In 1938, a small group of German generals almost did what no one else had dared. They planned to storm the Reich Chancellery and seize Adolf Hitler. The operation sat in the hands of Franz Halder, the army’s chief of staff. He was ready to give the order.
Then the news came from Britain. The prime minister was flying to Munich. The crisis over Czechoslovakia would not spark a war after all. Halder called everything off, and within days, the plotters burned their papers in a fireplace.
It was the closest the senior officers ever came to stopping Hitler. What those officers actually thought of their Führer ran from open hatred to something close to worship. Yet it barely changed how they served him. Halder was the unlikeliest man to plan a coup.
A devout Bavarian artillery officer, precise and gifted, he had risen through the ranks on pure ability. To him, Hitler was no leader to admire. He was a dangerous amateur playing at strategy with an army other men had built. Franz Halder felt that way.
He was not the only one. General Kurt von Hammerstein, the army’s commander when Hitler took power, hated the Nazis so much that he once begged President Hindenburg not to make Hitler chancellor. Within a year, he was pushed out of command. Others mocked from a safer distance.
Hindenburg himself was said to have called Hitler “the Bohemian corporal,” a jab at his rank and birthplace that the aristocrats in the officer clubs loved to repeat. At the other end stood the true believers. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the war minister, was so smitten with Hitler that his colleagues called him “the rubber lion”—stern on the outside, soft in the leader’s presence. Wilhelm Keitel, who would run the armed forces high command, turned into such a yes-man that officers changed his name into a pun that meant “lackey.
” Göring joked that Keitel had the mind of a sergeant in the body of a field marshal. In the middle sat almost everyone else. Most officers disliked Hitler’s manners and his origins, but they wanted what he delivered. He tore up the Treaty of Versailles, which had limited the army to 100,000 men and stripped it of tanks, aircraft, and a general staff.
He poured money into rearmament. He crushed the political left they feared. For a professional soldier, that transformation was intoxicating. Private opinion, though, was one thing.
Obedience was another. In the summer of 1934, Hitler found a way to bind the officer corps to him personally. It began with a purge. The SA, the brown-shirted stormtroopers who had helped Hitler rise to power, had swelled beyond two million men.
Their chief, Ernst Röhm, wanted them to swallow the regular army and become a revolutionary force of their own. To the professional officer corps, barely 100,000 strong, that was a mortal threat. At the end of June, Hitler struck first. Röhm and the SA leaders were swept away in what the regime called the Night of the Long Knives.
The generals welcomed it. The rival that threatened them was gone. But the purge reached into their own ranks too. Two retired generals, Kurt von Schleicher, a former chancellor, and Ferdinand von Bredow, died in those days.
It was a plain warning that the new government would settle scores with soldiers as well. The army command said almost nothing, and its silence cost more than anyone knew. Weeks later came the decision that bound the officer corps to Hitler forever. On August 2, 1934, President Hindenburg died.
That same day, before the old marshal was even buried, every soldier in Germany was made to swear a new oath. The old pledge had bound them to the constitution. The new one bound them to Adolf Hitler by name, promising unconditional obedience to him as supreme commander. It was Blomberg, the rubber lion, who pushed the oath through, hoping to tie Hitler closer to the army.
He had created the promise the generals themselves would later use to justify their obedience. Then, in early 1938, Hitler turned on the two men at the very top. Blomberg was forced out over his marriage in January. Within days, the army’s commander-in-chief, Werner von Fritsch, was accused on fabricated evidence of a crime that ended his career.
Both of Germany’s most senior soldiers were gone inside a month. No one lifted a hand to save them. Not the men who despised Hitler, and not the men who adored him. Hitler abolished the war ministry, built a new high command under the compliant Keitel, and named himself Supreme Commander in fact as well as in name.
Now it mattered even less what an officer thought of him. He had bound them by oath, shown he could remove their commanders, and taken direct control of the armed forces. In private they could feel whatever they liked. In public, they obeyed.
But in 1938, a small group of senior officers came closer than ever to turning that private opposition into action. Ludwig Beck, the chief of the general staff, resigned that summer rather than help plan a war he believed would ruin Germany. His successor, Halder, shared that fear and went further. He backed a plan to arrest Hitler if the Führer ordered an attack on Czechoslovakia.
For a brief moment that autumn, many senior officers believed Hitler was leading Germany to disaster. Then the victories began, and they changed a great many minds. Poland fell in weeks in 1939. In the spring of 1940, the German army did in six weeks what it had failed to do in four years of the First World War: it beat France.
Officers who had called Hitler’s plan reckless were stunned. The amateur they had sneered at had overruled his own general staff and been proven right. For a season, even the doubters wondered if he was some kind of genius. Halder, the man who had schemed to remove Hitler two years earlier, spent 1940 filling his journal with one triumphant plan after another.
Success did what threats never could. It silenced the skeptics. In the summer of 1941, Hitler turned east. Halder helped plan the invasion of the Soviet Union.
His staff drafted orders that stripped Soviet officials and prisoners of any protection under the laws of war. The same officer who had once considered removing Hitler was now helping organize his war. Whatever contempt he still carried, it made no difference to what he did. Long after the war, Halder told an American interrogator that in those years he had always carried a loaded pistol when he went in to see Hitler.
Whether that was true or not, the record is plain about what his hand actually did. It signed the orders. Then the invasion stalled, and the old professional contempt returned, sharper than before. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, one of Germany’s most respected commanders, judged that Hitler had talent and nerve but no real military training and no sense of what an army could and could not do.
He was not alone. Up and down the senior ranks, men who had cheered in 1940 now grumbled that a former corporal was overruling field marshals. Again and again, Hitler ignored commanders who were closer to the fighting and knew the situation on the ground. When the Normandy front broke in 1944, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the German commander in the west, was asked what should be done.
He was remembered later as snapping back: “Make peace, you fools. ”
By then, many generals privately believed Hitler was destroying them. But believing it did not change what they did. A small number finally turned to action.
On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried a bomb into Hitler’s headquarters and left it beside a map table. Ludwig Beck, the general who had resigned in 1938, was set to lead the new government. Hitler survived. The plot collapsed within hours, and Beck took his own life that night.
The interrogations that followed dragged up old conspiracies. On July 23, the Gestapo arrested Halder himself and sent him to Flossenbürg and then to Dachau. Most of the generals, though, had never joined. Keitel stayed a lackey to the end, signing whatever was put in front of him.
Manstein was approached more than once and refused every time. “Prussian field marshals do not mutiny,” he was remembered as saying. Even Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Germany’s most famous soldier, was only loosely tied to the plot. In October 1944, two generals came to his home and offered him a choice: a public trial that would ruin his family, or poison and a hero’s funeral.
He took the poison. The oath of 1934 became the ready answer whenever officers were asked why they had not acted. Then the war ended, and the surviving generals began to write. Franz Halder ended up holding the pen.
His hidden diary was found in an attic and carried to Nuremberg, where he testified against the Nazi leaders he had once served. After the trials, the United States Army hired him for a different job. Hungry for intelligence on its new Cold War enemy, it put the former generals to work writing the history of the Eastern Front. From offices in Germany, Halder directed some 700 of them through roughly 2,500 studies.
He told the writers to cut whatever damaged the army’s good name. The legend they built was of a clean, professional Wehrmacht, betrayed by an amateur dictator and innocent of the worst crimes. In memoirs with titles like “Lost Victories,” generals who had obeyed Hitler to the last presented themselves as clear-eyed professionals who had seen through him all along. In 1961, the Americans gave Halder a medal for his help.
He became the only man ever decorated by both Adolf Hitler and an American president. He had despised Hitler enough to plot his arrest. He had served him well enough to help organize a war. And he outlived him long enough to help shape the story that followed.
That was the contradiction at the heart of the German officer corps. There was never one view of Hitler. Men like Hammerstein despised him. Men like Keitel devoted themselves to him.
Most stood somewhere in between. But personal opinion was never enough to overcome the oath, ambition, the thrill of victory, or their own part in Hitler’s wars. After 1945, the survivors made their private contempt the center of the story they told about themselves.
By then, they were the ones writing the history.
