A few days later General Thomas and General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the military commander in Belgium and northern France, went to see Brauchitsch. They both found him surprisingly receptive to their ideas, probably not least because he was exhausted from the interminable wrangling with Hitler. According to an entry in Hassell’s diary, Brauchitsch acknowledged “what a bloody mess everything had become and even came to see that he himself must be held partially responsible.”20 As if a signal had gone out, activity within opposition circles immediately picked up. At meeting after meeting, “the overall situation was discussed,” Hassell recorded, “just in case…” Other preparatory steps were taken as welclass="underline" ties were established with Trott, Yorck, and Moltke, and Hassell was requested shortly thereafter to visit Witzleben and Falkenhausen. After the somber mood of the previous months, spirits within the opposition finally began to lift. Tresckow even felt sufficiently encouraged to make a last, although ultimately futile, attempt to draw Bock into the resistance.
At this point the great Russian winter descended on the troops in the field, who were left without appropriate provisions, having charged ahead on the assumption that there would be “no winter campaign,” as Hitler had assured skeptics only shortly before. The German offensive literally froze in its tracks, and confusion spread across the front. With every ounce of the general staffs strength devoted to dealing with the situation of the troops, all planning for a coup ceased. The members of the resistance fell once again into such despondency that they even interpreted Hitler’s dismissal of Brauchitsch on December 19-undertaken in the hope of ending the festering conflict with the OKH-as a blow. The incessant swinging from high to low had so frazzled them that the few strong words Brauchitsch had spoken to Thomas and Falkenhausen had raised their hopes in him, making them forget the countless occasions when he had demonstrated his lack of courage and sown nothing but despair. Hassell gave the figures who appeared in his diary humorously appropriate aliases, and it was no accident that Brauchitsch’s moniker was “Pappenheim,” which means a habitually unreliable person.
As he had done in the past, Hitler attempted to solve his problems with the army by assuming supreme command after Brauchitsch’s dismissal, thus making himself answerable only to himself twice over. The reasons he gave for this step are equally revelatory of his arrogance and his suspicion, as well as of his desire to bring about the ideological radicalization of the army, which had remained noticeably cool to his ideas. “Anybody can handle operational leadership-that’s easy,” he said. “The task of the commander in chief of the army is to give the army National Socialist training; I know no general of the army who could perform this task as I would have it.”21 Hitler used Brauchitsch’s departure as an opportunity to clean house in the upper echelons of the army. A large number of generals and division commanders were ousted, and Bock was replaced as commander in chief of Army Group Center by Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge. Relieving Gerd von Rundstedt of command of Army Group South, Hitler installed Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau. For failure to comply with orders to stand firm during the winter crisis, General Heinz Guderian was dismissed and General Erich Hoepner expelled from the army entirely. The commander in chief of Army Group North, Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, resigned voluntarily.
But Hitler’s nervous interventions and the insults and abuse he heaped on his generals could do nothing to dispel the specter of defeat that suddenly hung over the German forces. After striding for almost twenty years from one political, diplomatic, or military triumph to the next, Hitler suffered his first serious setback in the winter of 1941-2. The aura of invincibility that had surrounded Hitler and his armies, keeping them together and holding uncertainty at bay, began to dissipate. Always a gambler, Hitler had bet everything on a single card, and with the defeat before the gates of Moscow, his entire plan collapsed. The blitzkrieg had failed, as he immediately realized, and with it his whole strategy for the war against the Soviet Union.
Each step in the plan was predicated on the success of the previous steps. Just a few weeks before the invasion stalled, the general staffs had been made aware of a “preparatory commando unit” whose task would be to slip through the lines after Moscow was surrounded and assume responsibility for certain “security duties” in the heart of the Soviet capital. The unit’s leader reported to the army commanders that Hitler wanted Moscow razed to the ground. The eastern border of the German Reich would then be advanced to the Baku-Stalingrad-Moscow-Leningrad line, beyond which a broad, lifeless “firebreak” would extend to the Urals.22
Defeat also put an end to the mission of the commando unit. Hitler’s daydreams of master and slave races, resettlement programs, mass exterminations, and the renewal of bloodlines were also shattered, as were increasingly monstrous and megalomaniacal visions of himself as a world savior, though he continued to propound them in his “table talk” and monologues over the ensuing years. His magic spell broken by this setback, Hitler realized much more clearly than ever before that time was working against him. There is every reason to think that his disputes with the generals had been prompted largely by his nagging fear that the hourglass was indeed running down. Judgment day was not yet at hand, as one contemporary observer noted, but “dark clouds were gathering.”23
Ironically enough, the opposition, too, felt that time was working against them and deepening their dilemma. If they took action after a military defeat, such as had just occurred for the first time, they could probably count on more support from the populace, at least in the short term. But they also ran the risk of making a martyr of Hitler and so giving rise to another stab-in-the-back legend. None of the conspirators had forgotten the poisonous effect of this legend on the government that was established after the First World War. On the other hand, by launching the coup after a string of military victories the conspirators ran the risk of operating without popular support in Germany, even if their actions opened the prospect of negotiating satisfactory peace terms. When Tresckow asked a friend what he thought the solution was, the friend responded that risk was inevitable and that “the most favorable time externally” was necessarily “the least favorable internally.”24
As 1942 dawned, the conspirators faced the increasingly pressing question of whether a Germany that had rid itself of Hitler would have any hope of negotiating an acceptable peace with the Allies. The answer was clearly crucial, especially as far as the generals were concerned, and it had become all the more urgent since Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States on December 11, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. A colossal worldwide coalition of powers was emerging that would sooner or later overwhelm the Reich. Furthermore, Great Britain and the Soviet Union had signed a mutual-assistance pact as of July 12, 1941, according to which neither party would enter into cease-fire negotiations without the consent of the other. One month later Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt had announced the Atlantic Charter, which, notwithstanding its ringing declarations about peace, made plain their intent to disarm Germany for many years to come. Thus, even before the formal entry of the United States into the war, Beck, Hassell, and Popitz began to discuss whether it was not already too late for a coup. Even a government formed by the resistance, they felt, might “no longer be able lo obtain an acceptable peace.”