveness than by argument. Meanwhile Erwin von Witzleben, the former commander of the Berlin military district, took matters into his own hands. A practical man with little patience for tortuous discussion, he had been posted to Frankfurt am Main, as commander in chief of an army group there. Far from the center of things, he felt condemned to inactivity, a trying condition for someone of his energetic nature. Although he, too, realized that a coup had little chance of success at the present time, he had no doubt that a man as manic and restive as Hitler would soon provide fresh opportunity and the conspirators had to be ready.
Together with Georg von Sodenstern, his chief of general staff, Witzleben developed a long-term plan to identify like-minded officers and systematically build up as solid a network as possible of commanders who were prepared to support a military coup when the time was ripe. All previous plans had indeed relied far too heavily on two conditions: the elimination of Hitler in a quick strike and the smooth operation of the regular chain of command. Witzleben believed that it was no longer possible to assume that orders for a coup would be followed automatically without objection or complaint, a conclusion based on the fact that Hitler had succeeded so thoroughly in widening the rift within the armed forces. It has been suggested that Witzleben’s idea of forming a secret officers’ cadre was an alien concept incompatible with German military tradition, but it was no more revolutionary than Hitler’s own policies and constituted an apposite response to them. There is considerable truth to the argument that the coup of July 20, 1944, failed at least in part because the conspirators depended too greatly on the chain of command and, for whatever reason, were blind to the conclusions that Witzleben now drew.