An Honourable Defeat (6 page)

Nevertheless a Resistance to Nazism had been formed among those various groups which had either already suffered for their dissident views, or which (like elements within the Church) perceived the immoral and unethical dynamic behind the Nazi philosophy. Certain individuals, like Fritz von der Schulenburg, an aristocratic career official who had joined the Nazi Party because he believed in its socialist aims, had quickly become disaffected. For many more, the Night of the Long Knives was the moment of disabuse. Among them was a man who became a key player in the Resistance. He was confronted by decisions which demanded the very highest courage because they involved the lives of thousands of his countrymen. The full story did not emerge until after the war, and then for many years even those sympathetic to the Resistance branded him a traitor to Germany. His name was Hans Oster.

Like his fellow conspirator Ludwig Beck, Oster was a career officer who came neither from an aristocratic nor a Prussian family. He was the son of a Saxony parson, born in Dresden in 1887. The family had a liberal, humanistic outlook and Oster was devoted to his cultivated mother, who died when he was seventeen. Oster grew up a keen horseman and a good cellist. (In passing it is interesting to note just how many of the conspirators were musically gifted. Beck was an accomplished violinist, for example; and Stauffenberg, also a cellist, whose story dominates the latter half of this account, was gifted enough to consider a musical career.)

Oster joined the newly formed 48 Artillery Regiment in March 1907 and thus started a solid military career which was aided by his own self-confident and optimistic personality. In 1912 he made an advantageous marriage to Gertrud Knoop, the daughter of a lawyer, with whom he had three children. The middle son, Harald, was to commit suicide aged twenty-five in the wake of the disaster at Stalingrad, though Oster never learnt the truth of this.

In the First World War he saw action at Yser and in Champagne, earning the Iron Cross First and Second Class and the Knight’s Cross with Swords. He joined the Imperial General Staff in 1917, and was fortunate enough to keep his place in the Army after the defeat. Like most professional soldiers, he was no friend of the Weimar Republic, though he served it loyally. Unlike most of his colleagues, he was a bit of a maverick. It was unusual for a Captain of the General Staff to speculate on the Stock Exchange before work, for example, or to ride a bicycle to the office.

His peacetime career advanced steadily, bringing him into contact with many other officers who would later find their comradeship put to the test under Hitler. He also came into contact with the Nazis, but regarded their politics and their chances of success with scepticism. Nevertheless, in common with most professional soldiers, he accepted Hitler when he came to power.

Oster was slightly built, with an intelligently humorous face. He is by far the least military-looking of all the German generals. His daughter remembers him as a strict father, but also one who was never remote. Those who served with him and worked for him also remember a man who was easy-going without ever losing his authority. His chief pleasure remained riding — he was passionate about it — and the walls of his daughter’s drawing room today are covered with his hunting trophies.

He was stationed in Münster in the early thirties when his career as a staff officer suffered a fatal blow. By now a major, he had been having an affair with a senior officer’s wife. When this was discovered, Oster offered the wronged husband a duel, but this was refused and Oster had to leave active service in the winter of 1932-33. Fortunately there were no domestic or material repercussions for him; his wife was rich and stood by him, and they were able to keep their flat on in Münster. Nevertheless early in 1933 he was in Berlin seeking new employment. In Potsdam for 21 March, he was one of the few not taken in by Hitler’s masquerade. He was, however, sceptical of the new regime rather than opposed to it.

Oster was unsuccessful in finding a fresh opening in active service, though he was still permitted the right to wear his uniform. However he was offered a job in Göring’s so-called ‘Research Department’ (a kind of proto-secret police organisation), where he stayed for a short time, listening in to telephone conversations. He was approached by the SS, but turned them down, as he was becoming increasingly suspicious of Nazi ideology. In October 1933, he accepted a job in the Abwehr, then under the command of Conrad Patzig. This brought him into contact with the Gestapo (which Göring had founded in April 1933 and which Himmler would take over almost exactly a year later), the regular police and the SS. Hans Bernd Gisevius, the enormously tall lawyer who was one of the few survivors of the Resistance, met Oster at about this time and was able, as an employee of the Gestapo who was already working against the regime, to provide him with documentation on Nazi Security Service crimes as Oster began his own work against Hitler.

The Resistance, of course, was still barely an idea — a few pockets of like-minded individuals collecting information here and there, doing what they could without an overall plan, perhaps trying to build up files on the Nazis to be used in trials against them after the collapse of the regime. At this stage Oster could have had no idea how long his crusade was going to be. Like everyone else involved in the Resistance, he would spend long years under the terrible pressure of playing a double game, having to fulfil his official duties and at the same time — or rather, in what would otherwise have been his leisure hours — work in the interests of the enemy for the sake of long-term stability and the rehabilitation of Germany. ‘My father was fully aware of what he was doing,’ his daughter says. ‘His decisions were based on logic and ultimately on humane considerations. Few people were in a better position to alter the course of events, and my father was a man of action. Once he had decided on a course of action he would stay on it. The risk of drawing the odium of treachery upon himself didn’t seem too high a price to pay.’ She also remembers how the years of stress took their toll, that he became grimmer and moodier. An additional pressure on the conspirators was secrecy. They could share their feelings and confidence with virtually no one else. In the case of their families, it was for their own protection. Few Germans were unaware of the methods of the Gestapo.

Despite the need for discretion, Oster could be very careless. He had to involve his wife because she could speak English and he needed her to translate the BBC broadcasts for him, but he often voiced his opinion of the regime very clearly and in untested company. He would argue the state of things so loudly with Gisevius when the latter visited the Osters’ Berlin flat that Gertrud had to beg them to lower their voices lest the neighbours hear. On another occasion, travelling by car with Gisevius to visit a senior Army officer involved in the conspiracy, Oster casually took a file of secret coup plans with him. When the Field Marshal learned of this, he was outraged: what did Oster imagine would have happened if he had had a car crash, for example? And yet the same man was able to build up his own anti-Nazi intelligence unit within the Abwehr and run it successfully for ten years. It was a quirk of fate that finally brought him down.

It was Oster’s single-minded dedication to the Resistance that finally converted General Ludwig Beck to their cause. Given the contrast in Beck’s and Oster’s temperaments it is not surprising that Beck’s conversion was effected as late as 1938. Oster had seen early how valuable an addition Beck would be to the Resistance group: his long experience and the high regard in which he was held would give the opposition movement great kudos. The Chief of the Abwehr Admiral Canaris had already tried to sway the hesitant Beck in January and February 1938, but it was Oster and his bravery that made a strong personal impression on the general. Both Oster and Beck were passionate riders, and the shared interest provided an excuse for several excursions into the Grünewald, where the horsemen could discuss Resistance matters undisturbed. Oster worked hard on Beck in his pragmatic way, and it is regrettable if not tragic that Beck became the spiritual head of the Military Opposition only after his retirement from Army service — something he himself acknowledged almost immediately, as he continued to believe for a long time that Hitler could be dissuaded rather than forced from his course of action. But as a retired officer, Beck had no executive power in official circles at all. The friendship with Oster continued and deepened, however, creating one of the strongest links in the chain of the senior Resistance.

Beck was given to lengthy consideration and reflection, a soldier who spent thirty-two of his forty years’ Army service in the General Staff, a man whose manner and appearance were far more those of an academic than an officer. Never a National Socialist, he had a certain sympathy for Hitler’s military and territorial aims, and his conversion to the anti-Nazi camp was a gradual process, built as much on practical as moral considerations.

He was born in 1880, the son of a Rhineland engineer who on account of bad eyesight had been the first to break the military tradition of the family. Beck grew up in a cultured household, a reserved and sensitive child whose favourite subjects were literature, history and mathematics. He always intended to join the Army, and was a captain in the General Staff by the time he was thirty-three.

He married in the spring of 1916, and his only child, a daughter, was born the following January. In November of that year, his wife died of tuberculosis. Beck was given the news on the West Front. His reaction throws an interesting light on his character. He was a talented musician, yet now he laid down his violin for ever. He never remarried, or had any relationship with another woman. Wherever he moved in the course of his subsequent military career, one room was designated as his wife’s, and decorated and furnished precisely as her room had been during their brief marriage.

His daughter, who was brought up by relatives but who joined him at the age of fourteen, remembers that the Army was his life. He was an ascetic man — his pleasures taking the form of an occasional glass of wine and the odd cigar, though he liked thoroughbred horses, the interest which formed the basis for his friendship with Oster.

Beck certainly did not react to the rise of Nazism with antipathy. Like Oster he regretted the fall of Imperial Germany, though he had served the Republic conscientiously. He was depressed by the imposition of the Oath of Loyalty to Hitler, but although his secretary at the time, Luise Benda (later married to the Nazi general, Alfred Jodl), remembers his referring to 2 August as ‘the blackest day of my life’, he did take the oath, and there is every indication that he still believed at that stage that Hitler would uphold the German military tradition and even be its saviour. Only later did he express to his brother Wilhelm his regret at not having obeyed his initial instinct to resign over the matter.

Hitler as defender of the Army was certainly the gist of his speech to the War Academy on its 125th anniversary in October 1935, and it is also significant that he wholeheartedly approved of General Ludendorff, giving a radio broadcast loud in his praise on his seventieth birthday in April 1935. Ludendorff was one of the most prominent generals of the First World War, and a vigorous and active supporter of Hitler’s abortive putsch in 1923. Beck had no second thoughts about Germany’s moral right to have waged the Great War. He shared this attitude with most officers of his age and conservative outlook.

Such views did not preclude opposition to Hitler, especially as the Führer’s ambitions and demands became increasingly outrageous, branding him unbalanced. Many secret discussion groups sprang up in Nazi Germany which contributed to the Resistance cause in keeping the spirit of free thinking alive. Among these was the Wednesday Club. It was composed of sixteen distinguished scientists, including the eminent surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Johannes Popitz — the only member of the Resistance to hold a post in Hitler’s Cabinet, as Finance Minister of Prussia — and the conservative academic Professor Jens Jessen. Two specialist members were invited to join, as political and military experts. One was the Ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell; the other was Ludwig Beck. All were to be involved in the Resistance; many of them died as a result.

Beck was no pacifist, but he was convinced of France’s military superiority, and, in his attitude to war, he mirrored the great early nineteenth-century German strategist and military thinker, General von Clausewitz, whose central premise was that war is a continuation of politics, to be used only when all other means of resolving a problem have failed. That this view is in direct contrast to Hitler’s need hardly be stressed.

Beck’s career was exemplary. By 1930 he was a Major-General,
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but in that year came a crisis: two of the young officers under his command in 5 Artillery Regiment, Fulda, were accused of distributing Nazi propaganda. This was in contravention of Army regulations, which decreed that no soldier should have any political affiliation. Beck accepted the accusation, but, angry at not having been advised of it in advance, offered his resignation. It was refused, and Beck resumed his career. He became a Lieutenant-General in 1932, and joined Army Command, Berlin, under Kurt von Hammerstein, in October 1933. He was pleased to see the SA crushed during the action of the Night of the Long Knives, but he may well have genuinely believed that the method of the SA’s destruction posed a threat to national security. Certainly he was disturbed at the deaths of Schleicher and von Bredow, and this probably marked the beginning of his disquietude at the Nazi regime. A stickler for order himself, he would not have liked such flagrant flouting of the law. Further, he was distressed at Blomberg’s refusal to stand up to Hitler over the killings of his brother officers. Blomberg once more actively supported Hitler in this case, arguing that, as Hitler was the supreme lawgiver, it was his right to dispose of traitors as he saw fit. The Army Establishment would have argued that the two generals at least had the right to a hearing before a court martial.