Before Valkyrie: Review of "The Oster Conspiracy of 1936"

From GoodReads:
"September 1938. In power more than five years, Hitler unilaterally dismantled the Treaty of Versailles, provision by provision, daring Britain and France to stand up to him. Earlier that year, he forced Austria into his Third Reich without firing a single shot. Now his sights were set on Czechoslovakia.

It was in this dangerous climate that the first anti-Nazi coup was born. The plot was spearheaded by Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster, and its members included top German military leaders, the Berlin police, local troop commanders, civil authorities, religious leaders, and a group of resisters whose names have been wiped from the pages of history. Their mission was to kill Hitler and to overthrow the Nazi regime."

I knew something of this conspiracy from Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" but had no clue how close to pulling the trigger they came.

Whether the coup would have succeeded is a counter-factual that we can never know. That said, from this book it seems that the conspirators had a better shot at not just killing Hitler but also overthrowing the whole Nazi regime in 1938 than Count Stauffenberg (played by Tom Cruise in Valkyrie) and other later plotters ever had.

Reading about Chamberlain's appeasement policy is always frustrating, especially with Churchill sitting in the wings acting as if he had received a message from the future laying all of WWII out before him. But if you can get your mind into the limited view that these men actually had, you can see the heart-wrenching choices they had to make.

Knowing what WWII would become, the decision is easy. Without that knowledge it is much harder to commit to marching to war or commit to supporting a coup. The amazing thing about the 1938 coup was that this was quite possibly the last moment at which WWII (in Europe) could have been prevented. The Valkyrie plot was seeking to end the war, just to remove an increasingly unstable leader and maybe secure a separate peace with the Western Allies (a peace that was vanishly unlikely in light of Roosevelt's unconditional surrender policy).