Hitler's relationship with the senior army leadership was generally quite poor. While a lot of them were supportive of his aims of tearing up the Treaty of Versailles, they would have been more comfortable if it was one of their own doing it. Privately, the heavily aristocratic officers viewed Hitler as an Austrian peasant above his station, and mockingly called him 'the Bohemian corporal'. There were a number of significant showdowns between Hitler and the army, in each of which Hitler came out on top.

The first major incident between Hitler and the army was the Blomberg-Fritsch affair. Fritsch, the Commander in Chief, and Blomberg, the war minister, were the two most senior officers in the army. However, both were embroiled in separate scandals which allowed them to be removed from their posts and replaced with Hitler loyalists.

It emerged that Blomberg's new wife was a former convicted prostitute and had posed for pornographic photos, and so he was forced to resign. Fritsch was framed as a homosexual by Himmler, and while a court eventually cleared him of wrongdoing, he had long since been removed from his position.

Before the war began, Hitler faced a lot of opposition from military officers who were convinced that his plans to invade various countries would lead to Germany's downfall.

The first of these showdowns came during the planning for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the General Staff, was already unhappy with Hitler over the Anschluss and the changing of the military oath to swear loyalty to Hitler, and had severe reservations about how successful an invasion would be.

Army wargaming had shown that if Germany was at war with both France and Czechoslovakia at the same time, it could not defeat the Czechs and turn to France in good enough time to have any hope of victory. Beck wrote in his diary:

Vital decisions for the existence of the nation are at stake here; history will indict these commanders of blood guilt if they do not act according to their professional and political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience has a limit where their knowledge and their responsibility forbid them to carry out an order.

As the crisis intensified, with the army expressed its concerns and in turn being ignored by Hitler, Beck summoned a meeting of the General Staff, and tried to get them to resign en-masse in protest. He knew that this would probably lead to a showdown between the army and Hitler, one which the army stood a good chance of winning. However, he was undermined by the lacklustre support of Walter von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, who would not fully commit to supporting this. When he failed to gain the support he needed, Beck resigned.

After the war had begun, Hitler continued to face significant opposition from his commanders. After the invasion of Poland, General Blaskowitz complained that:

rampant brutalisation and moral decrepitude … [would] rapidly spread like a plague throughout the fabric of the German people

if the killings were allowed to continue. This both infuriated Hitler and effectively ended Blaskowitz's career. He was passed over for a prestigious command during the invasion of France, and was the only Colonel-General involved in the invasion who was not later promoted to Field Marshal. After the war he fell from a roof under mysterious circumstances before he could give evidence at Nuremberg. Hitler similarly recieved complaints from senior officers over the Commissar Order, and was so enraged that he threw an ink pot at Brauchitsch, who had brought him the protests.

In 1940, Himmler was forced to address a meeting of senior officers who had raised complaints about the brutality of German actions in Poland, reassuring them that "the Fuhrer knows everything that I do."

There was also a major clash over whether troops should be used to take Moscow, or to invade the Caucausus in 1941. Hitler won out, with the consequence that the battle of Moscow was lost that winter. A letter by one senior officer cursed Hitler's "bloody dilettantism".

The continuing resistance of army officers to Hitler's plans led him to exclaim in one outburst in 1941:

I always considered the General Staff to be a mastiff which one has to hold tight by the collar, because it threatens to attack every other person. I have realised the German general staff is anything but a mastiff and I am the one who must always drive the mastiff on.

Finally, ever since the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, a large group of senior officers had been working to disrupt Hitler's plans, and kill or overthrow him. This included a number of very senior officers, including two Field Marshals, the head of Military Intelligence and 5 of his section heads, and the Chiefs of Staff of Army Group Centre and the Reserve Army. While their plans only came to a head in 1944 with the successful detonation of a bomb in Hitler's headquarters, they had been trying to overthrow him for a long time. In 1938 at the height of the Sudetenland crisis, a squad of armed men were in position in Berlin to take the Chancellery by storm and kill Hitler. However, when Britain offered to meet Hitler at Munich these plans fell apart. On at least three other occasions before the 20th of July 1944, Hitler was in the presence of a live explosive device intended to kill him, and planted by his own officers.

In summary, Hitler had every right to feel the way he does in Downfall, because senior army officers continually opposed his plans, and even tried to kill him on a number of occasions.