I'm John That's with Charles Spicer.

His new book is Coffee with Hitler.

It is the crisis year of 1938.

And again, we're concentrating on our protagonists

and the results around them that they try to shape

with really good information about what Hitler and his colleagues,

Hitler and his co-conspirators, that would be Gehring, Himmler, and the rest, but especially

von Ribbentrop, the now foreign minister of Germany who has turned against England and

regards England as the major threat to the Hitlerite plans to conquer the world,

or at least all of Europe. We come to September of 38, and our heroes are meeting with the courts

and others and learn that there is a credible, as Charles says, robust plan to remove the dictator from the Reich

Stensary and set up a government that is not headed to war. It is called the Oster conspiracy,

and I emphasize it here because it doesn't end quickly. But Charles, you believe this was a credible

arrangement that was not pursued by Whitehall.

Was the Prime Minister fully informed of this?

It seems to have influenced his decision in September.

I think he was certainly made aware of the plans for the Oster conspiracy.

And he chose instead to proceed with his own plan to go and visit Hitler personally.

I don't think he necessarily understood the extent to which his own plans would undermine the conspiracy.

He wasn't opposed to it.

So I think it's more chaotic than a conspiracy from his point of view.

Plan Z is what the Prime Minister and Mr. Wilson called the Prime Minister's idea to fly to Germany,

...