* Corroborated to the author from a private source.
*Recently it has been suggested that Guderian did not make his request to transfer the main defensive forces to the east until after the Russians attacked. The evidence is academic and too thin to be persuasive.
11 The Final Stand
Among the most traumatic paradoxes of Guderian’s experience was the sudden and cataclysmic reversal of his mode of life which took place within the few weeks after his dismissal as Chief of Staff. From being the holder of one of the most prestigious offices in Germany he became, almost overnight, a fugitive and then the captive of foes who planned his prosecution for war crimes. At one moment he was engaged upon tasks which legally demanded an aggressive outlook and the next he was thrown back entirely upon the defensive in justifying the propriety of his previous employment. He adapted himself to these swift changes in fortune with relatively good humour and assured dignity. It was not the first time he had experienced abject defeat.
The intention of the victorious Allies, to bring both the persons and or organisations of their late opponents to trial, threatened members of the General Staff with a double chance of standing in the dock either for such criminal acts as they were deemed to have committed as individuals or as the servants of organisations – the Great General Staff and OKW – which were to be tried en bloc. It was as a potential war criminal in his own right and as a member of the General Staff that Guderian found himself incarcerated by the Americans along with many of his past colleagues in triumph and tragedy – among them Haider, Thomale, Milch, Praun, List, Weichs, Blomberg, and Leeb. Initially their treatment was overbearingly that to be expected by the vanquished from an arrogant conqueror, and the generals were submitted to many humiliations. Strik-Strikfeld records that, ‘In general Guderian’s bearing was dignified and soldierly, particularly when the American guards started to play tricks. I remember an American sergeant pointing a carbine at him and he stood there calmly facing him. I was close at hand and we managed to get the sergeant to drop his carbine’. And later Strik-Strikfeld recalls a day when a number of Russian officers who had fought on the German side were being made ready for transfer back to their homeland – and certain death for treason. ‘List, Weichs and Guderian went across to a young American captain who had always been correct and even friendly. “We must protest against the handing over of our Russian comrades to the Soviet authorities.” The Captain said he was merely carrying out his orders … I can still see them standing there, the two field-marshals and the general, once so powerful, now helpless and pleading …’
Gradually conditions for the generals improved. Interrogation followed by interrogation helped pass the time, and to describe their experiences to their captors (even though the threat of following their Russian comrades was rarely far from their thoughts) was a fruitful way of reliving past glories and defining their part in creating one of the most remarkable military machines the world had known. Guderian was at once recognised as a star turn and he, too, at first, gave freely of his knowledge.
A revealing glimpse of Guderian is obtained through the American officers who interrogated him. On 26th August, 1945, Major Kenneth Hechler, an infantryman, sat down to question him on the subject of the employment of panzer forces in Normandy. The entire exchange was friendly and in English and came as a pleasant surprise to Hechler who was aware that, previously, Historical Division officers had not found Guderian too co-operative. Guderian greeted Hechler genially with: ‘Aha! A fellow armoured officer!’, which Hechler sceptically adjudged as ‘… just so much soft soap, but I did not have the feeling that he twisted any of his real opinions in order to say what he felt an American would like to hear. He responded quickly to all of the questions and I do not believe that he was trying to make any particular impression or grind an axe.’
Guderian’s attitude waxed and waned in relation to the treatment he received and the aptitude of his intelocutors. For a prolonged period he withdrew all co-operation because it came to his ears that the Poles were demanding he should be handed over to them for trial. But the timing of this refusal was in some ways unfortunate since it coincided with a creative idea being fomented by the Americans. Dr George Shuster, the head of the War Department Interrogation Commission, is quoted as saying that ‘… after talking with General Guderian he could think of nothing more calculated to produce a good, strategic history of the German General Staff than to bring Guderian to the United States and install him on somebody’s porch up in Connecticut for a summer of casual conversation’. Shuster’s impression bore fruit in early 1946 when the Americans began to concentrate more than 200 former German generals and staff officers in one camp at Allendorf in order to gather as much information as they could from their previous enemies. In their opinion the two men with outstanding qualifications who should act as co-ordinators of the German writers were Haider and Guderian, but this was at once rendered impracticable because Guderian was moving through one of his periods of non-co-operation and in any case he and Haider were not on speaking terms. So Haider became co-ordinator in one of the most remarkable historical research projects ever attempted, while Guderian, when finally he decided that it was safe and in his better interests to help (he was told on 18th June 1947, his birthday, that all charges had been dropped), made contributions on the periphery and commented upon the major studies and those upon which he could focus his special expertise. The insight they give into his way of thinking and the nature of their contribution to the matters with which he dealt, are invaluable: prejudices and pride are intermingled with the caustic shafts which won him a special recognition among the Americans. But Guderian was far from alone in expressions of pique: factions gathered round Haider, with the traditionalists on the one side, and the progressives, including Guderian, on the other. Thus Generalfeldmarschalls von Blomberg and Erhardt Milch (the master-builder of the Luftwaffe under Göring) suffered from a form of ostracism in company with Guderian. Haider declined to shake the hand of Milch when it was offered and repeatedly declined even to discuss the quarrel with Guderian. Rival academic factions hurled verbal darts at each other while they refought – on paper – the battles of the past. A passage at arms with General der Infanterie Edgar Roehricht provides a good example of Guderian’s invective when roused. Roehricht, in a paper describing, somewhat inaccurately from memory, the training organisation of OKH, had criticised the methods employed by the Panzer Command. In retort Guderian wrote: ‘The study shows that the author had just as little peacetime training experience as wartime combat experience’ – a tart piece of defamation since Roehricht had much experience in many capacities, as Guderian should have known. Guderian objected to remarks such as, ‘The arbitrary manners of the armoured forces from the very beginning …’ and summarised his views (to the satisfaction of the American editors who deleted Roehricht’s offending passages) with ‘The contributor … also knows nothing about the Inspector General of Panzer Troops. Who was “disturbed” by the Inspector General? The work of the Inspector General did not lead to any “duplication of effort” nor did it cause any lack of uniformity in tactical views. It certainly had no “fatal consequences”.’
The principal articles written by Guderian for the American project were a long paper describing the training of General Staff Officers and a study giving his personal concept of the structure of joint command in the future. In the latter he developed an expansive and controversial line of thought, tackling the problem from a joint service angle instead of narrowly from that of Army High Command, and demonstrating his grasp of the essential need for such a concept in substantiation of his long-standing belief in unification. Haider treated the paper to some typically acetic, though by no means invalid and unconstructive, comments. The exchanges between these two were injurious to their reputations and productive of factions. Among Haider’s loyal adherents, an insinuation that Guderian was shallow, as Haider, with unworthy insincerity, made him out to be, became current. And Guderian, to t
he world at large, was to present Haider as of lesser calibre than, in fact, this remarkable man was. Haider the cool intellectual with a schoolmasterly manner, and Guderian, the dynamic man of ideas and action were worthy of better things.
Throughout this academic period behind bars in the unaccustomed role of comparatively passive inactivity – a style of secluded intellectual activity which had eluded him since the 1920s – Guderian was at last to find a relaxation which previously would have been inconceivable. To his elder son, who as a General Staff officer was his fellow prisoner, he appeared as something of a revelation in that he began to play bridge for the first time – and did so light heartedly. Moreover, he tended the camp vegetable patch with immense enjoyment. Heinz-Günther recalls those days with a sense of keen enjoyment. In 1948, too, the Americans were registering his father as a ‘very kindly man, cheerful … with an excellent sense of humour’, but, by then, of course, Guderian already knew he was not to be abandoned to the Poles, or any other court of justice. ‘The straight road’, as he wrote to Gretel, ‘proves right in the long run.’ And when captivity at last came to an end on his 60th birthday in June 1948 (he was the last to be released from the camp at Neustadt although, during the last six months, Gretel was allowed to be with him), it was to move to a small house at Schwangau. There he began work on the memoirs for which he had laid foundations while in prison and to start gardening with characteristic enthusiasm and a quite astonishing knowledge. And, as old men will, he planted trees.
Battles remained to be fought, though none with much relish. In 1948 it came to his notice that Schlabrendorff’s book, Offiziere gegen Hitler, which had already been published in Switzerland, was about to be serialised in a Munich newspaper. The serious allegations against Guderian’s conduct had to be combated, particularly the assertion that he had betrayed the 20th July plotters in order to become Chief of Staff. A prolonged wrangle took place out of court and resulted in what, in some respects, amounted to a Pyrrhic victory. Nevertheless the documents and sworn affidavits by Guderian and Thomale stimulated and provide an important contribution to the history of resistance against Hitler. When Schlabrendorff recanted in the pages of the Münchener Abendzeitung, saying ‘… much new material has been found. Due to this a rewrite of the book has begun … For this reason I have asked the editor of the Münchener Abendzeitung to stop publication of the old edition’, his letter appeared under the headline ‘The End of a Legend’. The paper added its own comment to the effect that, already, the case at that moment being heard against Haider showed that there could be no talk of a substantial political resistance to Hitler among the General Staff.
The remainder of his life was spent mostly in a backwater, although he was constantly engaged in correspondence with journalists all over the world and in caring for the interests of his old comrades of all ranks. Yet occasionally his name cropped up as a shot fired in the cold war being waged between East and West. In October 1950 he wrote a booklet about European defence called ‘Can Western Europe be Defended?’, its appearance timed to raise alarm at a moment of appalling weakness of the West’s defences as NATO began to seek new teeth to make its task credible. The booklet caused a stir, the London Times referring to people’s bewilderment at the authoritative ring of a voice from the recent iniquitous German past and the general’s acceptance of an estimate that the Russians had 175 divisions at readiness which they could raise to 500. And in 1951, at the invitation of his publisher, another evocative little booklet appeared – So Geht es Nicht (This cannot be the Right Way) – in which he unflinchingly and predictably stated the view held by so many people, that Germany could not remain divided and that there was a danger that NATO, in rearming the Germans, wished only to use them as the principal defenders of a unified Europe against the threat from the East. Looking farther ahead he added the fear that the Western Powers would exhaust themselves by the struggles in the Far East to the detriment of the essential defence of Europe. In that year, too, the Poles, searching no doubt for political advantage, exploited the name Guderian with its old symbolism of naked German aggression: they complained to the USA that Guderian was in charge of an alleged intelligence organisation which ‘established the so-called Guderian group for smuggling American agents into Poland’ – an accusation which lacked foundation.
These mild forays and minor disturbances ruffled him but little. To offset them occurred the intense interest of Germans and foreigners in Panzer Leader (to which the critics gave a fair if not exuberant reception) which was exhilarating. Most important was its translation into English and publication in the USA, where it starred among the best sellers of 1952; besides translations into nine other languages including Russian, Polish and Chinese. The negotiations of the English rights with the publishers Michael Joseph, however, were to have repercussions long after his death because of his post-war contacts with Basil Liddell Hart.
In 1948 Liddell Hart (who could not speak German and never met Guderian) began a correspondence with a view to obtaining information that would enable him to enhance and republish his successful The Other Side of the Hill about the German generals. Liddell Hart gave every kindness to Guderian and in due course helped in the arrangements to have the Erinnerungen published in English and wrote the Foreword. In return for this Liddell Hart sent a letter dated 6th April 1951 saying:
‘Because of our special association, and the wish that I should write the foreword to your book, people might wonder why there is no separate reference to what my writings taught. You might care to insert a remark that I emphasised the use of armoured forces for long-range operations engaged against the opposing army’s communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer infantry units – and that these points particularly impressed you. A suitable place for such a remark, apart from page 15 (trans page 22) would be on page 19 (trans page 31). I would appreciate it if you felt inclined to insert a sentence or two.’
In due course, Liddell Hart obligingly supplied the desired draft, which was inserted in page 20 of Panzer General, ending with ‘So I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.’ None of this would have mattered if the insert had been true or if Guderian had been the only target for Liddell Hart’s deception. But as Professor Mearsheimer discovered in the Liddell Hart files, Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein and the Rommel family were also singled out in efforts to lend testimony to Liddell Hart’s campaign to burnish his false, ambitious claims of prescience for having correctly envisaged the shape and dominating nature of offensive armoured warfare before 1939.
When Guderian’s son showed me the ‘missing’ letters we agreed that no purpose would be served by mentioning them in the biography. We did ask ourselves why his father agreed to co-operate (as Manstein refused and so did the Rommel family) and what effect this had on his reputation. Beyond much doubt Guderian permitted the spurious paragraph out of kindness and gratitude for friendship and gratitude – such was the man. In any case he could afford to be generous since nothing Liddell Hart might claim could detract from his own mighty achievements. But he might not have been so compliant had he lived to witness Liddell Hart’s blatant trading upon that now celebrated paragraph. And we can ask, if Guderian was a true disciple of Liddell Hart (the latter saddled with his actual pre-war scepticism about armoured forces) would he too have rejected panzer divisions in 1939? But, of course, Guderian, always his own man, was never anybody’s disciple – with the exception of General Fuller’s.
In March 1954 he was made an Honorary Member of the International Mark Twain Society. A few weeks later his health fell into sudden decline and on 14th May he died.
Standing beside his grave members of the Frontier Police fired a last salute. For the German Army had yet to be reborn and therefore military honours were denied him. But in those final days he was contentedly aware that the organisation that had absorbed his entire career was about to be recreated. In October of that year Germany would be admit
ted to NATO and the Bundeswehr become a unified defence force that he might have approved, a certainty. Yet it remains a controversial fact that Guderian was to be refused the honour that was granted to Rommel and, most worthily of all, Fellgiebel, the naming of barracks after them in the 1960s.
12 Seer, Technician, Genius or Germany’s best General?
It has to be left to the imagination whether Guderian could have fulfilled all the demands that can be placed upon a high commander for he never held a completely independent high command. Therefore it is impossible to assess fully his qualities at this level by the standards of Field-Marshal Lord Wavell when he declared that he would only consider the high-commander in history who had ‘… handled large forces in an independent command in more than one campaign and who had shown his qualities in adversity as well as in success’. Wavell’s qualifications as a judge are undeniable: among modern commanders he is almost unique in his record of endurance of the vicissitudes of independent command in many campaigns – in success and in adversity – and, also, respected as a writer with profound insight into the problem of generalship. Let it be recalled that Erwin Rommel carried a copy of Wavell’s lectures on campaign with him, though Guderian seems hardly to have felt the need for a foreign mentor – except, perhaps, Fuller. Nevertheless Wavell’s criteria are useful in evaluating Guderian as a Great Captain, even if the field-marshal’s requirements have to be adapted because Guderian had, perforce, to filch independent command of large forces by circumventing the restrictive orders of his superiors.
It is, in fact, by his propensity to walk alone, divorced from traditional orthodoxy, that Guderian must be judged, for he cannot be assessed by the standards of his more obedient contemporaries from whom so frequently, with calculated dissent, he stood apart. Guderian was that rare combination of a man of ideas equipped with the ability and verve to turn inspiration into reality. No other general in the Second World War – and few in history – managed to impress so wide and intrinsic a change upon the military art in so short a time, and left such a trail of controversy in his wake. And so the questions about this maverick general which have to be answered concern the impact of his unorthodoxy (if unorthodoxy it was) upon events as well as those concerning wisdom and stability of character. Was he seer or empiricist, a mere technician or a radical genius? Above all, in a profession which abides by strict discipline and standardised behaviour, could he be damned as an instrument of negative disruption or upheld as the harbinger of a new kind of military unity? By creating a unified Panzertruppe within the German Army was he a cause of fragmentation within that army? Or was it automatically productive that, by forging a system that parallelled the first attempt at creating a consolidated Defence Force, he introduced conditions which eliminated the burden of a long attritional war, such as ended in 1918, and made feasible, once more, campaigns of swift, economic viability?
Guderian: Panzer General Page 32