Chief of Staff Beck responded with two memoranda of 29 May and 3 June, highly critical both of Hitler’s political assumptions with regard to Britain and France, and of the operational directives for ‘Case Green’.243 Even so, as in his earlier memorandum of 5 May, there was significant overlap with Hitler’s basic assumptions about the need for ‘living-space’ (even if Beck had a much more limited conception of what this implied) and to eliminate — if necessary through war — the state of Czechoslovakia. The ‘cardinal point’ (as he put it) of disagreement was about the prospect of a war against France and Britain which, Beck was certain, Germany would lose.244 Beck was still at this time labouring under the illusion that Hitler was being badly advised by the
At a meeting of around forty army high commanders at Barth in Pom-erania on 13 June, Brauchitsch served initially as Hitler’s mouthpiece, in a morning session informing the assembled officers, most of whom had until then known nothing of Hitler’s directive and were taken completely by surprise, of the decision to solve the Czech problem by force. In such a tense situation, Brauchitsch appealed for, and received, the loyalty of his leading officers. The meeting had been called by Hitler to inform the officers about the Fritsch affair and head off the disaffection about the treatment of the former highly revered army leader which had lingered, and had been growing, since his complete exoneration by a military court.248 By the time Hitler arrived, around noon, Brauchitsch’s surprise announcement about the imminence of war had helped him out of his internal difficulties. Hitler’s subsequent skilfully toned ‘rehabilitation’ of Fritsch — though without restoring him to his office — had then fully warded off the possible crisis of confidence. He ended by taking up the theme introduced by Brauchitsch: in the face of impending danger of war, he appealed to his generals for loyalty.249 The generals complied. Any hopes that Beck — not present at the meeting — might have cherished of a united rejection by the military leadership of Hitler’s Czech adventure were revealed as futile.
Beck’s own position, and the force of his operational arguments, weakened notably in mid-June when the results of war games — initiated by the General Staff itself, and requested neither by Hitler nor the OKW — demonstrated, in contrast to Beck’s grim prognostications, that Czechoslovakia would in all probability be overrun within eleven days, with the consequence that troops could rapidly be sent to fight on the western front.250 His differences with Brauchitsch were unmistakably evident at the concluding discussion of the war-games exercise during the second half of June. Even in the General Staff itself, Beck’s Cassandra warnings were regarded as exaggerated.251 Increasingly despairing and isolated, Beck went so far in summer as to advocate collective resignation of the military leadership to force Hitler to give way, to be followed by a purge of the ‘radicals’ responsible for the high-risk international adventurism.252 ‘The soldierly duty [of the highest leaders of the Wehrmacht],’ he wrote on 1
