Hans Oster Hans Oster ( 9 August 1887 – 9 April 1945 ) was a German Army general , deputy head of the " Abwehr " under Wilhelm Canaris and an opponent of Adolf Hitler and Nazism . He was a leading figure of the German resistance from 1938 to 1943 . Early career . He was born in Dresden , Saxony in 1887 , the son of an Alsatian pastor of the French Protestant Church . He entered the artillery in 1907 . In World War I , he served on the Western Front until 1916 , when he was appointed as captain to the German General Staff . After the war , he was thought of well enough to be kept in the reduced " Reichswehr " , whose officer corps was limited to 4 , 000 by the Treaty of Versailles . However , he had to resign from the army in 1932 , when he got into trouble because of an indiscretion during the carnival in the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland , where " Reichswehr " officers were prohibited . He soon found a job in a new organisation which Hermann Göring set up under the Prussia n police . He transferred to the " Abwehr " in October 1933 . It was in this connection that he met future conspirators Hans Bernd Gisevius and Arthur Nebe , who were then working in the " Gestapo " . Oster also became a close confidant of Wilhelm Canaris , the head of the " Abwehr " . Opposition to Hitler . Like many other army officers , Oster initially welcomed the Nazi regime , but his opinion soon soured after the 1934 " " Night of the Long Knives " " , in which the " Schutzstaffel " ( SS ) extrajudicially murdered many of the leaders of the rival " Sturmabteilung " ( SA ) and their political opponents , including General Kurt von Schleicher , last of the Weimar Republic , and Major - General Ferdinand von Bredow , former head of the " Abwehr " . In 1935 , Oster was allowed to re - enlist in the army , but never on the General Staff . By 1938 , the Blomberg - Fritsch Affair and " Kristallnacht " ( the state - sanctioned pogrom against Jews in Germany ) , turned his antipathy into a hatred of Nazism . In the course of the Fritsch crisis , Oster met General Ludwig Beck , Chief of the General Staff , for the first time . Oster ' s position in the " Abwehr " was invaluable to the conspiracy . The " Abwehr " could provide false papers and restricted materials , provide cover by disguising conspiratorial activities as intelligence work , link various resistance cells that were otherwise disparate , 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 invade Czechoslovakia . In August 1938 , Beck spoke openly at a meeting of army generals in Berlin about his opposition to a war with the Western powers over Czechoslovakia . When Hitler was informed of this , 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 . ” During September , plans for a move against Hitler were formulated , involving Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben , the army commander of the Berlin Military Region , and thus well - placed to stage a coup . Oster , Gisevius and Schacht urged Halder and Beck to stage an immediate coup against Hitler , but the army generals argued that they could mobilise support among the officer corps for such a step only if Hitler made overt moves towards war . Halder nevertheless asked Oster to draw up plans for a coup . It was eventually agreed that Halder would instigate the coup when Hitler committed an overt step towards war . Therefore , emissaries of the conspirators travelled to Great Britain with assistance of Oster ' s " Abwehr " to urge the British to stand firm against Hitler over the Sudeten crisis . On 28 September , however , Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to a meeting in Munich , at which he accepted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia . Hitler ' s diplomatic triumph undermined and demoralised the conspirators . Halder would no longer support a coup . This was the nearest approach to a successful conspiracy against Hitler before the 20 July plot of 1944 . As war again grew more likely in mid - 1939 , the efforts for a pre - emptive coup were revived . Oster was still in contact with Halder and Witzleben . But many officers , particularly those from Prussian landowning backgrounds , were strongly anti - Polish and saw a war to regain Danzig and other lost eastern territories as justified . After the outbreak of World War II , resistance in the army became more problematic since it could lead to defeat of Germany . However , when Hitler decided to attack France soon after the Polish campaign in 1939 , Halder along with other ranking generals thought it to be hopelessly unrealistic and again entertained the idea of a coup , urged by Oster and Canaris . However , when Hitler vowed to destroy the " " spirit of Zossen " " ( Zossen was where headquarters of the Army High Command was located ) , by which he meant defeatism , Halder feared that their conspiracy was about to be discovered and destroyed all incriminating documents . Meanwhile , in an act that even other conspirators would have regarded as treason , Oster informed his friend Bert Sas , the Netherlands ' military attaché in Berlin , more than twenty times of the exact date of the repeatedly delayed invasion of the Netherlands . 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 , but concluded that it was necessary to prevent millions of deaths that would occur in what would be undoubtedly a protracted war should Germany achieve an early victory . 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 nevertheless succeeded in rebuilding an effective resistance network . In 1941 , when the systematic extermination of European Jews began with the invasion of the Soviet Union , his " Abwehr " group established contact with Henning von Tresckow ' s resistance group in Army Group Centre . In 1942 , his most important recruit was General Friedrich Olbricht , head of the General Army Office headquartered at the Bendlerblock in central Berlin , who controlled an independent system of communications to reserve units all over Germany . Oster ' s " Abwehr " group supplied British - made bombs to Tresckow ' s group for their various attempts to assassinate Hitler in 1943 . However , later in 1943 , the " Abwehr " group ' s efforts to rescue Jews were discovered by the " Gestapo " and Oster was dismissed from his post . Hans von Dohnanyi , who joined the " Abwehr " shortly before the war , and Dietrich Bonhoeffer , the famous Lutheran theologian and Dohnanyi ' s brother - in - law , helped 14 Jews to flee to Switzerland disguised as " Abwehr " agents in Operation U - 7 . 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 the Jauch family , being a first cousin - in - law of Oster , and Otto Hübener later being hanged . Oster was placed under house arrest . Their involvement in the German resistance was discovered after the failure of the 20 July plot . Death . 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 the conspirators be executed . On 8 April 1945 , Oster , Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Wilhelm Canaris , and other anti - Nazis were convicted and sentenced to death by an SS drumhead court - martial presided over by Otto Thorbeck . At dawn the next day , Oster , Bonhoeffer and Canaris were hanged in the Flossenbürg concentration camp . They were forced to strip naked before being taken to the gallows . The camp was liberated two weeks later by American forces . Fabian von Schlabrendorff , one of the few major coordinators of anti - Nazi activities to survive the war , described Oster as " " a man such as God meant men to be , lucid and serene in mind , imperturbable in danger . " "