Nor, unless the army leadership could have been stirred into action, could they have achieved anything. But the army leadership, as we have seen, was weakened and divided. We noted something of the feeling among the generals after Hitler’s speech at the Berghof on 22 August. The mood was much the same in the tense days that followed. Some leading officers thought Hitler’s optimism about the non-intervention of the West was likely to prove false. Others still thought the conflict could be localized. Most were sceptical, anxious even, but fatalistic and in depressed frame of mind. Resignation, not gung-ho enthusiasm for war, prevailed. But it was no platform for opposition.311 Compliance, even if reluctant on the part of some generals, was all that was needed. Hitler remained unhindered by any action such as that which Beck had mooted at the height of the Sudeten crisis the previous year, by any threat of refusal to collaborate in the destruction of Poland.
Close to the epicentre of power in the Reich, but following a line that differed from that of both Hitler and Ribbentrop, was Göring, now attempting something of a comeback after months in the doldrums. Over the summer he had tried through three intermediaries — the Swedish millionaire Axel Wenner-Gren, his own deputy in the Four-Year Plan organization Helmut Wohltat, and, as we have seen, Birger Dahlerus, also a Swede — to coax the British into negotiations.312 Predictably, nothing had come of such moves. The mood in the British government was not amenable to initiatives resting on major concessions to Germany, based on unclear authority, and leaving Hitler’s power untouched, the future potential for aggression undiminished. Göring was certainly anxious to avoid war with Britain, at least until Germany was ready for the big showdown. His entire political thinking over the previous years had rested on a rapprochement with Britain. This strategy was faced with imminent ruin, a development which Göring blamed exclusively on Ribbentrop. But, ultimately, Göring had no real alternative to offer Hitler. His informal approaches were no more successful than Hitler’s threats in severing the British from the Poles. Nor did he have the will to stand up against Hitler. For all the differences in emphasis, Göring remained Hitler’s man through and through.313
Göring was scarcely alone in blaming the war not on Hitler, but on Ribbentrop. It was the view, among others, of Dahlerus, Hassell, Hewel, Papen, Weizsäcker, and the British Ambassador Henderson.314 Unquestionably, Ribbentrop’s self-certainty, derived from his ‘understanding’ of the British and his absolute conviction that in the end they would not fight over Poland, helped to influence Hitler in his miscalculation.315 Despite the impression he tried to leave behind in his memoirs, Ribbentrop had — as in the previous year — been an outright warmonger, his crass aggression fuelled by smouldering resentment at his treatment in Britain. Alongside Goebbels and Himmler he could always be relied upon to egg on Hitler. While he acted, as always, as an amplifier, it is — given the domineering assertiveness of Hitler and his own fawning subservience — difficult to imagine Ribbentrop as the moving force. Hitler’s liaison officer with army command, Nikolaus von Vormann, had in retrospect no doubts about the relationship: ‘Hitler did not believe in a war with the western powers because he did not want to believe in it. From the difference in character and on the basis of the entire atmosphere in the Führer headquarters’ — he evidently meant, since he was writing of the last days before the war, the Reich Chancellery — he concluded ‘that the initiative rested with Hitler and that the essentially submissive
