Hans Oster

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Hans Oster (August 9, 1887 – April 9, 1945) was deputy head of the Abwehr, under Wilhelm Canaris, and a dedicated opponent of Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

Originally from Dresden, Saxony, Oster served as an officer on the German General Staff during World War I.

Oster was a central resistance figure; as early as 1937 he was plotting a coup against Hitler, whereby Count Hans-Jürgen von Blumenthal and other officers would march into the Reich Chancellery and arrest the Nazi leader. The plan was aborted when the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain adopted the policy of appeasement.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, 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 through to his government but was not believed. In 1943, after growing mistrust and accusations of aiding Jews, Oster was dismissed from his post. He was arrested one day after the failed July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler, and on April 8, 1945, he was given a show trial, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Wilhelm Canaris. They were convicted and sentenced to death.

The following day Oster, Bonhoeffer and Canaris were hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp. Oster was forced to strip naked before being taken to the gallows. The camp was liberated a few days 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."^[1]

[edit] Further reading

Roger Moorhouse, "Killing Hitler", Jonathan Cape, 2006.
Terry Parssinen, "The Oster Conspiracy of 1938", Harper Collins, 2004.
Joachim Fest, "Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945", Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996