Beck's campaign for a mass resignation was not aimed at the overthrow of Hitler but was rather intended to persuade Hitler to abandon his plans for war in 1938 and to purge certain "radical" elements from the Nazi Party, which Beck believed to have a negative influence on Hitler. Together with the "Abwehr" chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the German Foreign Office's State Secretary, Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, Beck was a leader of the "antiwar" group in the German government, which was determined to avoid a war in 1938 that it felt Germany would lose. The group was not necessarily committed to the overthrow of the regime but was loosely allied to another, more radical group, the "anti-Nazi" fraction centred on Colonel Hans Oster and Hans Bernd Gisevius, which wanted to use the crisis as an excuse for executing a "putsch" to overthrow the Nazi regime. The divergent aims between both factions produced considerable tensions.