Knives, perhaps because he was often at Göring's table and, through Prince Wilhelm, knew Mussolini's daughter Countess Ciano. In 1935, after finishing his studies, Graf Hans-Jürgen went back to Neustrelitz, where he joined the 48th Infantry Regiment as a second lieutenant. In December 1936, he was promoted to lieutenant. In the army he remade the acquaintance of his childhood friend, Mertz von Quirnheim, and came into contact with other members of the German Resistance such as Hans Oster. In the summer of 1938, Graf Hans-Jürgen became a company commander and had a position for two months at the War School in Munich. In that same year he wrote a contribution for the illustrated book for boys Wir Soldaten ("We Soldiers") but it is impossible to tell which piece was written by him. As he was writing his contribution to the book, he was already conspiring against Hitler. He had come to accept the view, common among the nobility, that the war was contrary to Germany's interests. It was still well before the Sudeten Crisis and the invasion of Czechoslovakia that Graf Hans-Jürgen became a member of the German Resistance. A group of officers led by General Beck was opposed to war, and it was not difficult to foresee Hitler's intentions. Beck and his followers, Hans Oster and Erwin von Witzleben, planned a coup d'etat. The idea was for a storm-party of officers, including Graf Hans-Jürgen, to march into the Reich Chancellery, overcome the resistance of any SS guards found there, and arrest Hitler. However, the policy of appeasement towards Hitler espoused by the British Prime Minister Chamberlain led the conspirators to conclude that the planned coup had no future. In August 1939, Graf Hans-Jürgen became a captain. He kept contact with the Resistance, based in the Abwehr under Admiral Canaris. War broke out, and on 9 September Graf Hans-Jürgen married Cornelia von Kries, née Schnitzler, a 34-year-old divorcée. Her first husband, Otto von Kries, by whom she had a daughter, would die at Leningrad in 1941. Her mother was a Borsig, a family of industrialists whose locomotive works in Berlin were among the largest enterprises in the country. From September 1939 to May 1940, during the so-called Phoney War, Graf Hans-Jürgen was based at Saarbrücken in command of a machine-gun company. When this blissful calm ended, he took part in the offensive in Alsace, but in July his regiment was