70 years ago on this
date, April 9, 1945, six German Resistance Members were executed by hanging at
Flossenbürg concentration camp. As the German Resistance had inspired the
comrades of Unit 1012, let us not forget them and remember them as heroes who
stood against evil.
We will
post information about one of the six, Generalmajor Hans Oster, the Deputy of
Abwehr from Wikipedia and other links.
 |
|
Hans
Oster in 1939
|
Born
|
9
August 1887
Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony, German Empire |
Died
|
9 April
1945 (aged 57)
Flossenbürg concentration camp, Nazi Germany |
Allegiance
|
|
Service/branch
|
Abwehr
|
Years of
service
|
|
Rank
|
|
Battles/wars
|
|
Hans Paul Oster (9 August 1887 – 9 April
1945) was a German Army general who was also a leading figure of the German resistance
from 1938 to 1943. As deputy head of the counter-espionage bureau (Abwehr),
Oster was in a strong position to conduct resistance operations under the guise
of intelligence work. But he was dismissed for helping Jews to avoid arrest.
And after the failed July Plot on Hitler’s life, the Gestapo seized the diaries
of Wilhelm Canaris, in which Oster’s treachery was revealed. In April 1945, he
was hanged with Canaris and Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Flossenbürg concentration
camp.
Early
career
He was born in Dresden, Saxony in
1887, the son of an Alsatian pastor of the French Protestant Church. 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 demilitarised zone of the Rhineland, where Reichswehr
officers were prohibited.
He soon found a job in a new
organisation which Hermann Göring 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.
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) extrajudicially 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.
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.” 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
mobilise 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
travelled 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 demoralised 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.
 |
|
Flossenbürg concentration camp,
Arrestblock-Hof: Memorial to members of German resistance executed on April 9,
1945. Translation: "In resistance against dictatorship and terror, they
gave their lives for freedom, justice, and human dignity."
|
Death
Oster was arrested one day after the
failed 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. On 4 April 1945, the diaries of
Admiral Canaris were discovered, and in a rage upon reading them, Hitler
ordered that the conspirators be executed.
On 8 April 1945, Oster, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris, and other
anti-Nazis were convicted and sentenced to death by an SS drumhead
court-martial presided over by Otto Thorbeck. At dawn the next day, Oster,
Bonhoeffer and Canaris were hanged in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. They
were forced to strip naked before being taken to the gallows. The camp was
liberated two weeks later by American forces.
Fabian von Schlabrendorff, one of the few
major coordinators of anti-Nazi activities to survive the war, described Oster
as "a man such as God meant men to be, lucid and serene in mind,
imperturbable in danger."
Quote
- "He's a man of courage and conviction. And what resolution in his sermons! There should be a handful of such people in all our churches, and at least two handfuls in the Wehrmacht. If there were, Germany would look quite different!"
- Speaking about Msgr. Clemens August Graf von Galen, Roman Catholic bishop and vocal critic of Nazism.
OTHER LINKS:
No comments:
Post a Comment