by Ian Kershaw
The autumn of 1939 would provide a crucial testing-time for the national-conservative resistance. In the end, they would resign themselves to failure. At the centre of their concern was not in the first instance the bestiality in Poland (though the detailed reports of the abominations there certainly served to cement oppositional feeling and the sense of urgency, both for moral reasons and out of a sense of national shame, at the need to be rid of Hitler and his henchmen who were responsible for such criminal acts). Nor was it the ‘euthanasia action’. Of the mass murder in the asylums they had not for months any real inkling. At any rate, it was not voiced as a matter of prime concern. The key issue for them, as it had been for two years or so, was the certainty that Hitler was leading Germany to catastrophe through engaging in war with the Western powers. Preventing a calamitous attack on France and Britain, and ending the war, was vital. This issue came to a head in the autumn of 1939, when Hitler was determined to press on with an early attack on the West. But even before he pulled back – because of poor weather conditions – from such a risky venture in the autumn and winter, then went on the following spring to gain unimaginable military successes in the western campaign, the fragility, weakness, and divisions of the nascent resistance had been fully laid bare. No attempt to remove Hitler had been made.
Hitler could by late 1939 be brought down in only one of two ways: a coup d’état from above, meaning a strike from within the regime’s leadership from those with access to power and military might; or, something which the Dictator never ruled out, an assassination attempt from below, by a maverick individual operating entirely alone, outside any of the known – by now tiny, fragmented, and utterly powerless – left-wing underground resistance groups which could so easily be infiltrated by the Gestapo. While generals and leading civil servants pondered whether they might act, but lacked the will and determination to do so, one man with no access to the corridors of power, no political links, and no hard-and-fast ideology, a Swabian joiner by the name of Georg Elser, did act. In early November 1939 Elser would come closer to destroying Hitler than anyone until July 1944. Only luck would save the Dictator on this occasion. And Elser’s motives, built on the naïvety of elemental feeling rather than arising from the tortured consciences of the better-read and more knowledgeable, would mirror not the interests of those in high places but, without doubt, concerns of countless ordinary Germans at the time. We will return to them shortly.
For Hitler, the swift and comprehensive demolition of Poland did not signal a victory to sit upon and await developments. Certainly, he hoped that the West, having now witnessed the might of the Wehrmacht in action, would – from his point of view – see sense, and come to terms with Germany. The peace feelers that he put out in September and October were couched in this vein. As Weizsäcker – reckoning the chances of peace to be no higher than 20 per cent – put it early in October, summarizing what he understood as Hitler’s desired outcome, in the somewhat unlikely event that London might agree to a settlement at the expense of Poland, Germany ‘would be spared the awkward decision on how England could be militarily forced down’. As it was, Hitler, though his overtures were serious enough, had few expectations that Britain would show interest in a settlement, particularly once the British cabinet had announced that it was preparing for a war that would last at least three years. He was sure that the western powers would try to hold out as long as possible, until their armaments programmes were complete. That would mark a danger-point for Germany. Though – a view not shared by his generals – he held the French military in some contempt, he had a high esteem of British resilience and fighting-power. And behind the British, there was always the threat (which at this time he did not rate highly) that in due course the Americans would intervene. So there was no time to lose. On the very day after his return to Berlin, with the shells still raining down on Warsaw, Hitler told his military leaders to prepare for an attack on the West that very autumn.
‘Militarily,’ he declared, ‘time, especially in the psychological and material sense, works against us.’ It was, therefore, ‘essential that immediate plans for an attack against France be prepared’. The rainy season would arrive within a few weeks. The air-force would be better in spring. ‘But we cannot wait,’ he insisted. If a settlement with Chamberlain were not possible, he would ‘smash the enemy until he collapses’. The defeat of France, it was plainly inferred, would force Britain to terms. The goal was ‘to bring England to its knees; to destroy France’. His favoured time for carrying out the attack was the end of October. The Commanders-in-Chief – even Göring – were taken aback. But none protested. Hitler casually threw his notes into the fire when he had finished speaking.
Two days later, Hitler told Rosenberg that he would propose a major peace conference (together with an armistice and demobilization) to regulate all matters rationally. Rosenberg asked whether he intended to prosecute the war in the West. ‘Naturally,’ replied Hitler. The Maginot Line, Rosenberg recorded him saying, was no longer a deterrent. If the English did not want peace, he would attack them with all means available ‘and annihilate them’ – again, his favourite phrase.
Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on 6 October indeed held out, as he had indicated to Rosenberg, the prospect of a conference of the leading nations to settle Europe’s problems of peace and security. But a starting-point was that the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union was to remain. There would be no recreation of the Poland of the Versailles settlement. It would be peace on Hitler’s terms, with no concessions on what he had won. He painted a lurid picture of death and destruction if the western powers should decline his ‘offer’. He blamed the warmongering on ‘a certain Jewish-international capitalism and journalism’, implying in particular Churchill and his supporters. If Churchill’s view should prevail, he concluded, then Germany would fight. Riding one of his main hobby-horses, he added: ‘A November 1918 will never be repeated in German history.’ The speech amounted to an olive-branch clenched in a mailed fist.
Hitler’s ‘offer’ was dismissed by Chamberlain in a speech in the House of Commons six days later. It was what Hitler had expected. He had not waited. On the very day of his Reichstag speech, he stressed to Brauchitsch and Halder that a decisive move in the north-west was necessary to prevent a French advance that autumn through Belgium, threatening the Ruhr. Two days later Brauchitsch was informed that Hitler had provisionally set 25 November as the date of attack. On 9 October, Hitler completed a lengthy memorandum that he had worked on for two nights, outlining and justifying his plans for an attack on the West. He had specifically prepared it because of his awareness of opposition to the idea in the army leadership. Again, he emphasized that time was of the essence. The attack could not begin soon enough. The aim was the complete military defeat of the western powers. He read out the memorandum at a meeting with his military leaders on 10 October. Its contents were embodied in ‘Directive No.6 for the Conduct of War’ issued later that day (though dated 9 October), stating Hitler’s determination ‘without letting much time pass by’ to take offensive action.
When Hitler heard on 12 October of Chamberlain’s rejection of his ‘peace offer’, he lost no time in announcing, even without waiting for the full text of Chamberlain’s speech, that Britain had spurned the hand of peace and that, consequently, the war continued. On 16 October Hitler told Brauchitsch he had given up hope of coming to an agreement with the West. ‘The British,’ he said, ‘will be ready to talk only after defeats. We must get at them as quickly as possible.’ He reckoned with a date between 15 and 20 November. Within a matter of days, Hitler had brought this date forward and now fixed ‘Case Yellow’, as the attack on the West had been code-named, for 12 November.
Speaking to his generals, Hitler confined himself largely to military objectives. To his trusted circle, and to party leaders, he was more expressive. Goebbels found him high in confidence on 11 October. Germany’s defeat in the last war, he stated, was solely attributa
ble to treachery. This time traitors would not be spared. He responded to Chamberlain’s dismissal of his ‘peace offer’ by stating that he was glad that he could now ‘go for England’. He had given up almost all hope of peace. ‘The English will have to learn the hard way,’ he stated.
He was in similar mood when he addressed the Reichs- and Gauleiter in a two-hour speech on 21 October. He reckoned war with the West was unavoidable. There was no other choice. But at its end would be ‘the great and all-embracing German people’s Reich’. He would, Hitler told his party leaders, unleash his major assault on the West – and on England itself – within a fortnight or so. He would use all methods available, including attacks on cities. After defeating England and France he would again turn to the East. Then – an allusion to the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages – he would create a Germany as of old, incorporating Belgium and Switzerland. Hitler was evidently still thinking along such lines when he told Goebbels a few days later he had earmarked Burgundy for the resettlement of the South Tyroleans. ‘He’s already distributing French provinces,’ noted the Propaganda Minister. ‘He hurries far ahead of all steps of development. Just like every genius.’
On 6 November Goebbels was again listening to Hitler’s views on the war. ‘The strike against the western powers will not have to wait much longer,’ he recorded. ‘Perhaps,’ added Goebbels, ‘the Führer will succeed sooner than we all think in annulling the Peace of Westphalia. With that his historic life will be crowned.’ Goebbels thought the decision to go ahead was imminent.
All the signs are that the pressure for an early strike against the West came directly from Hitler, without initiation or prompting from other quarters. That it received the support of Goebbels and the party leadership was axiomatic. Within the military, it was a different matter. Hitler could reckon with the backing – or at least lack of objection – of Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. And whatever his private anxieties, Göring would never deviate in public from Hitler’s line. But, as Hitler recognized, the decision to attack the West already in the autumn set him once more on a collision course with the army leadership, spearheaded by Brauchitsch and Halder. On 14 October, primed by Weizsäcker about Hitler’s reaction to Chamberlain’s speech rejecting his ‘peace offer’, the head of the army and his Chief of Staff met to discuss the consequences. Halder noted three possibilities: attack, wait, ‘fundamental changes’. None offered prospects of decisive success, least of all the last one ‘since it is essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable’. The qualifying remarks were made by Brauchitsch. The weak, ultra-cautious, and tradition-bound Commander-in-Chief of the Army could not look beyond conventional attempts to dissuade Hitler from what he thought was a disastrous course of action. But he was evidently responding to a suggestion floated by Halder, following his discussions with Weizsäcker the previous day, to have Hitler arrested at the moment of the order for attack on the West. The cryptic third possibility signified then no less than the extraordinary fact that in the early stages of a major war the two highest representatives of the army were airing the possibility of a form of coup d’état involving the removal of Hitler as head of state.
The differences between the two army leaders were nonetheless wide. And nothing flowed from the discussion in the direction of an embryonic plan to unseat Hitler. Brauchitsch attempted, within the bounds of orthodoxy, to have favoured generals such as Reichenau and Rundstedt try to influence Hitler to change his mind – a fruitless enterprise. Halder went further. By early November he was, if anything, still more convinced that direct action against Hitler was necessary to prevent the imminent catastrophe. In this, his views were coming to correspond with the small numbers of radical opponents of the regime in the Foreign Ministry and in the Abwehr who were now actively contemplating measures to remove Hitler.
In the last weeks of October various notions of deposing Hitler – often unrealistic or scarcely thought through – were furtively pondered by the tiny, disparate, only loosely connected, oppositional groups. Goerdeler and his main contacts – Hassell (the former Ambassador to Rome), Beck, and Johannes Popitz (former State Secretary in the Reich Finance Ministry) – were one such cluster, weighing up for a time whether a transitional government headed by Göring (whose reluctance to engage in war with Britain was known to them) might be an option. This cluster, through Beck, forged loose links with the group based in the Abwehr – Oster, Dohnanyi, Hans-Bernd Gisevius (one-time Gestapo officer but by now radically opposed to Hitler), and Groscurth. The latter grouping worked out a plan of action for a coup, involving the arrest of Hitler (perhaps declaring him mentally ill), along with Himmler, Heydrich, Ribbentrop, Göring, Goebbels, and other leading Nazis. Encouraged by their chief, Admiral Canaris, and driven on by Oster, the Abwehr group attempted, though with little success, to gain backing for their ideas from selected officers at General Staff headquarters in Zossen. Their ambivalence about Halder meant that they did not approach him directly. Moreover, they knew nothing of the thoughts he had aired to Brauchitsch on 14 October. A third set of individuals sharing the view that Hitler had to be removed and war with the West prevented centred on Weizsäcker in the Foreign Ministry, and was chiefly represented by Erich Kordt, who was able to utilize his position as head of Ribbentrop’s Ministerial Bureau to foster contacts at home and abroad. As we noted, this grouping had contact to the Abwehr group and to known sympathizers in the General Staff – mainly staff officers, though at this point not Halder himself – through Weizsäcker’s army liaison, Legation Secretary Hasso von Etzdorf.
Halder himself (and his most immediate friend and subordinate General Otto von Stülpnagel) came round to the idea of a putsch by the end of the month, after Hitler had confirmed his intention of a strike on 12 November. Halder sent Stülpnagel to take surreptitious soundings among selected generals about their likely response to a coup. The findings were not encouraging. While army-group commanders such as Bock and Rundstedt were opposed to an offensive against the West, they rejected the idea of a putsch, partly on the grounds that they were themselves unsure whether they would retain the backing of their subordinate officers. In addition, Halder established to his own satisfaction, based on a ‘sample’ of public opinion drawn from the father of his chauffeur and a few others, that the German people supported Hitler and were not ready for a putsch. Halder’s hesitancy reflected his own deep uncertainty about the moral as well as security aspect of a strike against the head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces. Others took a bolder stance. But, though loosely bonded through parallel thoughts of getting rid of Hitler, the different oppositional clusters had no coherent, unified, and agreed plan for action. Nor, while now accepting Halder’s readiness to act, was there full confidence in the determination of the Chief of Staff, on whom practically everything depended, to see it through.
This was the position around noon on 5 November when Brauchitsch nervously made his way through the corridors of the Reich Chancellery to confront Hitler directly about the decision to attack the West. If the attack were to go ahead on schedule on 12 November, the order to make operational preparations had to be confirmed to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army by 1 p.m. on the 5th. Among the oppositional groups, the hope was that Brauchitsch could finally be persuaded to go along with a putsch if Hitler, as was to be expected, held firm to his decision for an attack. Halderwaited in the ante-room while Brauchitsch and Hitler conferred together. Keitel joined them some while later. The meeting was a fiasco. It lasted no longer than twenty minutes. Brauchitsch hesitantly began to tell Hitler that preparations were not sufficiently advanced for an offensive against the West which, therefore, had every chance of proving catastrophic. He went on to back up his argument by pointing out that the infantry had shown morale and technical weaknesses in the attack on Poland, and that the discipline of officers and men had often been lacking. The Front showed similar symptoms to those of 1917–18, he claimed. This was a bad mistake by Brauchitsch. It diverted from the
main issue, and, as Brauchitsch could have anticipated, it provoked Hitler into a furious outburst. He wanted concrete evidence, he fumed, and demanded to know how many death-sentences had been carried out. He did not believe Brauchitsch, and would fly the next night to the front to see for himself. Then he dismissed Brauchitsch’s main point. The army was unprepared, he asserted, because it did not want to fight. The weather would still be bad in the spring – and furthermore bad for the enemy too. He knew the ‘spirit of Zossen’, he raged, and would destroy it. Almost shaking with anger, Hitler marched out of the room, slamming the door, leaving the head of the army speechless, trembling, face as white as chalk, and broken.
‘Any sober discussion of these things is impossible with him,’ Halder commented, in something of an understatement. But for Halder the impact of the meeting went further. Talk of destroying the ‘spirit of Zossen’ suggested to the Chief of Staff that Hitler knew of the plot to unseat him. The Gestapo could turn up in Zossen any time. Halder returned in panic to his headquarters and ordered the destruction of all papers relating to the conspiracy. Next day he told Groscurth that the attack in the west would be carried out. There was nothing to be done. ‘Very depressing impression,’ recorded Groscurth.