Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  Nor did I have a family as so many other rulers, especially, but not exclusively, hereditary ones, did. For a ruler, a family is by no means always a good thing to have. The number of them who had to kill their relatives, or were killed by them, is legion. Neither Shakespeare in Hamlet nor Schiller in Don Carlos invented anything; in fact my own nephew, William Patrick Hitler, the son of my half-brother Alois, tried to blackmail me. Even if things do not go that far, family, official or unofficial, means obligation. Obligation, in turn, means nepotism, favoritism, and corruption. Look at Napoleon, who was always appointing his worthless brothers to this office or that. Mussolini, whose mistress Clara Petacci became the stalking horse her relatives rode to riches, could also tell a pretty tale in that respect.

  The fact that I did not have a family did not stem from the inability or, especially during my last years, even the inclination to find a mate. It was the outcome of a conscious, politically motivated decision. Had I won the war, I would have resigned all my posts and left Berlin, a city I never liked. Let someone else look after government affairs, especially war! I would have spent the rest of my life with Eva in quiet retirement. I would not exactly have been trying to repair clocks, but I would have been reading, talking to a few friends, listening to records, writing my memoirs, enjoying art, designing buildings, walking a little, and training my dog without once having to see a uniform or meet a dunderhead of a bureaucrat or an officer. After years and years during which I suffered nothing but vexation at their hands, what a relief it would have been!

  Everything considered, was I really lonelier than others in my position? More, say, than Julius Caesar, who ended up by being assassinated by Brutus—the very Brutus whom, in an act of unparalleled generosity, he had forgiven for siding with Pompey during the civil war? Or than Henry VIII with his six wives, two of whom he executed, two of whom he divorced, and two of whom died on him? Or than Frederick the Great, who, as he grew older, increasingly preferred dogs to men and finally asked to be buried with them? Isn’t loneliness always and necessarily the price one pays for power?

  In brief, my private and public lives were in many ways one. I was what I was, and I did what I thought I had to. Even if the road was long and hard. Even if, especially toward the end, it gave me no joy. Even if I had to go against my own nature and use the most brutal available means. Not so much for myself, perhaps, as for the love I bore my people. Here is what one of our national poets, Ernst Moritz Arndt, had to say about the matter:

  The God who made the iron grow,

  Didn’t want slaves.

  So he gave saber, sword and spear,

  The man in his right hand.

  So he gave him the brave courage,

  The wrath of free speech.

  That he consisted to the blood,

  Till to the death the feud.

  17. Rearming the Reich

  Right from the beginning, I was absolutely determined to cast off the shameful shackles of Versailles and rebuild our German military power. Nor did I waste any time in starting to work in this direction. Within seventy-two hours of my appointment I met with the chiefs of the armed forces. I told them in no uncertain terms what I, with their help, was going to do. And I promised them a free hand in doing it.

  But we had to proceed carefully. First, our enemies, meaning mainly Britain and France, were watching. Instigated and bribed by the Jews, some of their generals and politicians would have liked nothing better than to cut off our heads when we were still small and weak. And weak we were. In 1914 Germany had a standing army of 750,000 men with another 3,750,000 trained reservists ready to join the ranks and be thrown into battle within a couple of weeks or so. We also had a navy which, at that time, was the third most powerful in the world after those of Britain and the U.S. Our defeat changed all this, leaving us essentially disarmed.

  The Reichswehr was as well trained as any other army in the world. But with just 100,000 men in nine small divisions, including two cavalry divisions, in truth it was little more than a frontier guard. Nor did it have any trained reserves on which it could draw. As some wargames held during the 1920s showed only too clearly, so weak was it that it could never have stopped even a Polish attack, let alone resist a full-scale French invasion. The navy had a couple of so-called pocket battleships. For their time they were true technological marvels. But they were no match for the numerous real battleships our opponents had. Nor, as we later learnt, were our ships a challenge for the carriers they were already developing.

  We did not have submarines, another weapon that would be essential for waging any kind of future war. We did not have military aircraft. We did not have heavy artillery, the only weapon capable of knocking out fortifications. And we did not have tanks. Tanks had proved their worth during the last months of the Great War, and it was becoming clearer every day that they would dominate the future battlefield. That was why the Allies did not allow us to build them. Those we used for training were cardboard constructions mounted on the chassis of trucks. So weak was their “armor” that children used to amuse themselves by sticking pencils into it! How our men felt about that may readily be imagined.

  I do not want to say that we took all this simply lying down. We did our best to keep abreast of the most recent technological developments. Throughout the 1920s we sent officers to Russia, where they taught themselves and the Russians how to use tanks. Come Operation Barbarossa in 1941, some of them put their knowledge of Russia to good use, especially von Manstein and Model, of whom I shall have more to say later. We also had some companies working for us in Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden. They produced a few experimental submarines and aircraft. To train our future pilots we put a great deal of effort into gliders. Both our pilots and our gliders did in fact become the best of their kind in the world; to that extent the effort paid off. On the whole, though, our situation with respect to the most modern and most powerful weapons was not unsatisfactory. It was disgraceful.

  The other problem I faced was more serious still. Ever since we had won our victories over Austria and France in 1866-71, the world had looked up to our General Staff as a model of its kind. Foreigners such as the Englishman Spenser Wilkinson and the American General Emory Upton studied it and wrote books about it. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, its existence was prohibited. That fact, of course, did not disturb us too much, since the General Staff continued to exist under the name of Truppenamt. In a way it even assisted us, because the army’s small size allowed us to select and train our officers more rigorously than ever before. The real problem was different. Under the Kaiserreich, our top commanders had a reputation for always pressing for the most extreme political and military measures. As, for example, General Moltke Jr.—who, at that time was Deputy Chief of the General Staff—did in 1905. He told his wife that, if Germany failed to use Russia’s defeat to push through its demands, it might as well fold its tail, place itself under the protection of Japan, and concentrate on making money! When I came to power, I expected them to adopt a similar attitude.

  It did not turn out that way. I very soon learned that my generals were not the bloodhounds everyone thought they were. They did not growl, they did not bare their teeth, and they did not have to be put on a leash. In reality, they were pussycats. To be sure, they were delighted with my promise that the Treaty would be abrogated and rearmament started as soon as possible. For them it meant more resources, greater power, and, in many cases, promising prospects for promotion. Colonel-generals wanted to become field-marshals, lieutenant generals wanted to become colonel-generals, and so on down the ladder all the way to the second lieutenants. Quite natural, I suppose. But war? No way. The more senior the officers, the more convinced they were that they had drawn a lesson from 1914-18. And the lesson, they thought, was that Germany should never again go to war against a powerful coalition of other countries.

  Not only were they pussycats, but they were totally lacking in vision. In their very first meetings with me they as
ked for an additional 50 million marks for the Reichswehr. They also wanted, as someone timidly said, another 43 million earmarked to start a fledgling air force. As I said before, I am no economist. My strong point has never been numbers and equations but my ability to reduce complex problems to their simplest components. And I also had something even more important: vision. I knew full well that the sort of rearmament I had in mind would cost billions, not a few paltry millions. This tendency of theirs to think small continued to plague me right down to the end. Each time I proposed some bold measure or operation, it reappeared.

  Like all other bureaucrats they were also parochial. They neither understood the broader historical context in which our national life necessarily developed nor cared for it. Their intellectual horizons were limited to Europe from the Ukraine to the Pyreneans. Anything beyond that might as well be on the other side of the moon. The Japanese attack on the U.S. provided a very good example of this. When the news arrived, I turned to the great military minds in my headquarters and asked where Pearl Harbor was, only to learn that none of them knew the answer. Not even my naval adjutant, Rear Admiral Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer! As to General Halder, four days later he did not even bother note my declaration of war on the U.S. in his diary. Geniuses, each and every one of them.

  The most important single actor was General Blomberg, whom I have already introduced. As a member of the Reichswehr, he could not join the party. But in all other ways he was very close to us National Socialists, so much so that he was nicknamed Hitler Youth Quex after the juvenile hero of a novel by that name! Others were General Werner von Fritsch, known as “The Iceberg,” whom I made Army Commander in Chief in 1934, and General Ludwig Beck, who took over the post of Army Chief of Staff in the following year.

  The Commander of the Navy was Admiral Erich Raeder, another iceberg (though he did not carry that name). Strangely enough for a native of Protestant Hamburg, Raeder was a practicing Catholic who sometimes carried his faith to ludicrous lengths. Later, during his trial at Nuremberg, the American prison chaplain called him the best lay Bible student he had ever encountered! He too was firmly opposed to war, at least until he could build up his miniscule force so that it would be a match for the English Navy. In practice, that meant more or less forever. I, however, had been born in Austria and served in the trenches. Naturally, I knew much less about naval affairs than about land warfare. So I had no choice but to respect his views, up to a point at any rate. That was why, unlike the rest, he survived until 1943.

  My next move was purely symbolic. I took Germany out of the disarmament talks in Geneva. The talks, which had been dragging on since 1931, were simply nonsensical. Some representatives talked about offensive arms. Others, especially America’s oafish President Franklin Roosevelt, focused on defensive ones. As if there were really a difference. As the Egyptians proved in October 1973, “defensive” anti-aircraft missiles can very well be used to cover an attack. Ten years later, the same applied to America’s “Strategic Defense Initiative.” Some thought gas was a civilized weapon—having experienced it, I could tell them some stories about that—and should be allowed. Others believed that it should be not be.

  The most difficult problem was our situation in all this. Having been prohibited from having proper armed forces, we were determined to gain equality. That could mean either that others should reduce their armaments to our level or that we be given permission to build and expand until we were level with theirs. The other countries, primarily France, refused to accept our demands. So we went round and round until I finally said, enough is enough.

  Now that we had burned the bridges behind us, it was time to step on the gas so as to get through the “risk period” as quickly as we possibly could. As early as 1934, we drew up a production schedule for military aircraft with the objective of having 17,000 by 1939. To assuage Allied suspicions as much as we could, many of them were to be disguised either as transports or as trainers. On 17 March 1935, Heroes’ Memorial Day, I announced that, as far as Germany was concerned, the Treaty of Versailles no longer existed. I also announced that we had just reintroduced conscription, thus providing the framework for a vast expansion of our armed forces. The initial goal was thirty-six divisions with many more to come. To accentuate the change we dropped the term Reichswehr and introduced a completely new one: the Wehrmacht.

  We restarted production of infantry weapons, artillery barrels, tanks—at first they were disguised as tractors—and naval vessels. Firms such as Borsig, Mauser, Thyssen, Krupp, and Rheinmetal made huge profits, reinvested them, and made even greater ones. The impact on unemployment was dramatic. In just two years employment in aircraft manufacturing increased by no less than 1,800 percent! As early as the end of 1934, we were able to suspend the various work-creation programs we had inherited from our predecessors.

  The impact on the public mood was even more dramatic. We Germans have long been denounced for being “militarists.” The accusations go back to the first half of the eighteenth century, when people used to call Friedrich Wilhelm I, the father of Frederick the Great, the “soldier king” of Potsdam. As sayings such as “the soldier is the first man in the state” indicated, we carried this attitude into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No nation was better served by its soldiers; no nation held them in higher honor. None loved reviews, tattoos, and parades more than we did. Our uniforms, many of them designed by the well-known firm of Hugo Boss, were the best in the world. They were tight, snappy, and gaudy with numerous multicolored badges and ribbons. In the judgment of one former Wehrmacht soldier who had worn them for years on end, “No other uniform [was] so deliberately designed as the German to turn a man into a soldier, absolute and united with his fellows, and not just a civilian in special clothes.” At least one famous American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, agreed; having spent several months with us as a prisoner of war, he should know.

  But that was just the beginning. Even in the eighteenth century the spectacle of Frederick the Great’s goose-stepping grenadiers had deeply impressed onlookers. So popular were some of our marching songs, especially Schiller’s Cavalry Song, I Had a Comrade, and the famous Erika, that they were translated, played and sung in several other languages as well. To this day the Netz bristles with “clips,” as they are known, showing our troops either on parade or in action. Just one version of Erika was watched over four million times! Our reintroduction of these traditions affected the nation like a tonic. It was one of the things they and I, being German myself, had in common. Alas, after 1945 all of this was verboten. Nowadays, to watch real soldiers on parade, you’d better turn to China or North Korea.

  In June 1935 Ribbentrop, who was serving as our ambassador in London, negotiated a new agreement with England. We dressed it in diplomatic language, of course, but what a defeat for our rivals and what a triumph for us! It enabled us to embark on a vast program of ship construction. At the same time, it did away with any fear that the English would try to Copenhagen us, as they did to the Danes in 1807 and as they would subsequently do to the French at Dakar in 1940. In March 1936 I took another daring step. Though we really did not have the forces to back it up, I decided to take a risk and remilitarize the Rhineland. The accretion to our strength and ability to defend ourselves against the West as a result of that successful action was very great indeed.

  Needless to say, most of my generals opposed the move. They worried about this and were afraid of that. Truth be told, so did I. For two nights before the move I didn’t sleep a wink. However, unlike them I could not afford to show my feelings or to tell anyone about them. After all, the enemy’s military superiority was crushing. Had he decided to use it, there was precious little we could have done. He could have marched straight to Berlin! That is exactly what I would have done! But I did not let my fears govern my actions. Instead, I bluffed, threatening to send in additional forces I did not have. And I proved to be right, increasing the confidence of the German people in me and making it a little harder for my o
pponents to criticize me.

  We also gave a lot of thought to what the next war would look like. During the World War the tremendous firepower of modern weapons—magazine rifles, machine guns, quick-firing artillery—as well as devices such as barbed wire and mines, had caused the defense to dominate the offense as perhaps at no time before or since. The outcome was Stellungskrieg, trench warfare and a prolonged war of attrition. It was a type of war which, owing to our limited human and material resources, even the magnificent performance of our troops could not win.

  The solution had a political aspect and a military one. Politically, I wanted to make sure we would never again have to fight on more than one front. In this, unfortunately, I did not succeed. Militarily, we had to find some method of breaking the stalemate and restoring mobility to the battlefield. We were lucky in that it was a time of tremendous technological progress. New tanks, new aircraft, and masses of other kinds of new equipment were coming from the factories in mighty streams. I was no Mussolini who piloted his own plane and who, on one occasion, boasted that he personally used to check the repairs of his country’s military aircraft. But always having taken an interest in military technology, I was probably more aware of the way things were changing than many of my opposite numbers in other countries. But how to organize them? How to combine them? How to keep them battle ready and supplied? How to enable them to communicate with each other? In what ways, and against what targets, to use them? For these questions each general and each pundit had his own answers.