Hans Oster | |
|---|---|
 Oster in 1939 | |
| Deputy Chief of theAbwehr | |
| In office 1935 – 21 July 1944 | |
| Leader | Wilhelm Canaris |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Hans Paul Oster (1887-08-09)9 August 1887 |
| Died | 9 April 1945(1945-04-09) (aged 57) |
| Cause of death | Execution by hanging |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | German Empire Weimar Republic Nazi Germany German Resistance to Nazism |
| Branch/service | |
| Years of service | 1907–1932 1935–1944 |
| Rank | Generalmajor |
| Battles/wars | World War I World War II |
GeneralmajorHans Paul Oster (9 August 1887 – 9 April 1945) was a general in theWehrmacht and a leading figure of theanti-Nazi German resistance from 1938 to 1943. As deputy head of the counter-espionage bureau in theAbwehr (German military intelligence), Oster was in a good position to conduct resistance operations under the guise of intelligence work.
He was involved in theOster conspiracy of September 1938 and was arrested in 1943 on suspicion of helpingAbwehr officers that were caught helping Jews to escape Germany. After the failed 1944July Plot on Hitler's life, during an interrogation, he namedAdmiralWilhelm Canaris, the head ofAbwehr, as the "spiritual founder of the Resistance Movement". The Gestapo arrested Canaris and eventually found his diaries, in which Oster's anti-Nazi activities were revealed. In April 1945, he was hanged with Canaris andDietrich Bonhoeffer atFlossenbürg concentration camp.
Oster was born inDresden,Saxony in 1887, the son of anAlsatian pastor of the French Protestant Church.[1] He entered the artillery in 1907 and inWorld War I, he served on theWestern Front until 1916, when he was appointed as captain to theGerman General Staff. After the war, he was thought of well enough to be kept in the reducedReichswehr, whose officer corps was limited to 4,000 by theTreaty of Versailles. He had to resign from the army in 1932, when he got into trouble with a married woman.[2]
He soon found a job in a new organisation whichHermann Göring set up under thePrussian police. He transferred to theAbwehr in October 1933. It was in this connection that he metHans Bernd Gisevius andArthur Nebe, who were working in theGestapo and became conspirators. Oster also became a confidant of Admiral Canaris.[3]
Like many other army officers, Oster welcomed theNazi regime. However, his opinion changed after the 1934Night of the Long Knives in which theSchutzstaffel (SS) murdered many of the leaders of the rivalSturmabteilung (SA) and their political opponents, including GeneralKurt von Schleicher, the second-to-lastChancellor of theWeimar Republic andGeneralmajor (Major General)Ferdinand von Bredow, former head of theAbwehr. In 1935, Oster was allowed to re-join the army but never on theGeneral Staff. By 1938, theBlomberg–Fritsch Affair andKristallnacht (the Nazi-led pogrom against Jews in Germany), turned his antipathy into a hatred of Nazism and a willingness to help save Jews.[4] During the Fritsch crisis, Oster metGeneraloberst (Colonel General)Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General Staff, for the first time, making the connections for theOster conspiracy of September 1938.[5]
Oster's position in theAbwehr was invaluable to the conspirators;Abwehr could provide false papers and restricted materials, disguise conspiratorial activities as intelligence work, link disparate resistance cells, 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 invadeCzechoslovakia. In August 1938, Beck spoke openly at a meeting of army generals inBerlin about his opposition to a war with the Western powers over Czechoslovakia. When Hitler was informed of that, 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".[6]
Oster, Gisevius andHjalmar Schacht urged Halder and Beck to stage a coup against Hitler. However, the army generals argued that they could mobilise support among the officer corps only if Hitler made overt moves towards war. Halder asked Oster to draw up plans for a coup, and it was eventually agreed that Halder would instigate the coup when Hitler committed an overt step towards war. Emissaries of the conspirators travelled to Britain, with the assistance of Oster and theAbwehr, to urge the British to stand firm against Hitler over theSudeten crisis. On 28 September, theBritish Prime MinisterNeville Chamberlain agreed to ameeting in Munich, where he accepted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Hitler's diplomatic triumph undermined and demoralised the conspirators. Until that time Halder seemed keen to stage a coup.[7]
As war again grew more likely in mid-1939, the efforts for a coup were revived. Oster was still in contact with Halder and Witzleben. However, many officers, particularly those from the PrussianJunker background, were strongly anti-Polish and saw a war to regainDanzig and other lost eastern territories as justified. After the outbreak ofWorld War II, resistance in the army became harder to contemplate since it could lead to the defeat of Germany. When Hitler decided to attackFrance soon after the Polish campaign in 1939, Halder along with other senior generals, thought it to be hopelessly unrealistic and again entertained the idea of a coup, urged by Oster and Canaris. When Hitler vowed to destroy thespirit ofZossen (the headquarters of the Army High Command), meaning defeatism, Halder feared that the conspiracy was about to be discovered and destroyed all incriminating documents.[8]
Oster informed his friendBert Sas, theNetherlands' military attaché in Berlin, more than twenty times the date of the postponedinvasion of the Netherlands.[9] Sas passed the information to his government but was not believed. Oster calculated that his treason could cost the lives of 40,000 German soldiers and wrestled with his decision. However, he then concluded that it was necessary to prevent millions of deaths that would occur in the protracted war after Germany was denied an early victory.[10]
The period between 1940 and 1942 was the nadir of German resistance. Some officers were pleased to be wrong to have feared military disaster. Others still opposed Hitler and the Nazi regime but felt that his enormous popularity with the people made any action impossible. Tireless, Oster rebuilt a resistance network. In 1941, when the systematic extermination ofEuropean Jews began after the invasion of theSoviet Union, hisAbwehr group established contact with the resistance group ofHenning von Tresckow inArmy Group Centre. In 1942, his most important recruit was GeneralFriedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office, at theBendlerblock in central Berlin, who controlled an independent system of communications to reserve units all over Germany. The Oster group supplied British-made bombs to Henning von Tresckow's group for their attempts to assassinate Hitler in 1943.[11]
In 1943, theAbwehr group's rescue efforts for Jews were exposed by theGestapo and Oster was dismissed from his post.Hans von Dohnanyi, who joined theAbwehr shortly before the war andDietrich Bonhoeffer, theLutheran theologian and Dohnanyi's brother-in-law, helped 14 Jews to flee toSwitzerland disguised asAbwehr agents inOperation U-7 [de]. Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were arrested on charges of alleged breach of monetary exchange laws, amongst others, with the leading German insurance brokers Jauch & Hübener, Captain Walter Jauch of theJauch family, a first cousin-in-law of Oster, and Otto Hübener later being hanged. Oster was placed under house arrest.[12]
Generalmajor 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 all current and past conspirators—Oster among them—be executed.[13]
On 8 April 1945, Oster,Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris, and other anti-Nazis were convicted and sentenced to death by an SSdrumhead court-martial presided over byOtto Thorbeck. All three were hanged on the dawn of the next morning in theFlossenbürg concentration camp.[14]
Fabian von Schlabrendorff, one of the few senior anti-Nazis to survive the war, described Oster as "a man such as God meant men to be, lucid and serene in mind, imperturbable in danger".[15]
Oster had two sons: one of them was aOberleutnant who fought at Stalingrad. He committed suicide by putting a blanket over his head and shooting himself near the end of the siege.[16]
Media related toHans Paul Oster at Wikimedia Commons