As far as the outside world is concerned, this eternal aim will have to undergo various propaganda adjustments … This does not alter the war aim. It is and remains the destruction of our Western enemies.
The generals had objected to haste in taking the offensive in the West. Time, however, he told them, was on the enemy’s side. The Polish victories, he reminded them, were possible because Germany really had only one front. That situation still held—but for how long?
By no treaty or pact can a lasting neutrality of Soviet Russia be insured with certainty. At present all reasons speak against Russia’s departure from neutrality. In eight months, one year, or even several years, this may be altered. The trifling significance of treaties has been proved on all sides in recent years. The greatest safeguard against any Russian attack lies … in a prompt demonstration of German strength.
As for Italy, the “hope of Italian support for Germany” was dependent largely on whether Mussolini lived and on whether there were further German successes to entice the Duce. Here too time was a factor, as it was with Belgium and Holland, which could be compelled by Britain and France to give up their neutrality—something Germany could not afford to wait for. Even with the United States, “time is to be viewed as working against Germany.”
There were great dangers to Germany, Hitler admitted, in a long war, and he enumerated several of them. Friendly and unfriendly neutrals (he seems to have been thinking mainly of Russia, Italy and the U.S.A.) might be drawn to the opposite side, as they were in the First World War. Also, he said, Germany’s “limited food and raw-material basis” would make it difficult to find “the means for carrying on the war.” The greatest danger, he said, was the vulnerability of the Ruhr. If this heart of German industrial production were hit, it would “lead to the collapse of the German war economy and thus of the capacity to resist.”
It must be admitted that in this memorandum the former corporal showed an astonishing grasp of military strategy and tactics, accompanied though it was by a typical lack of morals. There are several pages about the new tactics developed by the tanks and planes in Poland, and a detailed analysis of how these tactics can work in the West and just where. The chief thing, he said, was to avoid the positional warfare of 1914–18. The armored divisions must be used for the crucial breakthrough.
They are not to be lost among the maze of endless rows of houses in Belgian towns. It is not necessary for them to attack towns at all, but … to maintain the flow of the army’s advance, to prevent fronts from becoming stable by massed drives through identified weakly held positions.
This was a deadly accurate forecast of how the war in the West would be fought, and when one reads it one wonders why no one on the Allied side had similar insights.
This goes too for Hitler’s strategy. “The only possible area of attack,” he said, was through Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland. There must be two military objectives first in mind: to destroy the Dutch, Belgian, French and British armies and thereby to gain positions on the Channel and the North Sea from which the Luftwaffe could be “brutally employed” against Britain.
Above all, he said, returning to tactics, improvise!
The peculiar nature of this campaign may make it necessary to resort to improvisations to the utmost, to concentrate attacking or defending forces at certain points in more than normal proportion (for example, tank or antitank forces) and in subnormal concentrations at others.
As for the time of the attack, Hitler told his reluctant generals, “the start cannot take place too early. It is to take place in all circumstances (if at all possible) this autumn.”
The German admirals, unlike the generals, had not needed any prodding from Hitler to take the offensive, outmatched though their Navy was by the British. In fact all through the last days of September and the first days of October Raeder pleaded with the Fuehrer to take the wraps off the Navy. This was gradually done. On September 17 a German U-boat torpedoed the British aircraft carrier Courageous off southwest Ireland. On September 27 Raeder ordered the pocket battleships Deutschland and Graf Spee to leave their waiting areas and start attacking British shipping. By the middle of October they had accounted for seven British merchantmen and taken in prize the American ship City of Flint.
On October 14, the German U-boat U-47, commanded by Oberleutnant Guenther Prien, penetrated the seemingly impenetrable defenses of Scapa Flow, the great British naval base, and torpedoed and sank the battleship Royal Oak as it lay at anchor, with a loss of 786 officers and men. It was a notable achievement, exploited to the full by Dr. Goebbels in his propaganda, and it enhanced the Navy in the mind of Hitler.
The generals remained, however, a problem. Despite his long and considered memorandum to them and the issuance of Directive No. 6 to get ready for an imminent attack in the West, they stalled. It wasn’t that they had any moral scruples against violating Belgium and Holland; they simply were highly doubtful of success at this time. There was one exception.
General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of Army Group C opposing the French on the Rhine and along the Maginot Line, not only was skeptical of victory in the West; he, alone so far as the available records reveal, opposed attacking neutral Belgium and Holland at least partly on moral grounds. The day after Hitler’s meeting with the generals, on October 11, Leeb composed a long memorandum himself, which he sent to Brauchitsch and other generals. The whole world, he wrote, would turn against Germany,
which for the second time within 25 years assaults neutral Belgium! Germany, whose government solemnly vouched for and promised the preservation of and respect for this neutrality only a few weeks ago!
Finally, after detailing military arguments against an attack in the West, he appealed for peace. “The entire nation,” he said, “is longing for peace.”21
But Hitler by this time was longing for war, for battle, and he was fed up with what he thought to be the unpardonable timidity of his generals. On October 14 Brauchitsch and Halder put their heads together in a lengthy conference. The Army chief saw “three possibilities: Attack. Wait and see. Fundamental changes.” Halder noted them in his diary that day and, after the war, explained that “fundamental changes” meant “the removal of Hitler.” But the weak Brauchitsch thought such a drastic measure was “essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable.” They decided that none of the three possibilities offered “prospects of decisive successes.” The only thing to do was to work further on Hitler.
Brauchitsch saw the Fuehrer again on October 17, but his arguments, he told Halder, were without effect. The situation was “hopeless.” Hitler informed him curtly, as Halder wrote in his diary that day, that “the British will be ready to talk only after a beating. We must get at them as quickly as possible. Date between November 15 and 20 at the latest.”
There were further conferences with the Nazi warlord, who finally laid down the law to the generals on October 27. After a ceremony conferring on fourteen of them the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the Fuehrer got down to the business of the attack in the West. When Brauchitsch tried to argue that the Army would not be ready for a month, not before November 26, Hitler answered that this was “much too late.” The attack, he ordered, would begin on November 12. Brauchitsch and Halder retired from the meeting feeling battered and defeated. That night they tried to console one another. “Brauchitsch tired and dejected,” Halder noted in his diary.
THE ZOSSEN “CONSPIRACY” TO OVERTHROW HITLER
The time had now come for the conspirators to spring to action once more, or so they thought. The unhappy Brauchitsch and Halder were faced with the stern alternatives of either carrying out the third of the “possibilities” they had seen on October 14—the removal of Hitler—or organizing an attack in the West which they thought would be disastrous for Germany. Both the military and civilian “plotters,” suddenly come to life, were urging the first alternative.
They had already been balked once since the start of the war. General von
Hammerstein, recalled temporarily from his long retirement on the eve of the attack on Poland, had been given a command in the west. During the first week of the war he had urged Hitler to visit his headquarters in order to show that he was not neglecting that front while conquering Poland. Actually Hammerstein, an implacable foe of Hitler, planned to arrest him. Fabian von Schlabrendorff had already tipped Ogilvie Forbes on this plot the day Britain declared war, on September 3, at a hasty meeting in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. But the Fuehrer had smelled a rat, had declined to visit the former Commander in Chief of the Army and shortly thereafter had sacked him.22
The conspirators continued to maintain contact with the British. Having failed to take any action to prevent Hitler from destroying Poland, they had concentrated their efforts on trying to keep the war from spreading to the West. The civilian members realized that, more than before, the Army was the only organization in the Reich which possessed the means of stopping Hitler: its power and importance had vastly increased with general mobilization and the lightning victory in Poland. But its expanded size, as Halder tried to explain to the civilians, also was a handicap. The officers’ ranks had been swollen with reserve officers many of whom were fanatical Nazis; and the mass of the troops were thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazism. It would be difficult, Halder pointed out—he was a great man to emphasize difficulties, whether to friend or foe—to find an army formation which could be trusted to move against the Fuehrer.
There was another consideration which the generals pointed out and which the men in mufti fully appreciated. If they were to stage a revolt against Hitler with the accompanying confusion in the Army as well as the country, might not the British and French take advantage of it to break through in the west, occupy Germany and mete out a harsh peace to the German people—even though they had got rid of their criminal leader? It was necessary therefore to keep in contact with the British in order to come to a clear understanding that the Allies would not take such an advantage of a German anti-Nazi coup.
Several channels were used. One was developed through the Vatican by Dr. Josef Mueller, a leading Munich lawyer, a devout Catholic, a man of such great physical bulk and tremendous energy and toughness that he had been dubbed in his youth “Joe the Ox”—Ochsensepp. Early in October, with the connivance of Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, Mueller had journeyed to Rome and at the Vatican had established contact with the British minister to the Holy See. According to German sources, he succeeded in obtaining not only an assurance from the British but the agreement of the Pope to act as an intermediary between a new anti-Nazi German regime and Britain.23
The other contact was in Berne, Switzerland. There Weizsaecker had installed Theodor Kordt, until recently the German chargé in London, as an attaché in the German Legation and it was in the Swiss capital that he saw on occasion an Englishman, Dr. Philip Conwell-Evans, whose professorship at the German University of Koenigsberg had made him both an expert on Nazism and to some extent a sympathizer with it. In the latter part of October Conwell-Evans brought to Kordt what the latter later described as a solemn promise by Chamberlain to deal justly and understandingly with a future anti-Nazi German government. Actually the Britisher had only brought extracts from Chamberlain’s speech to the Commons in which, while rejecting Hitler’s peace proposals, the Prime Minister had declared that Britain had no desire to “exclude from her rightful place in Europe a Germany which will live in amity and confidence with other nations.” Though this statement and others in the speech of a friendly nature toward the German people had been broadcast from London and presumably picked up by the conspirators, they hailed the “pledge” brought by the unofficial British representative to Berne as of the utmost importance. With this and the British assurances they thought they had through the Vatican, the conspirators turned hopefully to the German generals. Hopefully, but also desperately. “Our only hope of salvation,” Weizsaecker told Hassell on October 17, “lies in a military coup d’état. But how?”
Time was short. The German attack through Belgium and Holland was scheduled to begin on November 12. The plot had to be carried out before that date. As Hassell warned the others, it would be impossible to get a “decent peace” after Germany had violated Belgium.
There are several accounts from the participants as to what happened next, or rather why nothing much happened, and they are conflicting and confusing. General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff, was again the key figure, as he had been at the time of Munich. But he blew hot and cold, was hesitant and confused. In his interrogation at Nuremberg he explained that the “Field Army” could not stage the revolt because it had a “fully armed enemy in front of it.” He says he appealed to the “Home Army,” which was not up against the enemy, to act but the most he could get from its commander, General Friedrich (Fritz) Fromm, was an understanding that “as a soldier”24 he would execute any order from Brauchitsch.
But Brauchitsch was even more wishy-washy than his General Staff Chief. “If Brauchitsch hasn’t enough force of character,” General Beck told Halder, “to make a decision, then you must make the decision and present him with a fait accompli.” But Halder insisted that since Brauchitsch was the Commander in Chief of the Army, the final responsibility was his. Thus the buck was continually passed. “Halder,” Hassell mourned in his diary at the end of October, “is not equal to the situation either in caliber or in authority.” As for Brauchitsch, he was, as Beck said, “a sixth-grader.” Still the conspirators, led this time by General Thomas, the economic expert of the Army, and Colonel Oster of the Abwehr, worked on Halder, who finally agreed, they thought, to stage a putsch as soon as Hitler gave the final order for the attack in the West. Halder himself says it was still conditional on Brauchitsch’s making the final decision. At any rate, on November 3, according to Colonel Hans Groscurth of OKW, a confidant of both Halder and Oster, Halder sent word to General Beck and Goerdeler, two of the chief conspirators, to hold themselves in readiness from November 5 on. Zossen, the headquarters of both the Army Command and the General Staff, became a hotbed of conspiratorial activity.
November 5 was a key date. On that day the movement of troops to their jump-off points opposite Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg was to begin. Also on that day, Brauchitsch had an appointment for a showdown with Hitler. He and Halder had visited the top army commands in the west on November 2 and 3 and fortified themselves with the negative opinions of the field commanders. “None of the higher headquarters,” Halder confided to his diary, “thinks the offensive … has any prospect of success.” Thus amply supplied with arguments from the generals on the Western front as well as his own and Halder’s and Thomas’, which were assembled in a memorandum, and carrying for good measure a “countermemorandum,” as Halder calls it, replying to Hitler’s memorandum of October 9, the Commander in Chief of the German Army drove over to the Chancellery in Berlin on November 5 determined to talk the Fuehrer out of his offensive in the West. If Brauchitsch were unsuccessful, he would then join the conspiracy to remove the dictator—or so the conspirators understood. They were in a high state of excitement—and optimism. Goerdeler, according to Gisevius, was already drawing up a cabinet list for the provisional anti-Nazi government and had to be restrained by the more sober Beck. Schacht alone was highly skeptical. “Just you watch,” he warned. “Hitler will smell a rat and won’t make any decision at all tomorrow.”
They were all, as usual, wrong.
Brauchitsch, as might have been expected, got nowhere with his memoranda or his reports from the front-line commanders or his own arguments. When he stressed the bad weather in the West at this time of year, Hitler retorted that it was as bad for the enemy as for the Germans and moreover that it might be no better in the spring. Finally in desperation the spineless Army chief informed the Fuehrer that the morale of the troops in the west was similar to that in 1917–18, when there was defeatism, insubordination and even mutiny in the German Army.
At hearing this, Hitler, according to
Halder (whose diary is the principal source for this highly secret meeting), flew into a rage. “In what units,” he demanded to know, “have there been any cases of lack of discipline? What happened? Where?” He would fly there himself tomorrow. Poor Brauchitsch, as Halder notes, had deliberately exaggerated “in order to deter Hitler,” and he now felt the full force of the Leader’s uncontrolled wrath. “What action has been taken by the Army Command?” the Fuehrer shouted. “How many death sentences have been carried out?” The truth was, Hitler stormed, that “the Army did not want to fight.”
“Any further conversation was impossible,” Brauchitsch told the tribunal at Nuremberg in recalling his unhappy experience. “So I left.” Others remembered that he staggered into headquarters at Zossen, eighteen miles away, in such a state of shock that he was unable at first to give a coherent account of what had happened.
That was the end of the “Zossen Conspiracy.” It had failed as ignobly as the “Halder Plot” at the time of Munich. Each time the conditions laid down by the plotters in order to enable them to act had been fulfilled. This time Hitler had stuck to his decision to attack on November 12. In fact, after the stricken Brauchitsch had left his presence he had the order reconfirmed by telephone to Zossen. When Halder asked that it be sent in writing, he was immediately obliged. Thus the conspirators had in writing the evidence which they had said they needed in order to overthrow Hitler—the order for an attack which they thought would bring disaster to Germany. But they did nothing further except to panic. There was a great scramble to burn incriminating papers and cover up traces. Only Colonel Oster seems to have kept his head. He sent a warning to the Belgian and Dutch legations in Berlin to expect an attack on the morning of November 12.25 Then he set out for the Western front on a fruitless expedition to see if he could again interest General von Witzleben in bumping off Hitler. The generals, Witzleben included, knew when they were beaten. The former corporal had once again triumphed over them with the greatest of ease. A few days later Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, called in his corps and divisional commanders to discuss details of the attack. While still doubting its success he advised his generals to bury their doubts. “The Army,” he said, “has been given its task, and it will fulfill that task!”
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 103