Plotting Hitler's Death

5. THE NEW GENERATION

Among the consequences of the failed November conspiracy was a shift in the center of gravity within the resistance. It has been observed, somewhat simplistically, that the resistance was led, up to this point, by older men, some retired and some still holding senior positions, who were struggling to regain their waning influence. Be­ginning in 1940 a younger generation came to the fore, taking up the challenge of overthrowing the regime and casting about for suitable leaders of its own.¹

Although this view glosses over numerous distinctions within the gathering “second generation” of opponents to the regime, there is no doubt that new faces and even a new type of person began to appear after 1940. The difference between the new conspirators and the “old school” had less to do with age than with the conclusions they drew from their experiences. This gulf was rarely bridged, de­spite the many similarities in the two groups’ views. While the older conspirators wanted to renew Germany in accordance with timeworn principles that they felt were still valid-though admittedly in need of updating-their younger counterparts were captivated by the idea that a new era was dawning, necessitating a sharp break with the past. In general, this second group was more radical and less respectful than the older generation, which felt bound by traditions, oaths, obe­dience and inhibited by possible accusations of high treason. The new generation tended to scorn such notions as the “subtleties” of a dying world. They made snide remarks about “the old-timers’ revolution.” Adam von Trot occasionally remarked that for the sake of their credibility they needed to “avoid any hint of being reactionary, of gentle­men’s clubs, or of militarism,” all of which stubbornly clung to the older opponents of the Nazis.²

In social terms, the “notables” who had previously set the tone were overtaken by the “counts,” although by no means did all members of this second group stem from the aristocracy. In military terms, the “colonels” took over from the “generals.” But there was, in fact, a fair amount of overlap between the two groups, as can be seen in the case of one of the key players in the first phase of the resistance who also played an essential role in the second and whose opposition to Nazism led him to such extremes that his actions remain controversial to this day.

Hans Oster had decided after much mental anguish that all resistance of the kind practiced hitherto was doomed to failure. Not only was the conspirators’ ability to act severely limited by traditional no­tions of gentlemanly behavior, but worse yet, they could not get around the objection that a coup would have little chance for success so long as Hitler suffered no political or military defeat severe enough to break his spell over the German people, at least momentarily. It seemed to Oster that such a defeat should therefore be arranged.

This was a perilous conclusion. But in his despair and helpless rage Oster realized much more clearly than most of his colleagues that National Socialism represented an entirely new phenomenon: an ide­ology of such sinister immorality that traditional values and loyalties no longer applied. For this reason, Oster commissioned Dohnanyi to gather information about the crimes of the regime both in Germany and, starting in September 1939, in Poland. Oster was hardly sur­prised when the misgivings he expressed about an offensive in the West through Dutch and Belgian territory were brushed aside by Hitler. With all these examples in mind, Oster forced himself to over­come his final inhibitions and take the step that led him to treason.

In the early 1930s he had made the acquaintance of a young Dutch officer named Gijsbertus Jacobus Sas. At the time of the 1936 Olympic Games, they became fast friends. When Sas, having risen to rank of colonel, was appointed a military attaché to the Dutch embassy in Berlin, they renewed their friendship and grew increas­ingly close despite the enthusiastic admiration of Sas’s wife for the German Führer. On the evening of October 8, 1939, Oster was on his way home to 9 Bayerische Strasse with his occasional driver, Franz Liedig. Silent and sunk in thought, Oster suddenly asked to be dropped off at Sas’s apartment. When he returned a few minutes later and took his place beside Liedig, Oster blurted out that now there was no going back: he had just committed high treason and, if discovered, would be hanged. In an extremely emotional state, he revealed all that had driven him to this point, concluding with words that Liedig would never forget: “It is far easier to take a pistol and kill someone, it is far easier to charge into a hail of machine-gun fire when you believe in the cause, than it is to do what I have done. If things should ever come to this pass, then please be the friend even after my death who knows how it was and what moved me to do things that others might never understand or undertake themselves.”³

Oster’s “treachery” has fired a passionate debate in Germany, with one side claiming that under a criminal regime all notions of illegality are overturned while the other takes a more formalistic view, saying that deliberate, premeditated treason should always be a capital of­fense. A third group makes the point that Oster’s deed was “basically of little import” because the Belgians, to whom Sas immediately for­warded the information provided by his friend, lent it no more cre­dence than the Dutch had.⁴ Furthermore, the Western powers reportedly already knew of Hitler’s intentions through many other channels. But these and other attempts to diminish, excuse, or con­demn Oster’s decision fail to come to grips with its seriousness and true intent; they also overlook the fact that Oster had crossed a cru­cial dividing line: he was prepared to cause the death of German soldiers if necessary, a position that practically none of the other members of the resistance could accept, no matter how much they still respected him.

It is impossible to assess Oster’s actions properly without considering that his intent was not to injure Germany but to spare it the catastrophe that would inevitably result, in the unanimous view of the generals, if the original plans were followed and Western Europe was invaded immediately after the Polish campaign. His motive was to do everything he could to prevent the impending catastrophe that Hitler, after successful invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, was deter­mined to visit on the entire western half of Europe, Germany in­cluded. Just how close the military itself was to desperate action can he seen in the example of Walter von Reichenau, who, though he has frequently been decried as a “Nazi general,” vehemently opposed Hitler’s plans for another offensive at the conference of August 30. He then went so far as to meet with Goerdeler in the house of the former vice-mayor of Berlin, Fritz Elsas, on November 6 and en­courage him in scarcely veiled terms to leak the date of the offensive to the British and Dutch so that they would begin their preparations, thus foiling Hitler’s strategic plan.⁵

While Reichenau was motivated primarily by pragmatic concerns, Oster’s intentions were much more far-ranging. He hoped, for exam­ple, to reveal, or rather highlight, a paradox that was often ignored: most officers-even those who were highly critical of the Nazis-tended to focus narrowly on their own military victories and thus found it difficult to accept that their successes redounded to Hitler’s glory, augmenting his authority and power and, for the time being, his reputation for almost magical invincibility.

Oster clearly saw no way out of this dilemma without breaking free of traditional values and thought patterns. He was enough of an officer to understand how seriously his peers took their responsibility for the well-being of their troops. But the question was how that responsibility compared to the one they would bear for the millions of lives that would be lost in a world war unleashed by Hitler and whether it was even possible to address the real issues from the stand­point of individual nations and their legal systems, which protected each nation’s self-interests and made “high treason” a heinous crime. Traditional values provided inadequate tools for understanding or combating Hitler’s rule. Moreover, they failed to address the moral grounds on which, more than anything else, Oster’s fierce opposition was predicated. Some doubt may still remain, but when all the philo­sophical arguments have been exhausted, one point stands beyond challenge in Osier’s thinking. He himself alluded to it when he told Franz Liedig that he had made a decision on moral grounds, for which he alone was responsible and for which, if things turned out badly, he alone would pay.

Like all previous designs of the German resistance, Oster’s action failed, even doubly so. Hitler did not suffer the expected setback, since the date of the western offensive was postponed twenty-nine times in total between the autumn of 1939 and May 1940, when Wehrmacht units that had recovered their strength and were well prepared and better equipped finally smashed across the borders. Furthermore, the never-ending series of new starting dates for the attack that Oster relayed to the West made his warnings seem unreli­able. The Dutch high command never placed much stock in them in any case, as the original November date struck them as too foolish and irrational to be believed, even of Hitler. They soon wrote Sas off, suspecting that he was either being deliberately misled by his secre­tive informer or that he had become hysterical and hoped to appear more important than he really was. As a result, all his messages were simply filed away. When Oster warned the Norwegian ambassador in Berlin of Hitler’s decision to seize Norway and Denmark the ambas­sador, concluding that it was a deliberate attempt to mislead him, did not even forward the information to Oslo. By the time Norway even­tually mobilized, it was too late. Similarly, the British fleet, which set sail on April 7 to beat the Germans to the punch in Norway (Hitler invaded on April 9) had no idea it was in a race against time. As if to remind Oster that he had risked his life, honor, and reputation in vain, the Dutch commander in chief, General Winkelmann, told Sas that the German officer who was feeding him information must be “a pitiful fellow.”⁶

On the evening of May 9, 1940, Oster gave Sas the code word for the imminent German attack in the West: “Danzig.” Sas hastened to the embassy to forward this information. The Ministry of War in The Hague hesitated, however, calling the embassy back to express its doubts, and ultimately seemed unwilling, out of fear of the Germans, to give orders for the mobilization of troops. The reaction in Belgium was no different. Consequently, when the invasion finally began in the early hours of May 10, the German units took their opponents so much by surprise that “Fortress Holland” fell within five days and Belgium soon thereafter. German units poured into France, using what Churchill called a “scythe cut”—a strategy developed by Erich von Manstein in the face of opposition from the OKH and substituted by Hitler at the last minute for the traditional strategic plan, which the Führer disparaged as “that old Schlieffen thing” (a reference to the attack on France in World War I). Within just a few weeks, the Germans overwhelmed the still slightly superior Allied forces, and on June 14 they marched through the Porte Maillot into the heart of Paris. On the same day, Guderian’s panzer units reached the Swiss border and broke into the Maginot Line from the rear. This line had not only dominated French strategic thinking but also had misled France into the deceptive, self-absorbed sense of contentment that now proved so fatal.

On June 17 the French government made its “melancholy deci­sion” to capitulate. Four days later Hitler reached the apex of his career: In the forest of Compiègne, where the terms of the armistice had been dictated to the Germans on November 11, 1918, a French delegation now signed the surrender. With his sense for high drama, the Führer invested the occasion with all the signs of symbolic reparation. The railroad car in which the historic ceremony had been held Twenty-two years earlier was retrieved from the museum in which it had been displayed. In the little clearing, a German flag was draped over the granite monument, whose inscription stated that at this place “the criminal pride of the German empire” had finally been broken. Hitler had sworn in countless speeches never to rest until the humiliation of November 11, 1918, had been erased. Finally his goal had been achieved. The “deepest disgrace of all times,” according to the text of the truce, was expunged.

The outburst of joy that this triumph prompted in Germany far surpassed that surrounding any of Hitler’s other successes, despite the fact that the decision to launch the western war had seemed senseless and obstinate to many when it started. Many lingering res­ervations, as well as new doubts about the Nazis, were allayed that day-or even transmuted into respect and admiration. The victorious generals, having gorged on titles, Knight’s Crosses, and grants for distinguished service to the state,” as Gisevius remarked bitterly, had little desire to recall their dire predictions about the offensive and felt forced to acknowledge that Hitler had perceived the weaknesses of the Western powers much better than they.⁷ In the years that fol­lowed, it was these brilliant successes, much more than opportunism or personal weakness (although they also existed), that generated the mysterious confidence in Hitler’s genius that always seemed to resurface despite setbacks.

For the German opponents of Nazism, the victory in France brought profound discouragement. Their only, albeit paradoxical, consolation lay in the fact that Hitler did not crown his triumph with serious peace initiatives; he savored it greedily but only for a short time before turning to new ventures. At some point, they thought, even Hitler’s luck must turn and Germany’s strength be exhausted. As if taking his leave from the cause that had so consumed him over the years, Canaris said that the resistance had “shrunk to fewer than the five fingers on one hand.”⁸

The Security Service (SD) reports on the mood of the general population in the second half of June 1940 speak of unprecedented social consensus. According to them, church groups were still making “defeatist” statements, but even the Communists had ceased their oppositional activities, thanks in large part to the Hitler-Stalin pact. The surviving remnants of the Social Democratic Party had dis­integrated into nothing more than apolitical circles of friends who met to reminisce about the days when their cause had seemed to be the wave of the future. Occasionally they produced leaflets to stir fading memories. Those party leaders who had remained in Germany had withdrawn into their private lives or joined the various civilian resistance groups, which offered at least intellectual opposition to the regime.

Recognizing that it was nearly impossible to mount a broad-based coup, the plotters resorted to assassination attempts. In May 1940 Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg resigned as regional commissioner in Silesia and joined his reserve regiment, because he believed that he could serve the resistance more effectively from within the army. Together with Eugen Gerstenmaier, a theologian and member of the Kreisau Circle, he attempted to form a commando unit to undertake Hitler’s assassination. They failed, however, to assemble the nearly one hundred people required, and their plans were frustrated by transfers, orders to travel on official business at inopportune times, and Hitler’s unpredictable changes of location.

Also busy conspiring, from their positions in Paris, were members of the staff of Erwin von Witzleben, commander in chief of the west­ern army groups, who was promoted to field marshal after the French campaign. Two members of this group, Major Alexander von Voss and Captain Ulrich Wilhelm Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, hoped to have Hitler shot by sharpshooters during the repeatedly postponed parade of German troops down the Champs-Elysées. Schwerin was also determined to kill Hitler with a hand grenade upon his first visit to the western front. But Hitler never went to Witzleben’s headquarters, and the parade down the Champs-Elysées was finally canceled once and for all on July 20, 1940, partly to spare the feelings of the French population and partly because Göring could not guarantee safety from British air attacks.

The Nazi regime exploited the victory over France and the distractions it afforded to advance its special agenda with less outside inter­ference than ever before. In the sections of Poland under his administration, Governor General Hans Frank undertook a mam­moth “security operation” in May involving widespread mass execu­tions. These activities, he said, had been “intentionally” delayed until the world “lost interest in events in the government general.”⁹

In the summer of 1940 the civilian opposition began to gather strength, a development that cannot be ascribed solely to the silence of the generals and their withdrawal into apolitical pride over their great victory in France. Civilians like Goerdeler, Beck, Hassell, and Moltke were no less impressed by the military accomplishments of the Third Reich, but at the same time they were increasingly certain of the regime’s imminent collapse. Thanks perhaps to their greater remove from military events and their ability to think politically, they were convinced that Hitler had been carried away by his own suc­cesses and was hopelessly overextending Germany’s resources.

It is an indication of this growing confidence that in the very hour og Hitler’s greatest triumph, when he stood at the pinnacle of his power, Goerdeler was writing a paper predicting the quick end of the Nazi dictatorship. The Führer would prove incapable, Goerdeler ar­gued, of ruling the conquered territories “in such a way that the honor and freedom of the peoples living there are preserved.” He concluded with Baron von Stein’s celebrated words of October 1808 urging Friedrich Wilhelm III to resist Napoleon: “The only salvation for the honest man is the conviction that the wicked are prepared for any evil.… It is worse than blindness to trust a man who has hell in his heart and chaos in his head. If nothing awaits you but disaster and suffering, at least make a choice that is noble and honorable and that will provide some consolation and comfort if things turn out poorly.”¹⁰

By this time Goerdeler had indisputably become the central figure in the civilian opposition. Although he was always surrounded by some controversy, he had established over the years an extensive net­work of like-minded friends, including business people, government officials, professors, clergymen, and labor leaders. To be sure, individ­ual members who objected to his “open risk taking” or, like Julius Leber, to his “illusions” about foreign policy, were always dropping out of the network. Others were put off by his peculiar combination of antimodernism and social progressiveness, practicality and naive idealism. Generally, though, Goerdeler managed to conciliate the many sharp differences of opinion within the network and succeeded in steadily increasing its members.

As a result Goerdeler was unanimously considered not only the hub of the civilian opposition but its driving force as well; he pushed ahead tirelessly, insisting on action and fostering confidence among the conspirators. In the end it was his indomitable spirit in the face of any adversity that most distinguished him from his associates, who were prone to feelings of hopelessness and dejection. It is still hard to say whether his curiously restricted view of people and the world around him stemmed from his ability to reduce problems to their most basic terms, a skill that all his associates found praiseworthy, or from the natural simplicity of a man who trusted all too readily that reason would ultimately prevail. Many saw in the former mayor of Leipzig a strange combination of city-hall pragmatism and Prussian enlightenment, seldom encountered in such arid purity. Darker, more complex phenomena were beyond his comprehension. The phi­losopher Theodor Litt, who was teaching in Leipzig at the time and had contacts with the Goerdeler group, remarked: “Goerdeler was a clear-headed, decent, straightforward kind of man who had very little or nothing about him that was somber, unresolved, or enigmatic. He therefore assumed that his fellow human beings needed only enlight­enment and well-meaning moral instruction to overcome the error of their ways… . The eerie tangle of good and evil, the seductive ambivalence of certain kinds of mental gifts, the power of unacknowl­edged prejudices and secret desires, the entire shadowy area in which the inner lives of so many are played out-there was no room for any of this in his view of humanity.”¹¹

Even before the victory over France, Goerdeler had quickly turned out a series of memoranda for his colleagues from which he then distilled a coherent overview of the positive aims of the resistance. The outline of the new order that resulted from this effort, entitled “The Aims,” was finished in early 1941 and reflected not only his own ideas but, even more important, those that emerged in the course of comprehensive discussions with Beck; Johannes Popitz, the Prussian minister of finance; former trade union leaders such as Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser; and many others. Later Goerdeler also drew on a group of Freiburg professors, including Walter Eucken, Constantin von Dietze, and Adolf Lampe, the founders of the social market economy, as well as historian Gerhard Ritter and others, who had come together out of disgust for the regime after Kristallnacht. To understand the political aims of the conservative resistance, one must also consider a draft of a constitution produced in early 1940, apparently under the leadership of Ulrich von Hassell and Johannes Popitz, which had an unmistakable authoritarian and statist cast and from which Goerdeler in all likelihood distanced himself. There were always clashes and shifts of opinions within these constantly changing opposition circles, which were only labeled a “group” in retrospect. Even among national-conservative opponents of the regime, there existed a broad range of thoughts and ideas about the new order that would emerge. This so-called group was therefore much more heter­ogeneous and riven by contradiction and contrast than a simplifying label would suggest.¹²

Despite their clashing views, however, all the opposition groups, the conservative “notables” to the various left-wing factions, were indelibly marked by their common experience of the totalitar­ian dictatorship that erupted in the midst of the democracy of Weimar and by the inability of the political parties, whether on the left or the right, to deal with this disaster. Virtually all opposition cir­cles tended to blame this breakdown on the unyielding antagonism among the parties, which was played out in terms of nineteenth-century slogans and popular platitudes that no longer bore a re­semblance to reality. The opponents of the Nazis turned their at­tention to the structures that had encouraged this disunity. Sweeping critiques of modern civilization had long been fashion­able in Germany, and they certainly played a role as well, with their indictments of “mass society,” “urbanization,” the original sin of “secularization,” and the spreading “materialism” that under­mined all sense of higher purpose. The fact that even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who certainly did not move in conservative circles, spoke of a “trend toward mob tastes at all social levels” demonstrates the prevalence of the aversion to modernity implicit in these critiques.¹³ Like most other people of his political persuasion, he interpreted National Socialism as an expression, albeit an ex­treme one, of such modernist tendencies.

Virtually all the internal opponents of Nazism believed that it had originated in the miseries of the Weimar Republic. Even former supporters of democracy were convinced that Germany must dispense with political systems based on parties and adopt instead a rigidly structured, if not authoritarian regime. In their search for a minimal political and moral consensus, without which they believed no state could survive, they frequently flirted with Utopian, “conflict-free” no­tions that were disturbingly reminiscent of the Nazis’ own ideology of a “people’s community.” Yet wherever their ideas led them, the mem­bers of these civilian opposition groups were united in their desire to bring the Nazi tyranny to a quick end and to reorganize social and political life from top to bottom.

Much criticism has been directed at the German resistance’s persistent skepticism toward democracy, its desire to return to older ethical systems and human values that were eternally valid and only in need of a contemporary form of expression. Hannah Arendt, for instance, saw the German resistance as nothing more than a continua­tion of the antidemocratic opposition to the Weimar Republic. After the collapse of the republic, which was, she stated, partially brought on by their efforts, resistance leaders paradoxically invoked Hitler as well, in order to advance what Arendt viewed as their own reactionary objectives. Others have seen a connection between the resistance and the so-called conservative revolution, that restless movement of radi­cal intellectuals from all sides of society who were united only in their distaste for the democratic order.¹⁴

It is true that resistance groups of all kinds, and not just national conservatives, considered the “Weimar experiment” a hopeless failure and basically differed only in the conclusions they drew from it. Significantly, there was not a single well-known proponent of the defunct republic in these various circles despite the profusion of views their members held.¹⁵ It would be historically inaccurate to pin the resis­tance down to this initial position. Close examination reveals numer­ous conflicts, some of them never resolved, and continuous confrontations that led to fresh insights. The resistance was neither static nor monolithic. Its peculiarity and perhaps even its glory lay in the openness and intellectual ferment it created as its members moved, often with much soul searching, from their original views, which tended to be narrow and highly conditioned by a particular social and political background, to broader visions.

Carl Goerdeler himself can be taken to illustrate this phenomenon. There is every reason to believe that he was closely involved in the draft constitution put forward by Ulrich von Hassell and Johannes Popitz, both senior officials in earlier governments, in early 1940. Under this plan, a three-person council would assume executive power after the Nazi dictatorship had been overthrown, with Beck as its leader, and a constitutional council would be formed to restore “the majesty of the law.” Although the draft constitution clearly stated that this regime, quasi-dictatorial at best, would only be temporary, no termination date was specified and no mention was made of elec­tions.

Goerdeler’s counterproposal illustrated his unmitigated but perhaps misguided faith in reason, he suggested holding a plebiscite us soon as possible so as to give the new regime a solid popular base. His friends firmly rejected this proposal on the grounds that the corrupting effects of the Hitler years would still be felt for a considerable period so that it would be foolish to submit the new order to the peoples will too hastily. Once again, however, Goerdeler was dissuaded from an authoritarian approach by his stubborn belief in the good judgment of humankind. He continued to insist, despite well-founded doubts on all sides, that if the truth about the Nazis could be freely spoken for “only twenty-four hours” their myopic followers would suddenly see the light. The same kind of reasoning led Goerdeler to argue that the NSDAP should not be prohibited under the new order.

Differences of opinion about the transitional regime remained. The political scientist Jens Peter Jessen and the lawyer Carl Langbehn, who advised the conspirators on their plans, added a sharply worded clause to the draft providing for a time limit on the state of emergency. The conspirators generally agreed, however, that all criminal acts committed under the Nazi regime should be severely punished: the “sword of justice,” as Goerdeler later wrote, adding to the typical bombast of the times his own touch of the country pastor, must “mercilessly strike down those who have corrupted the fatherland into a caricature of a nation.” Mere membership in Nazi organizations would not be punishable under this plan, though, and anonymous denunciations would be inadmissible in court. The conspirators also planned a law to rectify past injustices, especially toward Jews. A dubious feature of this law, however, was a set of provisions that recognized the citizenship of Jews whose families had long been established in Germany but that called for every effort to be made to enable more-recent Jewish immigrants “to found a state of their own.”

The modifications that the conspirators’ thinking underwent over the years is also evidenced in the fate of a plan Goerdeler and some of his advisers originally advanced to restore the monarchy. They were by no means royalists; rather, their intent was to establish an institu­tion that would be universally accepted and remain above the fray of daily political life as the British and Dutch monarchies were. It seems that tactical considerations also played a role in their proposal: the conspirators hoped thereby to win the support of conservatives, espe­cially within the officer corps. In the course of many lengthy debates, various names were considered as possible pretenders to the throne, but in the end the entire subject was dropped when it met with passionate opposition from Helmuth von Moltke’s Kreisau Circle.

Many variants of Goerdeler’s constitutional plans have survived, indicating both his openness to new ideas and the influence of changing advisers. But the core of his plan, which eventually took shape after a rather nebulous start, was always a strong government in which various “corporatist bodies” played a leading role while the parliament was limited to a more or less supervisory function. This basic thrust found expression in a considerable expansion of self-government at even the lowest levels of society; not only mu­nicipalities but universities, student bodies, churches, and profes­sional organizations would be involved. To the end of his life, Goerdeler clung to the belief that this was the genuine “German way” in politics, which had proved itself even amid the confusion of the Weimar years and despite “extreme democratization” and “extensive corrosion by political parties.” The various states within Germany he reduced to little more than large administrative units, seeing them as an intermediate level of government that was not really close to everyday life and yet too far removed from the focus of real power.

In the same spirit, Goerdeler attempted to limit the influence of the general public, especially through political parties, and to turn the decision-making process over to indirectly elected bodies whenever possible. One of the clear contradictions between Goerdeler’s theory and his practice was that, despite his belief in the power of reason, he never entirely freed himself from the fear he had acquired in the Weimar years of what ordinary people might do. Notions such as “the power of parties,” “splinter parties,” and “self-interested parties” continued to haunt his own constitutional thinking as well as that of the entire group.

The election process was therefore calculated to bring forth strong, experienced “personalities with roots in real life” by means of a complicated modified majority-rule system. It is noteworthy that all the opposition groups agreed on this, despite their strong differences on other questions. The socialist Carlo Mierendorff said “never again shall the German people lose their way amid the squabbling of politi­cal parties,” and his fellow socialist Julius Leber called for an end “to the old forms of party rule.” It was he who summarized as follows the argument against proportional representation, which he blamed most of all for creating political fragmentation: “It fails totally to carry out its real functions, namely, selecting suitable men and maintaining the trust between the people and the leadership. Instead, it simply im­poses on politics the determined dullards who eventually rise to the top of party hierarchies.”¹⁶ Goerdeler even contemplated a drastic limitation on majority rule by restricting seats in the parliament to the three strongest parties.

Another suggestion for the new order would have conferred a double role on fathers with at least three children. Other plans for reform reflected the strong corporatist tradition in German society. Goerdeler, for instance, wanted to see a Reichsständehaus, an upper house consisting of fifty respected appointees as well as representatives of the churches, universities, artists’ guilds, and, most important, labor unions, for whom he had particularly high expectations, certainly far higher than he did for political parties. He had learned in his years as mayor of Leipzig that involvement in everyday life soon dispels the doctrinaire theories that in his view were badly damaging political life or even destroying it.

Goerdeler also advanced some suggestions about how the economy should operate: he advocated moderate liberalism, limits on the role of industry (a stricture that clearly reflected the influence of the Frei­burg school), participation of workers in corporate management, and a sense of social responsibility on the part of the propertied classes. There were many thoroughly antimodern aspects to Goerdeler’s pro­posals, which were as passionately opposed to the egalitarian tenden­cies of contemporary industrial societies as they were to pluralistic social and political interests. Goerdeler wanted to bring all these con­tending interests together within an idyllic, community-based order that served the general interest. Thus there was a definite Utopian cast to national-conservative thought, an inclination to idealize the “good old days” even though, as everyone knows, they were never all that good. Nevertheless, these efforts cannot be dismissed as mere attempts to restore the lost societies of the past. Goerdeler’s close working relationship and even friendship with trade union leaders such as Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser points to the contrary. Indeed, the first people to accuse Goerdeler of being “reactionary” were, in a remarkable twist, the most conservative members of the group-Hassell, Jessen, and Popitz-who denounced Goerdeler’s proposals for going too far toward restoring democratic “Weimar” conditions.¹⁷

These proposals, of course, were fragmentary. Many of them were inevitably driven by tactical considerations, and in any case, there is always a great divide in politics between theory and prac­tice. It is impossible to say whether Goerdeler’s proposals would have been adopted if a coup had succeeded. Thus they are primar­ily of interest for what they reveal about the two primary goals of Goerdeler’s group, namely the far-reaching depoliticization of gov­ernment and the overcoming of political fragmentation by forging a new sense of community. The Weimar Republic cast as long a shadow over these objectives as it did over the Hitler years. An un­derlying feeling of helplessness pervades these proposals. When Goerdeler remarked that he wanted to pursue the “German way” in drafting his constitution and would not allow himself to be “led astray” by Western models, he inadvertently disclosed an intellec­tual detachment and isolation that the entire German resistance never overcame. In the end, however, Goerdeler was not motivated by the desire for social and constitutional change embodied in these proposals, nor did he justify himself by them. They were pro­duced under great pressure and emotional stress and were often not fully developed. To understand Goerdeler we have to look to more compelling forces.¹⁸

Quite different from the Beck-Goerdeler-Popitz group, and yet in some ways strangely similar, was the other important group of civilian opponents of the Nazi regime. It was founded and held together by Helmuth von Moltke, a great-grandnephew of the celebrated army commander of the Franco-Prussian War, who worked in the Wehrmacht high command as an expert in international law. His group was later dubbed the Kreisau Circle after the estate owned by the Moltke family in Silesia, although it met there only two or three times. Its intense discussions, conducted in working groups, took place more frequently in various locations in Berlin; beginning in early 1943 most were held on Hortensienstrasse in Lichterfelde, at the home of Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, another bearer of a famous name in Prussian history. Related to both Moltke and Stauffenberg, he was a lawyer and officer who had been assigned to the eastern department of the Defense Economy Office. While Moltke has been described as the “engine” of the group, Yorck von Wartenburg was its “heart.”¹⁹

Around Moltke and Yorck gathered what at first glance appeared to be a motley array of strong-willed individuals with markedly different origins, temperaments, and convictions. Among them was Adam von Trott zu Solz, a descendant, on his mother’s side, of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States. Trott had been a Rhodes scholar and had many friends in England, including the so-called Cliveden set around David Astor. Like Hans-Bernd von Haeften, another member of the circle, Trott was employed in the Foreign Office. Striving to include experts from as many areas of political and social life as possible, the Kreisau Circle recruited Horst von Einsiedel, a Harvard graduate and an expert in economics. Carl Dietrich von Trotha, on the other hand, was a cousin of Moltke’s, born in Kreisau, and had been, like some other members of the group, a student of the philosopher and sociologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

The most striking characteristic of this group, apart from its strong religious leanings, was its earnest and quite successful attempt to attract a number of devoted but undogmatic socialists. Among them was the educator Adolf Reichwein, who came from the Romanticist youth movement of the 1920s and had met Einsiedel and Moltke in one of the reform-minded volunteer work camps. Through Reich­wein, Theodor Haubach also joined the group. A former student of Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber, Haubach was nicknamed The Gen­eral by his friends because of his expertise in military policy. He also had a deep interest in philosophy and the arts and had served as chief press officer of the Prussian government for several years.

Haubach, in turn, recruited the man who was possibly the most colorful, emotional, and powerful figure in the circle, Carlo Mierendorff, a close friend since their school days in Darmstadt. Like Haubach, Mierendorff had a background in literature; before finally devoting himself entirely to politics, he had dabbled in the expres­sionist movement and edited a magazine. According to another ac­quaintance, the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, he was a “born leader.” Within the Social Democratic Party he was one of the young rebels who look on the complacent party hierarchy and its outdated pro­grams and slogans. Mierendorff was arrested shortly after Hitler took power and spent five years in concentration camps, where at one point he was delivered by camp authorities into the hands of Commu­nist fellow prisoners, who beat him nearly to death. During this time Haubach sought constantly to obtain the release of his friend, suc­ceeding even in reaching Adolf Eichmann. (Never, he later said of Eichmann, had he seen “such glassy green eyes.”²⁰)

A number of figures from the Christian resistance also joined the Kreisau Circle, including the Jesuits Alfred Delp and Augustin Rösch, as well as prominent Protestants like the theologian Eugen Gerstenmaier and the prison chaplain Harald Poelchau. Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg and Julius Leber were also loosely affiliated with this group. They were older and more experienced than the others, with too much of the politician in them to be interested in sharing the circle’s passion for theoretical debates. “What comes later will take care of itself,” Leber was fond of saying. True to type, he struck up an immediate friendship with Stauffenberg-who was always pressing for more action-when the two met in late 1943.

What brought the Kreisau group together was not principally a determination to overthrow the Nazi regime but rather the common project of planning, through their preparatory discussions, what a modern, post-Hitler Germany would look like. In this way “they kept themselves alive,” according to a close observer.²¹ There was a strong utopian streak in their thought and planning, which was infused with Christian and socialist ideals, as well as remnants from the youth movement of a romantic belief in the dawning of a new era. They basically believed that all social and political systems were reaching a dead end and that capitalism and Communism, no less than Nazism, were symptomatic of the crisis deep and all-encompassing in modern mass society.

This lofty radicalism, often quite remote from the real world, was the main source of discord between the Kreisau and Goerdeler groups. The former accused the “old-timers” of being stuck in out­moded patterns of thought. Instead of seeking a genuinely new begin­ning, the Goerdeler group wanted merely to avoid the missteps that had been revealed by the failure of the Weimar Republic. The birth of a “new age,” on the other hand, required an entirely fresh ap­proach. Moltke spoke contemptuously of “that Goerdeler mess” and, like Delp, cautioned opponents of the regime who were looking for like-minded contacts against any involvement with what he called “their reactionary Excellencies.”²²

The two groups had more in common, however, than they ever imagined. They were both deeply enamored of the curious German tradition of grand, sweeping critiques of entire civilizations. The main difference lay in the fact that the Goerdeler group translated its ideas into more or less practical programs for action (which were by no means free of inconsistencies), while the Kreisau group moved in more theoretical and idealistic spheres, launching ideas that only oc­casionally led to concrete solutions. Both groups considered mass society the great scourge of the time, and both sought to replace it with a “community” of some kind-markedly more Christian in the case of the Kreisauers, although still not without an authoritarian streak. Both groups were eager to recover the lost “organic” commu­nities of the past, which in their view still retained something of the Garden of Eden, and both were appalled by the egalitarian tenden­cies of the time.

For all these reasons, their members repeatedly expressed the need for an “elite,” which the Goerdeler group thought could be created by a stern government based on traditional values and which the Kreisau group believed would emerge from a return to “personal substance” based on Christian or socialist values. There were even similarities in their recipes for the new society. The Kreisauers, too, imagined a society constructed from the bottom up, beginning with simple units of local self-administration. They also had a deep distrust of professional politicians and aimed to replace them with individuals who had proved themselves in practical life and had strong local or regional roots.The greatest contrast between the two groups was in the field of economics, although even here the Kreisau group’s dislike for Goerdeler’s liberalism only brought them into line with Popitz and Jessen, who favored a highly interventionist economy in keeping with their authoritarian, state-driven view of society. Even corporatist ideas found eloquent advocates in the Kreisau group, especially among its Catholic members.

The Kreisauers suffered many internal differences of opinion over such issues as the nationalization of heavy industry, the division of landed estates, and the role of parochial schools. The question of redrawing the regional map of the Reich led to such bitter controver­sies that some of the inveterate Bavarians even left the group. Histori­cal perspective tends to make many of the internal and external conflicts of these groups seem less serious than they in fact were. Goerdeler’s dismissal of the Kreisauers as “armchair Bolsheviks,” for example, reveals as great a misunderstanding of their basic intentions as Moltke’s and Trott’s remarks about reactionary “notables” do of Goerdeler’s circle, however accurate these characterizations may have been in individual cases.

Another difference was far more telling. While the group around Heck and Goerdeler was committed to some form of coup d’ état, violent if necessary, most members of the Kreisau Circle rejected any sort of violence. This stance largely reflected their religious convictions, of course. Almost equally strong was their belief that “demonic forces” were at work in Hitler, which neither could nor should be simply swept aside.”²³ All attempts to do so were, in their eyes, merely efforts to overcome the great crisis in world history through the same arbitrary and violent means that helped cause it in the first place. Instead, the demonic forces had to be allowed to burn out. This conviction led many within the circle to reject not only an assas­sination attempt but even the notion of a coup, for, as Moltke wrote lo his friend Lionel Curtis, “we need a real revolution, not just a putsch.” Only a complete collapse and widespread acceptance of the inevitability of defeat and the ensuing chaos could create the neces­sary preconditions for the great internal revival on which the future depended. Among the Kreisauers, Eugen Gerstenmaier most vehemently attacked this belief and what he termed its un-Christian fatalism. But Moltke championed it energetically nevertheless, carrying most of the circle with him. The fervor with which he denied the possibility of a shift in Germany’s ebbing military fortunes and fore­cast total destruction (with far more realism than his friends) indi­cated that he took a certain satisfaction in the approaching inferno, which alone could give rise to a radically new beginning. “My own homeland of Silesia will go to the Czechs or the Poles,” he wrote before the battle of Stalingrad to his old friend George F. Kennan.²⁴

The foreign policy ideas of these two groups also differed greatly. Beck and Goerdeler’s circle still thought in terms of hegemonic power and regarded it as a matter of course that Germany would continue to play a major role in Europe. The Kreisauers adopted a more radical, Utopian stance on this issue as well, their ideas focusing to varying degrees on a new brand of international relations that would do away with the “borders and soldiers” of the past. In the new age that they saw dawning, selfish nationalisms would yield to a pan-European unity. The germ of this idea came from Moltke and the socialist members of the circle-Haubach, Reichwein, and Mierendorff-but it was swiftly embraced by all the others. Even before the outbreak of the war, the only belief that all the members of the Kreisau Circle shared was this emphasis on the larger picture, on what Europeans had in common, the intellectual foundations of their history, traditions, and way of life, a shared desire to see neighbors no longer as foes but as family, as people who were similar to one an­other and yet different in interesting ways. Only in this manner, they thought, could there be a reconciliation of the nations in Europe that considered themselves hereditary enemies, and only in this manner could the problem of minorities finally be solved, an issue that seemed always to end in bloodletting, especially in the central and eastern parts of the continent.

There was much less unanimity among the Kreisauers on the consequences of their program. To be sure, they agreed that the old idea of dominant powers in Europe should be abandoned, that there should be no more territorial claims escalating into life-and-death issues, that a new understanding of national interest, the state, and national sovereignty must emerge. Once again Moltke proved to be the most radical member of the circle, advocating nothing less than the elimination of the nation-state and the reorganization of Europe into a multiplicity of regions that were historically and culturally related. In this he was returning to the idea of small self-governing units and applying it to Europe as a whole. These autonomous regions would exercise only limited powers, with the traditional jurisdiction of sovereign states transferred to a single European entity.

Most of Moltke’s associates did not share his radical vision of a federated Europe. Adam von Trott, the circle’s “foreign minister,” saw the national characters that the European countries had devel­oped in the course of history as a feature of the old continent that merited preservation. For much the same reason, he opposed the idea of simply squeezing Germany into a “Western” constitutional tradition, despite his high hopes for what Anglo-German cooperation could achieve. He shared, though, the conviction of almost all the members of the circle that the age of the nation-state had passed and that some measure of sovereignty would have to be surrendered to a Federal European state if the survival of the various nations of Europe was to be ensured.

These ideas were obviously not fully thought out, but they pointed the way to the future. They attracted support for their own sake, not only because they were categorically opposed to Hitler’s approach of conquest and subjugation but also because their vision of the future stood in stark opposition to the nationalistic fervor of the times. This vision, like all the other plans and designs of the German resistance, eventually faded from memory, and during the actual process of Eu­ropean unification after the war it was not even mentioned. For this very reason, however, it deserves to be recalled now.

It is hardly surprising that the “notables” around Goerdeler viewed the pan-European ideas of the Kreisau Circle as little more than idealistic or eccentric fantasies. They had grown up at time when Germany was rising into the ranks of the great powers of the world and to them concepts as nation-states, great-power status, zones of influence, and national interest were like the laws of phys­ics-they could not simply be abolished. Virtually all the members of the Goerdeler group thought that at least the “greater German territories” should remain within the Reich. This has given rise to accusations that there were strong underlying similarities with the regime-or even that the national-conservative opposition was simply striving to realize Hitler’s aims without Hitler.

As far as the first revisionist interpretation is concerned, there is some truth to this accusation. When Hitler pointed time and again to the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles as the grounds for his de­mands, people like Beck, Goerdeler, and Hassell could only nod in agreement, all the more so as his arguments were widely shared abroad, especially in Britain. Those who most strenuously indict the Goerdeler group, however, ignore an essential distinction: although the national conservatives generally agreed with Hitler’s border claims, they did not agree with his methods. Ludwig Beck, for in­stance, said as early as 1938 that war was not only militarily absurd but anachronistic, and he attempted to resist, though perhaps not forcefully enough. At about the same time, Goerdeler called Hitler a “national bandit” for risking Germany’s honor and reputation on one adventure after another.²⁵

The inconsistencies within the conservative position therefore became all the more apparent with the outbreak of the war. Although Goerdeler repeatedly called for peaceful cooperation in Europe after Hitler and a renewal of the League of Nations, the papers he wrote after the conquest of France spoke unabashedly of “German leader­ship” on the continent. Among other contradictory positions, he as­sured the Western powers that Poland would be restored but he insisted on Germany’s eastern frontiers of 1914. Hermann Graml has demonstrated convincingly that the “notables” clung to the familiar. They could only imagine, for instance, a unification of Europe and a distribution of power that would resemble the unification of Germany under Prussia.²⁶

The conservatives’ reflexive belief in the concept of the great powers, so deeply rooted in their psyches, began to disappear, however, by the end of 1941-and not just because of the spread of the war to the Soviet Union and the entry soon thereafter of the United States. More important was the mounting awareness of the destruction wrought by arbitrary German policies in southeastern Europe after the Reich smashed Czechoslovakia and extended its dominance deep into the Balkans. Most important of all were the rampant reports of massive crimes in the East, which cast a pall over all talk of the “Reich’s mission to bring order and peace.”

Despite the persistent disagreements between the two main civil­ian opposition groups, contacts were gradually established. Ulrich von Hassell played an especially important role in this regard. Although he was always uneasy with the utopianism of the Kreisau Circle, he shared many of its objections to Goerdeler and believed that the two most important resistance groups should not waste their strength nursing differences when they were in such extreme danger. The rest of the work necessary for a rapprochement was accomplished thanks to his skill as a negotiator. There were also contacts between Yorck and Jessen, Schulenburg and Goerdeler, and Popitz and Gerstenmaier. After strained preliminary negotiations, the two groups met for the first time on January 8, 1943, in Yorck’s house, with Beck serving as chairman. They made little progress in narrowing the dif­ferences between them, partly because Goerdeler “trivialized all at­tempts to get to the heart of matters,” as Moltke noted with great exasperation. But in the end a majority of the Kreisau group sup­ported the selection of Goerdeler as chancellor of a transitional gov­ernment, despite some complaints that the decision represented a dangerous “Kerensky solution.”²⁷

Now, under the influence of the Kreisau Circle, the national-conservative resistance moved even more quickly to drop its insis­tence that Germany play a leadership role in the new Europe. By mid-1943 Goerdeler himself had discarded a number of hitherto cherished notions. With all the impulsive exuberance of his nature, he began to speak of a European “peace confederacy” that no nation would dominate and in which “inner-European borders” would play “an ever-diminishing role.”

Similarly, the ideas of the Kreisau group were colored by its increasingly close contacts with the Goerdeler people. There is no convincing evidence, however, for the accusation raised from time to time that the Kreisauers became infected with old nationalist ideas. It is true that Adam von Trott began insisting somewhat more deter­minedly on a “reasonable peace plan” for post-Hitler Germany and warning against the ruinous consequences of a second Versailles. But an unbiased observer would have to acknowledge that both the Kreisau Circle and the Goerdeler group, as well as Oster, Leber, Gisevius, and many other opponents of the regime, rejected national­ism much more strongly than most of their contemporaries did, even if they were less than sure-footed as they ventured onto new terrain.

The progress they had made is evident when considered in the light of the fruitless efforts of the German resistance over the years to establish contacts with like-minded people in other countries through the World Council of Churches, Allen W. Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Services in Bern, the lawyer Eduard Waetjen, Theodor Strünk, Ulrich von Hassell, Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, and numer­ous others. Most of the politicians and military leaders whom they unsuccessfully courted in London, The Hague, and Washington still believed, however, that these Germans were committing “treason” and therefore regarded them with contempt. There was no appreciation of the fact that the opponents of the Nazi regime felt guided by new principles and laws whose legitimacy did not end at national borders. Even after the failed coup attempt of July 20, 1944, the New York Times commented reproachfully that the conspirators had plotted for an entire year “to kidnap or kill the head of the German state and commander in chief of the Army,” something one would not “normally expect within an officers’ corps and a civilized government.”²⁸ But the German resistance deserves to be remembered precisely because of this break with “normalcy,” a feat achieved with great effort but one that only further reduced the already slim chances for success.

Out of the blue during the summer of 1941, alarm bells sounded at Military Intelligence, when the commotion attending the victory over France and Hitler’s celebration of himself as the “greatest general of all time” had not yet died down. The research office informed Canaris that the timing of the western offensive had probably been betrayed by a German officer. The monitoring service had taped Col­onel Sas’s telephone conversation with The Hague on the eve of the attack and decoded telegrams from Belgian ambassador Adrien Nieuwenhuys, in which he mentioned an informant in Rome. Suspi­cion immediately fell on Josef Müller, whom Military Intelligence had sent to the Vatican, and then on Hans Oster himself.

In fact, it is remarkable that the constant bustle surrounding Oster and the other conspirators, their trips and often frantic telephone calls, as well as their unannounced visits and swiftly closed doors, could have failed to attract attention for so long in as highly organized a police state. Virtually none of the conspirators lived in a world of his own. Most worked in government departments where everyone was acutely aware of everyone else and where personal animosities and rivalries, ideological conflicts, and competition for positions abounded. Everyone in Military Intelligence would presumably have been aware of Oster’s friendship with Sas and his continuing contacts with Beck, Goerdeler, Popitz, Kordt, and others. Oster once gestured toward the five telephones on his desk and commented to a visitor, “That’s me. I’m the middleman for everything.”²⁹ In his diary Hassell recorded numerous breakfast meetings in hotels with four or more people, as well as “gentlemen’s evenings” and walks in the Tiergarten. Occasionally he remarked on having all met at Beck’s apartment or Popitz’s or Jessen’s-and then gone together to Yorck’s place. Most of the conspirators demonstrated a similar lack of caution for years on end and were quite careless about whom they revealed their plans to. The likeliest explanation for why they were not apprehended sooner is that the military and the civil service, having fallen quickly into line after 1933, were not regarded with much suspicion by the security apparatus, whose gaze was still focused on the Nazis’ original foes- Communists, Social Democrats, labor union leaders, and church fig­ures suspected of opposing the regime.

Canaris seemed to be deeply upset by the rising tide of evidence against Oster. Those who knew the admiral found him an enigmatic, inscrutable personality, who always maintained a certain distance from people as well as from his duties. Among all the competing elements of his nature there may even have been some part that could understand the treason of his closest collaborator, though there is no evidence of this. In any case, Canaris continued to protect both Oster and Müller despite the fact that Hitler himself had taken an interest in the issue and had ordered Canaris to join Heydrich in conducting the investigation. Canaris demonstrated great resilience and flexibility in drawing the inquiry into his own hands, leading it, and then letting it drop quietly, all at great personal risk. His perfor­mance revealed a poker-faced master strategist, cold-blooded, quick to react, and gifted with sure instincts. “He pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes-Heydrich, Himmler, Keitel, Ribbentrop, even the Führer himself,” a Gestapo official later lamented.³⁰

Behind the cool mask lay a high-strung disposition; Canaris was agitated and tormented by fear after each passing danger yet was still addicted to new adventures. Like most cunning people, he hated violence. He was nimble in the face of danger, witty, and sardonic. During one of his trips to Spain he would spring to attention in his open car and raise his arm in the Hitler salute every time he drove past a herd of sheep. You never know, he said, whether one of the party bigwigs might be in the crowd. He called his immediate superior, Wilhelm Keitel-his total opposite in temperament-a block­head. Some observers have deduced from all the incongruities in Canaris that he was an unprincipled cynic who sought only thrills from the resistance and who admired Hitler as an even greater gamesman than himself. These interpretations miss the mark. In his last years Canaris increasingly suffered from the conviction that he had served Hitler far too long and far too submissively, and he regretted not having turned the resources of Military Intelligence against the regime in a more determined fashion. It has been said that he was a master of the art of obfuscation, and his skill has tended to obscure his rigid adherence to a number of principles. He could not abide treason whatever the pretext, as his break with Oster shows, but neither could he bear the lack of basic humanity that made the Nazi regime so abhorrent in his eyes.

One of his colleagues recounted that while visiting the Military Intelligence offices in Paris on his way back from Spain, Canaris learned that Hitler had issued orders to have former French prime minister Paul Reynaud and General Maxime Weygand not just ar­rested but quietly killed should the opportunity present itself. At din­ner with his colleagues, Canaris sat sunk in silence until his feelings suddenly erupted in an angry denunciation of “these gangster meth­ods of Hitler and his henchmen,” who were not only committing crime upon crime in the East but now bringing betrayal and murder to the West as well. Germany would lose more than just the war, he added before leaving the table, and its future would then be too frightful to contemplate.³¹

Because Canaris understood the nature of the Nazi regime better than most and yet never crossed irrevocably into the camp of its enemies, he exemplified the dilemma of many torn between emotion and reason. They felt proud of the restoration of German might yet were well aware of the repellent ways in which it had been achieved. They took great professional pleasure in their successes yet despaired over the “gangster methods of the regime.” They recognized that a catastrophe was looming for which they bore some responsibility yet felt paralyzed by such honorable principles as duty, loyalty, and a job well done. On March 10, 1938, Chief of General Staff Ludwig Beck was summoned to the Chancellery and asked to prepare mobilization plans for the entry into Austria. Although he plainly foresaw the disas­ters to which Hitler’s ambitions would lead, he threw himself into his task when it turned out that no plans existed because Hitler had been keeping the general staff in the dark. He spurred on his staff and his chief of operations, Erich von Manstein, to produce plans as fast as possible. Five hours later they lay ready. There was no escape from the fact that if opponents of the regime wished to avoid serving Hitler they had to turn their backs on all the values they believed in and even on longstanding friendships. Hans Oster was prepared to do precisely that. Franz Halder once remarked-half in grudging admi­ration, half in disapproval-that Oster was fired by a “burning hatred of Hitler,” which caused him to conceive notions “that the sober, critically minded listener simply could not accept.”³²