The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

been poor too. Yet now Hitler wanted to wage war with France, who had
the world’s biggest army, and Britain, who had the biggest navy, at the same
time, and with winter on its way.
The majority of the Wehrmacht officer corps thought, as Halder did,
that the plan was insane. Even Keitel, normally the first to kowtow to
Hitler, urged the Führer to reconsider, and, when he refused, offered his
resignation. This too was refused. Halder had tried to dissuade Hitler by
producing a draft plan that, like the German advance in 1914, saw them
making a thrust through Belgium to the coast. So unimaginative was it, he
hoped it would show Hitler the senselessness of such an offensive.
It did nothing of the sort, however. Hitler stuck to his guns, and with
mounting impatience. It was at this point that Halder took on the mantle of
the central figure in Nazi resistance, hatching at Zossen, the headquarters of
the OKH south of Berlin, a plan for a coup d’état and Hitler’s assassination
that involved a number of leading officers, including General Wilhelm
Ritter von Leeb, commander of Army Group C, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,
the head of the Abwehr – the military intelligence service – and General
Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Deputy Chief of Staff of Operations at OKH.
For Halder, however, the plot produced a terrible crisis of conscience. He
did not want to act without sufficient support – yet getting that support was
an extremely risky task. Increasingly, he came to believe that assassinating
the Führer was probably the best option and so through Canaris began
planning to plant some explosives at one of his meetings with Hitler. He
even took to carrying a loaded pistol in his pocket so that he might gun him
down himself.
In the meantime, and with his nerves worn thin, he continued
preparations for the Western offensive, producing a second plan at the end
of October, which in essence was the same, but included a second
simultaneous thrust further south. This was deliberate heel-dragging, and
Hitler knew it. In the Reich Chancellery on 5 November, von Brauchitsch
had tried to explain that his field armies were simply not ready for a major
offensive in the west, only for Hitler to erupt into one of his uncontrollable
rages. Von Brauchitsch had been left stupefied, and later confessed to
Halder that he was unable to deal with Hitler’s iron and maniacal will. Yet
von Brauchitsch rarely stood up to Hitler, which was just as the Führer
wanted it. In part this was because of his fear of Hitler but also because the
Führer had agreed to pay von Brauchitsch’s first wife a substantial divorce