ABSTRACT
Ludwig von Beck was faced by the hard crude fact of its already inevitable decline. Von Fritsch knew well enough that Germany was not strong enough to fight a multi-front war, while Beck was particularly insistent that no war in which Germany was involved could be anything else. Fritsch and Beck sat in their offices in complete ignorance of the fact that Kurt von Schleicher, the sometime Reichswehr Minister, had been shot. Fritsch and Beck took the matter more calmly, though the former was at pains to make it perfectly clear to Adolf Hitler that putting the Army on a universal service basis would take time and was not a thing that could be rushed. In a series of memoranda which he prepared for Fritsch, Beck stressed that since Germany was a continental power, the Army was her most decisive arm, and the General Staff was the Army’s proper leader.
