An Honourable Defeat (16 page)

Halder is a man over whom people have argued. He has been presented as a model administrator, but a man torn between conscience and duty. Less charitably, he has been seen as someone who never quite had the courage of his convictions, but who at the same time could not bear to let go of them. He seems, on balance, to have been a man whose heart was in the right place, but who was too spineless to follow its promptings. Unfortunately, like so many of his colleagues, he bent with the wind: many a general who would have supported a coup had it succeeded, would do nothing to help instigate one. Halder, at least in the early days, could be counted as a participant in the Resistance.

With his cropped grey hair and stubbly moustache, his pince-nez and his pedantic expression, he resembled a slightly nervous little schoolmaster, and to several of his brother officers who had crossed the divide and stood squarely against Hitler, he was indeed. ‘the very stuff of a petit bourgeois’; but he was in a supremely difficult position, and not quite man enough to cope with it. His own postwar recollection of his situation sounds honest at least, and does not smack of self-justification or hand-washing:

Resignation — the way Beck went — or treacherous murder. In the making of a German officer there are deep and earnest inhibitions against the idea of shooting down an unarmed man...The German Army did not grow up in the Balkans where regicide is always recurring in history. We are not professional revolutionists. Against this speaks the predominantly conservative attitude in which we grew up. I ask my critics, who are still very numerous, what should I have done, i.e. what should I have prevented? Start a hopeless coup for which the time was not ripe, or become a treacherous murderer as a German staff officer, as a top representative of the German General Staff, who would act not only for his own person but as representative of the German tradition? I say honestly, for that I was not fitted, that I have learnt. The idea that was at stake was clear to me. To burden it in the first stage with a political murder, of that as a German officer I was not capable
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Halder believed that the people were behind Hitler and that an Army coup could not succeed unless it had the assured support of a majority of middle-ranking officers. This, contended Halder, the coup would not have. At the same time, he discussed (with Gisevius, among others) the idea of a bomb attack on Hitler’s train made to look like an accident. Gisevius is cutting about how this rather underhand assassination idea sat with Halder’s pretensions to a high moral stance. Halder’s reasons for not doing anything looked like excuses for cowardly inaction. And yet Halder, in what seems to have been genuine agitation, talked about having a pistol in his pocket ready for the express purpose of shooting Hitler down — it was just that, when it came to it, he could not bring himself to do it.

Where Halder indisputably failed wis by not coming down on one side of the fence or the other. For such a key man to dither was a great hindrance to the Resistance.

Meanwhile, Hitler was not remotely appeased by the Munich Agreement. Within a month secret operations were afoot to take over what remained of Czechoslovakia. Despite being let down so badly by Britain once, the conspirators, when they learned of Hitler’s intention, again began to plan against the dictator. Britain and France had, after all, said at Munich ‘thus far and no farther’ — and Britain had speeded up its rearmament programme. But Hitler, ever vigilant, caused anyone suspected of disloyalty to be removed from the centre of activity. Witzleben was transferred from his Berlin command to Frankfurt in November 1938.

The Führer had outfaced the Allies once again and his stature was at its height. Although there was no enthusiasm for war in Germany, the popular feeling shared by the generals was that Hitler stood a good charice of taking the rest of Czechoslovakia without risking hostilities, and so it proved. There could be no unity against him, therefore any coup risked plunging the country into civil war. Even Witzleben recognised this, and top generals like Alexander von Falkenhausen, who later joined the conspiracy when he was Commander-in-Chief of Belgium and Northern France, declined — though not unsympathetically — an approach to join the Resistance made at about this time by Adam von Trott zu Solz, an old acquaintance from the days when they had both been working in China, Trott as a diplomat, Falkenhausen as military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek.

Taking advantage of a threat of annexation which Hungary was hanging over Slovakia, Hitler so engineered matters politically that on 14 March 1939 the regional government in Pressburg (Bratislava) declared Slovakia’s autonomy, and placed the new country under German protection. At the same time, the elderly and ill new president of Czechoslovakia (following Beneš’ resignation), Emil Hácha, was summoned to Berlin. There, he was forced to wait several hours at the Adlon Hotel before being summoned down Wilhelmstrasse to the Reich Chancellery in the small hours, where he was subjected to a long, bullying tirade from Hitler, the gist of which was: hand over what you’ve got left or we’ll smash it to pieces. Hácha knew by now that no one would come to his aid if he fought. He succumbed.

On 16 March Hitler proclaimed the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from the great castle of Prague, which was also the seat of government. France and Britain did little more than grumble disapproval, though a fortnight later Britain, realising where would be next on Hitler’s list and awakening at last to the real danger he posed, signed an agreement promising unconditional support to Poland in the event of an enemy invasion, and signed similar agreements with Greece, Romania and Turkey. France followed suit.

This action had been taken with the indirect help of the German Resistance. Through the agency of Gisevius, who by now had a consular post in Zurich, Goerdeler had made representations to British contacts in Switzerland. At the same time, briefed by Kleist-Schmenzin, the young Ian Colvin approached his formidable contacts in the British Foreign Office. At last the British lion showed some signs of stirring, and not before time. At the beginning of April, Hitler issued his first orders for ‘Operation White’ — the invasion of Poland.

This was what Beck and Oster had imagined would happen. By now it was clear that Hitler thought he could smash through any obstacle set in his path to get what he wanted; equally, the dictator did not believe that, given their record over Czechoslovakia, the Allies would really do anything for Poland. And if they did decide on action, he had one more diplomatic iron in the fire with the help of which he proposed to crush even them.

On 23 May he summoned his commanders-in-chief to another meeting. He told them that he planned to attack Poland as soon as possible and that, in order to pre-empt a counter-attack from the west, the key military positions in Belgium and Holland would have to be taken over immediately. The fact that those countries were neutral ‘must be ignored’, declared Hitler. ‘The idea that we can get off cheaply is dangerous; there is no such possibility. We must burn our boats; it is no longer a question of justice or injustice, but of life or death for 80 million people.’ And now, realising that the generals would panic at the thought of a two-front war when Germany was not only still not ready, but had not the resources to supply the arms industry with raw materials in the event, he played his trump card: it was possible, he hinted, that Russia might not oppose the invasion of Poland.

Once again Poland was to fulfil its self-perceived destiny of being ‘Christ between two thieves’. The great flat plain of farmland which constituted the country would be swallowed up and shared again between its two powerful neighbours, as it had been between Imperial Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the whole of the nineteenth century.

When Weizsäcker and his fellow conspirators in the Foreign Office learnt this news, they hastened to transmit it to colleagues in the Abwehr. Immediately, preparations were made to communicate Germany’s diplomatic overtures to Russia to the Allies. The British were themselves engaged in negotiating a treaty with Stalin. A series of visits to Britain by a number of different German conspirators with strong British contacts was the result — among them were Goerdeler, the Kordt brothers and the young Adam von Trott zu Solz — but the British were increasingly inclined to view any German with suspicion, and even Chamberlain knew by now that peace could not be maintained for much longer. It is sad to reflect that the one opportunity for peace was still the collapse of the Nazi regime, and the only chance of that was for the British to give credence to, and act on, the information given them by the conspirators. But the conspirators did not represent an alternative party, nor did they seem, to British eyes, to be much more than a loose collection of conservative and liberal individuals: and might they not be German agents? And these emissaries wanted to keep the land Hitler had gained for his adopted country. Also, there was no physical sign of a movement against Hitler which could be encouraged. Now, as so often, Fate was playing along with the Führer.

At home, there had been not a word of dissent by the generals at Hitler’s proposal to launch an unprovoked attack on Poland. Operational plans were in his hands by mid-June. But whereas several generals were still tempted by the idea of a quick war of occupation followed by a quick peace in Poland — in other words, a localised war — there was a handful of others not so sure. Among the most influential was Georg Thomas, the Army’s economic administrator. Thomas was another example of the kind of military man who opposed the regime and, yet aided it in the efficient fulfilment of his duty. He did, however, with the encouragement of Oster and Canaris, draft a long memorandum to Hitler’s lackey, Keitel, in which he stated that there was no way in his view that a localised war could be realised: that the balance of power would thereby have been tipped so far that the Allies would have to react in the interests of international security; and that in such a case the war Germany would be drawn into would be one which she could not physically sustain — in the medium term she would inevitably be starved of munitions and food. Coupled with this, Germany had started the recent arms race, and was ahead in terms of quantity — just; but in terms of sophistication it was the Allies who were ahead, developing weaponry (particularly in the field of warplanes) which was already more advanced than Germany’s.

At the beginning of his career, Hitler had been willing to listen to rational arguments and at times even act on them. Now, even Keitel dismissed Thomas’s ideas. The danger of war did not exist.

France was too degenerate, Britain too decadent, America too uninterested to fight for Poland; and when Thomas begged leave to disagree on the grounds of better information, he was sharply reproved for becoming infected with defeatist pacifism. The Führer’s greatness and superior intelligence, said Keitel, would solve the whole problem to the advantage of Germany
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In the meantime, despite the best efforts of the Resistance to jolt the British out of their complacency over the possibility of a pact being signed between Hitler and Stalin before they could agree on one, Joachim Ribbentrop scored the greatest victory of his diplomatic career. On 23 August he concluded a German-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression with Molotov in Moscow. The British, outmanoeuvred again, at least had the strength to create even closer ties of obligation with Poland as an immediate result. In fact, the British had made no secret of their intention to do this, something which had infuriated Hitler, who had snarled to Canaris a few months earlier when this likelihood had been revealed to him, ‘I’ll cook them a stew they’ll choke on!’ On 22 August, after Ribbentrop had set off for Moscow, Hitler convened a meeting of his top brass at Berchtesgaden, where he gave vent to a four-hour speech — with an interval for an opulent dinner at which caviare was served. The speech was confidential — copies were forbidden, as it amounted to a call to arms; but Canaris was present and able to take it all down verbatim.
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Canaris was thus forewarned of Hitler’s intentions and appalled by them. He later handed his copy of the transcript to Oster for the file Dohnanyi was still building up against the regime, but it has been lost. In it Hitler spoke in no uncertain terms about his projected policy of mass extermination. Was it convenient for most of them to believe that he did not mean to be taken literally?

Hitler was positively crowing. The wavering generals had swung round behind him again, and again his genius appeared to be vindicated. The wild gamble had paid off and it looked, not least to him, as if he could not lose. The Russian alliance had been snatched from the feeble grasp of the British and the French: without it, how could they hope to protect Poland militarily? ‘Our enemies’, boasted the Führer, ‘are men below average, not men of action, not masters. They are little worms. I saw them at Munich...My only fear is that at the last moment some Schweinehund will make a proposal for mediation [over Poland].’

Still the Resistance hung on, though this was one of their darkest hours. The generals, who had barely responded to the events of
Kristallnacht
, made no objection now when Hitler told them that he planned to unleash SS death squads behind the lines of a conquered Poland. With their double-standard morality and sense of honour they seemed to be able to lull themselves into thinking that so long as their own hands were clean, it did not matter what the government saw fit to do with the people they had placed at its mercy. Schacht told Brauchitsch and Halder that a declaration of war without reference to the Reichstag was an illegal and unconstitutional act, but any hope the Resistance might have had of the commanders of the Army arresting Hitler as a result were torpedoed by their reply, which was that Schacht himself would be arrested if he tried to set foot in OKH HQ. Beck’s own last-minute appeals too fell on deaf ears. The date of the invasion of Poland was set for 26 August.