September conspiracy

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The September conspiracy is the term used to describe plans and considerations for a coup d'état against Adolf Hitler that were employed by various groups and individuals, especially within the Abwehr, in the summer and September of 1938. These plans were largely driven by Hans Oster , while commanders such as Erwin von Witzleben , Wilhelm Canaris and Ludwig Beck , Ernst von Weizsäcker from the Foreign Office and Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht were involved. The circle around the former Mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, was in indirect contact with this group . While the conspirators agreed that they wanted to prevent the war that threatened during the Sudeten crisis in 1938 by eliminating Hitler, it remained open whether Hitler should be arrested or killed. With the diplomatic solution to the crisis at the Munich conference , the conditions for the coup no longer existed. Subsequently, the circle of conspirators disintegrated.

Planning and failure

In 1938 a resistance group was formed in the Foreign / Abwehr Office, which was able to win commanders for coup plans in Berlin in the event of mobilization . The following were involved:

In addition, the Emperor's grandson Wilhelm of Prussia as the future “Reichsregent” and Colonel General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord were inaugurated in the plans.

According to the plans of the conspirators, on September 28, 1938, at the height of the Sudeten crisis , a shock troop led by Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz and Corvette Captain Franz-Maria Liedig was to penetrate the Reich Chancellery . Hitler was to be arrested and taken to a safe place so that he could later be tried. At a final briefing of the closest circle of conspirators (Oster, Witzleben, Gisevius, Dohnanyi, Heinz and Liedig) in Oster's apartment on September 20, 1938, after Witzleben had left the meeting, the conspirators changed the arrangement on one essential point: Hitler should be during In a staged scuffle they were shot in the Reich Chancellery, because even an accused Hitler, Heinz argued in particular, still posed a danger.

When the surprising news came on September 28, 1938 that Hitler had agreed to the Munich conference with Chamberlain , Daladier and Mussolini on the peaceful settlement of the Sudeten question, his popularity among the population reached a new high. Suddenly Hitler, who had reluctantly agreed to the conference, appeared as the keeper of the peace. The conspirators, "who had hoped to be able to use Hitler's military adventurism as a weapon for his dismissal and annihilation," no longer saw sufficient leverage to strike against Hitler's regime. "'Chamberlain saved Hitler', that's how they bitterly judged the appeasement policy of the Western powers."

Whether the various plans and activities of the men around Witzleben were actually a specific attempt at overthrow is disputed in research. The historian Henning Köhler refers to the low source value of the memoirs by Gisevius and Schacht, on which the research was based for a long time, and emphasizes that there were no concrete plans of how to deal with the numerous National Socialists in the military and administration after a successful attack : "It is [...] a long way from approving radical change to planning a coup".

consequences

The conspirators did not recover from this September shock for a long time . Only a small core continued to hold together, but without the organizational strength to repeat such an undertaking. It was not until the fall of 1943 that Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg succeeded in combining coup plans that went beyond a mere assassination attempt with the plans for " Operation Valkyrie " in order to prepare for the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 .

It was not until September 1944, during an investigation into the assassination attempt on July 20, that the Gestapo came across the 1938 plans for a coup and the names of those who knew about it through files found in a branch office of the Abwehr Office in Zossen . In October 1944, Walter Huppenkothen put Hitler in the picture. This ordered the absolute secrecy of the findings and forbade them to be forwarded to the senior Reich attorney . In the tense military situation on the fronts and the assassination attempt on Hitler, the population should not be further unsettled by the announcement of conspiracy plans from the time before the war.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hans Magnus Enzensberger : Hammerstein or Der Eigensinn. A German story. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-41960-1 .
  2. ↑ Sebastian Sigler : Eduard Brücklmeier , in ders. (Ed.): Corps students in the resistance against Hitler . Duncker & Humblot , Berlin 2014. ISBN 978-3-428-14319-1 , pp. 91-113.
  3. ↑ Peter Hoffmann . Resistance, coup, assassination. The fight of the opposition against Hitler . Ullstein, Frankfurt (M.), Berlin, Vienna 1974, ISBN 3-548-03077-7 , p. 703, footnote 253.
  4. ↑ According to Rochus Misch , access to Hitler's private rooms in the Reich Chancellery was only guarded by a post of Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler sitting at a table . From this guard a staircase with only 22 steps led directly into Hitler's apartment. Misch writes: “Already in the first days I noticed the sparse security precautions. […] I was able to observe very closely that guarding the head of state was not really capitalized ”. Misch reported here that he took up his post in May 1940, but it is unlikely that the security precautions were higher in 1938, in so-called peacetime. Cf. Rochus Misch: The Last Witness. With a foreword by Ralph Giordano . 8th edition, Munich and Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-86612-194-2 , p. 65.
  5. ↑ See Joachim Fest: Coup. The long way to July 20th. Berlin 1994, p. 94.
  6. ↑ Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936-1945. Stuttgart 2000, p. 181.
  7. ^ Henning Köhler: Germany on the way to itself. A history of the century . Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, p. 362 f.
  8. ↑ See Joachim Fest: Coup. The long way to July 20th. Berlin 1994, p. 103.
  9. ^ Susanne Meinl: National Socialists against Hitler. The national revolutionary opposition around Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz . Siedler, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88680-613-8 , p. 326.
  10. ↑ Cf. Jörg Hillmann: Naval officers in the resistance movement