secretary’s master, not the other way round.
Vansittart was, in short, anything but quiet and unobtrusive. His frequently-voiced concerns about the rise of Hitler were so contrary to the appeasement policy of His Majesty’s Government of the time that one of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s close advisers referred to him as ‘an alarmist, [who] hampered all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states’.
A few days later, Goerdeler had a meeting with Vansittart, no doubt as a result of Young’s report on the National Liberal Club dinner. Afterwards, Van wrote a memorandum to Eden for circulation to the cabinet. In it he underlined Goerdeler’s warnings, referring to the visiting German as ‘an impressive, wise and weighty man [who by coming to Britain is] putting his neck in a halter’.
Vansittart’s minute got no further than Eden’s desk. It did not accord with the prevailing government policy of appeasement, and would therefore, the foreign secretary judged, not be welcomed by his cabinet colleagues.
The minute still exists in Van’s private papers. On it, in Vansittart’s hand, are written the words: ‘Suppressed by Eden’.
2
If there was a soldier in the German army who embodied the antithesis of all that Hitler and the Nazi Party stood for, it was Ludwig Beck.
And yet, he was not one of life’s natural rebels. He was too intellectual, too thoughtful, too careful, too considered and too punctilious (that word again) to be a great plotter – and far too straightforward to be a successful conspirator.
And that was his problem. Like Carl Goerdeler, Ludwig Beck was a man made for a different age than the one in which he found himself.
Also like Goerdeler, Beck at first welcomed the arrival of Hitler and the Nazis on the German scene. In the autumn of 1930 he famously defended young officers in his unit who were court-martialled for being members of the Nazi Party, contrary to the rules of the time which prohibited army officers from political activity. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Beck, whose Lutheran faith had incorporated a degree of anti-Semitism since the days of Luther himself, announced, ‘I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.’
Ludwig August Theodor Beck was born the son of a gifted metallurgical engineer on 29 June 1880 in Biebrich, then a small village on the opposite bank of the Rhine from Mainz. As a middle-class Prussian brought up in the long afterglow of the victories of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing unification of Germany, and living little more than a stone’s throw from Frankfurt, where the treaty which sealed these triumphs was signed, the young Beck’s career would probably have been decided from the moment he was born – he was to be a soldier.
What followed was an education in the classic Prussian military tradition. This produced officers of high professional ability, who regarded a commitment to their country as synonymous with loyalty to their regiment and to the brotherhood of their fellow officers. For these men the Prussian military code, characterised by the motto Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit* (Always practise loyalty and sincerity), was more than a slogan – it was a way of life that they were sworn to follow and protect. Later this sense of loyalty and brotherly solidarity among the officer corps would protect even plotters against the German state from discovery by the security services.
Ludwig Beck’s moral compass, founded on Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit, was different from that of Carl Goerdeler – but its pull was no less strong.
Tall, angular, thin, Beck’s physical appearance closely mirrored his personality. He had the look of an ascetic, with what one colleague described as ‘facial skin so tight as to seem ghoulish, especially on the rare occasions when he smiled’. Another noted his ‘tense, sensitive, finely chiselled face with slightly sunken, rather sad eyes’. To his contemporaries Beck seemed a solitary figure, set slightly apart from the crowd, as though close human contact was strange and uncongenial to him. A committed and practising Lutheran, for Beck, austerity, rectitude and restraint were the guiding principles of his life and the cornerstone of his religious beliefs.
Beck the young officer was no moustachioed, boneheaded Prussian militarist of the sort beloved of cartoonists and popular legend. He was what was known in the Germany of the time as an ‘educated officer’. Like Frederick the Great he was keen on music, and played the violin well. Widely read, knowledgeable and engaged in all aspects of German cultural life, he was fluent in English, an admirer of French culture and, unlike most in the Prussian officer class, engaged freely with politicians. Intellectually disciplined, he was widely recognised as a man of refinement and integrity; in later life he would earn the nickname ‘the philosopher general’.
But Ludwig Beck had his flaws too – they were the flaws which can often weaken the soldier who has more intellect than is needed for the job. He was a man of thought rather than of action, who weighed every step so carefully that he could sometimes miss the fleeting opportunity whose lightning exploitation is the true test of the great commander. One contemporary put it more prosaically: ‘Everyone who knew him, knew he could not be persuaded into a cavalry charge.’ Men looked up to Beck not for his battle-readiness, but for his deep spiritual and intellectual qualities, and for his unshakeable integrity.
Ludwig Beck
By the time the First World War came, Ludwig Beck was an experienced thirty-four-year-old professional soldier, widely regarded as a man on the way up. He spent most of the first three years of the war as a staff officer on the Western Front, earning a reputation for diligence and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. He worked such long hours at the front that he was forced to give up his beloved violin. In May 1916 he took a few days’ leave from the front to marry Amalie Pagenstecher, the daughter of a Bremen merchant and, at twenty-three, twelve years Beck’s junior. Nine months later the couple had a daughter, Gertrud. Then, in November 1917, tragedy struck when Amalie suddenly died. Beck arranged for Gertrud’s care and swiftly returned to his duties at the front line. After the war ended he took over his daughter’s upbringing himself, throwing himself into the task with typical dedication and energy.
A period commanding an artillery regiment in present-day Baden-Württemberg followed, before Beck was posted to the Department of the Army in Berlin in 1931. He arrived in the capital just in time to have a ringside seat for the final stages of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Beck’s job was to lead a team tasked with producing the German army’s new operations manual, the Truppenführung, which first appeared in 1933. A modified version of this widely acclaimed work is still in use in the German Federal Army of today. In 1932 Beck was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, he was made head of the army department. By this time the army department had effectively become the German general staff, despite an explicit prohibition against the creation of such an organisation in the Versailles Treaty. Beck threw himself into his new task with his usual ferocious energy. He rose each morning at 5.30 and rode from six to eight, before being driven to army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse at 8.30. He worked in his office overlooking the courtyard from 9 a.m. until seven in the evening, when he returned home to dine. After dinner he did paperwork for a further three hours, before retiring to bed punctually at midnight.
These long hours were not spent
