the regime's excesses, and that the removal of Heinrich Himmler and reduction in the power of the SS was needed. Some oppositionists were devout Christians who disapproved of assassination as a matter of principle. Others, particularly the army officers, felt bound by the personal oath of loyalty they had taken to Hitler in 1934. The opposition was also hampered by a lack of agreement about their objectives other than the need to remove Hitler from power. Some oppositionists were liberals who opposed the ideology of the Nazi regime in its entirety, and who wished to restore a system of parliamentary democracy. Most of the army officers and many of the civil servants, however, were conservatives and nationalists, and many had initially supported Hitler's policies—Carl Goerdeler, the Lord Mayor of Leipzig, was a good example. Some favored restoring the Hohenzollern dynasty, while others favored an authoritarian, but not Nazi, regime. Some opposed his apparent reckless determination to take Germany into a new world war. Because of their many differences, the opposition was unable to form a united movement, or to send a coherent message to potential allies outside Germany. Nadir of Resistance: 1940–1942 In February 1940, Ulrich von Hassell met with James Lonsdale-Bryans to discuss plans to "stop this mad war". The peace terms that Hassell unveiled stated that Germany would keep the Sudetenland and Austria while "the German-Polish frontier will have to be more or less identical with the German frontier of 1914". Though Britain in 1940 was prepared to cede the first two demands, the demand that Poland was to surrender land to Germany as part of a peace terms proved to be a problem. The national-conservatives were strongly opposed to the Treaty of Versailles and tended to support the aims of Nazi foreign policy, at least when it came to challenging Versailles. In their plans for a post-Nazi Germany, the conservatives took it for granted that Germany would keep the Sudetenland, Austria, the Memelland, and all of the parts of Poland that had once been German. Most were willing to consider restoring nominal independence to the Poles and Czechs, but even then, both the reduced Polish and Czech states would have to be client states of the Reich. Objections to Nazi foreign policy tended to be over the means, not the ends, with most conservatives taking the viewpoint that Hitler had conducted his foreign policy in a gratuitously