"IT is now a question of final decisions affecting the fate of the
nation. History will hold these leaders guilty if they do not act in
accordance with their professional and political conscience. Their
military obedience ends where their knowledge, their conscience
and their sense of responsibility forbid the carrying out of an order.
If their advice and warnings in such a situation are not heeded,
they have the right and the duty before their people and history
to resign from their posts. If they all act with a united will, then it
will be impossible to make war. In this way, they will have saved
their Fatherland from the worst, from catastrophe. It shows a lack
of stature and a failure to recognize one's obligations when a soldier
of the highest rank at such times sees his duties only in the limited
framework of his military tasks and is not conscious of the highest
responsibility to the whole nation. Extraordinary times demand
extraordinary actions." ¹

With these words Ludwig Beck, the German Chief of the General
Staff from 1933 to 1938, went beyond the traditions which had
been normally binding on a senior German officer. He sought to
evoke in the man, to whom the words were addressed, General
Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, a higher sense
of responsibility than faithfulness to duty. He was ready to accept
all the consequences for himself. Six years later he paid for it with
his life.

His forebears had been Hessian officers. His father, an expert in
iron and iron-smelting, scholar and businessman, had settled in
Biebrich in the Rhineland as manager of a foundry. Here Beck,
who was born in 1880, grew up with his two brothers in a pleasant
property close to the Rhine. Later, he went to the Gymnasium in
Wiesbaden. In the First World War he had posts in the General
Staff and from the winter of 1916-17 he was in the High Command
of the Army Group "Deutscher Kronprinz". Here he established a
close and lasting friendship with the Chief of the General Staff,
Count von der Schulenburg, a man whom he greatly admired.

In the Army of the Weimar Republic he rose to the rank of
Lieutenant-General. On October 1, 1933 he achieved the position
for which his gifts destined him. He was responsible for the training

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