Panzer Leader

by Heinz Guderian

  But yet another blunder was to follow. The lame armistice with France, the ending of the Western Campaign before the Mediterranean coast had been reached, the postponement of the African landing and of the immediate continuation of the French campaign by means of an attack on Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, all this proves the justice of the assertion that Hitler, bold and even rash as he was in the drafting of plans, became timid in the execution of his military intentions. He would have served Germany better if he had shown more care and foresight in his planning and more speed and determination in the execution. ‘First weigh the considerations, then take the risks,’ is a German adage originally coined by Field-Marshal Moltke.

  The question of the African undertaking was affected by two facts: first, Hitler believed that he must consider Mussolini’s point of view; secondly, his attitude was conditioned by his purely continental approach to military matters. His personal knowledge of the world was very limited and he had absolutely no understanding of the meaning of sea power and all that it implies. I do not recall whether or not he had ever read the book by the American Admiral Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History; in any case, he never acted according to the precepts there laid down.

  As a result of this lack of knowledge he was, in the summer of 1940, unsure how he might lead his country back to peace. He did not know how to deal with the English. His armed forces were ready. They could not remain mobilised and inactive for an indefinite length of time. He felt an itch to act. What was to happen? The old ideological enemy, against whom he had struggled throughout his career and which, by opposing it, had brought him the mass of his supporters’ votes, stood intact on the eastern frontier. He was tempted to make use of the time allowed him by the temporary lull on the Western Front in order to complete the reckoning with the Soviets. He was clearly aware of the threat that the Soviet Union and the communist urge to world hegemony offered both to Europe and to the whole of Western civilisation. He knew that in this matter he was in agreement with the majority of his fellow-countrymen and, indeed, with many good Europeans in other lands. The question of whether these ideas of his could in fact be militarily executed was, of course, quite another matter.

  To begin with perhaps he only toyed with these ideas, but as time went on he began to take them more and more seriously. His unusually vivid powers of imagination led him to under-estimate the known strength of the Soviet Union. He maintained that mechanisation on land and in the air offered fresh chances of success, so that comparison with the campaigns of Charles XII of Sweden or Napoleon was no longer relevant. He maintained that he could rely with certainty upon the collapse of the Soviet system as soon as his first blows reached their mark. He believed the Russian populace would embrace his National-Socialist ideology. But as soon as the campaign began almost everything was done to prevent any such thing from taking place. By ill-treating the native populations in the occupied Russian territories that were administered by high Party functionaries, and by reason of his decision to dissolve the Russian state and to incorporate considerable areas into Germany, Hitler succeeded in uniting all Russians under the banner of Stalin. They were now fighting for Holy Mother Russia and against a foreign invader.

  In part responsible for this blunder was his habit of under-estimating other races and nations. This had become evident before the war, within Germany, in his significantly short-sighted and irresponsibly harsh treatment of the Jews. It now assumed an even more sinister aspect. If any single fact played a predominant part in the collapse of National-Socialism and of Germany it was the folly of this racial policy.

  Hitler wished to unite Europe. His failure to understand the characteristic differences of the various nations, combined with his methods of centralised control, doomed this intention from the start.

  The Russian war soon showed the limitations of Germany’s strength. But Hitler did not conclude from this that he must either break off the undertaking or at least choose more modest objectives; on the contrary, he plunged into the unlimited. He was determined, by means of reckless violence, to force defeat upon the Russians. With incomprehensible blindness he was simultaneously courting war with the United States. It is true that Roosevelt’s order to his ships that they might open fire on Germany’s naval vessels had produced a state of affairs that was close to war. But between that and actual, open warfare there might have lain a very long road had Hitler’s overweening arrogance not closed it.

  This frightening gesture on his part coincided with our first decisive defeat on the battlefields before Moscow. Hitler’s strategy, lacking in consistency, and subject to continual vacillation in its execution, had crashed. From now on ruthlessly harsh treatment of his own troops was to make up for a failure of capability on the part of the controlling mind. For a time this proved successful. But in the long run it was not enough simply to remind his soldiers of the sacrifices made by Frederick the Great’s grenadiers on the orders of that powerful king and commander. It was not enough that he should identify himself with the German people and thus, because he was prepared for privation, that he should simply ignore the population’s basic requirements.

  I must now turn to Hitler’s personal characteristics as they impressed me. What sort of a man was he? He was a vegetarian, a teetotaler and a non-smoker. These were, taken independently, very admirable qualities which derived from his personal convictions and from his ascetic way of life. But, connected with this, was his isolation as a human being. He had no real friend. His oldest Party comrades were, it is true, disciples, but they could hardly be described as friends. So far as 1 could see there was nobody who was really close to him. There was nobody in whom he would really confide his deepest feelings. There was nobody with whom he could talk freely and openly. As he never found a true friend, so he was denied the ability deeply to love a woman. He remained unmarried. He had no children. Everything on this earth that casts a glow of warmth over our life as mortals, friendship with fine men, the pure love for a wife, affection for one’s own children, all this was and remained for ever unknown to him. His path through the world was a solitary one and he followed it alone, with only his gigantic plans for company. His relationship with Eva Braun may be cited as a contradiction of what I have here written. I can only say that I knew nothing of this and that so far as I am aware I never once saw Eva Braun, though for months on end I was with Hitler and his entourage almost every day. It was only when I was in prison that I first learned of that liaison. It is obvious that this woman cannot have had any influence over Hitler, and the more’s the pity, for it could only have been a softening one.

  Such was Germany’s dictator, a man lacking the wisdom and moderation of his great examples, Frederick the Great and Bismarck, a man going in solitary haste from success to success and then pressing on from failure to failure, his head full of his stupendous plans, clinging ever more frantically to the last vanishing prospects of victory, identifying himself ever more with his country.

  He turned night into day. Until far into the early hours one conference would succeed another. His meals, which, until the Stalingrad disaster, had provided him with brief periods of rest in company with the men of the OKW, were thereafter brought to him separately. Only very rarely would he invite one or two guests to eat with him. He would hastily swallow his dish of vegetables or of farinaceous food. He drank with it either cold water or malt beer. After the last conference of the night was over he would sit for hours on end with his adjutants and his female secretaries, discussing his plans until after dawn had broken. Then he would retire for a short rest, from which he was usually awakened by the brooms of the charwoman banging against his bedroom door at nine o’clock at the latest. An over-hot bath was then supposed to reawaken his still drowsy mind. So long as all was going well this irregular way of life did not appear to do him any harm. But as one blow followed another and his nerves began to give way he turned increasingly to drugs; he had injections to make him sleep, to wake him up again, to calm his heart,
to stimulate it once more; his personal physician, Morell, gave him whatever he asked, but all the same the patient still frequently took far more than the prescribed quantity, particularly of a heart medicine that contained strychnine. Thus, in due course, he ruined both his body and his mind.

  When, after the Stalingrad disaster, I first saw him again following an interval of fourteen months I noticed the change in his condition. His right hand trembled, he stooped, he stared fixedly, his eyes had a tendency to bulge and were dull and lustreless, there were hectic red spots on his cheeks. He was more excitable than ever. When angered he lost all self-control and then both what he would say and do became unpredictable. The external symptoms of his malady grew ever more pronounced, though the change was barely perceptible to his closer circle who saw him every day. Finally, after the assassination attempt of July 20th, 1944, it was no longer simply his left hand but the whole left side of his body that trembled. He would place his right hand on his left and cross his right leg over the left one so that, when he was seated, this trembling might be less noticeable. He now walked awkwardly, he stooped more than ever, and his gestures were both jerky and slow. He had to have a chair pushed beneath him when he wished to sit down. His mind, it is true, remained active; but this very activity was itself unhealthy, since its mainsprings were his distrust of humanity and his anxiety to conceal his physical, spiritual, political and military bankruptcy. Thus he attempted continually to deceive both himself and others in his efforts to keep his edifice standing, for he really knew what was the true state of himself as well as of his cause.

  With a fanatic’s intensity he grasped at every straw which he imagined might save himself and his work from destruction. His entire and very great will-power was devoted to this one idea which was now all that preoccupied him—“ never to give in, never to surrender.”

  Thus within the man whom the German nation had raised from obscurity to be its leader, because it hoped that he would give it a new social order, a resurrection from the defeat of the First World War, and true peace both internally and externally, the demon conquered the genius. Abandoned by his good fairies, he ended in utterly destroying his own handiwork, and with him a fine, upstanding, hard-working and loyal nation was cast down into the depths.

  The doctors with whom I talked in prison, and who knew Hitler and his maladies, told me that he suffered from Paralysis Agitans, which is also called Parkinson’s disease. The layman, though quite well able to observe the more superficial symptoms of this illness, would not be able to diagnose it for what it was. The first doctor correctly to name Hitler’s malady—so far as I now recall, at the beginning of 1945—was Professor de Crinis of Berlin, who committed suicide shortly after. His diagnosis remained secret. The personal physicians said nothing. The German Cabinet was thus unable to form any clear picture of Hitler’s physical condition; but even had it been in a position to do so it remains doubtful whether it would have been able to take the steps that were, in consequence, necessary. It may be assumed that the root of the appalling disease did not, in his case, lie in some earlier venereal infection, but rather that it derived from a severe chill suffered at some time in the past; for example, from a cold in the head. It is for the doctors to make their estimates on this subject. All the German people needs to know is that the man at their head, in whom they had an implicit trust such as few nations have ever given a leader, was a sick man. This sickness was his misfortune and his fate. It was also the misfortune and the fate of his country.

  The Party

  Apart from Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, the most outstanding personality of the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party was Hermann Goering, who was appointed as Hitler’s eventual successor. An officer on the active list during the First World War, a fighter ace who had taken over from Richthofen, a knight of the order Pour le Mérite, after that war was over he had been one of the founders of the SA.1

  A ruthless and very informal man, he began by showing considerable activity, and he laid the foundations for the construction of a modern German air force. Whether without his driving energy and his insistence on the creation of a third and independent branch of the armed forces a really up-to-date and operationally efficient air force could in fact have been formed is doubtful in view of the limited understanding for this development that was shown by the senior branches of the armed forces, even despite the outstanding qualities of the first Chief of the Air Force General Staff, General Wever.

  Once, however, Goering had seen the young German air force through its teething troubles, he surrendered more and more to the charms of newly won power. He adopted a feudal manner of life, collecting decorations, precious stones and antiques, building his famous country seat, Karin Hall, concentrating with visible results on the joys of the table. On one occasion, while sunk in contemplation of old pictures in an East Prussian castle, he suddenly cried out: ‘Magnificent! I, too, am a man of the Renaissance. I adore splendour!’ His style of dress grew ever more eccentric; at Karin Hall or while hunting he adopted the costume of the ancient Teutons, and when on duty his uniform was always unorthodox; he either wore red boots of Russian leather with golden spurs—an item of dress scarcely essential to an aviator—or else he would appear at Hitler’s conferences in long trousers and black patent-leather pumps. He was strongly scented and he painted his face. His fingers were covered with heavy rings in which were set the many large gems that he loved to display. From a medical point of view these distressing manifestations are accounted for by disturbances to his hormones.

  As plenipotentiary responsible for the Four-Year Plan he exercised great influence on Germany’s economy.

  In political matters he proved himself considerably more farsighted than his Party comrades, in that he attempted at the last moment to prevent the outbreak of war. For this purpose he made use of a Swedish acquaintance, Birger Dalerus, but unfortunately without success.

  During the war his influence was uncommonly disastrous. He overvalued the Luftwaffe and he was responsible for halting the Army outside Dunkirk, for the failure of the attack on Great Britain, for making a promise he could not keep to supply the Sixth Army in Stalingrad by air and thus for Hitler’s order that the town be held, and for many another disaster.

  From what I saw of him after 1943 I can only conclude that at that time he knew little or nothing about the state of the Luftwaffe. When he attempted to interfere with the actions of the Army such interference was either motivated by crass ignorance or by strong dislike.

  His role as Hitler’s heir presumptive led him to adopt a very conceited and self-satisfied manner.

  By August 1944 at the latest Hitler recognised the incompetence of the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. In Jodl’s and my presence he addressed him in very blunt terms: ‘Goering! The Luftwaffe’s doing nothing. It is no longer worthy to be an independent Service. And that’s your fault. You’re lazy.’ When the portly Reichsmarschall heard these words great tears trickled down his cheeks. He had no reply. The scene was altogether so unpleasant that I suggested to Jodl that he and 1 go into another room and leave the two of them together. As a result of this conversation I urged Hitler to act according to what he now realised and to appoint some competent air force general to succeed the Reichsmarschall. I told him that we dare not risk losing the whole war on account of the incompetence of one man like Goering. But Hitler replied: ‘For political reasons I cannot do as you suggest. The Party would never understand my motives.’ When I said that in my opinion political considerations urgently demanded the appointment of a new Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, since if that were not soon done there would be no policy left to consider, I failed to make any impression. Until the very end Goering retained his offices and his titles, even though in the final months he joined Galland in sending back his decorations and his gold braid as a protest against Hitler’s criticisms of the Luftwaffe. It is true that he continued to obey Hitler’s order that he attend conferences, but now he dressed with
extreme simplicity, without decorations or orders and wearing an ordinary soldier’s forage cap, which for him was not a very becoming style.

  He seldom dared speak the truth to Hitler.

  Only in prison and by the manner of his death did Goering do something to atone for his past negligence. By taking his own life he escaped from his terrestrial judges, after having openly defended his own past actions.

  The most impenetrable of all Hitler’s disciples was the National Leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. An inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority, the impression he made was one of simplicity. He went out of his way to be polite. In contrast to that of Goering his private life might be described as positively Spartan in its austerity.

  His imagination was all the more vivid, and even fantastic. He seemed like a man from some other planet. His racial doctrine was fallacious and led him to commit terrible crimes. His attempt to educate the German people in National-Socialism resulted only in concentration camps. As late as 1943, long after Stalingrad, he still believed that Russia should be colonised by Germans as far as the Urals. On one occasion, when I said to him that it was already impossible to find volunteer colonists for the east, he insisted that the land as far as the Urals must be Germanised by compulsory colonisation if necessary and by planting the land with German peasants conscripted for that purpose.