Hans Oster

Hans Oster in 1939
Born(1887-08-09)9 August 1887
Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony, German Empire
Died9 April 1945(1945-04-09) (aged 57)
Flossenburg concentration camp, Nazi Germany
49°44′06″N 12°21′21″E? / ?49.734958°N 12.35577°E? / 49.734958; 12.35577? (Execution Site of 20 July 1944 Plot (Nazi Germany Resistance))
Allegiance

German Empire

Weimar Germany

Nazi Germany

Service/branchAbwehr
Years of service

1907?1932

1935?1944

RankBrigadier General
Battles/wars

World War I

World War II

Hans Oster (August 9, 1887 ? April 9, 1945) was a German Army general, deputy head of the Abwehr under Wilhelm Canaris, and an opponent of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He was a leading figure of the German resistance from 1938 to 1943.
Contents

1 Early career

2 Opposition to Hitler

3 Death

4 Quote

5 See also

6 Footnotes

7 Further reading


Early career

He was born in Dresden, Saxony in 1887, the son of an Alsatian pastor of the French Protestant Church.[citation needed] He entered the artillery in 1907. In World War I, he served on the Western Front until 1916, when he was appointed as captain to the German General Staff.

After the war, he was thought of well enough to be kept in the reduced Reichswehr, whose officer corps was limited to 4,000 by the Treaty of Versailles. However, he had to resign from the army in 1932, when he got into trouble because of an indiscretion during the Carnival in the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, where Reichswehr officers were prohibited.

He soon found a job in a new organization which Hermann Goring set up under the Prussian police. He transferred to the Abwehr in October 1933. It was in this connection that he met future conspirators Hans Bernd Gisevius and Arthur Nebe, who were then working in the Gestapo. Oster also became a close confidant of Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.[1]
Opposition to Hitler

Like many other army officers, Oster initially welcomed the Nazi regime, but his opinion soon soured after the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives", in which the Schutzstaffel (SS) extra-judicially murdered many of the leaders of the rival Sturmabteilung (SA) and their political opponents, including General Kurt von Schleicher, last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, and Major-General Ferdinand von Bredow, former head of the Abwehr. In 1935, Oster was allowed to re-enlist in the army, but never on the General Staff. By 1938, the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair and Kristallnacht (the state-sanctioned pogrom against Jews in Germany), turned his antipathy into a hatred of Nazism. In the course of the Fritsch crisis, Oster met General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General Staff, for the first time.[2]

Oster's position in the Abwehr was invaluable to the conspiracy. The Abwehr could provide false papers and restricted materials, provide cover by disguising conspiratorial activities as intelligence work, link various resistance cells that were otherwise disparate, and supply intelligence to the conspirators. He also played a central role in the first military conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, which was rooted in Hitler's intention to invade Czechoslovakia. In August 1938, Beck spoke openly at a meeting of army generals in Berlin about his opposition to a war with the western powers over Czechoslovakia. When Hitler was informed of this, he demanded and received Beck’s resignation. Beck was highly respected in the army and his removal shocked the officer corps. His successor as Chief of Staff, Franz Halder, remained in touch with him and also with Oster. Privately, he said that he considered Hitler “the incarnation of evil.”[3] During September, plans for a move against Hitler were formulated, involving Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, the army commander of the Berlin Military Region, and thus well-placed to stage a coup.

Oster, Gisevius and Schacht urged Halder and Beck to stage an immediate coup against Hitler, but the army generals argued that they could mobilize support among the officer corps for such a step only if Hitler made overt moves towards war. Halder nevertheless asked Oster to draw up plans for a coup. It was eventually agreed that Halder would instigate the coup when Hitler committed an overt step towards war. Therefore, emissaries of the conspirators traveled to Great Britain with assistance of Oster's Abwehr to urge the British to stand firm against Hitler over the Sudeten crisis. On 28 September, however, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to a meeting in Munich, at which he accepted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Hitler's diplomatic triumph undermined and demoralized the conspirators. Halder would no longer support a coup. This was the nearest approach to a successful conspiracy against Hitler before the 20 July plot of 1944.

As war again grew more likely in mid-1939, the efforts for a pre-emptive coup were revived. Oster was still in contact with Halder and Witzleben. But many officers, particularly those from Prussian landowning backgrounds, were strongly anti-Polish and saw a war to regain Danzig and other lost eastern territories as justified.

After the outbreak of World War II, resistance in the army became more problematic since it could lead to defeat of Germany. However, when Hitler decided to attack France soon after the Polish campaign in 1939, Halder along with other ranking generals thought it to be hopelessly unrealistic and again entertained the idea of a coup, urged by Oster and Canaris. However, when Hitler vowed to destroy the "spirit of Zossen" (Zossen was where headquarters of the Army High Command was located), by which he meant defeatism, Halder feared that their conspiracy was about to be discovered and destroyed all incriminating documents.