Hans Oster Almost Prevented the Holocaust

Hans Paul Oster was a deputy head of Abwehr (German military intelligence and counter-intelligence service) … and a leading figure (CEO, practically) of the anti-Nazi German resistance from 1938 to 1943. To put it simply, a traitor (is anyone surprised that Germany lost the Second Great War?)

Still, in the very last days of September of 1938, Hans Oster could have prevented the Holocaust by killing Adolf Hitler (and, most likely, Himmler, Heydrich and G;ring as well) – and destroying the whole Nazi government (F;hrerstaat)… if only his “September Conspiracy” (“Oster Conspiracy”) had been successful. It wasn’t. 

The Oster Conspiracy was a highly detailed plan to overthrow German F;hrer Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime if Germany went to war with Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland (which prior to Munich Agreement was a foregone conclusion).

Oster and his co-conspirators believed (incorrectly) that by using the military force to get back Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia Hitler was getting Germany into a war that they believed it would disastrously lose. It was not the case because neither Britain nor France would go to war with Germany over keeping Sudetenland under Czechoslovakian rule.

The plotters planned to use loyal (to them) Wehrmacht commandos to storm the Reich Chancellery, kill Hitler and other top Nazis and restore the Monarchy under Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the grandson of Wilhelm II.

The plan could have worked because Oster managed to bring on board such powerful Wehrmacht generals as Generaloberst Ludwig Beck (highly influential ex-head of General Staff); General Wilhelm Adam (commander of Military District VII); Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch (Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, no less), Generaloberst Franz Halder (Chief of General Staff), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (chief of Abwehr), and Generalleutnant Erwin von Witzleben.

Witzleben’s units, which garrisoned the Berlin Defense District, were to have played a decisive role in the planned coup. Commando unit led by Count Hans-J;rgen von Blumenthal to lead a storm party into the Reich Chancellery and kill Hitler… and quite likely other leading Nazis.

The conspirators also had contact with Secretary of State Ernst von Weizs;cker and the diplomats Theodor Kordt, Erich Kordt and Hans Bernd Gisevius. Theodor Kordt was considered a vital contact with the British on whom the success of the plot depended; the conspirators needed strong British opposition to Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland. It never happened.

However, Neville Chamberlain, who had no desire to start the Second Great War over such an unimportant matter as who would own the Sudetenland (and needed Hitler as counterweight to both France and the USSR negotiated at length with Hitler and eventually conceded strategic areas of Czechoslovakia to him. French leaders (who had no desire to go to war period) joined him… and the Munich Agreement was the result.

This destroyed any chance of the plot succeeding, as Hitler was then seen in Germany as the greatest statesman of all times at the moment of his greatest triumph, and the immediate risk of war had been neutralized. In other words, support for ousting Hitler and doing away with Nazi regime evaporated.

Was the failure of Oster Conspiracy a good thing? On the one hand, it was as Hitler and his F;hrerstaat (the Third Reich) were the only force capable of saving Germany, Europe and the whole world from being destroyed by Bolshevist hordes (and they did).

On the other hand, their (in the opinion of some historians, almost miraculous) survival on September 30, 1938, paved the way to the Holocaust – in many ways the worst genocide in human history.

Therefore, the (almost mystical) failure of Oster Conspiracy became another major step on the Road to Holocaust – and another slab in the “stack of slabs” that ultimately killed four million Jews.