Nein!: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944. Paddy Ashdown

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       Ludwig Beck

      If there was a soldier in the German army who embodied the antithesis of all that Hitler and the Nazi Party stood for, it was Ludwig Beck.

      And yet, he was not one of life’s natural rebels. He was too intellectual, too thoughtful, too careful, too considered and too punctilious (that word again) to be a great plotter – and far too straightforward to be a successful conspirator.

      And that was his problem. Like Carl Goerdeler, Ludwig Beck was a man made for a different age than the one in which he found himself.

      Also like Goerdeler, Beck at first welcomed the arrival of Hitler and the Nazis on the German scene. In the autumn of 1930 he famously defended young officers in his unit who were court-martialled for being members of the Nazi Party, contrary to the rules of the time which prohibited army officers from political activity. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Beck, whose Lutheran faith had incorporated a degree of anti-Semitism since the days of Luther himself, announced, ‘I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.’

      Ludwig August Theodor Beck was born the son of a gifted metallurgical engineer on 29 June 1880 in Biebrich, then a small village on the opposite bank of the Rhine from Mainz. As a middle-class Prussian brought up in the long afterglow of the victories of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing unification of Germany, and living little more than a stone’s throw from Frankfurt, where the treaty which sealed these triumphs was signed, the young Beck’s career would probably have been decided from the moment he was born – he was to be a soldier.

What followed was an education in the classic Prussian military tradition. This produced officers of high professional ability, who regarded a commitment to their country as synonymous with loyalty to their regiment and to the brotherhood of their fellow officers. For these men the Prussian military code, characterised by the motto Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit* (Always practise loyalty and sincerity), was more than a slogan – it was a way of life that they were sworn to follow and protect. Later this sense of loyalty and brotherly solidarity among the officer corps would protect even plotters against the German state from discovery by the security services.

      Ludwig Beck’s moral compass, founded on Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit, was different from that of Carl Goerdeler – but its pull was no less strong.

      Tall, angular, thin, Beck’s physical appearance closely mirrored his personality. He had the look of an ascetic, with what one colleague described as ‘facial skin so tight as to seem ghoulish, especially on the rare occasions when he smiled’. Another noted his ‘tense, sensitive, finely chiselled face with slightly sunken, rather sad eyes’. To his contemporaries Beck seemed a solitary figure, set slightly apart from the crowd, as though close human contact was strange and uncongenial to him. A committed and practising Lutheran, for Beck, austerity, rectitude and restraint were the guiding principles of his life and the cornerstone of his religious beliefs.

      Beck the young officer was no moustachioed, boneheaded Prussian militarist of the sort beloved of cartoonists and popular legend. He was what was known in the Germany of the time as an ‘educated officer’. Like Frederick the Great he was keen on music, and played the violin well. Widely read, knowledgeable and engaged in all aspects of German cultural life, he was fluent in English, an admirer of French culture and, unlike most in the Prussian officer class, engaged freely with politicians. Intellectually disciplined, he was widely recognised as a man of refinement and integrity; in later life he would earn the nickname ‘the philosopher general’.

      But Ludwig Beck had his flaws too – they were the flaws which can often weaken the soldier who has more intellect than is needed for the job. He was a man of thought rather than of action, who weighed every step so carefully that he could sometimes miss the fleeting opportunity whose lightning exploitation is the true test of the great commander. One contemporary put it more prosaically: ‘Everyone who knew him, knew he could not be persuaded into a cavalry charge.’ Men looked up to Beck not for his battle-readiness, but for his deep spiritual and intellectual qualities, and for his unshakeable integrity.