By 1939, Franz Halder, a German general, had taken to carrying a pistol so that when he was in the room with Hitler, he might assassinate him. But he could never pull the trigger. He could not reconcile how he could take up as “human being and a Christian to shoot down an unarmed man.” In fact, many German generals knew that someone should do it, they wanted it to have been done, but they could not do it themselves . . . because it was unethical. Hans Oster, himself a dogged German conspirator against Hitler, would despair, “We have no one who will throw the bomb in order to liberate our
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