These troops, of course, were acting in the spirit of the Valkyrie operation to put down an SS mutiny. Also they were perfectly correct in saying that they acted under Guderian’s orders since all home-based panzer units were, by Charter, under his command, and the commander of this unit had been told by Thomale only to follow orders from Hitler, Keitel or Guderian. In this moment of confusion, when nobody knew friends from foes, sudden false conclusions were inevitable. Speer writes: ‘Both Goebbels and Remer thought it likely that Guderian was a participant in the Putsch. The leader of the brigade was Oberst Bollbrinker. Since I knew him well I tried to reach him by telephone. The message I received was reassuring: the tanks had come to crush the rebellion’. They did not, of course, say what sort of rebellion because they were unaware of the circumstances. This raises the important matter of loyalties. The panzer officers, at that moment, were willingly engaged in an operation on behalf of Hitler but they gave their initial allegiance to Guderian, all the more willingly, probably, in the belief that he was the Führer’s agent. This not only underlines the conspirators’ essential need for support by credible military leaders, other than forgotten and discredited men of Beck’s standing, but shows how correct were those who evaluated Guderian as a potentially key personality in the crisis. It also goes to substantiate Guderian’s contention that ‘… at that time the great proportion of the German people still believed in Adolf Hitler …’ Without troops personally loyal to themselves the conspirators never had a chance. Yet, even Guderian’s weight, thrown behind the plot at the last minute, as Barsewisch had asked, would have saved nothing. Still there would have been a bungle and as a result Guderian, too, would have been destroyed and deprived of the task he saw for himself on Germany’s behalf.
At Rastenburg Hitler was picking up the pieces and giving the orders that were to lead to the slaughter of dissidents and infliction of the final indignities upon the Army. So far as Guderian was concerned this was neither the first nor the last time he benefited from the services of a Chief of Staff who was as meticulously loyal as, for example, Nehring had been. It was Thomale who, at 6 pm on the 20th, was the first to be asked to account for Guderian’s absence and he who was called to see the Führer an hour later to answer, satisfactorily, further questions.* He was told to instruct Guderian immediately to go to OKH at Lötzen and take over as acting Chief of Staff. Fate had a hand, for Hitler had earlier decided to be rid of Zeitzler, whose objections had become too strong for comfort, and replace him with General Buhle. Zeitzler had retired on grounds of ill-health but Buhle had been wounded by the explosion and was temporarily incapacitated. Quite by chance, and as second choice, Guderian reached what Warlimont called ‘the summit of his ambitions’ – in which judgement Warlimont may well have been right in connection with an ambitious man, except that, as Guderian writes: ‘… even the rumour-mongers must admit that voluntarily to tackle the situation on the Eastern Front in July 1944 was no very enticing proposition.’ For there were those who gave credence, as did Schlabrendorff, to the gossip that ‘All those in the plot were convinced that Guderian had given them away to Hitler in order that he would be made Chief of Staff’. The fact that Buhle was already the Chief of Staff designate disposes of these accusations without the need to hear Guderian’s defence that he was ordered to comply and that, in any case, ‘I should have regarded myself as a shabby coward if I had refused to attempt to save the eastern armies and my homeland, eastern Germany’. These were reasons enough, but there was one more which he later confided to his family, to Strik-Strikfeld and close associates. That was the need to prevent an SS man becoming Chief of Staff, the vital necessity to curb the excesses of Heinrich Himmler and his minions as they closed in for the kill of the old Army.
There is a revealing clue to the innermost thoughts and intentions of Guderian in a letter from Gretel on August 20th. In it she wrote: ‘We have often talked about this dreaded development and the task that would be set for you. That is how it has turned out! Also that we would be parted in this most serious hour and have to make independent decisions was clear to us. So now each must stand at his post and hope that we will be happily reunited quite soon … Our unique understanding gives me the strength to see things through … The forbidden emotions you will not be able to avoid in the future. I get panic-stricken sometimes when I think of all that is piling upon you. May God maintain for you his [the Führer’s] close confidence. That is the foundation of all. If that is lost so is everything else.’
The letter, carried by hand, is of necessity guarded in its obliquity, for every communication was dangerous, but it seems quite apparent that together they had visualised, with a sense of forboding, a day he would be called upon as Chief of Staff. The reference to ‘forbidden emotions’ requires interpretation, but almost certainly concerns medical instructions that he must avoid emotions and excitements under stress. The references to Hitler’s confidence do not, however, imply a close allegiance to Hitler, but suggest instead the need to cling to any straw for survival. This letter, however, could be read in the context of abiding loyalty to the Führer, had it been intercepted. Never before, let it be remembered, was the urge for survival more strongly stimulated in Gretel.
*Guderian’s times are extracted from his sworn affidavit.
*Reference to a post-war affidavit sworn by Thomale.
10 The Last in the Line
The task awaiting Guderian as acting Chief of Staff was gigantic beyond belief and, of course, preposterous in its enormity. An analysis of his duties, to which those of Inspector of Panzer Forces were now a subsidiary part, gives the barest indication of the absurd state to which the role of Chief of Staff had been reduced. Operationally, and primarily, he was responsible, subject to aggravating supervision by Hitler and OKW, for the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front. As a painful secondary task he was made a member of the Court of Honour set up by Hitler to examine the dossiers of officers who were said to be responsible for acts in connection with the Putsch and to expel them from the Service in order that they could be brought to trial by the People’s Court. As self-appointed duties were his efforts to attempt to maintain the status of the Army and that of the General Staff, along with resistance to further encroachment by OKW and the SS in the province of OKH, and such endeavours as could be made to save innocent or only marginally implicated men from the Gestapo or any other form of summary justice. As guarantee of his presence he was expressly forbidden to offer his resignation, as had Zeitzler no less than five times!
Hercules, compared with Guderian, had a relatively easy task in cleansing the Augean stables, for at least there had been a nearby stream for his assistance, whereas the resources available to Guderian were drying up. Moreover Hercules had a free hand while Guderian’s were tied, and his authority impaired. Ask as much as he liked to be ‘… permitted to give directions to all General Staff Corps Officers of the Army on such subjects as concerned the General Staff as a whole’, Hitler, Himmler, Keitel and Jodl were bent on the General Staff’s abolition and had no intention of relenting. Instead Guderian felt compelled to make larger concessions than any of his predecessors. On 23rd July, in a broadcast to the nation, he said, ‘A few officers, some on the retired list, have lost courage and by an act of cowardice and weakness preferred the road to disgrace to that of duty and honour … The people and the Army stand closely behind the Führer … I guarantee the Führer and the German people the unity of the generals, of the officer corps and of the men in the Army in the single aim of fighting for and achieving victory under the motto created by the venerable Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg, “Loyalty is the essence of honour”.’ And on the 29th he issued a notorious order (one which Goerlitz says, with exaggeration, ‘produced a division in the ranks of the General Staff which could never be bridged’) saying: ‘Each General Staff officer must be a National Socialist officer. That means he must show and prove himself by way of exemplary conduct in political questions, through active instruction and
advice to younger comrades on the thoughts of the Führer in the political field as well as a member of the “selected few”, and also in the area of tactics and strategy.’ At this time, too, the Nazi salute, at Hitler’s demand, became obligatory for the Wehrmacht. That a division was produced is undeniable though it is probably more correct to say that it was the cumulative effects of the 20th, not just the order of the 29th, which did it.
Neither the broadcast nor the order of the 29th are mentioned in Panzer Leader. It is likely the former was made at the request of Goebbels (whose activity was dynamic) and the latter under pressure from Hitler, whose fury with the Army was uncontainable. By means of silence in his memoirs Guderian transmits his disquiet at the measures to which he was reduced: if he had chosen to comment he would probably have elected to justify the ends being worthy of the means. His was to be a Micawberlike holding action, a bargaining of status for time in pursuit of a military stalemate from which a bearable peace could be negotiated. Quite deliberately he put country before self and the Army – and in so doing performed what may have been his greatest service to Hitler. For though the Führer and his henchman Himmler (who was appointed commander of the Replacement Army instead of Fromm) were well on the road to substituting the Waffen SS for the Army, they were not yet completely ready. Meanwhile the officers, rank and file of the Army cordially disliked and mistrusted their ‘comrades’ of the Party. By identifying himself as one with the Army and the Party Guderian, for the time being, guaranteed the Army’s loyalty to Hitler. It is unlikely that there was another officer then serving (other than Rundstedt) who had the prestige to do so. As it was, Guderian felt the need for a complete restructuring of OKH, the disciplining of officers who were already (under cover of the new National Socialist atmosphere) taking liberties, and the incorporation of faithful followers who had served him in the past – among them Praun as Chief Signals Officer, and the enthusiastic General der Panzertruppen Walter Wenck who had collaborated with him in developing minor panzer tactics in 1928 and had urged him on at Sedan) as Chief of Operations. After the Bomb Plot staff officers who, as Guderian demanded, ‘should have three good ideas a day’, were at a premium.
The customary initial renouncements were the price paid for the consolidation of Guderian’s position with Hitler. Clearly he believed there was a slight chance of retrieval. On 30th July Gretel, in a letter which dealt mainly with the farm, had written: ‘My feeling that one day you would be called to the top position in the Army has been proved right. May you succeed despite the most devilish difficult situation in keeping the Red hordes from invading our beloved land … May the Führer’s trust stay with you and give you the opportunity to achieve your aim’. Well might the Führer’s faith be in question: nobody, by this time, took him at his word and he trusted nobody. And Guderian had replied to her on the 18th August: ‘Difficulties have to be overcome and that is my daily work. Because of this, much has to be done and successes are few. I hope by holding firmly to my goals we will survive, but it is difficult to catch up with years of neglect’. Hope was about all that did remain. Guderian, though not yet prepared to concede total defeat, realised that victory was impossible. As he took office, the front in Normandy was on the eve of rupture, that in Italy in steady recession, while in the East the Russian armies had overrun vast areas and were advancing into the Baltic States in the north, towards Warsaw in the centre and Rumania in the south. All three Army Groups in Russia were in the process of destruction along with those in the West. At the same time German cities and industry were being ripped apart by aerial bombardment. In this heart-rending position it is indicative of Guderian’s innermost conviction of impending doom that he called upon a precedent of desperation to bolster his optimism -taking as model the events of the year 1759 and the calamity of the Battle of Künersdorf and its aftermath. On that occasion Frederick the Great had contemplated abdication but eventually had saved the situation through hanging on until there occurred the almost miraculous death of the Russian Empress with her successor ending the war when Prussia was at the last gasp. In essence Guderian’s private and hopelessly optimistic war aim amounted to stabilisation of a fortified front in the East and the achievement of peace in the West – the latter helped, perhaps, by a local success.
Epitomising the stresses and strains, from within and without, that were imposed upon rehabilitation and operational measures, was the struggle for Poland where it centred through August and September on the Battle of Warsaw. On 1st August, as Russian armies, at the end of their tether, came close to the city after a 300-mile advance, the clandestine Polish Home Army rose up and cut vital German communication links with the armies fighting at the front. The insurrection was not, in fact, aimed against the Germans who, it was assumed, were utterly defeated as they evacuated Warsaw: if that had not been so the uprising would never have been ordered. The Poles were really attempting to win a prestige success with a view to establishing a political presence prior to the arrival of the Russians. Nevertheless the Germans could not stand by and let them do so, particularly since Guderian was assembling forces for the defence of the River Vistula: he stopped a panic evacuation that began after 22nd July and poured reinforcements against the flanks of the Russian spearheads. He also requested that the city be declared part of the Army’s zone of operations and therefore should be handed over by the Governor General and the SS, who were the responsible agency, under Himmler, for all anti-partisan operations. But Himmler, encouraged by Hitler, refused to hand over and instead, on 5th August, sent his chief of anti-partisan operations, SS Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, to lead the fight against the Poles. Thus there was divided command between the SS inside the city and the Army on the perimeter.
The fighting which engulfed Warsaw contained all that was worst in partisan warfare and attracted the fiercest of combatants whose forebears were the Reds of 1917 and the Freikorps. It had repercussions for Gretel too: in mid-August she received warning that some of the people on the estate might be of the ‘Warsaw Organisation’ and be plotting to do her harm. She wrote: T am not frightened, darling, and I sleep alone downstairs’ – and went on living there until the Russians were at the gates in January 1945. Hitler demanded the extermination of the Poles and the destruction of Warsaw, instructions which Bach-Zelewski saw fit to disobey. Guderian, of course, knew about the merciless partisan operation which undermined, in varying extent, almost every corner of enemy-occupied territory, but this was his first experience of dealing with it in all its ramifications from High Command. If he had been unaware of the ruthlessly repressive and murderous anti-partisan instructions which, from time to time, had been issued by Hitler and OKW, he was left in no doubt now of the depravity which ruled on both sides. At the post-war trials of war criminals the perpetrators of horror at Warsaw were to appear and pay penalties. Guderian, as Chief of the Army Staff, was to be among those upon whom the Poles would have liked to lay hands. It is true that Army units fought in the streets of Warsaw under the direction of Bach-Zelewski and, of course, it was the Army under Guderian’s command that stopped the Russians on the outskirts of Warsaw, so preventing the link-up with the Polish partisans that led to the eventual collapse of the uprising. Guderian, in Panzer Leader, is at pains to emphasise his interventions in mitigating the depradations by some of the cruellest anti-partisan forces under Bach-Zelewski’s command and in seeking withdrawal of Hitler’s demand that prisoners should not be granted full rights by International Law. He also underlines that the worst retributive orders were sent through SS channels and not those of the Army. The SS, eager for credit, took pride in this victory. Guderian could claim innocence of a crime and, after the war, the Americans declined to hand him over to the Poles.
While conducting the battle which led to the defeat of the Russians at Warsaw, Guderian began developing his technique of ‘holding firmly to his goals’ with Hitler. On 15th August they had a flaming row when Guderian, in his capacity as Inspector General of Armoure
d Forces, remarked, apropos conditions in the West, The bravery of the panzer troops is not enough to make up for the failure of the other two Services – the Air Force and the Navy’. Warlimont wrote that ‘… he went about his new job with characteristic energy; he did not, however, as Zeitzler had done, waste any effort trying to get the other theatres of war back under OKH … In his impetuous and vivacious manner he would often use strong language even at the briefing conferences. From his general outlook and the consequential personal animosities it soon became clear that, even under the extreme pressure of the situation, the change in Army Chief of Staff was unlikely to bring any change in the unhappy relationship between the two top levels of the Wehrmacht. Although we were franker in our dealings with each other, it did not enter the head of any senior officers concerned with the overall direction of the war to make common cause with OKW or co-operate in opposition to the continuance of a war already lost’. A letter to Guderian on 15 August from General-leutnant Graf Schwerin in the War Ministry said that his greatest worry was leadership. OKW, he said, was incapable. In Normandy, where a pocket was forming near Falaise, the only possible order should be withdrawal across the River Seine. Developments were bound to be dictated by the enemy. Fifth SS Panzer Army under Sepp Dietrich seems to be the only man capable of dealing with the situation – all the others [including Kluge] are incapable.
Guderian: Panzer General Page 29