did not take him long to realise that his hope that Hitler would be a necessary and passing evil after the chaos of the Weimar years was to be confounded. Like Goerdeler and many others, Beck and his army colleagues were horrified by the lawlessness and bloodletting of the Night of the Long Knives, especially when one of the army’s own, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, and his wife were cold-bloodedly murdered in their home.
Three weeks later, an attempted putsch by Austrian Nazis to overthrow their government, in which Hitler’s hand was clearly visible, failed disastrously.
To Beck, who had close contacts in the German Foreign Office, the failed coup confirmed what he had feared for some time: that the long-term consequence – and probably intent – of Hitler’s foreign policy was war. Shortly afterwards, he wrote a memo to his superiors warning that premature foreign adventures would ultimately result in a ‘humiliating retreat’.
Beck, however, went further than predictions. Basing his arguments on religious and moral convictions similar to those of Goerdeler, he asserted, in a way that foreshadows the Nuremberg trials of more than a decade later, that legitimate action by the state and its servants in the army had to be based on morality. To prevent modern conflict becoming total war, he wrote, what was needed was ‘a policy with moral bases which knows to retain its supremacy on the foundation of a new moral idealism in the state itself and in its relations with other nations’. It goes without saying that if such a moral context for state policy and action was what Beck hoped for, he must have known that it could never be found in Hitler and his associates.
On 2 August 1934, a month after the Night of the Long Knives, the death occurred of the eighty-six-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg, the only person whose status and position could act as a counterbalance to Hitler’s growing command of the German state. A little over two weeks later, in a referendum called the day before the old president’s death, 89.9 per cent of Germans voted to combine the offices of president and chancellor, conferring absolute power on Adolf Hitler. All civil servants and members of the armed forces were now required to attend mass rallies and swear an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler (rather than, as previously to ‘the People and Fatherland’): ‘I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life for this oath.’ Beck, who claimed to have been unaware of the full form of the oath until he arrived at the ceremony, declared to a friend afterwards, ‘This the blackest day of my life.’ Later, in a classic Beck afterthought, he confided to another, Hans Bernd Gisevius, that he ‘could never rid himself of the awful thought that at the time he should not, perhaps, have given his oath’.
Very few felt as Beck did. The average officer in the Wehrmacht was delighted by the new mood of militarism in Germany, by the respect the army appeared to receive from Hitler and by the physical consequence of this: increased budgets for the latest arms and equipment, and a massive expansion in numbers. True, some were concerned that the flood of new recruits – especially members of the Hitler Youth, for whom the notion of Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit was as alien as it was quaint – would alter the nature of the German army. Most officers consoled themselves with the thought that the army would change the newcomers before they changed the army; and anyway, since the man to whom they had just sworn absolute fealty clearly needed them, what had they to fear?
Beck was one of very few who understood that the imposition of Hitler’s Führerprinzip (the leader principle), with its demand for absolute obedience, meant the destruction of the normal checks and balances of a democratic state. His answer to this threat was for the army, as Germany’s strongest and most revered institution, to play its role as the essential counterweight needed to keep the state on a safe course. In a normal democratic state, he suggested, military action was tasked and constrained by the political leaders. But if this balance was broken or dysfunctional, the roles should be reversed, and it should become the responsibility of the army to set its own limits for the politicians. ‘It is not what we do,’ he wrote to one of his subordinates in 1935, ‘but how we do it which is so bad. [It is a] policy of violence and perfidy.’ National confidence in Germany’s most illustrious arm, its military, depended, Beck asserted, on the army’s refusal to allow itself to be used as the tool of a foreign policy built on naked adventurism. The army, in short, had a duty to act as the emergency brake on political folly or evil.
Beck was now on territory which was dangerously close to rebellion. Writing to his superior Werner von Fritsch in January 1937, he insisted, ‘All hope is placed in the army. The Wehrmacht will never permit adventure – for able and clever men are its head. Total responsibility rests [on us] for future developments. There is no escaping that.’
It did not take long for Beck to be cruelly disabused of these elaborate niceties.
Hitler’s long-term intentions had for some time been strongly hinted at for those with ears to hear. As early as May 1935, Beck, as chief of staff, had been ordered to start planning for Operation Schulung, an ‘imaginary’ invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the first months of 1937, responding to the mood in Hitler’s Chancellery, Beck began considering how he would implement an order to bring Austria into the German fold.
On 5 November 1937, Hitler finally made plain what had so far only been implied. In a long monologue delivered at a secret meeting with his key military leaders, the chancellor announced that his intention was indeed to go to war with his neighbours: ‘The first German objective … should be to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia simultaneously … the descent upon the Czechs [should be carried out] with lightning speed [and might take place] as early as 1938.’ Hitler stressed that he was not predicting a short conflict – his long-term aim, he warned, was to acquire more ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for Germany’s population by 1943.
Any hope that the army would act as Beck’s hoped-for ‘emergency brake’ on what was now plainly revealed as Hitler’s headlong dash to war vanished in the early months of 1938, when the German army suffered a double blow to both its prestige and its power. It began with a carefully engineered ‘scandal’ which on 27 January ended the career of the then minister of war and commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. Eight days later the head of the army, Colonel General Fritsch, the man to whom Beck had written a few weeks earlier asserting that the army would never permit ‘adventure’, was forced to resign because of an alleged, but entirely manufactured, homosexual encounter with a male prostitute in a backstreet close to a Berlin railway station. The army, in which Beck had invested ‘all hope’, stood silently by and uttered not a squeak of protest at these public crucifixions of two of its most respected officers, or at the step-by-step emasculation of its power and position which ensued. On 4 February, Hitler, seeing this weakness, seized direct personal control of Germany’s military machine, declaring, ‘I exercise henceforth immediate command over the entire armed forces.’
Following the Fritsch affair and Hitler’s takeover of the army, whispered talk began to circulate about the possibilities of taking direct action. Carl Goerdeler lobbied some generals to initiate a coup d’état by using the army to seize Gestapo headquarters. But Ludwig Beck had not yet crossed the Rubicon. Asked at a meeting about this time if he had any comment on the recent events, he responded that the question was improper: ‘Mutiny and revolution are words which will not be found in a German soldier’s dictionary.’
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Beck, still failing to understand the true nature of Hitler’s demonic will, continued to believe that he could divert the coming war by persuasion and legal means.
Again, he was soon proved wrong.
Hitler swiftly consolidated his mastery of the German machine by appointing his most loyal acolyte, Wilhelm Keitel, as chief of the newly created high command of the armed forces, and Joachim von Ribbentrop as his
