aggressive manner that had caused war with Britain and France, made all the more objectionable because the policy of appeasement showed a willingness to accept Germany's return to great power status without a war. The sweeping success of Hitler's attack on France in May 1940 made the task of deposing him even more difficult. Most army officers, their fears of a war against the western powers apparently proven groundless, and gratified by Germany's revenge against France for the defeat of 1918, reconciled themselves to Hitler's regime, choosing to ignore its darker side. The task of leading the resistance groups for a time fell to civilians, although a core of military plotters remained active. Carl Goerdeler, the former lord mayor of Leipzig, emerged as a key figure. His associates included the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, the Prussian Finance Minister Johannes Popitz, and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, heir to a famous name and the leading figure in the Kreisau Circle of Prussian oppositionists. These oppositionists included other young aristocrats such as Adam von Trott zu Solz, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and later Gottfried Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen, who was a Nazi member of the Reichstag and a senior officer in the SS. Goerdeler was also in touch with the SPD underground, whose most prominent figure was Julius Leber, and with Christian opposition groups, both Catholic and Protestant. These men saw themselves as the leaders of a post-Hitler government, but they had no clear conception of how to bring this about, except through assassinating Hitler—a step which many of them still opposed on ethical grounds. Their plans could never surmount the fundamental problem of Hitler's overwhelming popularity among the German people. They preoccupied themselves with philosophical debates and devising grand schemes for postwar Germany. The fact was that for nearly two years after the defeat of France, there was little scope for opposition activity. In March 1941, Hitler revealed his plans for a "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union to selected army officers in a speech given in occupied Poznań. In the audience was Colonel Henning von Tresckow, who had not been involved in any of the earlier plots but was already a firm opponent of the Nazi regime. He was horrified by Hitler's plan to unleash a new and even more terrible war in the east. As a nephew of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, he