was very well connected. Tresckow appealed unsuccessfully to Bock to not enforce the orders for the "war of annihilation". Assigned to the staff of his uncle's command, Army Group Centre, for the forthcoming Operation Barbarossa, Tresckow systematically recruited oppositionists to the group's staff, making it the new nerve centre of the army resistance. American journalist Howard K. Smith wrote in 1942 that of the three groups in opposition to Hitler, the military was more important than the churches and the Communists. Little could be done while Hitler's armies advanced triumphantly into the western regions of the Soviet Union through 1941 and 1942—even after the setback before Moscow in December 1941 that led to the dismissal of both Brauchitsch and Bock. In December 1941, the United States entered the war, persuading some more realistic army officers that Germany would ultimately lose the war. But the life-and-death struggle on the eastern front posed new problems for the resistance. Most of its members were conservatives who hated and feared communism and the Soviet Union. The question of how the Nazi regime could be overthrown and the war ended without allowing the Soviets to gain control of Germany or the whole of Europe was made more acute when the Allies adopted their policy of demanding Germany's "unconditional surrender" at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943. During 1942, the tireless Oster nevertheless succeeded in rebuilding an effective resistance network. His most important recruit was General Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office headquartered at the Bendlerblock in central Berlin, who controlled an independent system of communications to reserve units all over Germany. Linking this asset to Tresckow's resistance group in Army Group Centre created what appeared to a viable structure for a new effort at organising a coup. Bock's dismissal did not weaken Tresckow's position. In fact he soon enticed Bock's successor, General Hans von Kluge, to at least partly support the resistance cause. Tresckow even brought Goerdeler, leader of the civilian resistance, to Army Group Centre to meet Kluge—an extremely dangerous move. Conservatives like Goerdeler were opposed to the Treaty of Versailles and favored restoring the Reich back to the frontiers of 1914, together with keeping Austria. These territorial demands for keeping Alsace-Lorraine together with the parts of Poland that had once belonged to Germany made for many difficulties in Goerdeler's attempts to reach an accord with governments of Britain and the United