The Second World War

by John Keegan

  Five months later the war had indeed been won, but by the French, British and Americans, not by Germany. Her soldiers, beaten back to the Belgian frontier by the Allied counter-offensives of July, August and September, had learned in November of the armistice their leaders had accepted, had marched back across the Rhine to home territory and had there demobilised themselves. Within days of their return, the largest army in the world, still numbering over 200 divisions, had returned its rifles and steel helmets to store and dispersed homeward. Bavarians, Saxons, Hessians, Hanoverians, Prussians, even the immortals of the Imperial Guard, decided overnight, in defiance of every imperative by which the German Empire and the European military system had been built over the preceding fifty years, to stop their ears to superior orders and resume civilian life. Cities, towns and villages which since 1914 had been empty of young men suddenly repossessed them in cohorts; but the Berlin government, which had counted unreflectively on the availability of boundless military force for a hundred years, disposed of none whatsoever.

  The Freikorps phenomenon

  States cannot survive in a military vacuum; without armed forces a state does not exist. This truth was soon discovered by the socialists who came to power after the fall of the Kaiser, committed though they were to popular instead of autocratic government. Confronted by armed communist insurrection and Russian Bolshevik intervention – in Bavaria, in the Baltic and North Sea ports, in Berlin itself – the German Social Democratic government took military help wherever they could find it. It was not a time to be choosy and the choice was not delicate. Friedrich Ebert, Chancellor of the new republic and a lifelong socialist, announced, ‘I hate the Social Revolution like sin!’; but he can scarcely have liked the soldiers whom the crisis threw his way. ‘War had taken hold of them’, Ernst von Salomon wrote of the young republic’s first protectors, ‘and would never let them go. They would never really belong to their homes again.’ The men of whom he spoke – and he was one of them – were a type thrown up by any great military convulsion. They had congregated at Cape Taenarum in the Peloponnese in the fifth century BC after the wars of the Greek city-states – landless men looking for mercenary hire. Germany had been full of them during the Thirty Years War, as had the whole of Europe after the fall of Napoleon, when many had made a living by going to fight for the Greeks in the war of independence against the Turks. In November and December 1918 they called themselves Frontkämpfer – ‘front fighters’, men who had learned in the trenches a way of life from which the onset of peace could not wean them. General Ludwig von Maercker, organiser of the first of the republic’s Freikorps, spoke of forming ‘a vast militia of bourgeoisie and peasants, grouped around the flag for the re-establishment of order’. His vision harked back to a pre-industrial military system in which artisans and farmers united to repress anarchy and sedition. In truth no such system had ever existed. The Freikorps were a manifestation of a much more modern principle – the post-1789 belief that a political being was a citizen armed with a rifle which he was trained to use in defence of the nationality to which he belonged and the ideology that nationality embodied.

  It was significant that Maercker’s original Freikorps, the Volunteer Territorial Rifle Corps (das Freiwillige Landesjägerkorps), included a tier of ‘trusted men’ (Vertrauensleute) intermediate between officers and rank-and-file, and that its disciplinary code stipulated that ‘the leader of a volunteer corps must never inflict a punishment capable of touching a man’s honour’. The Landesjägerkorps, in short, embodied the idea that statehood was ultimately military in origin, that citizenship was validated by military service, that service should be freely given and that the serviceman’s duty of obedience should always be mitigated by the honour owed to him as a warrior. Here was the ultimate realisation of the political philosophy proclaimed by the fathers of revolution in France 130 years earlier.

  Maercker’s original Freikorps was rapidly replicated all over the new German republic; in addition, Freikorps sprang up in the regions over which Deutschtum (‘Germanness’) had historic claims to dominate, in the borderlands disputed with the new state of Poland, in the Baltic lands winning their independence from Russia and in the German-speaking remnants of the Habsburg Empire. The titles adopted by such Freikorps – the word was itself a direct reference to the popular units raised in Prussia against Napoleon in 1813-14 – were indicative of their ethos: the German Rifle Division, the Territorial Rifle Corps, the Border Rifle Brigade, the Guard-Cavalry Rifle Division, the Yorck von Wartenburg Volunteer Rifle Corps. There were many others, and some would go to form brigades, regiments or battalions of the ‘hundred thousand men’ army that Versailles would eventually allow the German republic. Others would naturally disband but take on clandestine existence as the political militias of the parties of the extreme right in Weimar Germany; their defeated left-wing equivalents would survive as the camouflaged street-fighting units of the Red Front.

  The Freikorps phenomenon was not confined to the German lands alone. Wherever peoples were divided by ideology, as they were in Finland and in Hungary, to say nothing of Russia in the era of Civil War, it appeared, and often hydra-headed. The post-war world was awash with rifles, with rootless and rancorous men and with freebooting officers who knew how to lead them; but it was in Italy that it took its most purposive form. Italy seethed with rancours, diplomatic and domestic. It had benefited little by its blood sacrifice; the acquisition of Trieste, the South Tyrol and the Dodecanese islands was little recompense for 600,000 dead. The survivors benefited from victory not at all. The costs of the war drove post-war Italy into an economic crisis with which the traditional parties, liberal and religious alike, were unable to deal. The only leader to promise salvation was the Freikorps-type Benito Mussolini, who advocated military-style solutions to the country’s problems. His Fascio di Combattimento drew its activists from ex-servicemen, among whom former arditi (stormtroopers) were foremost. Their programme, proclaimed on the eve of the ‘March on Rome’ which delivered the government to the Fascists in October 1922, was ‘to hand over to the King and Army a renewed Italy’.

  The idea of the army as a social model – centrist, hierarchical and supremely nationalist – was to energise politics over a wide area of Europe throughout the post-war years. It took no root in the great victor nations, France and Britain, nor in the settled bourgeois democracies of northern Europe and Scandinavia. But it proved deeply attractive in the defeated nations, in the successor states of the dismembered empires and in the underdeveloped countries on the European fringe, particularly Portugal and Spain. There the strains of adaptation to democracy or self-government and to the unfamiliar market forces of a suddenly unstable international economy seemed best solved by calling a halt to competition between classes, regions and minorities and consigning authority to a militaristic and often uniformed political high command. The polarisation of politics between the military and political principles would even manifest itself in Bolshevik Russia, where much of the victorious revolutionaries’ bureaucratic energies after the defeat of the Whites in 1920 would be devoted to emasculating the Red Army as an alternative political force.

  Uniforms and titles of rank were pushed to the margin of political life in Lenin’s and then Stalin’s Russia. In Italy they dominated the centre; in Austria and Germany they hovered in the wings, poised to occupy the stage at the moment the drama of events gave them their cue. Elsewhere – in Hungary, in Poland, in Portugal, in Spain – career colonels and generals took over and exercised power without the hesitations that their equivalents in states of liberal tradition felt they owed to the conventions of representative rule. A strange transvaluation of the ideal of 1789 took possession of the public life of these countries. Military service was seen no longer as the token by which the individual validated his citizenship but as the form in which the citizen tendered his duty to the state and took part in its functions. ‘Every citizen a soldier and every soldier a citizen’ had borne a creative and even be
neficent meaning in a society like that of France before the Revolution, where the two states of being were historically and sharply separate. In societies where they had become undifferentiated, soldierly obedience all too easily supplanted civic rights in the relationship between masses and government. So it came to be in Italy after 1922; so it would be, comprehensively and fatally, in Germany after 1933.

  No European of his time had more potently imbibed the soldierly ethic than Adolf Hitler. As a subject of the Habsburg Empire, he had evaded conscription into its army because that entailed service with the non-Germans – Slavs and Jews – whom he despised. August 1914 offered him the chance to enlist as a volunteer in a unit of the German army and he eagerly seized it. He quickly proved himself a good soldier and served bravely throughout the war, an event that produced in him ‘a stupendous impression – the greatest of all experiences. For that individual interest – the interest of one’s own ego – could be subordinated to the common interest – that the great heroic struggle of our people demonstrated in overwhelming fashion.’ The defeat of November 1918 outraged him as intensely as any of those who joined a Freikorps – as he might himself have done. Instead he found a position which better suited his talents and exactly encapsulated that interpenetration of political by military principles of which he would eventually make himself the supreme practitioner. In the spring of 1919 he was appointed a Bildungsoffizier in the Weimar Republic’s VII District Command, with the task of instructing soldiers of the new army in their duty of obedience to the state. It was a propagandist’s job, created by the army for the purpose of inoculating the men against contagion by socialist, pacifist or democratic ideas. Bildung is a word of manifold meanings ranging from ‘formation’ through ‘education’ to ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’. The self-taught and dreamily romantic Hitler would have been aware of all of them and conscious of his responsibility not merely to warn against dangerous influences but also to form minds and attitudes. It can have surprised him not at all that the army command in Munich simultaneously encouraged him to join an embryo nationalist movement, the German Workers’ Party, nor that his superior, Captain Ernst Röhm, not only fed it with members drawn from the Freikorps but also joined it himself; so too did other veterans of Hitler’s wartime regiment, Lieutenant Rudolf Hess and Sergeant-Major Max Amann. Röhm quickly organised the toughest ex-soldiers and Freikorps men into a party street-fighting force, the Sturmabteilung (SA). By 1920 the essential elements of the Nazi Party were in place.

  Like its communist antithesis, the Red Front, and its Italian equivalent, the Fascio di Combattimento, the Nazi Party was military in ethos, organisation and appearance from the outset. It chose brown as its uniform colour, from that of the victorious British army, whose Sam Browne belt it also adopted; from the elite mountain rifle regiments it borrowed the peaked ski-cap; and its members wore knee-length boots, an age-old symbol of the rough-riding warrior. On parade it formed ranks behind legionary banners; on the march it stepped out to the beat of the drum. Only the absence of rifles differentiated it from an army proper; but, in Hitler’s vision, political victory would bring it weapons also. The triumph of the National Socialist revolution would abolish the distinction between party and army, citizen and soldier, and subordinate every German and everything in Germany – parliament, bureaucracy, courts, schools, business, industry, trades union, even churches – to the Führerprinzip, the principle of military leadership.

  * * *

  fn1It was not only continentals who opposed barrack building. Field Marshal Wade, the eighteenth-century British general, put the British attitude thus: ‘the people of this Kingdom have been taught to associate the idea of Barracks and Slavery so closely that, like darkness and the Devil, though there be no manner of connection between them, yet they cannot separate them’.

  fn2It is evidence of the military importance the German state and army attached to the free use of the railways that the personnel of the Reichsbahn were not allowed to unionise. Understandably so; the word ‘sabotage’ derives from the Belgian railwaymen’s practice of unseating rails from their shoes (sabots) during the great strike of 1905.

  fn3Often very much better in the army than at home. In the 1860s the French national intake was 1.2 kilograms, the army intake 1.4. The contemporary Flemish conscripts’ refrain, reflecting the hardship of peasant life, ran: ‘Every day in the army meat and soup without working.’

  TWO

  Fomenting World War

  Military leadership implies military action. The first public act of Hitler’s political life was to lead a Putsch – an attempted military coup – against the constitutional government of the German republic. He had been contemplating it for five years. ‘I can confess quite calmly’, he disclosed at Munich in 1936, ‘that from 1919 to 1923 I thought of nothing else than a coup d’état.’ During those years Hitler had led a double life. As the leader of a party seeking members and support he had spoken constantly, tirelessly – and electrifyingly – to any audience that he could command throughout the area of his political base in Bavaria. He spoke of the ‘criminals of Versailles’, of Germany’s sufferings in the World War, of her losses of territory, of the iniquity of the disarmament terms, of the presumptions of the new states – Poland most of all – which had been raised on historic German soil, of the extortion of reparations, of the national shame, of the part played by the enemies within – Jews, Bolshevists, Jewish Bolshevists and their liberal republican puppets – in bringing Germany to defeat in 1918. On 25 January 1923, at the first Nazi ‘Party Day’ in Munich, in a speech which might stand for all his others, he proclaimed: ‘First of all, the arch-enemies of German freedom, namely, the betrayers of the German Fatherland, must be done away with. . . . Down with the perpetrators of the November crime [the signing of the armistice]. And here the great message of our movement begins. . . . We must not forget that between us and those betrayers of the people [the republican government in Berlin] . . . there are two million dead.’ This was the central theme of his message: that German manhood had fought honourably, suffered and died in a war that had ended by denying the succeeding generation the right to bear arms. As a result, ‘Germany disarmed was prey to the lawless demands of her predatory neighbours.’ Those neighbours included the Poles, against whom the Freikorps had fought a frontier campaign to defend the Reich territory in 1920, and behind them the Bolshevik Russians and the new Slav states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the unstable remnants of the Habsburg Empire, Hungary and Austria, which had been threatened by communist takeover and might be again. They also included the French, the most rapacious of the victors, who had not only taken back the Reich provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, but maintained an army in the Rhineland and openly threatened to use military force to back up their demands for full payment of the costs of the war, which had been determined by the Allies at Versailles in the form of reparations. The menace of these threats and demands, Hitler endlessly reiterated, could only be set aside when Germany had an army once again, not the paltry 100,000-man force allowed it under the Treaty of Versailles, stripped of tanks and aeroplanes and almost of artillery, but a true national army commensurate in size with that of the largest and most populous state on the continent.

  This was a message that magnetised Hitler’s audiences, which grew steadily in size throughout 1919-23. He had become a brilliant speaker and, as his power with words increased, so did the numbers who heeded them. ‘I cast my eyes back’, he was to say in 1932, ‘to the time when with six other unknown men I founded [the Nazi Party], when I spoke before eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, twenty, thirty, fifty persons. When I recall how after a year I had won sixty-four members of the movement, I must confess that that which has today been created, when a stream of millions is flowing into our movement, represents something unique in German history.’ The stream of millions had not yet begun to flow in 1923; his followers were still only numbered in thousands. They responded ecstatically, however, to his call f
or revenge. ‘It cannot be’, he said at Munich in September 1922, ‘that two million Germans should have fallen in vain and that afterwards one should sit down at the same table as friends with traitors. No, we do not pardon, we demand – vengeance!’ Some of them also responded to his call for violent action; for the other side of Hitler’s double life was as an organiser of a ‘parallel’ army within the Weimar Republic as a conspirator against it. By 1923 the Sturmabteilung (SA) numbered 15,000 uniformed men, with access to an ample store of hidden arms, including machine-guns; moreover, Hitler believed it had the promise of support by the legitimate army of the state, the Bavarian division of the Reichswehr. Hitler had been encouraged in that belief by many of the division’s officers, most importantly by Captain Ernst Röhm, the future head of the SA, who until 1923 was also a serving soldier. Through him, but also because of the attitude of the army commander in Bavaria, General Otto von Lossow, Hitler had formed the impression that if the SA and its associated militias, together forming the extreme right-wing Kampfbund (Battle League), were to stage a Putsch the army would not oppose it. What such a Putsch needed was leadership and a pretext for action. Hitler would supply the leadership – though he conceded the role of figurehead to General Erich Ludendorff, the retired First World War chief of staff (technically First Quartermaster General), who had put the Kampfbund under his patronage. The pretext was provided by the French. In January 1923, in order to force the German government to sustain its reparations payments, which it insisted it was incapable of meeting, the French government sent troops to occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, to extract payment at source.