Hans Oster

Generalmajor Hans Paul Oster (9 August 1887 – 9 April 1945) was a general in the Wehrmacht and a leading figure of the anti-Nazi German resistance from 1938 to 1943. As deputy head of the counter-espionage bureau in the Abwehr (German military intelligence), Oster was in a good position to conduct resistance operations under the guise of intelligence work.

He was involved in the Oster conspiracy of September 1938 and was arrested in 1943 on suspicion of helping Abwehr officers that were caught helping Jews to escape Germany. After the failed 1944 July Plot on Hitler's life, during an interrogation, he named Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of Abwehr, as the "spiritual founder of the Resistance Movement". The Gestapo arrested Canaris and eventually found his diaries, in which Oster's anti-Nazi activities were revealed. In April 1945, he was hanged with Canaris and Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Flossenbürg concentration camp.

Early career

Oster was born in Dresden, Saxony in 1887, the son of an Alsatian pastor of the French Protestant Church. He entered the artillery in 1907 and in World War I, he served on the Western Front until 1916, when he was appointed as captain to the German General Staff. After the war, he was thought of well enough to be kept in the reduced Reichswehr, whose officer corps was limited to 4,000 by the Treaty of Versailles. He had to resign from the army in 1932, when he got into trouble with a married woman.

He soon found a job in a new organisation which Hermann Göring set up under the Prussian police. He transferred to the Abwehr in October 1933. It was in this connection that he met Hans Bernd Gisevius and Arthur Nebe, who were working in the Gestapo and became conspirators. Oster also became a confidant of Admiral Canaris.