Hitler taught and believed that reason and knowledge are nothing, and that the unbending will to victory and the relentless pursuit of the goal are everything. Mystical speculation replaced considerations of time and space, and the careful calculation of the strength of one’s own forces in relation to the enemy’s.17
Step by step during the thirties the military opposed Hitler’s aggressive actions, and step by step they saw their warnings rejected and Hitler successful. They opposed withdrawal from the League of Nations because it would isolate Germany. They warned against the repudiation of the Versailles Treaty and the reintroduction of conscription in 1935; they were sure it would bring about retaliatory action by the Allies. Fearing French intervention, they protested against the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. Later in that year they opposed sending German forces to Spain. In November 1937, when Hitler unveiled to the military leaders his plans of expansion against Austria and Czechoslovakia, the generals again argued that German military strength was not up to such adventurous exploits. The Anschluss with Austria, however, was carried out successfully in the following spring by an adroit combination of internal subversion, diplomatic maneuvering, and military bluff. Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia aroused even greater military consternation as they could easily embroil Germany in a war with France, and possibly with England and Russia also. The military opposition in the summer of 1938 was led by the Chief of the General Staff, General Beck. Hitler, however, forced Beck to resign and replaced him with Halder. As Hitler’s campaign against Czechoslovakia mounted, a military group with Halder’s cooperation planned a coup d’état to seize control of the government before Germany became involved in a disastrous war. The officers, however, were torn with indecision and hesitancy which was only finally resolved by the Allied concessions at Munich. The coup d’état was cancelled. Hitler had again defeated his generals.18 This broke the military. Subsequently, during the war the military objected to the more daring of Hitler’s schemes — such as his desire to attack in the west in the fall of 1939, the invasion of Russia, and proposals pushed by the S.S. to attack Switzerland in 1943. But Hitler’s continued success in the face of their continued objections had undermined their self-confidence and their influence with the government. The Nazis were contemptuous of the timid and overcautious generals. Hitler himself found the military mind to be much different from what he expected, commenting on one occasion,
Before I was head of the German Government I thought the German General Staff was like a butcher’s dog — something to be held tight by the collar because it threatened to attack all and sundry. Since then I have had to recognize that the General Staff is anything but that. It has consistently tried to impede every action that I have thought necessary . . . It is I who always had to goad on this “butcher’s dog.”19
The clash of Nazi and military values made accommodation between the two impossible. The situation in a sense was similar to that of 1900–1918, except that the tension between the military ideology and the popular ideology was incomparably greater. An “unpolitical army” is an intolerable anomaly in a completely politicized totalitarian society. Reasoned military caution is equally alien to the revolutionary mind. In World War I the military had relinquished their views and embraced the popular enthusiasm. A few were to follow that course again. Most did not. Consequently, the balance could only be restored by the destruction of the political power of the army and the forcible conversion of the military to the Nazi viewpoint.
Governmental Authority. The destruction of the military was carried out by every conceivable technique. The authority of the military institutions was reduced, divided, and limited. The level of the General Staff, which tended to be the center of professionalism, was steadily lowered. In 1935, Hitler assumed the position of Supreme Commander and under him von Blomberg, an officer who cooperated with the Nazis, became Minister of War and Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht. Under Blomberg were the commanders of the three services, and under each commander the service staff. Also created out of the Ministeramt (Schleicher’s former office) was an expanded staff, the Wehrmachtamt, subsequently headed by Keitel, also a Nazi collaborator, and working directly under Blomberg. Thus, all offices at the ministerial level were filled with either party members or generals willing to work with the Nazis. The General Staff which had previously so jealously guarded its right of Immediatstellung was now down at the fourth level in the military hierarchy.
In February 1938 after Blomberg and von Fritsch, the army commander, had been forced out, the War Ministry was in effect abolished. Hitler himself assumed Blomberg’s position as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, and transformed the Wehrmachtamt into the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) under the direction of Keitel. The principal unit in the OKW was the Operations Staff — under another Nazi sympathizer, Jodl — which now took over many of the planning functions previously exercised by the army General Staff. Subsequently, the doctrine of the co-responsibility for decisions of the Chief of Staff together with the commanding officer was abandoned and the General Staff was thus still further reduced in importance. This organization persisted until December 1941 when the army Commander in Chief, von Brauchitsch, was dismissed and Hitler assumed personal command of the army. He thus combined in his own person the political offices of Chief of State, party leader, and War Minister with the military offices of Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht and Commander in Chief of the Army. In effect, this meant that military functions of the latter positions were no longer performed.
Military authority was divided as well as reduced in level. The liquidation of the S.A. leadership in 1934 was a Pyrrhic victory for the army in its effort to protect its position as sole arms bearer of the Reich. The real winner was Himmler who, immediately after the June 30th purge, began the expansion of the S.S. Eventually the S.S. became in effect a second army numbering by 1944 twenty-five or thirty divisions, virtually all of them armored, mechanized, or airborne. The Luftwaffe under Göring was also independent of the normal chain of command. In 1935 it took over the anti-aircraft units, thereby insuring that in the event of trouble, the army would not be able to shoot down Göring’s planes. In 1942, Luftwaffe Field Divisions, eventually numbering about twenty and designed for ground fighting, were created from surplus Air Force personnel. Thus in effect the Third Reich had three armies: the regular army, Himmler’s Waffen-SS., and Göring’s varied Luftwaffe units. Hitler also maintained a complicated set of duplicate command relationships. The diminution of the army General Staff’s role in planning began in 1938 when Hitler assigned to OKW responsibility for drafting plans for the complete occupation of Czechoslovakia. In 1941, after the invasion of Russia, OKW and OKH (the Army High Command) were given completely different spheres of authority. The latter was responsible for the conduct of the war on the Russian front, whereas the former assumed direction of the military effort elsewhere. The only connection between these two commands was Hitler himself and his own personal staff. Even the transfer of a single regiment from one front to the other had to be approved by Hitler. Independent lines of command persisted out into the field. Numerous special organizations and hierarchies were created for special missions. The so-called Organisation Todt affiliated with the party and independent of the army was responsible for military construction work. In 1943, political indoctrination officers (National Socialistische Fuhrungsoffiziere-NSFO) were introduced into the armed forces. These officers were modeled upon the Russian political commissars and had a chain of command independent of the military hierarchy. Competition among the intelligence services was encouraged with disastrous results for the accuracy and efficiency of German reporting.20
The scope of military authority was also reduced. With respect to the withdrawal from the League of Nations, rearmament, and the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler either did not inform the military high command or told them of his plans at the lastmoment. Efforts of Fritsch and Beck to assert the military right to be consulted were de
void of effective result. Subsequently, not only were the military excluded from foreign policy decisions, but they were also not allowed to make purely military decisions. Hitler first began to intervene in the preparation of military plans in the fall of 1938. Once the war was on, however, and particularly after it began to go badly for Germany, Hitler extended his range of decision down to the most detailed tactical level. Time and again the recommendations of the generals were overridden and countermanded by Hitler. He insisted upon a rigid rather than a flexible system of defense, and no withdrawals were allowed without his permission. He personally supervised the movement of battalions, and he neglected long-range strategic planning. “All freedom of action was eliminated. Even the highest commanders were subjected to an unbearable tutelage.”21
Political Influence. The Nazis were not content merely to eliminate the authority of the officer corps. It was even more necessary to alter its fundamental character, to destroy it as an autonomous group positing its own values and goals. This was done through three principal techniques. First, efforts were made to win over the high commanders to the Nazi cause through propaganda, threats, and bribery with wealth and power. Blomberg, Keitel, and Jodl were undoubtedly in part persuaded by the high office and honors which they received to cooperate with the Nazis. Personal indiscretions might be forgiven by the Führer if the officer were loyal to the regime. Substantial gifts were presented to officers who rendered special services to the party or whose loyalty was thought to be wavering. With middle-ranking officers, persuasion and promotion were employed. The Nazis, of course, had little use for military orthodoxy, and they rapidly advanced military iconoclasts and dissenters such as Guderian and Rommel whose personalities and views were not of the traditional General Staff variety.
More significant in the long run was the infiltration of Nazi-oriented younger officers into the lower ranks. The very speed which the Nazis demanded in the expansion of the army made it difficult, as Beck and others saw it would, for the army to digest its new recruits and indoctrinate them in the code of the corps. The newer officers were frequently graduates of Nazi youth organizations. Although in the early years of the regime, the army tried to curb the influx of subalterns from this source, the need for leaders eventually forced it to give in. Consequently, a marked difference in outlook rose between the junior and the senior ranks, and by World War II the latter could not be sure of the obedience of their ideologically oriented subordinates if they ordered a military move against Hitler.22 In the Navy and Air Force the corps of officers had to be built up virtually from scratch; consequently, these services were more predominantly Nazi in outlook.
The final technique of the Nazis in altering the complexion of the officer corps was simply the removal of those who adhered to the professional outlook and values. The first major purge was the Blomberg-Fritsch Crisis of February 1938. Both officers had opposed Hitler’s aggressive designs revealed at the conference of commanders on November 5, 1937. Blomberg had also abandoned the soldier’s role, embarked upon politics, and aroused the enmity and jealousy of Göring and Himmler. In January 1938, with the Führer’s permission, he married a woman beneath his own social level. Two weeks later Göring presented to Hitler police documents proving that the new Frau Blomberg had been a prostitute. This insured Blomberg’s dismissal as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht. The logical candidate to succeed him, however, was Fritsch, the Army Commander in Chief and a professional soldier through and through. To forestall this appointment Göring and Himmler presented evidence that Fritsch was a homosexual. The charges were untrue, but they were enough to have Fritsch removed from his post pending investigation and to give the Führer opportunity to revamp the officer corps. Six other general officers were retired and a major shake-up of regimental commanders occurred.
The acquiescence of the officer corps to the removal of Fritsch on trumped up charges marked its end as an autonomous organization. Against such machinations, the officers were virtually helpless. Instead of fighting back with the conspiratorial and unscrupulous techniques of totalitarian politics, Fritsch submitted to Gestapo interrogation and considered challenging Himmler to a duel. In the end a special court exonerated him. But by then he was out of a job, and the long arm of the secret police had made itself felt in the army. Subsequently, Fritsch was made honorary colonel of his old regiment. He was, however, a broken, disillusioned man. Just before war began he joined his regiment in East Prussia, writing: “For me there is, neither in peace or war, any part in Herr Hitler’s Germany. I shall accompany my regiment only as a target, because I cannot stay at home.”23 On September 22, 1939 he walked into Polish machine gun fire on the outskirts of Warsaw and was killed. Fritsch did not know how to act as a politician in the totalitarian state. But he did know how to die as a soldier on the battlefield. With him died the moral integrity and professional spirit of the German officer corps.
Immediately after Munich three more generals were retired. Two, Beck and Adam, had been outspoken in their opposition to Hitler. The third, von Rundstedt, was a Prussian professional of the old school. From this point on through the war, there was a steady stream of dismissals and retirements of officers who displeased Hitler because of their military caution or their doubtful loyalty. In the fall of 1941, after the Germans had been halted in Russia, Brauchitsch, Rundstedt (who had been called back), Bock, and Leeb left active service. Finally, after the July 20th, 1944 attempt to overthrow the regime, in a mass purge of the high command, twenty generals and one admiral were executed, five other generals committed suicide, and approximately seven hundred officers were either executed or dismissed.24
Military Götterdämmerung. The reactions of the military to the Nazi penetration split them into three groups. One clique succumbed to Nazi temptations, abandoned the professional outlook, adopted Nazi views, and were suitably rewarded by the government. Another group, including Hammerstein-Equord, Canaris, Beck, Adam, Witzleben, and most of the July 20th conspirators, also assumed political roles actively opposing Hitler and his policies. Since both these groups abandoned professionalism for politics, it is appropriate to judge them, not by professional, but by political standards. The former share in the guilt of National Socialism; the latter were usually motivated by the highest humanitarian and Christian ideals.
The great bulk of the officer corps had no political yearnings one way or the other and simply desired to follow the proper professional course. In the early days of the Nazi regime this behavior was feasible. The generals did the soldier’s job, they issued the soldier’s warnings, and, when they were overruled, they did the soldier’s duty. After the ouster of Fritsch, however, the military role became impossible. The invasion of the authority of the officer corps and the destruction of its autonomy produced an insoluble conflict. The military code did not permit either total obedience or total resistance. Professional duty to obey the leaders of the state clashed irreconcilably with professional responsibility for the security of the state. “I am a soldier; it is my duty to obey,” argued Brauchitsch. Others with equally good military logic disagreed: “The highest commanders in time of war,” commented Speidel, “have not always been able to differentiate between the obedience due to God and conscience and the obedience due to men.”25 So the generals struggled along: obeying where there were no grounds for complaint; sabotaging, where possible, impossible policies; temporizing in one place and acquiescing in another; resigning when the situation became intolerable and accepting again the call of duty when it was even worse.
There was nothing politically glorious in this performance. But then they were not trying to act as political figures; they were escaping from politics, and it is not appropriate to judge them by political standards. They were trying to behave like professional soldiers, and it is by the standards of soldiers that they should be judged. By these criteria they come off well. The evil was not in them. It was in the environment which would not permit them to live by the soldier’s creed. They could not destr
oy the evil in the environment without violating that creed and destroying the good in themselves. Their glory and their tragedy was that they adhered to their faith until obliterated by the holocaust.
THE FUTURE OF GERMAN CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS. The professional officer corps which was created by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and carried to its highest peaks by Moltke, Schlieffen, and Seeckt ceased to exist in World War II. It was a victim of Nazism and its destruction was one of the calamities of the war. It had embodied many of the noblest and best elements of western civilization. Born of enlightened reform, it had been motivated by the ideals of integrity, service, competence, duty, and loyalty. Whatever the uses to which it was put, in and of itself it was a force for reason, realism, and peace. Neither Germany nor the world is better off for its passing.
It remains to be seen what pattern of civil-military relations will emerge in the German Federal Republic. Early plans for the West German army called for a return to some elements of the old tradition. The prevailing tendency, however, seemed to be in a different direction. The Bundestag insisted upon sharing in the control of the military forces. It was stressed that the new army would be basically civilian in character. The decisions of courts martial were to be reviewed by independent boards of civilians. Differentiation among the ranks was to be minimized, the powers of officers curtailed, saluting limited. More significantly, the German government’s defense adviser indicated that a commission of civilians would supervise the “inner order” of the army and that all soldiers would go through a special “citizenship course.” “Democracy can be defended only by democrats,” Herr Blank was quoted as saying, “and freedom only by those who experience it themselves.”26
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