4	Hitler’s March to War

Having established unquestioned dominance within the Reich, Hitler’s regime began to flex its expanding muscles abroad, although its slowly escalating step-by-step approach at first effectively disguised these ambitions from the anxious eyes of the outside world. There was, moreover, a strong feeling among foreign observers that by moving into the Saar – a coal-rich region administered since the First World War by the League of Nations – and a year later, in March 1936 into the Rhineland, Germany was merely reoccupying its own backyard. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 gave the Nazis an unlooked-for opportunity to test their growing armed might. Junkers 52 transport aircraft were used to ferry the Nationalist rebel General Franco’s Army of Africa from Morocco to the Spanish mainland, and, as the Civil War became an international conflict, Goering’s Luftwaffe formed a Condor Legion of planes and pilots to fight on Franco’s side. The Condor Legion’s most notable exploit was the destruction of the ancient Basque capital of Guernica – a dry run for the future bombing of many another European city by the Luftwaffe.

Moabit, Berlin, 6 October 1936: Stauffenberg had by now been marked down by his superior officers and contemporaries alike as an exceptional soldier with a glittering future ahead of him. In the autumn of 1936, he was selected to attend Berlin’s War Academy in the Moabit district for training as a potential General Staff officer. In the capital, Stauffenberg was among both family and friends. His two eldest sons, Berthold and Heimaren had been born in 1934 and 1936 respectively, and his brother Berthold lived nearby in Wilmersdorf, along with his cousin Casar von Hofacker. Other friends and future conspirators were also in the neighbourhood, including a circle of fellow aristocrats among whom were numbered Fritz-Dietlof, Count von Schulenburg, a fellow officer; the intellectual diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz; Count Ulrich von Schwerin; another Stauffenberg cousin, Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg; and their maternal uncle Count Nikolaus von Üxküll-Gyllenbrand.

These men represented the cream of the old Prussian aristocracy, with lines of ancestors distinguished by their military services to the state. The younger ones were members of a discussion group that came to be known as the Kreisauer-Kreis (Kreisau Circle) after the country estate of the group’s informal leader, Count Helmuth von Moltke, where they sometimes met.

The bluest of Prussian blue blood ran through Moltke’s veins. Descended from two other Helmuth von Moltkes – the ‘Elder’, who had won the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, and the ‘Younger’, who had notably failed to win the replay against France in 1914 – the current Helmuth was, like Stauffenberg, a thoughtful intellectual whose distinguished mind, sweetness of nature and commanding height gave him the leading position in any gathering. Unlike Claus, however, and despite his martial ancestry and his job as a legal adviser to the army, Moltke was a pacifist who loathed violence. Half-English and a convinced Christian, he strove to see the good in everybody, even the Nazis. His refusal to countenance any sort of armed action, including the assassination of Hitler, against the dictatorial regime he abhorred was a fatal handicap dooming the Kreisau Circle to political impotence, and Moltke personally, along with most of his friends, to death on the gallows.

These were early days for the Kreisau Circle, however, and as yet the overthrow of the regime did not figure in their discussions. They represented the younger generation among the conservative and aristocratic opposition to Hitler. Moltke, Yorck, Trott and their spiritual adviser, the Jesuit priest Father Alfred Delp, were much concerned with the future of Germany and Europe after the demise of Nazism. They envisaged Germany as the centre of a united Europe, a state based on Christianity and the rule of law. Although from society’s upper echelons, they were in favour of social justice and made contact with former social democratic labour and party leaders. Stauffenberg, who was often in their company, certainly imbibed their heady notions of remaking Germany in a more ideal image; as a man of action as well as ideas, though, he would never be content with their purely intellectual theorising.

Colonel Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim.

Stauffenberg’s contemporaries at the War Academy included two other future conspirators: balding, bespectacled Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, an impulsive, daring and sarcastic officer who had recanted his early enthusiasm for Nazism by rebounding into bitter opposition, denouncing the officially sponsored boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in 1933 as ‘a disgrace’. Also in the same study hall was a fellow Swabian, Eberhard Finckh, quiet but clever and determined, and fated to play a key role in the events of 20 July in Paris. Surrounded by such sympathetic colleagues, Stauffenberg enjoyed his two years at the War Academy – participating in military manoeuvres in the ancestral heartlands of east Prussia, and viewing the 1914 battlefields of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes with a professional soldier’s eye. He was not to know that he would achieve his life’s tragic apotheosis in the same haunted region.

The papers that Stauffenberg delivered to his fellow General Staff candidates reflected the contradictory impulses of his character. One, on defences against paratroop landings, was forward looking – indeed, it was the first on the topic ever mooted by a German officer. The other, on the future of cavalry in warfare, reflected the romantic nostalgia that was also an integral part of his personality. On a visit to the river Rhine, the traditional barrier guarding western approaches to the Fatherland, Stauffenberg delivered an impromptu lecture in which he pictured the great waterway as the site for a mighty decisive battle in the future: but what, he wondered, if the enemy came from the east – from the vast fastnesses of Soviet Russia?

On 1 January 1937, Stauffenberg was promoted to the rank of Captain. At the conclusion of his course in June of the following year, he passed out first in his class. His final report was glowing, referring to his ‘Tireless industry, tactical ability, [and] great organisational talent’. He was, it concluded, an ‘above average’ officer. As these words were being written, the army to which Stauffenberg had decided to dedicate his life was passing through the greatest crisis since the Röhm Putsch. It was a crisis that was to end in the complete subordination of the last vestiges of army independence to a criminal regime; it set a fatal course that Stauffenberg would eventually pledge himself to reversing – even, if necessary, at the cost of his life and of those who thought as he did.

On 5 November 1937, Hitler summoned his top commanders and ministers to a conference to hear his proposals for the armed forces over the coming year. Present were Goering, Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg; the Commander-in-Chief of the army, General Werner von Fritsch; and the head of the newly created Kriegsmarine (the navy), Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. What they heard from the Führer was truly explosive. He planned, he announced, to conquer Czechoslovakia before 1938 was out, using the plight of the young state’s large German minority in the Sudetenland as a pretext for the takeover. Hitler had a very Austrian contempt for the Czechs, and wiping their hated state from the map would enhance Germany’s military might through the acquisition of the giant Skoda armaments works. Blomberg swallowed hard. He had already suffered two severe shocks to his fragile nervous system with the takeover of the Rhineland in March 1936 and the intervention in Spain, both of which he had opposed, fearing that the army was not yet ready for such dangerous adventures. Indeed, so terrified had he been that France and Britain would stop the reoccupation of the Rhineland by armed force, that he panicked halfway through the operation and demanded a German withdrawal. A furious Führer had called Blomberg a ‘hysterical woman’ for his reaction. As far as Hitler was concerned, the Rubber Lion’s card was marked.

Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s pliable army cheif.

As his derisive nickname indicated, despite the Pour le Mérite medal that twinkled at his throat, Blomberg was physically brave, but a moral coward. He soon overcame his own objections to the coming occupation of Czechoslovakia and obediently set Hitler’s plans in train, much to the disgust of Commander-in-Chief Fritsch and Fritsch’s bitterly anti-Nazi Chief of Staff, General Ludwig Beck. It was in vain: the Führer would not forget the war minister’s cold feet and his revenge would soon follow.

On 15 December 1937 a ‘highly excited’ Blomberg set out for a week’s holiday at the Thuringian winter sports resort of Oberhof. The sixty-year-old widower’s anticipation was understandable: his companion on the ski slopes would be a twenty-four-year-old Fraulein Marguerite (also known as Erna or Eva) Gruhn. Gruhn’s day job was as a typist at the Reich’s Egg Marketing Board, but she moonlighted by night as an ‘escort girl’ in Berlin’s more louche clubs and bars, which is presumably where the lonely field marshal, who had been widowed in 1932, had met her. Travelling from Oberhof to Munich, on 22 December 1937, Blomberg delivered the funeral oration for Ludendorff, Germany’s First World War overlord who had died in grumpy retirement after garnering a derisory vote in the 1927 presidential election, when he stood as the Nazi candidate against his old chief Hindenburg. While there Blomberg took the opportunity to have a quiet word with a fellow mourner, Goering.

His ticklish problem, he explained, was that he wished to marry Fraulein Gruhn, but he was not sure that the Führer would view the young stenographer – younger than his own four children – as an ideal match for Germany’s top soldier. Young as she was, Blomberg admitted sheepishly, Erna was a woman with a past. Nonsense, Goering guffawed. That would be no problem at all. In the new Germany, he assured the field marshal, such absurd and outmoded snobbery had no place. Fraulein Gruhn was doubtless a good daughter of the German Volk and Blomberg was to be congratulated for winning her.

Here Blomberg admitted a second problem – he had a younger rival who was dancing attendance on Erna. No problem at all, the Reichsmarschall declared again: he would send the man on a long foreign trip, a very long one: all the way to a plum job with a German firm in Argentina. Why, he would even intercede with Hitler and make sure that no difficulties were placed along Blomberg’s path to wedded bliss.

Much relieved, Blomberg met Hitler in Munich later that day to formally request permission from his boss to marry a social inferior young enough to be his daughter (Erna’s mother was a laundress, a profession which, lowly as it was, was at least respectable: her other job was manageress of a massage parlour). Not only did Hitler give the field marshal his blessing, but he also promised that he and Goering would be guests of honour at the nuptials too. Having won the Führer’s permission to wed, Blomberg, an old man in a hurry, did not hang around. Barely a fortnight later, on 12 January 1938, he married the petite blonde Erna. Although, on Goebbels’s orders, there was no publicity – still less wedding pictures – Hitler and Goering kept their promise and attended the ceremony, and the newly weds left for Leipzig on the first stage of their Italian honeymoon.

Despite the publicity ban, rumours about the field marshal’s mésalliance were rife in Berlin. The wife of a police official named Curt Hellmuth Müller mentioned them to her husband. The name of the field marshal’s bride rang a bell in the bureaucrat’s brain, and the next day Müller checked his files. Sure enough, with the ink hardly dry on Blomberg’s wedding certificate, a clutch of pornographic pictures tumbled out showing the new Frau Blomberg performing oral sex on a shaven-headed Czech Jew named Lowinger. Erna Gruhn had a police record as a prostitute and she and her pimp had been prosecuted for selling porn. Aghast, Müller passed the explosive dossier up the police chain of command until it reached the desk of the chief of Berlin police, Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf.

The police president was a deeply ambiguous figure: an opportunist who always sought to be on the winning side, he had fought with the Freikorps, and had fled into exile after taking part in the 1920 Kapp Putsch. As police president, he would extort money from wealthy Jews to procure them passports to safety, and, riding two horses, was a member of both the SS and the SA. Destined to join the anti-Nazi resistance, albeit late in the day, he would suffer torture and execution for his pains. Now, the Blomberg dossier presented him with a dilemma. Strictly speaking, he should have passed it to his superior, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. But, knowing that Himmler would use it to weaken further the army and the officer caste, Helldorf – bearing in mind that he too, an ex-Hussar, was a member of the Prussian officer corps – took the material instead to his former Freikorps colleague, General Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Wehrmachtamt (Army Office) and effectively Blomberg’s office manager.

Hitler and (left to right) Field Marshal Keitel, Colonel-General Halder, Field Marshal Brauchitsch.

Despite the fact that his son was married to Blomberg’s daughter, and that he owed his position entirely to the field marshal, Keitel did not agree to Helldorf’s suggestion that they destroy the file. Yet another moral coward – a character trait that ideally fitted him for his future job as Hitler’s army hatchet man – Keitel proposed instead that they forward the document to Goering, although even a man of his strictly limited intelligence must have known that this would give the Reichsmarschall the ammunition he needed to fulfil his ambition to destroy Blomberg’s career and run the armed forces himself.

On Saturday, 22 January 1938 Helldorf submitted the dossier to the Luftwaffe chief. In great glee, Goering rushed to Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden and acquainted the Führer with the unsavoury facts. Hitler, mindful of Blomberg’s past services to him in making the army acquiescent in the Nazi takeover of the German state, professed reluctance to dismiss the field marshal, but Goering insisted. The entire officer corps was outraged by Blomberg’s reckless marriage, he said: he had to go. Without further ado, Hitler summoned Blomberg back from honeymoon and, although the ever-compliant war minister obediently offered to divorce his damaged bride, Hitler insisted on his dismissal. He let him down gently: he would receive a full pension, retain his rank, and the scandal, as far as possible, would be hushed up. Moreover, he added, when – not if – war came, Blomberg would be recalled to command. This pledge would not be honoured.

In a second interview, Hitler asked Blomberg’s advice on his successor. Not knowing of the Luftwaffe overlord’s role in his downfall, the disgraced field marshal suggested Goering as a suitable replacement. Hitler dismissed his Number Two’s ambitions with something approaching contempt – Goering was too lazy. In that case, suggested Blomberg, obsequious to the last, how about Hitler personally taking charge? The idea was music to Hitler’s ears – even if he had not already considered it. And if that happened, who should transmit his orders to the army, he wondered. Blomberg shrugged. ‘Who ran your office?’ Hitler demanded. Blomberg named Keitel, but added that he did not really have a first-class mind. ‘That’s exactly the man I’m looking for,’ Hitler exclaimed. And so the deed was done: within a week Hitler, the former corporal, had been named Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. And to head the newly created Oberkommando des Wehrmachts (OKW), the colourless Wilhelm Keitel was promoted far, far beyond his own abilities. The mediocre Keitel was supreme in one respect only: no one outdid him in supine obedience to his master’s will. Not for nothing was he nicknamed ‘Lakeitel’ (‘Lackey’) or ‘Nickesel’ (‘Nodding Donkey’).

As for Blomberg, he and the bride who had caused him so much grief left for Capri on an interrupted honeymoon that would turn into an extended round-the-world cruise to let the scandal blow over. Secure in the illusion that he was indispensable, and happy in the enjoyment of Erna’s charms, Blomberg departed. He would never be recalled, and by some sort of irony would retire with Erna to a chalet at Bad Weissee, the self-same resort where Röhm and his SA cohorts had had their own final encounter with Hitler. Blomberg, his faith in Hitler unshaken, survived the war to give evidence at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Despised by the army he adored, he became ill and died of cancer in American captivity in 1946. Erna returned to her Berlin roots, dying alone and forgotten in a bedsit in 1978 – forty years after the match that had made her notorious and set the final seal on Hitler’s mastery of the army.

Blomberg’s downfall gave the ever-ambitious Himmler an undreamedof opening for his long-term strategy: to weaken the army and replace it with his own SS. His sinister deputy and ruthless hatchet man, Reinhard Heydrich, suggested the satanic means: that a similar sexual scandal could be manufactured to bring down Werner von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the army. Fritsch was a notable drag on the Nazi Party’s drive to dominate Germany’s armed forces. An exceptionally able soldier, but decidedly professional and non-political, Fritsch was an officer of the old school, and markedly less amenable than Blomberg had been to Hitler’s insatiable will. Heydrich reminded his boss of the existence of a police file on Fritsch’s alleged sexual proclivities.

The file alleged that the austere bachelor Fritsch had been caught red-handed in 1935 in an illegal homosexual encounter near Potsdam railway station with a well-known rent-boy, known in his Berlin low-life haunts as ‘Bavarian Joe’. They had been observed by a professional blackmailer named Hans Schmidt, who had followed Fritsch home and successfully extorted money from him. The file had already been shown to Hitler, who had rightly perceived what Himmler and Heydrich knew perfectly well: the documents impugning Fritsch were a tissue of lies. Schmidt’s true victim was not the Commander-in-Chief, but an obscure retired cavalry officer named Frisch. The file was a clumsy attempt to frame Fritsch, which the Führer saw through, scorned and even ordered to be destroyed. The wily Heydrich, however, had hung on to it against the rainy day that had now arrived. Himmler took the dossier to Goering.

Werner von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the army.

Once again, as they had during the Röhm purge and the Blomberg affair, Himmler and Goering overcame their mutual loathing for the greater good of doing down their enemies. Goering, in his accustomed role as the postman of chaos, once more brought the dodgy dossier to Hitler. This time, well knowing that Fritsch opposed his plans for an Anschluss (union) with Austria and an annexation of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was more than ready to listen. A hasty meeting was arranged at the Chancellery on 26 January 1938 at which the wretched Schmidt confronted Fritsch and accused him of being the elderly officer whose activities he had witnessed. The Commander-in-Chief was too humiliated and dumbfounded to speak, and taking his silence for guilt, Hitler abruptly terminated the meeting, sending an outraged Fritsch on indefinite leave – and effectively terminating his career. To add insult to injury, just as he had done with Blomberg, Hitler asked Fritsch who should succeed him. Fritsch promptly recommended his own deputy, Chief of Staff General Ludwig Beck, a known and outspoken critic of Nazism whom Hitler rejected out of hand, favouring instead one of the army’s rare militantly pro-Nazi commanders, the unpopular General Reichenau. In a rare moment of dissent from his Führer’s wishes, Keitel, the newly appointed head of the OKW, murmured that the army would not stand for such a political general after the double shock of the Blomberg and Fritsch scandals.

Berlin, 27 January 1938: by the end of January, Berlin was alive with rumours as to what was afoot. Senior officers who were opposed to Nazism or lukewarm in their loyalty to Hitler looked at each other with horror as they wondered what further abominations the dictator had in store for their beloved army. Stauffenberg, nearing the end of his staff course at the War Academy, was one of those who heard the rumours of what was happening behind the scenes, via his friend Count von der Schulenberg, Helldorf’s deputy as vice-president of the Berlin police. Courageously, he stood up in his classroom and demanded to know the real reason for Fritsch’s dismissal. Privately, he also expressed dismay that the generals had accepted the underhand intrigue behind the Commander-in-Chief’s fall without a squeak of protest.

But further up the chain of command there was serious disquiet. In his office at the old War Ministry, General Beck met with Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster, director of operations for the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence department, headed since 1935 by Oster’s direct superior, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Beck and Oster were at this time the most convinced anti-Nazis in influential positions. Aghast at the actions and lawlessness already committed by the Hitler regime, and appalled by the prospect of further such offences, they were, unlike many critics, prepared to go beyond grumbling and put an end to Nazi rule if they possibly could.

Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster.

Oster in particular was an uncompromising opponent of Hitler. Tall, elegant and an officer of the old school, his dislike of the regime dated at least as far back as 1934 and the murder of General Schleicher, under whom he had once served. He had developed an unwavering hatred of the SS for killing his old superior, and even at that stage accepted that Hitler – whom he referred to contemptuously as ‘the pig’ or ‘Emil’ – would have to be killed to unseat his regime. Oster’s strength was his clubbable charm and ease of manner. His job at the Abwehr allowed him to travel freely and meet whomever he pleased; he made full use of such opportunities. The problem was that, along with the Abwehr’s legal adviser, his fellow conspirator Hans von Dohnanyi, Oster had an almost criminally lax attitude towards security. Bizarrely for a spymaster, he would meet contacts quite openly in cafés and restaurants and chat freely about their plans, no doubt to the education and delight of many listening ears. Dohnanyi even kept documents recording the crimes of the regime in his office safe. Given such elementary breaches in security it is hardly surprising that both Oster and Dohnanyi were destined to be arrested in 1943, before their conspiratorial plans had come to final fruition. What is more surprising is that they managed to conceive such an attempt before the doors of their Gestapo cells clanged shut behind them.

Colonel-General Ludwig Beck.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr.

Colonel-General Franz Halder.

Canaris was also present at the meeting between Beck and Oster. His commitment to anti-Nazi activity would always be ambivalent. A convinced anti-Communist and a staunch German nationalist, he had at first welcomed the arrival in power of a government committed to expanding the armed forces and reasserting Germany’s power. Canaris had delighted in the shady world of espionage since his active service days in the navy in the First World War. In the turbulent post-war state he had even, as a naval judge, helped spring the military killers of the Communist leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg from jail, and aided their escape abroad. As an old hand at such cloak-and-dagger tricks, the ‘little Admiral’ – he was just over five-foot in height – was less shocked by the Nazis’ excesses than the rigidly moral Beck and Oster. But the blatant stitching up of Blomberg and Fritsch had severely shaken him and he was ready to hear what the two anti-Nazis proposed.

Oster knew the inside story of Fritsch’s framing; he had been tipped off by Arthur Nebe, head of the criminal police and another senior police official who would, like Helldorf, become a future conspirator. As a soldier who had served under the fallen commander in the 1920s, Oster was especially outraged by the affair, rightly attributing it to the dirty tricks of Himmler and Heydrich. Even at this early date, Oster was determined that the regime could and should be removed by force, that the army should act before it was completely emasculated by the Nazis. Oster contacted leading provincial commanders – Generals Wilhelm Ulex in Hanover, Günther von Kluge in Munster and Siegmund von List in Dresden – in an attempt to persuade them to move. Even though Kluge turned ‘white as ash’ when he heard the details of the Fritsch framing, none of the generals were prepared to stand up to Hitler and insist on Fritsch’s reinstatement. When another general, Franz Halder, stormed into Beck’s office on 31 January 1938 and demanded to know what was going on, Beck remained silent. Why didn’t he, insisted Halder, raid the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, which was surely the vipers’ nest from where all the poison was emanating? ‘Mutiny and revolution’, replied the man who would commit both on 20 July 1944, ‘. . . are not words in the lexicon of a German officer.’ The dithering and procrastination that were to become the abiding and fatal handicaps of the anti-Hitler resistance were already exercising their paralysing influence.

But the generals’ foot-dragging becomes more comprehensible if we take into account the fact that even the victim himself seemed ready to swallow the injustice without protest. The un-political Fritsch was vaguely aware that he was the victim of a plot, but refused to accept that Hitler was a party to it. Silent and stiff-lipped, he awaited the verdict of his peers. A Court of Honour was established to look at the charges against Fritsch, but by the time it had reached the conclusion in March that the fallen Commander-in-Chief was entirely innocent, Hitler was riding high after the acclaimed and bloodless Anschluss with Austria; the caravan had moved on and the world had forgotten about poor Fritsch. The following year, given command of a mere corps in the Polish campaign, Fritsch deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire, was hit in the thigh by a splinter, and bled to death in a minute. Those who knew him best were sure that he no longer wanted to live.

On 4 February 1938 the Führer completed his takeover of the army. He issued a decree appointing himself the ‘direct and personal’ supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, with Keitel running the new OKW under him. At the same time he purged the Wehrmacht’s upper ranks: no fewer than sixteen senior generals were compulsorily retired and forty-four others were transferred from their current jobs to posts of lesser importance. Among the victims who were retired were future field marshals whom Hitler was forced to reinstate after the Second World War began: Leeb, Kuechler, Weichs, Kluge and Witzleben. Fritsch’s colourless successor as Commander-in-Chief under Hitler was to be Walther von Brauchitsch. Hitler also took the opportunity to reshuffle his cabinet, ridding himself of the non-Nazi foreign minister Neurath and the economics wizard Hjalmar Schacht in favour of the party toadies Ribbentrop and Funk.

The year 1938 would prove to be the most momentous since the advent of the Third Reich. With a government and army now entirely in his own image, and a country at his feet, Hitler was free to embark on the next step along his road to European domination: the annexation of his Austrian homeland. As with his earlier occupation of the Rhineland, this was not an event that attracted much condemnation abroad, even though the Versailles Treaty specifically forbade the unification of Germany and Austria. Most foreign observers believed that, once again, Hitler was merely strolling into his own backyard. The vast majority of Germans and Austrians, Stauffenberg included, also approved the move, seeing the division of ethnically, culturally and linguistically similar people into two states as an unnatural aberration. The Anschluss, however, was carried out by methods that were becoming the characteristic hallmark of Hitler’s diplomacy: a mixture of violence, deceit and bullying bluster. The young Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg – whose predecessor, the diminutive Engelbert Dollfuss, had been callously murdered in a botched Nazi putsch in 1934 – had been summoned to Berchtesgaden on 12 February 1938 by Hitler and issued with an ultimatum: he must lift the ban on the Nazi Party, release all Nazis jailed after the 1934 putsch, and accept the Nazi leader, Seyss-Inquart, into his cabinet as minister of the interior in charge of the police and internal security. Although this would effectively mean the end of Austria’s independence and its subordination to Germany as a Nazi satellite state, a bruised and browbeaten Schuschnigg accepted the demands.

However, on his return to Vienna he called a referendum on whether Austria should continue to exist as a free and independent nation. Enraged, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to mobilise and cross the Austrian border on 12 March 1938, by uncanny coincidence or otherwise the same day that the Court of Honour belatedly exonerated Fritsch. Unopposed by the Austrian army and police, the Wehrmacht rolled across the frontier and were greeted by rapturous crowds of cheering, swastika-sporting Austrians. Hitler made a triumphal entry into Vienna, the city where in his impoverished youth he had experienced bitter years as a lonely vagrant. Addressing vast crowds, he proclaimed the incorporation of Austria into the greater Reich. The only people not rejoicing, it seemed, were the Austrian capital’s large Jewish community, who were forced to endure such indignities as scrubbing anti-Nazi slogans off the pavements with toothbrushes: a mere foretaste of what was to come.

While the Anschluss was in full swing, an emissary of the nascent opposition was in London. It was not Carl Goerdeler’s first visit to the British capital; he had been there already in June 1937, just one of twenty-two countries he travelled to in his tireless efforts to secure foreign support for the overthrow of the Hitler regime. Goerdeler knew that regime at first hand. A conservative economist and a sworn German nationalist, he had been mayor of Leipzig and price-control tsar under both Weimar and Hitler. An almost pathological optimist, Goerdeler believed right to the end in the power of persuasion and sweet reason to change men’s minds. He tried at first to work with the Hitler regime, and it was only the evidence of the Nazis’ savage anti-Semitism that swung him into the ranks of the opposition. He resigned as mayor of Leipzig after the Nazis insisted on removing a statue of the Jewish composer Mendelssohn, and thereafter devoted all his formidable energy as an indefatigable networker to galvanising the opposition.

In London, Goerdeler met with senior officials at the Foreign Office and with his customary volubility, pleaded with them to extend a helping hand – if only an encouraging word – to the ‘decent men’ who he claimed were already working to supplant the Nazis. As before, he was listened to politely, but met the same stone wall he had the previous year. Diplomat, politician and journalist Harold Nicolson noted in his diary on 13 March that Goerdeler had arrived travelling under an assumed name, on a Yugoslav passport and on a secret mission. ‘He is a hero,’ Nicolson added. That mission, though Nicolson did not say so, was to persuade Whitehall that the German army, disgusted by the framing and besmirching of Fritsch, was preparing a putsch against Hitler. Whitehall simply refused to believe it. Foreign Office mandarin Ivo Mallet noted that Goerdeler, whom he correctly characterised as ‘over optimistic’, exaggerated the possibility of an army coup.

Carl Goerdeler as Mayor of Leipzig.

Goerdeler’s fruitless visit to London was made at the behest of Oster and Beck. The latter had at last been persuaded, probably by Oster’s eloquence, that a move had to be made by the army, even if it fell short of a full-scale mutiny or putsch. Beck devised a clumsy slogan: ‘For the Führer, against war, against rule by the bosses, for peace with the Church, freedom of speech, and an end to Cheka methods’. The last reference to the first brutal secret police set up in Bolshevik Russia was an unsubtle reference to the SS and their crimes. What Beck was proposing was a ‘Generals’ Strike’ – a refusal by the military establishment to carry out Hitler’s aggressive plans for foreign conquest without actually rising against him – although he was, he said, quite prepared to shoot at the SS. Beck’s sudden determination was prompted by a deadline. He knew that the Führer had vowed to abolish the state of Czechoslovakia before the year was out. Lest there be any doubt on that score, Hitler had summoned the leading generals to another conference at the Chancellery on 28 May 1938 and had told them unambiguously: ‘It is my unshakeable will that Czechoslovakia shall be wiped off the map.’ He predicted that Britain and France would not go to war to defend Czech integrity: after all, they had stood aside when he occupied Austria. He told the generals to prepare to move against the Czechs by the end of September.

Beck’s immediate tactic was to stall. He had already written memoranda to Hitler pointing out the weakness of the Wehrmacht, as evidenced during the Anschluss when many of the army’s motorised vehicles had broken down on the road to Vienna. Now he stepped up his bombardment of memoranda, variously stressing the strength of the Czech army and its defensive formations; the weakness of Germany’s only putative allies – Italy and Japan – and the likelihood that Britain and France would go to war. Hitler’s reaction to this host of mantraps flung in his path was predictable: ‘What kind of generals are those that I have to drag to war?’ he wondered aloud. He added ominously, ‘I do not require that my generals understand my orders – only that they obey them.’

Beck’s next ploy was to approach the Western Powers to convince them that Hitler was serious about smashing Czechoslovakia – the next stage in his plan to bring all Europe under German domination. Only if the West stood up to Hitler now and drew a line in the sand along the Czech frontier, Beck’s emissaries declared, would the Nazi Führer’s insatiable appetite be checked. Then, and only then, would the German army move to thwart Hitler and replace him with a more ‘civilised’ and reasonable regime. Beck’s first messenger was Erich Kordt, an Anglophile German diplomat who had been educated as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Kordt had risen to be a close aide to the new German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, during that former Champagne salesman’s stint as ambassador to Britain. Ribbentrop – known as ‘Brickendrop’ in London for his lack of tact – valued Kordt for the knowledge of English society that he so painfully lacked himself. His regard was not returned, however, since Kordt despised his boss as Hitler’s toadying lackey, and firmly allied himself with Oster and Beck in their opposition.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador in London and foreign minister.

On 3 July 1938 Kordt met T. Philip Conwell-Evans, a friend of his diplomat brother and fellow resister Theodor. Conwell-Evans was a socialite with contacts high in the British government. Erich Kordt’s message to him was clear. On Beck’s authority he told the Englishman that, so long as Britain made a firm declaration of support for Czech independence, then Beck would lead an army putsch to depose Hitler should he proceed with his plan to make war on Czechoslovakia. Conwell-Evans was non-committal but promised to pass the message on.

Beck followed up Kordt’s visit a month later, on 4 August 1938 by convening a meeting of Germany’s top generals in the Bendlerstrasseblock, the large brooding office block surrounding a wide central courtyard that housed the army’s headquarters, and where the conspirators’ efforts were destined to reach their final, tragic culmination almost exactly six years later. Beck had filled the intervening month by penning yet more memoranda pointing out the perils of the planned assault on the Czechs. He had also been badgering the army’s chief, Walter von Brauchitsch to support his projected generals’ strike. The upshot of his efforts was this meeting in the Bendlerstrasse.

The Bendlerstrasseblock, headquarters in Berlin of the Reserve Army, 1944.

Beck addressed his fellow generals and demanded that they present Hitler with a united ultimatum demanding that he call off the Czech adventure scheduled to go ahead, as he reminded his audience, the following month. The risks were enormous, he stressed. Germany would find herself fighting not only France and Britain, but waiting in the wings were the Soviet Union and the United States, with their limitless economic and manpower resources. Beck was backed by General Wilhelm Adam, the elderly commander of Germany’s barely fortified Western Front – the much trumpeted but barely begun Siegfried Line. Adam painted a black picture of an almost defenceless front that would be overrun within weeks, if not days. There were only two dissenting voices: General Busch and the Nazi-sympathising Reichenau, who lost no time in informing Hitler of what had been discussed. If Hitler did not know before how unenthusiastic his top military men were about his plans, he was in no doubt now.

Furious with the ‘defeatism’ of his senior generals, Hitler decided to skip a generation. On 10 August 1938 at the Berghof, he called a meeting of twenty of the younger commanders, predominantly the Chiefs of Staff of their more timid seniors, and subjected them to a three-hour harangue. The burden of Hitler’s song was the same as previous performances: he had always been proved right in his estimation of the weakness of his western adversaries, and he would also be correct over Czechoslovakia. When it came to questions, General Wietersheim, deputy to the sceptical General Adam, commander of the western wall, asked him how long the weak defences would stand up to an Anglo-French assault. ‘I can assure you, Herr General,’ Hitler hissed back, ‘that the western wall will resist not just for three weeks – but for three years.’ When it came to the defensive, the corporal who had learned his warfare on the static Western Front in the First World War remembered everything but had learned nothing.

On 15 August 1938 at Jüterbog, an artillery range south of Berlin, Hitler was at it again. This time he had called his commanders to a practical demonstration of the power of the German guns. The 15-centimetre howitzers crashed away, showing – at least to Hitler’s satisfaction – that the much-vaunted Czech defences would be as matchwood in the face of a ferocious Wehrmacht assault. As soon as the guns fell silent, Hitler plunged in with another pep talk, once more pooh-poohing the possibility of western intervention. For an enraged Beck, the Jüterbog meeting was the final straw. On 18 August 1938 he submitted his resignation to Brauchitsch. ‘If I wanted to preserve one spark of self-respect I could not do otherwise,’ he told his friend General Kurt von Liebmann, commandant of the War Academy where Stauffenberg was completing his General Staff course. ‘After all, I sat in the seat of Moltke and Schlieffen and had an inheritance to administer. I could not quietly observe how this band of criminals let loose a war.’ When Brauchitsch broke the news that Beck had quit, the Führer was visibly relieved. With his uncanny intuition he had marked the general down as an enemy: ‘The only man I fear is Beck,’ he had told an aide, ‘That man would be capable of acting against me.’ Now, by honourably resigning over policy, Beck had saved him the trouble of manufacturing another Blomberg- or Fritsch-type scandal to get rid of him.

On the same day that Beck submitted his resignation, a second envoy acting for him and Oster – the ultra-conservative Pomeranian landowner Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin – was in London to support the message that Kordt had delivered in July. Briefing Kleist-Schmenzin in Berlin before his trip, Beck had asked him to ‘Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked and I will put an end to this regime.’

With these words ringing in his ears, Kleist-Schmenzin, travelling under a false name and staying at Mayfair’s exclusive Park Lane Hotel, began his round of contacts. He met Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office’s German expert, and a passionate Germanophobe. Kleist-Schmenzin prefaced their discussion by telling Vansittart, with grim prescience, ‘I come with a rope around my neck,’ and then disclosed that Hitler intended to attack the Czechs on or by 27 September. Vansittart agreed that he was committing high treason, but suggested that Hitler was possibly in the grip of ‘extremists’ who were pushing him along the road to war. Kleist-Schmenzin denied this emphatically: ‘The only extremist’, he said, ‘is Hitler himself.’ He and his friends were willing to remove the regime, he concluded, but only if England made an unequivocal statement that an attack on Czechoslovakia would mean war. Only then would the bulk of the population understand the implications of Hitler’s aggression.

The next day, 19 August, Kleist-Schmenzin drove down into the Kent countryside to meet Winston Churchill, the veteran maverick Conservative politician whose warnings to his colleagues at Westminster about the growing threat posed by German rearmament and Hitler’s aggressive foreign expansionism had largely fallen on deaf ears. Britain well remembered the all-too-recent recent horrors of the trenches, and was desperate to avoid another war with a resurgent Germany. Churchill drove his guest around his Chartwell estate, while his son Randolph took notes on their talk. The German people, like the British, asserted Kleist-Schmenzin, were peace loving and had no stomach for a second war. But the obedient Wehrmacht would only refuse Hitler’s orders to march if they were certain that by attacking the Czechs they would bring down an attack from France and Britain. Kleist-Schmenzin begged his host to get that message through to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax – neither of them friends of Churchill. The old warrior was pessimistic, but promised his German guest that he would pass his message on.

On 20 August 1938, relaxing at Chequers, his official country residence among the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, Chamberlain digested three separate reports on Kleist-Schmenzin’s visit from Churchill, Vansittart and Lord Lloyd, an imperialist friend of Churchill whom Kleist-Schmenzin had also lobbied. Chamberlain viewed none of the trio sympathetically, and their urgent reports made unwelcome reading. The premier, although unversed in foreign affairs, was convinced that he could establish a personal rapport with Hitler, and that by meeting man to man any differences could be ironed out. Although a non-combatant in the First World War, like many Englishmen, Chamberlain dreaded above all else a repeat of that mass slaughter. In a minute to his like-minded foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, Chamberlain dismissed Kleist-Schmenzin ‘and his friends’, comparing them to the eighteenth-century Jacobites who fruitlessly plotted and intrigued to return the Stuart dynasty to the English throne. ‘I think we must discount a great deal of what he says,’ Chamberlain concluded. Not for the last time, the anti-Hitler conspirators were on their own.

On 21 August 1938 Hitler officially accepted the resignation that Beck had proffered three days earlier. The Führer’s relief was palpable, particularly when Beck accepted his suggestion that no public announcement be made. Beck’s successor as Chief of Staff was General Franz Halder, who was at least in words as convinced an oppositionist as Beck himself, though clearly lacking Beck’s moral backbone. ‘Now you see what one can achieve with intellectual memoranda and elegant gestures of resignation,’ the tactless Halder told his departing predecessor. ‘The time for memoranda is past. We must adopt other methods.’ Bitterly, Beck replied: ‘Now everything depends on you.’

At first it looked as though Halder meant to stop Hitler’s inexorable march towards war. Within a week of taking over from Beck, the new Chief of Staff summoned the leading conspirator, Oster, to his Berlin office on 27 August 1938. Halder, in his blunt Bavarian way, asked Oster straight out how far preparations for a putsch had progressed, and requested the names of the civilians who were also involved in the conspiracy. Oster mentioned Goerdeler and Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s former economics minister, who, disillusioned with the regime, had resigned the previous year and sought contact with the conservative opposition. Halder asked Oster to set up a meeting with Schacht. The same day, Kleist-Schmenzin reported back to Oster’s chief, Admiral Canaris, on his mission to London. With his usual gloom, Kleist-Schmenzin told the Abwehr head that his trip had been a failure. The British, he said, wanted to avoid war at almost any cost and were ready to appease Hitler over Czechoslovakia to prevent a conflict. The same day, as ever keeping his options open, Canaris had another visitor: Karl Hermann Frank, the militant deputy leader of the Sudeten German party, who reported on a meeting he had held earlier that day with Hitler to receive his orders for increasing the pressure on the Prague government. The Nazi puppet – who would be hanged for his wartime atrocities against the Czechs – asked Canaris if Germany was ready to fight a world war on behalf of the Sudetenland. The wily admiral, of course, was non-committal.

So the dog days of August limped away, with the clock ticking towards Hitler’s planned deadline of 27 September and the conspirators still irresolute: Erich Kordt had returned from London and informed Oster, Canaris and the head of the army, Brauchitsch, what his boss Ribbentrop and Hitler were prepared to risk: a war with all Europe united against Germany. On 3 September 1938 – a year to the day before Britain declared war on Germany, Hitler called Brauchitsch and his own military lackey, Keitel, to his mountain home, the Berghof, to finalise the plan for Operation ‘Case Green’, the codename for the coming attack on Czechoslovakia. In the meantime Oster had dispatched two more emissaries – the industrialist Hans Bohm-Tettelbach and Erich Kordt – to London to repeat the warnings that Hitler was hell bent on war, and that a firm British declaration ‘that even a child could understand’ as the forthright Oster put it – was necessary. Such an unequivocal statement from Britain would be answered by a military move against Hitler, Oster’s messengers promised. Now on 4 September 1938 Oster set up the promised meeting between Halder, the new army Chief of Staff, and Schacht, Hitler’s disillusioned economics supremo. The secret encounter took place in Schacht’s Berlin apartment.

Halder, as usual, was blunt. In the event of Hitler’s overthrow, he asked Schacht, would he be willing to take over the Reich’s government as a caretaker chancellor? Schacht assured him that he would. Thus reassured, on the following day, 5 September 1938, Halder called a veteran anti-Hitler conspirator to his own Berlin apartment. His guest, Hans Bernd Gisevius, was a young government lawyer who had left his post with the political police in disgust at the slaughter of the Röhm purge in 1934, and had since been both an inside witness to the atrocities of the regime and an impassioned opponent of the Nazis. Gisevius had kept his contacts with the police, and Halder wanted to know what stance this crucial pillar of state security would adopt in the event of an anti-Hitler putsch. Halder and Gisevius would both survive the war, and at this early stage, according to Gisevius’s revealing memoirs, Halder was ‘all fire and fury’ against the regime, denouncing Hitler as a ‘madman and criminal’ whose bloodlust, as evidenced by the massacre on the Night of the Long Knives and the murders going on daily in the concentration camps, was quite possibly prompted by the Führer’s sexual pathology.

Dr Hans Bernd Gisevius giving evidence to the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946.

Having damned Hitler, the two men got down to the nitty-gritty of how a putsch would proceed. The army, thought Halder, hated the SS and Gestapo so deeply that they would launch an attack on them without hesitation. On the other hand, Hitler himself still enjoyed wide popularity in the Wehrmacht as much as among the population at large. Unless he was dealt with, thought Halder, any putsch would be pointless. The army chief suggested several ways of getting rid of the dictator, although he thought any assassination should be disguised as a ‘fatal accident’. For example, his train could be derailed, or his car could be strafed from the air in a wartime situation. Gisevius diplomatically declined to point out that Halder himself was in a prime position to eliminate Hitler personally, since he saw the Führer regularly and had his service pistol in a holster at his side every time. The meeting ended with Halder asking Gisevius to coordinate with Oster over the police’s participation in the coming putsch.

On 7 September 1938, Erich Kordt’s diplomat brother Theo managed to meet Lord Halifax in person in London. Kordt repeated to the impassive and gentlemanly British foreign secretary the message that his brother and all previous German emissaries had brought: Hitler was determined to destroy Czechoslovakia by force and within the month. The only chance of stopping him was if the British government made him understand that any such attack would cause another European war. If he persisted with the aggression, said Kordt, quoting Hamlet, then his friends in Germany would ‘take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them’. Halifax listened politely, but said little.

A key figure in any successful coup would be the army general commanding the Wehrkreis Berlin, the army troops garrisoning the capital and its immediate environs. In September 1938 the man holding this crucial post was the infantry general who probably hated Hitler more than any other: Erwin von Witzleben. The general was a hawk-nosed old Prussian who yielded to no one in his hatred of the Nazis – when told of the Röhm Putsch he remarked that he wished he could have shot the SA leaders personally – although he strongly objected to the simultaneous murders of Generals Schleicher and Bredow. The disgraceful treatment of Fritsch had completed his disillusionment, and he was now ready to support or lead a putsch. At a meeting with Gisevius at his Berlin headquarters on 8 September 1938, they went through the plans that Oster had drawn up: Witzleben’s III Infantry Division, with the Potsdam Division commanded by Count Walter Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt acting as its spearhead, would seize and neutralise key points in the capital: the police and radio stations, telephone exchanges and major ministries. Outside Berlin, General Adam, commander of the Western Army Group was in on their plans, as was General Erich Hoepner, whose fast-moving 1st Light Division would have the crucial task of blocking the loyalist Waffen SS if they tried to move on the capital and stage a counter-coup.

Nuremberg, 8 September 1938: the annual Nazi rally or Parteitag took place as usual at Nuremberg in the first week of September. Conspirators on the fringes of the monster gathering were making discreet contacts. Halder was there, and so was his deputy General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, destined to play a crucial but ultimately tragic role in the events of 20 July 1944. Stülpnagel was able to get an assurance from General Alfred Jodl, one of Hitler’s military entourage, that the army would get at least two days’ notice and probably five, before the invasion of Czechoslovakia was launched. Jodl did not know this, but it would give the conspirators a window of opportunity in which to execute their putsch. On the same day, Halder bumped into his old friend General Kurt Liebmann at the rally, and blurted out: ‘There is only one way to stop the way things are going and that is the removal of Hitler by force.’

General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel.

The next night at Nuremberg, on 9 September 1938, Brauchitsch and Halder were called to Hitler’s headquarters to formally present the military plans for the coming attack on the Czechs, ‘Case Green’. They envisaged a pincer movement by the Second Army, attacking from the north, and the Fourteenth Army based in Austria, or the ‘Ostmark’ – as the Reich’s new territory was now known – from the south. Hitler insisted on adding a third prong to the attacking force: the Tenth Army would be the Schwerpunkt (‘Spearhead’) of the attack from the west. The former corporal lectured his two senior military men until the small hours on strategy and tactics before sending them to their beds feeling, as Halder confided, that ‘this man was leading Germany to its doom’.

On 10 September at the police headquarters on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, with Oster’s permission the ever-energetic Gisevius took the plunge and recruited Berlin’s police president, Count Helldorf, to the conspiracy. This was a dangerous step. As we have seen from the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, Helldorf was a deeply ambiguous figure who liked to run with the conspiratorial hare and hunt with the Nazi hounds. In sounding him out, Gisevius was taking a huge risk: the police chief might well report or arrest him for treason. But he did not. Instead, he told Gisevius – who had known him for years – that he was willing to co-operate with the plot. Helldorf’s deputy, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenberg, a friend of Claus von Stauffenberg, was already in the plot and acting as a communications channel between Oster and the Kordt brothers. Now that the two chiefs of the police were onside, the conspirators could go ahead with the military preparations for the putsch, safe in the knowledge that the only substantial government force in the capital would not lift a finger to oppose or hinder their troops on the day.

Planning for the putsch now moved into top gear. On the afternoon of 10 September, Gisevius accompanied Generals Witzleben and Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt to meet Hjalmar Schacht at the ex-economic minister’s country estate outside Berlin. At this meeting, they divided their labour for the coming coup. Gisevius would be responsible for the police, providing essential back-up – directing traffic and the like – to the troops of Brockdorff’s 23rd Infantry Division, who would spearhead the putsch. Schacht himself would draw up a list of ministers for the emergency administration that would replace the Nazi government. The only issue that seriously divided the conspirators – and would prove a fatal handicap that would dog them to the end – was the vexed question about what to do with Hitler himself. They all knew that the Führer still enjoyed enormous popularity among the population at large. Himmler and Heydrich, by contrast, were feared and hated and any blow aimed at their sinister black-uniformed SS would be welcomed. Most of the plotters wanted the attack to be aimed at the regime’s Praetorian Guard, while Hitler himself could be arrested and tried later when the public’s eyes had been opened as to the true nature of the Nazi regime.

Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, Police President of Berlin and ambiguous plotter.

Only Gisevius, with a clear-eyed understanding of the Führer’s demonic power, favoured the most radical solution of all: Hitler, he was sure, should be killed. Tyrannicide could be morally justified in Christian theology even by those whose religious principles forbade assassination. More practically, if Hitler was left alive – even in a jail cell – he would remain the focus of frenzied efforts by his supporters to attempt a rescue and restoration; only by eliminating the man, in Gisevius’s ruthlessly realistic view, could the conspiracy be sure of success.

On 11 September 1938, a chilly early autumn day, the commander of the coup, General Witzleben, celebrated the birth of his first grandson and used the family occasion to sound out his civilian cousin, Ursula von Witzleben, about the likely attitude of the most senior serving general, Gerd von Rundstedt towards a coup. Ursula had been raised in the Rundstedt household, and accurately replied that the elderly and stiff-necked Prussian could not be relied upon to rise against the state. Meanwhile, Gisevius and Brockdorff toured Berlin on a reconnaissance. Their driver was Elisabeth Gartner-Strunck, a wealthy friend of Oster who had been recruited by the dapper Abwehr man to the conspirators’ ranks. The presence of a woman, reasoned Oster, would deflect any suspicious eyes of those who might wonder why a general and a police official were driving around Berlin peering at government buildings. Gisevius pointed out the key points that the men of Brockdorff’s 23rd Division would be expected to secure: the government quarter around the Wilhelmstrasse including the Reich Chancellery, the SS headquarters in Prinz Albrechtstrasse and Goering’s Luftwaffe Ministry in central Berlin. On the outskirts were the SS barracks at Lichterfelde – scene of mass executions during the Röhm Putsch – the radio relay station at Königs Wusterhausen and, north of the capital, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where many of the regime’s leading opponents were already incarcerated.

Halder returned from Nuremberg on 13 September with Hitler’s keynote speech to the party’s serried ranks still ringing in his ears. To thunderous applause, Hitler had once again blatantly threatened the Czechs with war, even if Britain and France were ready to intervene. Fortunately, rasped Hitler menacingly, Germany was now strong enough to help the oppressed German people in the Sudetenland throw off their shackles, even at the cost of war. At a private meeting in his Berlin apartment with Oster, Schacht and Gisevius, Halder appeared as confident and committed to the coup as ever. He had ensured that he would have sufficient warning of the mobilisation for war, he said, and that would be the moment to launch the putsch. But, as they left the meeting, his confederates felt uneasy: if Hitler suddenly plunged into war, wouldn’t the wavering Halder plead military necessity ahead of political considerations as an excuse to postpone the putsch after all?

All might yet have been well with the plotters’ plans, had the guarantees of solid support from the Western Allies – for which they had, via their envoys, been vainly seeking – been forthcoming. Unfortunately, the policy of Neville Chamberlain’s government in London, with Daladier’s weak French administration – desperate for peace at almost any price – tailing obediently at its heels, was also tending towards defeatism and peace whatever the cost. Already on 7 September Geoffrey Dawson, the appeasing editor of The Times – in that era less a newspaper than the mouthpiece of the British establishment – had run an editorial suggesting that the Czechs preserve European peace by surrendering their German-speaking areas to Hitler.

London, 14 September: the day Hitler ordered his forces to mobilise for the attack on the Czechs, Chamberlain’s cabinet rubber stamped the prime minister’s proposal to hold a plebiscite in the Sudetenland to determine which parts wished to secede and join the Reich. Without so much as a word to his Czech allies, Chamberlain was prepared to dump them and dismember their state.

In order to preserve peace, Chamberlain told his astonished colleagues, he was proposing to go an extra mile more than he needed to. An air mile, in fact. The very next day the 69-year-old premier would, for the first time in his life, board a plane and fly to Germany to meet Hitler personally and plead for peace. It was as abject a surrender as Hitler could have wished for, and when he heard the news, the Führer admitted, it came as ‘a bolt from the blue’. Without further ado, the British government agreed to this proposal too.

The news that Chamberlain was coming to see Hitler burst like a bombshell among the plotters. Halder and Witzleben heard it in the army headquarters in Berlin’s Bendlerstrasse when they were discussing the logistics of the coming putsch. Canaris, round the corner in the Abwehr’s headquarters, was given the news while he was having his supper. It quite spoiled his appetite and he retired, leaving his meal half eaten. Erich Kordt learned it in the Foreign Office and it left him flabbergasted: ‘What, him . . . coming to see that man?’ Their dismay is easily explicable: by approaching Hitler as if he was a supplicant on his knees, Chamberlain was lending credibility to the Nazi dictator’s bullying and warmongering. At the same time he was cutting the ground from under the feet of the conspiracy. How could they claim to be acting against a recklessly aggressive policy that threatened to plunge the world into war for the second time in a generation, if the very powers they counted on to stop Hitler in his tracks were flinging themselves at his jackbooted feet? It was truly inexplicable. Gisevius, most realistic of all the conspirators, summed up their bewilderment, and their gloom: ‘We bowed our heads in despair. To all appearances it was all up with our revolt.’

The Berghof, 15 September 1938: the first of Chamberlain’s three meetings with Hitler was held. After his exhausting flight, the prime minister arrived at the Berghof, the Führer’s mountain lair at Berchtesgaden. At this, their first meeting, he was shocked by Hitler’s plebeian appearance – ‘the commonest little dog,’ he said later – but got straight down to man-to-man talks with only the Führer’s interpreter, Dr Paul Otto Schmidt, present. Brushing aside Chamberlain’s talk of a new Anglo-German understanding, Hitler said the priority was to resolve the Sudeten question without delay. Chamberlain surrendered all his cards at once: it made no difference to him, he told Hitler, if the Sudeten Germans dwelt within Czechoslovakia or joined their racial compatriots in the Reich. At a single stroke, and without consulting his cabinet colleagues, his French allies or, least of all the Czechs whose state he was proposing to demolish, Chamberlain had sold the pass. He departed, with the illusion intact that Hitler was a man of his word with whom he could do business.

Back in Berlin, Oster had found a hitman. What the conspirators lacked – now and all too often in the future – was an individual with a clear mind, courage and a ruthless capacity for action. One day both Henning von Tresckow and Claus von Stauffenberg would fill this role, but for now the man of action was a friend and former military colleague of Oster, Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz. At first sight, Heinz was an unlikely figure to find among the ultra-civilised anti-Hitler conspirators. Like many members of his generation – Hitler, Goering and Röhm were other examples – Heinz’s life had been moulded, and warped, by his terrifying experiences as a soldier in the trenches of the First World War while he was still a teenager. This frontline ‘lost generation’ had never successfully made the transition back to civilian life after the horrors of that cataclysm, and were permanently disoriented and ill-suited to a mundane civilian life.

Heinz had joined the paramilitary, freebooting Freikorps in the chaos of post-war Germany, choosing the most extreme and murderous unit of all: the Ehrhardt Freikorps, who had carried out the 1920 Kapp Putsch that had briefly overthrown the young Weimar republic, and who had subsequently been implicated in the assassination of leading leftwingers and republicans, including the Catholic leader and armistice signatory Matthias Erzberger, as well as the Jewish industrialist and Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. Heinz had acquired a taste for such secret, underground work, becoming a propagandist for extreme right-wing organisations such as the nationalist veterans’ paramilitary organisation the Stahlhelm and the Nazis themselves, becoming a party member in 1928. However, like so many other Freikorps veterans, he could not accept Hitler’s dictatorial tendencies, and aligned himself with the left-wing Strasserite section of the party, for which ‘offence’ he was expelled in 1930. Along with Oster, Heinz had drifted into the Abwehr, where he was responsible for monitoring the German press, and where his friend had recruited him to the plotters’ ranks.

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Freikorps fighter, anti-Nazi plotter, post-war spymaster.

Heinz’s role was to lead a Stosstrupp, a commando of rough, tough soldiers like himself, into the Reich Chancellery and arrest Hitler. In recruiting this strong-arm group as the spearhead of the putsch, the former Freikorps man had cast a surprisingly wide net. Naturally, there were a score or so old comrades from the Freikorps and Stahlhelm milieux. Another dozen had come from fellow serving Wehrmacht soldiers, while there was also a sprinkling of students and even some socialist and trade union activists. In all Heinz had collected around fifty men – easily enough, he considered, to overpower the dictator’s dozen or so SS bodyguards from the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The only ties linking these disparate activists were a shared hatred for Hitler and a willingness to take decisive action against him.

On the evening of 20 September 1938 Oster invited the top conspirators to a final meeting at his apartment to meet Heinz and learn the fine details of the putsch. Present were Oster and Heinz, along with Witzleben; Gisevius; the plot’s legal expert Hans von Dohnanyi; another Abwehr operative, Franz Maria Liedig; the military conspirator Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth and possibly Carl Goerdeler too. Having optimistically discussed the shape of a post-Nazi Germany, with most of those present favouring a restoration of the monarchy, the conspiracy’s inner core moved on to discuss what would happen on ‘der Tag’ – the day – planned for a week ahead, when their putsch would finally be launched. They agreed that the rushing of the Reichs Chancellery by Heinz’s shock troopers was a sound strategy, but, as so often, the question of Hitler’s fate was left dangling. Oster was well aware that senior members of the conspiracy – especially the more conservative and Christian amongst them – would not countenance the dictator’s physical elimination, even though Oster himself, also a Christian, considered assassination essential for the plot’s success. As it was, he successfully fudged the issue, promising his fellow plotters that Hitler would only be arrested and held to stand trial later.

Only after the conspirators had dispersed, having agreed to launch the putsch the moment Hitler issued the mobilisation order to move on Czechoslovakia at the end of the month, did Heinz, lingering behind, put his cards on the table. Hitler, he told Oster with a simple soldier’s bluntness, had to die, since ‘Hitler alive is stronger than all our divisions.’ Oster, a soldier himself, agreed, but it must remain a secret between the two of them: a conspiracy within the conspiracy. The way to accomplish it was to shoot Hitler in the melee when the Chancellery was rushed, and blame the assassination on an accident of war. Besides, there would be plenty of time for hindsight discussion of an accomplished fact after the deed was done. Doing it, however, was the essential priority.

The conspirators were, however irrationally, counting on Chamberlain to stand firm at his coming second meeting with Hitler, designed to finalise the agreement of their informal Berghof meeting. At first it seemed that their confidence was justified. On 22 September 1938 Chamberlain was sped on his way by Lord Halifax, with Theo Kordt among the other onlookers at London’s Heston Airport for his second flight to meet the Führer. He departed believing that he had peace in his pocket. He had persuaded the majority of his cabinet, the French and even a despairing Czech government to bow to Hitler’s demands without a struggle: the Czechs must sacrifice the Sudetenland, and with it their mountainous natural defences against attack, for the sake of peace. Now, he thought, he was meeting the man he habitually called ‘Herr Hitler’ at the spa of Bad Godesberg on the Rhine to finalise a done deal. Chamberlain, however, was in for a shock. He sat down with the Führer in the plush Dreesen Hotel – where Hitler had been staying in 1934 on the night he flew south to settle final scores with Röhm and the SA – and, like an eager school swot reporting to a strict teacher on a difficult piece of homework successfully completed, he proudly confirmed that everyone had capitulated to Hitler’s blackmail: both the British and French cabinets and even the Prague government were ready to cede the German Sudetenland once plebiscites there had confirmed the inhabitants’ desire to unite with the Reich.

Then the blow fell. Harshly Hitler shook his head and replied: ‘I’m sorry, Mr Chamberlain . . . the situation has changed. This solution no longer applies.’ In mounting horror and indignation Chamberlain listened while Hitler upped the ante: his patience with the Czechs was over: without a plebiscite, without even maps to show which portions of their country were being torn from them, the Czechs, bag and baggage, must vacate the Sudetenland within four days. Shell-shocked, Chamberlain flew home the following day, bleating that Hitler had not supported his attempts to preserve peace. The conspirators, by contrast, were in high spirits. After being downcast when it looked as though Chamberlain would succumb without a squeak of protest, their rollercoaster had climbed back up now that Hitler’s unreasonable demands would force even the supine Chamberlain to think twice.

‘Thank God,’ breathed Hans Oster when Erich Kordt brought news of the Bad Godesberg debacle. ‘Finally we have clear proof that Hitler wants war, no matter what. Now there can be no going back.’ He told Kordt to do what he could to lure Hitler back to Berlin – in order for the putsch to close its jaws around him, ‘The bird must return to its cage.’ It is noteworthy that, from the outset, the anti-Hitler plot had its supporters in the highest places. In this time of high international tension the Kordt brothers were dogging the steps of the foreign ministers of both Britain and Germany – Halifax and Ribbentrop. Friends in high places kept the group that was planning the putsch in Berlin abreast of events as they happened.

Hitler’s hardline demands at Godesberg had buoyed the conspirators’ resolve. They knew just by the grim looks of ordinary people in the streets that this time, in Gisevius’s words, ‘Hitler had gone too far . . . even Brauchitsch mumbled grim threats.’ Oster confirmed to Erich Kordt at Godesberg that the army commander was ‘ready to participate in a revolt’. But, despite all this fighting talk, the plotters still stayed their hand – waiting on a word from London. And that word, when it came, was deeply dispiriting.

Neville Chamberlain had been initially horrified by Hitler’s sudden threat to occupy the Sudentenland instantly. But between leaving an intransigent Hitler to fly home in a mood of ‘indignation’ at his impossible demands, and meeting his cabinet on the morning of 24 September, Chamberlain told his ministers, he had had a change of heart. The crucial moment in restoring his passion for peace at any cost had come when, returning from the Rhine, his plane had flown up another river, the Thames, and he had looked down to see the peaceful and vulnerable suburbs of London lying helplessly below. What if his plane had been a German bomber, Chamberlain wondered, or a fleet of bombers? The destruction would have been unimaginable, and not preventable, since Britain’s Spitfire and Hurricane fighters had not yet come onstream. Had not his predecessor as premier, Stanley Baldwin, told MPs pessimistically that ‘the bomber will always get through’? Faced with that terrifying scenario did not Hitler’s demands suddenly seem not impossible bullying, but the tough bargaining position of a hard-headed but still reasonable statesman?

Chamberlain told his cabinet that Britain was in no position to wage a war, and had no realistic choice but to allow the Germans a free hand to occupy Czechoslovakia. Several cabinet members expressed their disquiet at this abject defeatism, although the majority still went along with Chamberlain’s appeasement.

The next day, 25 September 1938, the cabinet met three times in a crisis atmosphere. Prompted by his conscience, Chamberlain’s hitherto closest ally in appeasement, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax, announced that after a sleepless night he had changed his mind. It would be dishonourable, said this upright aristocrat, for Britain to be dictated to by a man whose word could not be relied upon. Backed up by other cabinet ministers he insisted that an envoy, Horace Wilson, carry a letter to Hitler rejecting his outrageous Godesberg demands and warning that Britain and France would stand by the Czechs and go to war if Germany carried out its threat to occupy the Sudetenland immediately. Czechoslovakia’s ambassador, Jan Masaryk, son of the state’s founder Tomas Masaryk, had told Chamberlain that Prague would not submit tamely to Hitler. ‘The nation of St Wenceslas, Jan Hus and Tomas Masaryk will not be slaves.’

Spurred on by an indomitable Winston Churchill, and without consulting the prime minister, Halifax issued a press release on 26 September re-asserting his new-found conviction that war was preferable to meek submission to Hitler’s brute force: ‘If, in spite of all efforts by the British Prime Minister, a German attack is made upon Czechoslovakia the immediate result must be that France will be bound to come to her assistance, and Great Britain and Russia will certainly stand by France.’ The same day, a quaking Horace Wilson confronted an enraged Führer in Berlin, carrying a reluctant Chamberlain’s letter announcing that the Czechs had refused his Bad Godesberg demands to give up one-quarter of their country.

Hitler almost burst a blood vessel at the news, and that night in the Berlin Sportspalast let the full force of his dammed-up frustration loose on an audience of 15,000 party bigwigs. Alternately sneering and ranting, he threatened the Czechs with fire and brimstone unless he was permitted to occupy the Sudetenland by 1 October – five days hence. Referring to the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, he concluded ‘It is now up to Herr Beneš – peace or war!’

Europe was certainly preparing for war: in France reservists were called up; in London slit trenches were dug in the capital’s parks; and in Germany itself army units were ordered up to the Czech frontiers in preparation for the coming invasion as Goebbels’s propaganda campaign over the alleged Czech persecution of the suffering Sudeten Germans ratcheted up to a peak of hysteria. If this was all Hitler’s bluff, it was a gigantically dangerous one. Claus von Stauffenberg’s 1st Light Division, commanded by the future conspirator General Erich Hoepner, and bolstered by tanks and artillery, was one of the Wehrmacht units involved, moving from Hesse in central Germany, to the Jena area near the Czech border. By 27 September 1938, along with six other divisions, they were poised to invade.

But, despite all Goebbels’s careful propaganda preparations, the German population was far from enthusiastic about Hitler’s war. The Führer had ordered Wehrmacht units to parade through central Berlin on 27 September to attempt to instil some martial ardour in the dour Berliners, but to no avail. Only 200 people gathered outside the Reichs Chancellery to see the parade march by, and according to a civilian eyewitness, Ruth Andreas-Friederich, the grim-faced crowds stared stonily in silent disapproval as the parade passed by: ‘They stand there with their tails between their legs . . . not a hand is raised anywhere. The tanks roll, the people keep silent, and the Führer, uncheered, vanishes from the balcony.’ The American correspondent William Shirer, watching the same parade, recorded: ‘Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade un-reviewed. What I’ve seen tonight almost rekindles a little faith in the German people. They are dead set against war.’ A gleeful Gisevius commented: ‘Never had soldiers been treated so badly in Berlin as they were on that day. In the workers’ quarters clenched fists were raised against them; in the city centre people turned conspicuously away.’ Even Hitler’s interpreter Paul Otto Schmidt was startled by ‘the completely apathetic and melancholy behaviour of the Berlin people’. In utter disgust, Hitler himself snarled to Goebbels: ‘I cannot make war with such a people.’

The conspirators had not been idle. On the day that Hitler had seen for himself from the Reichs Chancellery balcony that his war fever had not infected his own people, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz had assembled the raiding party whose task would be to break into the Chancellery and kill the dictator on the morning of the putsch. The raiders were hiding out at flats across central Berlin, conveniently close to the Wilhelmstrasse, which was the goal of their mission. Heinz gave his men their final marching orders. All they were waiting for was the signal to go.

In Britain, a reluctant Chamberlain mobilised the still-powerful British navy, and summoned parliamentarians back from their summer recess for an emergency session on 28 September. The prime minister still favoured appeasing Hitler, but a growing swell of opinion in and outside his cabinet was pushing him towards drawing a line in the sand. However ‘horrible, fantastic and incredible’ it was, as Chamberlain had said in a radio broadcast, that the British people should be digging slit trenches and trying on gas masks because ‘of a quarrel in a far-away country between a people of whom we know nothing’, in the end, if Hitler’s push became a shove, Britain would – albeit reluctantly – take up arms. This was the news the conspirators had been hoping and waiting for. At last, it seemed, appeasement had run out of road.

Berlin, 28 September 1938: the day dawned dull and grey. Silently, the men of Heinz’s raiding party made their way through the streets and slipped into the army headquarters at the Bendlerstrasse (today Stauffenbergstrasse). Heinz personally issued them with their weapons: short carbines and hand grenades, useful for close-quarter combat. Lips dry with nervous tension were licked as the men got used to their arms. As soon as the signal was received that Brockdorff’s 23rd Division were on their way from nearby Potsdam, they would move. As they had been throughout the mounting crisis, the leaders of the conspiracy were keeping themselves abreast of the gathering storm, mainly through the work of the Kordt brothers, themselves close to the centre of the action in Berlin and London. Erich Kordt, at the side of Ribbentrop, who was urging Hitler to invade, was charged with ensuring that the great doors of the Chancellery would be open to admit Heinz’s raiding party. He fully intended to play his part.

As Heinz’s men assembled at the Bendlerstrasse, a few blocks away at the Abwehr headquarters, Oster was opening a copy of Hitler’s reply to Chamberlain’s letter informing the Führer that Britain and France would stand by the Czechs. Oster instantly alerted General Witzleben, who told the Chief of Staff, Halder. As he read Hitler’s brusque rejection of Chamberlain’s offer of further British mediation, ‘tears of indignation’ welled up behind Halder’s pince-nez. Together, he and Witzleben decided that they could delay no longer.

They urged their immediate superior, the cautious army commander Brauchitsch, that the day for launching the putsch had at last arrived. Brauchitsch agreed in principle. He would support a coup, he said, as soon as he had visited the Chancellery and ascertained that Hitler was still bent on war.

But then, against all expectations, Hitler backed down. Almost simultaneously at the Reichs Chancellery he received two near-identical proposals from Chamberlain and Mussolini. Italy’s Fascist dictator, with no wish to be dragged into war in Hitler’s tank tracks, had responded positively to a last-minute plea from Chamberlain to get the Duce’s German ally around a conference table. Both leaders now called for an immediate conference of the European powers to solve the crisis face to face. The only difference was that Chamberlain proposed Czech participation along with that of Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Mussolini would exclude the Czechs. Gratefully, Hitler accepted his Italian ally’s idea. He was sure that he could get what he wanted without the bother of fighting a war, a conflict for which his generals – and his people – had shown such scant enthusiasm. And he was right.

Immediately, Hitler issued invitations to Chamberlain, Mussolini and the French premier Edouard Daladier to attend a conference in Munich the following day. At the same time, he ordered that the troops poised on the borders of the Sudetenland ready to invade Czechoslovakia should be stood down. Rather than face a messy campaign in which Britain, France and the not-inconsiderable thirty-four divisions of the Czech army would be ranged against him, he could, he reckoned, get his own way by the tried and tested formula of bullying and browbeating his potential adversaries over the conference table.

In London that afternoon, Chamberlain was just concluding a gloomy summing up of the crisis so far to MPs packed into a hushed and sombre House of Commons when a paper was passed to him. It was Hitler’s invitation to the Munich conference. MPs on all sides stood and cheered, their voices hoarse with relief. Even the minority who felt that honour compelled Britain to fight did not actually want to fight. Desire for peace was overwhelming. Even Churchill shook Chamberlain’s hand and wished him ‘Godspeed’ as he left the chamber for the Munich conference of 29 September.

(Left to right) Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Italy’s Foreign Minister Count Ciano.

Chamberlain surrenders to Hitler.

Back in Berlin, news of the outcome of the Munich Conference took the wind out of the conspirators’ sails and becalmed their putsch in a moment. The tension and dread that had been gathering towards an unbearable climax was punctured like a balloon by a pin. Drip by painful drip, the awful news leaked out: Chamberlain, with Daladier trailing in his wake, had given in to Hitler all along the line: the Sudetenland would be occupied – albeit to a slightly longer timetable than Hitler had originally required (10 October rather than 1 October). Plebiscites would be held – albeit in areas already occupied by the Wehrmacht. The Czechs would not be permitted to dismantle any of the fortifications along their borders, and there would be no compensation for the land they were giving up. When the cheering that greeted Chamberlain’s return to London had died away, the truth gradually began to sink in that Hitler had inflicted a total humiliation on the West.

Rather than the worthless piece of paper fluttering from Chamberlain’s hand on his return to London, which he proclaimed as ‘peace with honour’, Munich represented, in Churchill’s rather more realistic estimation, ‘an unmitigated defeat – the first sip of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us year by year – unless by a supreme effort of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom’.

As for the conspirators, Munich represented the shattering of all their hopes. Instead of their putsch being seen as a blow for sanity and moderation, Hitler would now be lauded by a people delirious with relief and starry-eyed with hero-worship as the divine, all-seeing, all-wise leader who could do no wrong.

To his leaden-eyed companions as the weary, depressed and defeated conspirators gathered in Oster’s flat on the evening of 29 September, General Witzleben spoke a terrible truth:

You see, gentlemen, for our poor deluded nation he [Hitler] is once more our dearly beloved Führer, unique, God-given, . . . and we, we are just a small heap of reactionary, malcontents . . . disgruntled officers and politicians who dared to scatter pebbles in the path of the greatest statesman of all time at the moment of his greatest triumph.

Any attempt at a putsch now, concluded Witzleben, would be seen by history, ‘And not just German history, as nothing more than a refusal to serve the greatest German at a time when he was at his peak and the whole world recognized his greatness’.

A few days after Munich, the leaders of the conspiracy got together again at Witzleben’s house to wrap up their aborted putsch. Gisevius, the only survivor of the gathering, described later how they tossed ‘all our lovely plans and projects’ into the general’s fire. Afterwards they spent the rest of the melancholy evening ruminating ‘Not on Hitler’s triumph, but on Europe’s calamity’.