The armed forces and the Nazis also shared a common commitment to the future rather than a vision of the past. General Hans von Seeckt during the Great War had established a reputation as one of the army’s most brilliant staff officers. He became head of the Reichswehr high command in the newly established Weimar Republic. From the beginning, he challenged the concept of mass that had permeated military thinking since the Napoleonic Wars, instead insisting on the principle of pursuing quick, decisive victories by offensive action.
Boldness was Seeckt’s first rule; flexibility was his second. The Treaty of Versailles, however, specified the structure of the Reichswehr in detail: a force of one hundred thousand, but, forbidden tanks, aircraft, and medium or heavy artillery, it badly needed force multipliers. Versailles did authorize each Reichswehr division a motor-transport battalion, and Seeckt saw their vehicles as an increasingly valuable supplement to the conventional combat arms. Beginning in the early 1930s, war games focused on not merely the combination but the integration of mobility and striking power—quality enhanced by technology. In 1934, the first “experimental armored division” was authorized. The next year Hitler reintroduced conscription and officially initiated rearmament. In return, the armed forces gave the Nazis a free hand in Germany’s “reconstructuring.”
This decision reflected neither simplemindedness nor moral blindness. The Reichswehr understood, better than any army in the world, that total war and industrial war had generated new styles of combat and new methods of leadership. The officer no longer stood above his unit but functioned as an integral part of it. The patriarchal/hegemonic approach of the “old” Prussian/German army, parenting youthful conscripts and initiating them into adult society, was giving way to a collegial/affective pattern, emphasizing cooperation and consensus in mission performance. “Mass man” must give way to “extraordinary man”—the combination of fighter and technician who understood combat as both a skilled craft and an inner experience.
The soldiers were confident that once Germany’s young men changed their brown shirts and Hitler Youth uniforms for army field gray, their socialization away from National Socialism would be relatively easy. The army knew well how to cultivate them from its own resources. The new Wehrmacht had new facilities. Leave policies were generous. Food was well cooked and ample. Uniforms looked smart and actually fit—no small matters to young men on pass seeking to make quick impressions.
The conscripts were motivated, alert, and physically fit. Thanks to the eighteen months of compulsory labor service required of all seventeen-year-olds since 1935, they required a minimum of socializing into barracks life and were more than casually acquainted with the elements of close-order drill. Officers and noncommissioned officers were expected to bond with their men, leading by example on a daily basis.
The army was still the army, and NCOs had lost none of their historic set of tools, official and unofficial, to “motivate” recalcitrants and make them examples for the rest. But military service had for over a century been a major rite of passage for males in Prussia/Germany. The army’s demands had generally been understood as not beyond the capacities of an ordinarily fit, well-adjusted young man. That military service had been restricted during the Weimar years gave it a certain forbidden appeal. And a near standard response of older generations across the republic’s social and political spectrum to anything smacking of late-adolescent malaise or rebellion was that what the little punks needed was some shaping up in uniform.
Recruit processing differed significantly from both pre-1914 practice and the patterns in contemporary conscript armies. While not ignoring experience, aptitude, education, and even social class, the German sorting and screening system paid close attention to what later generations would call “personality profiles.” Determination, presence of mind, and situational awareness were the qualities most valued. Initial training in all branches can best be compared to a combination of the U.S. Army’s basic training with its advanced infantry training, informed by the Marine Corps’s mantra of “every man a rifleman.” That reflected the belief that infantry warfare’s moral and physical demands were the greatest. A soldier who could not meet them was less than an effective soldier no matter his level of technical proficiency. Misunderstandings and mistakes in combat were to be expected. Overcoming them depended more on character than intellect. And character in the context of combat meant, above all, will.
The question of nature versus nurture did not significantly engage the Wehrmacht. Long before Leni Riefenstahl celebrated Hitler’s version of the concept, the armed forces acted on the principle that a soldier’s will was essentially a product of cultivation. Drill was the means to develop the reflexive coordination of mind and body. Troops trained day or night, at immediate notice, in all weather, under conditions including no rations. Combat conditions were simulated through the extensive use of live ammunition. Casualties were necessary reminders of the dangers of carelessness and stupidity.
A persistent mythology continues to depict the German army of World War II as a “clean shield” force, fighting first successfully and then heroically against heavy odds, simultaneously doing its best to avoid “contamination” by National Socialism—a “band of brothers” united by an unbreakable comradeship. That concept of comradeship is arguably the strongest emotional taproot of what John Mearsheimer has memorably dubbed “Wehrmacht penis envy.” Soldiers and scholars inside and outside Germany have consistently cited “comradeship” to explain the “fighting power” the Reich’s opponents found so impressive.
Particularly in the context of the Russian front, the concept of comradeship has been described as an increasingly artificial construction, based on Nazi ideology, generated by material demodernization and consistent high casualty rates that destroyed “primary groups” that depended on long-standing relationships. Small relational groups based on affinity, proximity, and experience were above all survival mechanisms. A man physically or emotionally alone in Russia was a casualty waiting to happen. The ad hoc, constantly renewed and reconstructed communities resulting from heavy losses were held together by the old hands—sometimes of no more than a few days’ standing—who set the tone and sustained by the newcomers not only seeking but needing to belong in order to survive physically and mentally.
“Good” was in fact frequently defined as any behavior that strengthened the fragile, fungible, ad hoc community against external or internal challenges. But however deep ran their brutalization, the ground forces, army and Waffen SS alike, never degenerated collectively into what Martin van Creveld called “the wild horde.” Lawless and disorganized, committed to destruction for destruction’s sake, self-referencing to the point of solipsism, the horde can neither give nor inspire the trust necessary for the kind of fighting power the Germans demonstrated to the end.
Comradeship helped them to remain soldiers, not warriors or killers. And after 1945, for German veterans comradeship became the war’s central justifying experience. Few were willing to admit they had fought for Hitler and his Reich. The concept of defending home and loved ones was balanced, and increasingly overbalanced, by overwhelming evidence that the war had been Germany’s war from start to finish. What remained were half-processed memories nurtured over an evening glass of beer or at the occasional regimental reunion—memories of mutual caring, emotional commitment, and sacrifice for others. Traditionally considered to be feminine virtues, these human aspects of comradeship made it possible to come to terms morally and emotionally with war’s inhuman face—and to come to terms with the nature of the regime one’s sacrifices had sustained.
If the Soviets saw war as a science, the Germans interpreted it as an art. Though requiring basic craft skills, war defied reduction to rules and principles. Its mastery demanded study and reflection but depended ultimately on two virtually untranslatable concepts: Fingerspitzengefühl and Tuchfühlung. The closest English equivalent is the more sterile phrase situational awareness. The German concept incorporated
as well the sense of panache: the difference, in horsemen’s language, between a hunter and a hack—or, in contemporary terms, the difference between a family sedan and a muscle car. It emphasized speed and daring, maneuvering to strike as hard a blow as possible from a direction as unexpected as possible.
The mobile way of war was epitomized in the panzer divisions. From its inception, the division was conceptualized as a balanced combined-arms force. Tanks and motorized infantry, motorcyclists and armored cars, artillery, engineers, and signals would train and fight together at a pace set by the armor. The panzer division would break into an enemy position, break through, and break out with its own resources, thereby solving the fundamental German problem of World War I. But the panzer division could also create opportunities on an enemy flank or in his rear areas. It could conduct pursuit and turn pursuit into exploitation. It could discover opportunities with its reconnaissance elements, capture objectives with its tanks, hold them with its infantry, then regroup and repeat the performance a hundred miles away.
No less significant was the rapid development of radio—and the accompanying sense that commanders of mobile forces could and must be at the head of their units. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder’s familiar aphorism that “no plan survives contact with the enemy” acquired a new context. In the future, mechanized commanders and mechanized forces would be able to make, remake, and implement plans immediately reflecting changing situations. War by timetable in the fashion of 1914–18 would become war by stopwatch.
The critique of mass war developed in German military thought after 1918 had never excluded numbers per se. Its goal had been the eventual creation of a force able to achieve decisive tactical and operational results initially, thus avoiding the spiral of escalation forcing Germany into a war of attrition—exactly the kind of war the professional soldiers had warned for decades that Germany had no chance of winning. The army that took the field, however, was the product of improvisation. The steady pace originally projected by the general staff and the high command was submerged by a rearmament that rapidly became its own justification and increasingly outran available human and material resources. Even after the Blood Purge of 1934 eliminated the possibility of using the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary brownshirts, as the basis for an alternative military system, the army continued to fear dual loyalty in an increasingly Nazified society. Total war of the kind Hitler seemed willing not merely to risk but to affirm remained in strategic terms the wrong kind of war for Germany. And in social/political contexts, a mass war involving the German Volk was likely to benefit the Nazis far more than the soldiers.
Since the Napoleonic Wars, the Prussian/German army had stressed the desirability of a high average. The general staff developed as a leaven to the officer corps as a whole, rather than as a self-absorbed elite. In operational terms, one regiment, division, or corps had been considered as capable as any other. When reserve divisions were organized on a large scale as part of the run-up to World War I, they were structured as far as possible to the active army’s norms and from the beginning used in the same way as active formations. In 1939, however, most of the divisions were formed by “waves” (Wellen), each with differing scales of equipment, levels of training, and operational effectiveness. Now, in planning for war, the army had developed a hierarchy of dependability, with the peacetime divisions of the “first wave” at its apex—and the mobile divisions at the apex of the first wave.
That situation offered the army a political and military window of opportunity. The tactical, doctrinal, and institutional concepts developed by the Reichswehr and refined after 1933 provided the prospect of decisive offensive operations executed not by a small professional army, but by specialized technocratic formations within a mass. High-tech force multipliers favored developing an elite—not in the racial/ideological sense, but a functional elite, based on learned skills. Its professionalism would enable the employment of ways of war, inapplicable by homogenized mass armies in the pattern of 1914–18, that would produce victories.
Soldiers and academics alike in recent years have been at pains to discredit and deconstruct the concept of blitzkrieg. Reduced to its essentials, the critique is that the German victories of 1939–41 were not consequences of doctrine or planning. They developed from a series of accidents and coincidences reflecting improvisations born of the necessity to avoid a war of attrition and responding to imperatives generated by the random nature of the National Socialist regime.
Blitzkrieg was not a comprehensive principle for mobilizing and employing Germany’s resources. Nor was it a structure of concepts expressed in manuals, taught in schools, and practiced in maneuvers. To say that blitzkrieg was an ex post facto construction nevertheless makes as much sense as to assemble the components of a watch, shake the pieces in a sack, and expect to pull out a functioning timepiece. Blitzkrieg was the latest manifestation of mobile war, the historic focus of Prussian/German military planning that Seeckt and his contemporaries sought to restore after 1918. Blitzkrieg also gave a technologically based literalness to an abstract concept. Mobile war waged with human and animal muscle power had always been more of an intellectual construction than a physical reality. In blitzkrieg, the combination of radios and engines made it possible for an army literally to run rings around its enemy—if, and it was a big if, its moral and intellectual qualities were on a par with its material.
Between 1939 and 1941, that was the case from France and Belgium to Yugoslavia and Cyrenaica. The stresses of making war in Russia, however, transmuted blitzkrieg’s strengths to its weaknesses. Production lagged behind expenditures. Casualties exceeded replacement capacities. The gap in capabilities and effectiveness between the mechanized elite and the foot-marching, horse-drawn infantry divisions grew into a chasm. One consequence was the progressive devolution of the mechanized forces from spearhead to backbone: the necessary element of every operation from holding the front in the winter of 1941 to leading the way street by street in Stalingrad a year later. Infantry divisions remained so chronically understrength that by 1943 they were in the process of being reduced to six battalions instead of the original nine. New weapons like the MG-42 light machine gun and a family of man-portable antitank rockets enhanced the infantry’s firepower. But the reconfigured divisions lacked the staying power to sustain operations, offensive or defensive, against a Red Army increasingly able to depend on more than its own determination.
As the panzers became more of an elite, their responsibilities expanded beyond any original intentions. The mobile divisions were increasingly expected to use their own resources to hold ground, recover it, and secure it, at the expense of generating and sustaining offensive momentum. By the end of the winter fighting in 1942, the eighteen panzer divisions on the Russian front had a combined strength of only around six hundred serviceable tanks. The shortages of trucks and other supporting vehicles were even greater. Replacing casualties and equipment had become a haphazard process—almost random, depending on which division could be pulled off the line, how far back it could be moved, and what was available in the depots and workshops.
A second consequence was tunnel vision: a focus on “hitting the next target,” an emphasis on action at the expense of reflection at all levels and in all aspects of war making. Prussian/German military planning historically tended to devolve downward, privileging operational art at the expense of strategic projection and privileging tactical virtuosity at the expense of both. A chronic shortage of staff officers at all levels, often uncritically praised as reflecting a “lean and mean” profile, in practice too often meant chronic overwork and no time to think about next week. Improvisation was a necessity in the German way of mobile war. But improvisation on the Eastern Front too often tended to the verge of randomness—and beyond.
Third, and arguably most serious in the long run, was a culture, a mentality, that had developed into something combining convenience and indifference, embedded in a matrix of “hardness.” Hardness was neit
her cruelty nor fanaticism. It is best understood as evolving from prewar concepts, as will focused by intelligence for the purpose of accomplishing a mission. It was a mind-set particularly enabling the brutal expediency that is an enduring aspect of war and was underwritten and nurtured by Nazi ideology.
Hardness transmuted expediency into a norm and redefined it as a virtue. Impersonalization and depersonalization went hand in hand. Interfering civilians or inconvenient POWs might not be condignly and routinely disposed of—but they could be, with fewer and fewer questions asked externally or internally. The culture of hardness was centered in the army’s junior officers. With the outbreak of war, combat experience became the dominant criterion for a commission. By the end of 1942, any German over sixteen could become an army officer if he served acceptably at the front, demonstrated the proper character, believed in the Nazi cause, and was racially pure—and the final three criteria were as much a matter of square filling as rigorous investigation.
This relative democratization in good part reflected the growing synergy between National Socialist ideology and the demands of the front. Hitler wanted young men “as tough as leather, as fleet as greyhounds, and as hard as Krupp steel,” correspondingly unburdened by reflection or imagination. The Red Army at its best did not offer sophisticated tactical opposition. What regiment and division commanders wanted in subordinates was tough men physically and morally, willing to lead from the front and publicly confident in even the most desperate situations. One might speculate, indeed, that a steady supply of twenty-something lieutenants with wound badges and attitudes helped older, wiser, and more tired superiors to suppress any developing doubts about Hitler and his war.
Armor and Blood Page 4