Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  If the Tiger seemed immediately promising, the same could not be said for its intended stablemate. As early as 1938, the Weapons Office had begun considering replacements for the Panzer III and IV: something along the same lines, in the 20-ton category with improved armor, armament, and chassis. A few prototypes were developed in leisurely fashion through 1940. Its priority remained low in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, when the Russian heavy tanks appeared sporadically. That began to change as the campaign progressed. In particular the T-34 was impossible to ignore. Its gun could take out Panzer IIIs and IVs at more than a thousand yards—ten times the effective range of the German tanks against the T-34’s comprehensively well-sloped armor. The Soviet vehicle’s mobility over mud, swamp, and dirt roads was no less impressive.

  On October 5, 1941, Guderian’s 4th Panzer Division encountered a brigade of T-34s. Not only were the Germans stopped cold; for the first time in a head-to-head fight at even odds, their losses were significantly greater. Well before that oft-cited day, however, it was clear in the panzers that besides upgrading and upgunning an entirely new weapons system, it was necessary to sustain the synergy of technical and human superiority on which their effectiveness depended. Continuing to rely on crew expertise and command skill to compensate for inferior equipment created an ultimately unsustainable imbalance in a military/political system structurally vulnerable to attrition and overextension.

  Guderian had something his colleagues lacked: enough influence to demand an inquiry. In late November 1941, a commission of officers and civilian designers toured the combat zone, examined derelict T-34s, and evaluated the situation. Guderian recommended copying the T-34—not literally through reverse engineering but by imitating the essentials. The Weapons Office replied by citing the problem of producing diesel engines, and by making the point that copying what existed gave the Soviets an automatic lead for the next generation. On returning to Berlin, the commission issued contracts to Daimler-Benz and MAN for a 30-ton tank with a difference.

  When the prototypes were completed Hitler favored a Daimler version resembling the T-34. The Weapons Office supported MAN, in good part because of a larger turret ring. The soldiers won politically and technically. Working on the Tiger, Rheinmetall had sought to balance the army’s wish for a relatively light main armament and Hitler’s insistence on maximum hitting power. The eventual result was a 75mm L/70 piece developed too late for the Tigers, but mounted on the MAN chassis just in time to give the Panther the most ballistically effective tank gun of World War II.

  Preproduction was authorized in May 1942; the first of what were eventually designated Panther Model D reached the proving grounds in November. Apart from the predictable teething troubles, two fundamental issues emerged. One was protection. The Panther’s well-sloped frontal armor was 80mm on the hull and 100mm on the turret. This was a substantial improvement over the Panzer III and IV, but would it suffice against the weapons likely to be introduced as a counter? That increase, moreover, was at the expense of side armor not much better than the Panzer IV. The Panther’s other problem was the engine. The tank weighed 45 tons. Its Maybach 230 engine delivered a power-to-weight ratio of 15.5 horsepower per ton: lower than its panzer predecessors, lower than the T-34, and low enough to seriously strain the entire drive system.

  One difficulty sustained the other. The Panther D’s already overstrained engine could not take the additional strain of up-armoring. As a result the tanks were disproportionately vulnerable to a flank shot. On the other hand, the cadres and crews of a Panther battalion were expected to avert or solve that kind of tactical problem, especially since the new vehicles were expected to be assigned to existing, experienced battalions. “Not perfect, but good enough” was a verdict rendered in the developing crisis of the Eastern Front. Serial Panther production was authorized in November 1942, with a projected delivery of 250 delivered by May 1943 and a projected deployment of a battalion in each panzer division, replacing Panzer IVs.

  As a stopgap measure pending the Panthers’ design, production, and delivery, Guderian’s commission had recommended upgrading the army’s assault guns. About 120 of the Model IIIF with a 75mm L/43 had entered service in 1942, prefiguring the assault gun’s development from an infantry support vehicle into a tank destroyer. As a rule of thumb, the longer a gun, the less effective its high-explosive round. From the infantry’s perspective, however, the tradeoff was acceptable, and the Sturmgeschütz IIIG was even more welcome because of its 75mm L/48 main armament. The effective range of this adapted Pak 43 was more than 7,000 feet. It could penetrate almost 100mm of 30-degree sloped armor at half that distance. The IIIG took the original assault gun design to the peak of its development by retaining the low silhouette and improving frontal armor to 80mm by bolting on extra plates, all within a weight of less than 25 tons. The family was completed, ideally at least, with the addition of a 105mm howitzer version in one of the battalion’s three ten-gun batteries to sustain the infantry support role.

  The one-time redheaded stepchild of the armored force now had a place at the head table. There had been 19 independent assault gun battalions in May 1941. In 1943 that number would double. Constantly shifted among infantry commands, their loyalty was to no larger formation. Continuously in action, they developed a wealth of specialized battle experience that led infantry officers to follow the assault gunners’ lead when it came to destroying tanks and mounting counterattacks. Assault guns cost less than tanks. Lacking complex revolving turrets, they were easier to manufacture, and correspondingly attractive in an armaments industry whose workforce skill and will were declining with the addition of more and more foreign and forced labor and the repeated combouts of Germans destined for the Wehrmacht.

  Meanwhile, tank production was in the doldrums. The Panzer III was so clearly obsolete as a battle tank that its assembly lines had been converted to providing chassis for assault guns. By October 1942, production of the Panzer IV was down to 100 a month. The General Staff recommended a leap in the dark: canceling Panzer IVs and concentrating exclusively on Panthers and Tigers. Previous outsiders like Porsche, and a new generation of subcontractors turning out assault guns, were jostling and challenging established firms. But the German automotive industry, managers and engineers alike, had from its inception been labor-intensive and conservative in its approaches to production. As late as 1925 the US Ford Motor Company needed the equivalent of five and three-quarters days’ labor by a single worker to produce a car. Daimler needed 1,750 worker days to construct one of its top-line models. When it came to design, focus was on the top end of the market and emphasis was on customizing as far as possible by multiplying variants. It was a far cry from Henry Ford’s philosophy that customers could have any color they wanted as long as it was black.

  For their part, the civilian tank designers were disproportionately intrigued by the technical challenges Panthers and Tigers offered. They took apparent delight in solving engineering problems in ways that in turn stretched unit mechanics to limits often developed originally in village blacksmith shops.

  One might suggest that by 1942 a negative synergy was developing between an armored force and an automobile industry, each in its own way dedicated to an elite ethos and incorporating an elite self image. The designers were correspondingly susceptible to the dabblings of Adolf Hitler. Previously, his direct involvement in the issue had been limited, his demands negotiable, his recommendations and suggestions reasonable. The Hornet, for example, combined the Hummel’s armored open-topped superstructure with the 88mm L/71 gun Hitler had wanted for the Tiger. The vehicle’s bulky chassis made it too much of a target to render feasible stalking tanks in the fashion of the Marder and the assault guns. But its long-range, high-velocity gun was welcome to the half dozen independent heavy antitank battalions that absorbed most of the 500 Hornets first introduced in 1943.

  The Ferdinand, later called the Elephant, was a waste-not/want-not response to the Porsche drives and hulls prepared in an
ticipation of the Tiger contract that went to Henschel. Hitler saw them as ideal mounts for a heavily armored tank destroyer mounting the same 88mm gun as the Hornet. Ninety were rushed into production in spring 1943 and organized into an independent panzer regiment. Without rotating turrets, at best they were Tigers manqué, with all the teething troubles and maintenance problems accompanying the type and no significant advantages. At 65 tons, any differences in height were immaterial. And the omission of close-defense machine guns as unnecessary would too often prove fatal for vehicles whose sheer size made them targets for every antitank weapon in the Red Army’s substantial inventory when they were sent into action at Kursk.

  The Hornet and the Elephant were mere preliminaries. Since adolescence the Führer had liked his architecture grandiose, his music molto pomposo, and his cars high-powered. In June 1942, he authorized Ferdinand Porsche to develop a super-heavy tank: the Maus (“Mouse”—and yes, the name was ironic). The vehicle carried almost ten inches of frontal armor, mounted a six-inch gun whose rounds weighed more than 150 pounds each, and weighed 188 tons. Its road speed was given as 12.5 miles per hour—presumably downhill with a tail wind. It took more than a year to complete two prototypes. To apply a famous line from the classic board game PanzerBlitz, “The only natural enemies of the Maus were small mammals that ate the eggs.”

  The complete worthlessness of the Maus as a fighting vehicle in the context of World War II needs no elaboration. Neither does the total waste of material resources and engineering skill devoted to the project. The Maus was nevertheless a signifier for Germany’s panzer force during the rest of the war. Apart from its direct support by Hitler, the Maus opened the door to a comprehensive emphasis on technical virtuosity for its own sake, in near-abstraction from field requirements. The resulting increases in size at the expense of mobility and reliability were secondary consequences, reflecting the contemporary state of automotive, armor, and gun design. After 1943, German technicians turned from engineering to alchemy, searching for a philosopher’s stone that would bring a technical solution to the armored force’s operational problems. Hubris, idealism—or another example of the mixture of both that characterized so many aspects of the Third Reich’s final years?

  The Maus thread, however, takes the story a few months ahead of itself. Its antecedent combination of institutional infighting, production imbroglios, and declining combat power led an increasing number of Hitler’s military entourage to urge the appointment of a plenipotentiary troubleshooter—specifically Heinz Guderian. Guderian describes meeting privately on February 20, 1943, with a chastened Führer who regretted their “numerous misunderstandings.” Guderian set his terms. Hitler temporized. He was given the appointment of Inspector-General of Panzer Troops, reporting directly to Hitler; with inspection rights over armored units in the Luftwaffe and the Waffen SS, and control of organization, doctrine, training, and replacement. That was a lot of power in the hands of one officer.

  There was also a back story. Guderian had spent most of 1942 restoring his stress-shaken health, which centered on heart problems, and looking for an estate suitable to his status, to be purchased with the cash grant of a million and a quarter marks Hitler awarded him in the spring of 1942. Norman Goda establishes in scathing detail that once Guderian became a landed gentleman on an estate stolen from its Polish owners, his reservations about Hitler as supreme warlord significantly diminished. Cash payments, often many times a salary and pension, were made to a broad spectrum of officers and civilians in the Third Reich—birthdays were a typical justification. Since August 1940, Guderian had been receiving, tax-free, 2,000 Reichsmarks a month—as much as his regular salary. Similar lavish gifts were so widely made to senior officers that Gerhard Weinberg cites simple bribery as a possible factor in sustaining the army’s cohesion in the war’s final stages.

  The image of an evil regime’s uniformed servants proclaiming their “soldierly honor” while simultaneously being bought and paid for is so compelling that attempting its nuancing invites charges of revisionism. Nevertheless there were contexts. A kept woman is not compensated in the same fashion as a streetwalker. Dotation, douceur, “golden parachute,” hush money, conscience money, or bribe—direct financial rec ognitions of services rendered the Reich were too common to be exactly a state secret. Guderian and his military colleagues were more than sufficiently egoistic to rationalize the cash as earned income, as recognition of achievement and sacrifice in the way that milk and apples are necessary to the health of the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

  The appointment Hitler signed on February 28, 1943, ostensibly gave Guderian what he requested. But lest any doubt might remain as to who was in charge, only the heavy assault guns, still in development stages, came under Guderian’s command. The rest, whose importance was increasing by the week, remained with the artillery. It was a relatively small thing. But Guderian’s complaint that “somebody” played a “trick” on him belies his own shrewd intelligence and low cunning. The desirability of trust between the head of state and the general in such a central position was overshadowed in Hitler’s mind by Lenin’s question: “Kto, kogo?” (Who, whom?): the question of who was to be master. Guderian had spent a year in the wilderness. Now he was back on top. Omitting the assault guns was a reminder that what had been given could be withdrawn at a chieftain’s whim. It might well make even a principled man think twice before deciding and thrice before speaking. And Hitler’s army was increasingly commanded by pragmatists.

  From the Führer’s perspective, Guderian’s appointment was one of the heaviest blows he had struck against the High Command. The ground forces’ key element, the panzers, were now under his personal authority—at one remove, to be sure, but Guderian was the kind of person whose ego and energy would focus him on the job at hand, and whose temperament was certain to lead to the same kinds of personal and jurisdictional clashes that had characterized his early career. Hitler would have all the opportunities he needed either to muddy the waters or to resolve controversies, as circumstances indicated.

  VI

  NINETEEN FORTY-TWO MARKED the end of Hitler’s panzers as originally conceived and configured. For the rest of the war, the army’s armored force plateaued, then declined—not only absolutely but relative to a counterpart and a rival, a battle companion and a partner in the Third Reich’s crimes. The Waffen SS made its first appearance at stage center in the aftermath of Stalingrad. Previously its formations had served individually. Now it was an SS Panzer Corps that retook Kharkov in March, anchoring Manstein’s counterattack to the Donets with a combination of maneuver engagements recalling Barbarossa at its best, and close-gripped street fighting suggesting Stalingrad in reverse. The campaign’s price was almost 12,000 SS men killed or wounded. And if Russian prisoners and civilians were regularly shot out of hand, if several hundred wounded Red Army soldiers were murdered when the SS overran a Kharkov hospital—victory has its price, and Manstein was not especially squeamish.

  An overjoyed Hitler declared the SS Panzer Corps to be worth 20 Italian divisions, and ordered that it be given priority in personnel and equipment—including the latest tanks. The discontent that last caused in the army was balanced by a sense, albeit sometimes grudging, that the men who wore the lightning runes had the right stuff for what the panzers knew was a coming showdown battle for control of the Eastern Front.

  The Waffen SS has been described in terms ranging from “soldiers like the rest” to a criminal institution distinguished even in the Third Reich for ideologically based bestiality. It is unrivaled in the spectrum and intensity of the attention lavished on it. Not merely SS divisions but regiments and battalions have their own English-language histories. Waffen SS military reenactors exist in Britain and the US, carefully proclaiming their nonpolitical, non-revisionist ethos on websites whose constructions nevertheless often resemble—too closely for comfort—throwbacks to purported glory days on the Russian Front.

  Simple anti-Communism has never
contributed much to the enduring fascination with the Waffen SS. More relevant is the underlying and uncomfortable question whether criminality is a component of military effectiveness. Another element involves taboo-breaking. In a Western culture where traditional masculine values are increasingly downgraded when not denigrated, there can be a certain appeal in the men who—in mythic terms at least—lived large, accepting neither boundaries nor limitations, staking everything on the iron dice of battle for themselves and their comrades.

  Those kinds of subtexts guarantee controversy. A historiography of the Waffen SS is a book by itself; a study of its images a second; and an analysis of its fascination a third. All three, however, begin at the same point: the focal point of this work. The identity of the Waffen SS is constructed around its panzer divisions. They established a legitimate reputation as some of the most formidable combat formations in the brief history of armored war. Waffen SS soldiers learned tactical and technical skills quickly. Waffen SS officers combined a charismatic fearlessness and an aggressive, opportunistic approach to command that together focused an esprit de corps able to overcome heavy odds and survive high casualties.

  Waffen SS achievements involved more than iron discipline and battlefield ferocity, more than often-cited superior weaponry allegedly obtained at the army’s expense. F. Scott Fitzgerald speaks of a whole-souled emotional equipment as necessary in modern war. The Waffen SS ethos was a blend of vitalism and racism—culturally, ideologically, and institutionally based—that nurtured and synergized conscious ruthlessness and conscious brutality, each an integral element of Waffen SS fighting power. That fighting power in turn manifested the inseparability of war and racism in Nazi Germay. One was the other, and the Waffen SS epitomized both.