Hitler's Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich 9780300219524

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HITLER’S SOLDIERS

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HITLER’S SOLDIERS THE GERMAN ARMY IN THE THIRD REICH

BEN H. SHEPHERD

YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON iii

Copyright © 2016 Ben H. Shepherd All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] Europe Office: [email protected]

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Typeset in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shepherd, Ben (Ben H.) Title: Hitler’s soldiers : the German army in the Third Reich / Ben H. Shepherd. Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. LCCN 2016003731 | ISBN 9780300179033 (cloth : alkaline paper) LCSH: Germany. Heer—History—World War, 1939–1945. | Soldiers—Germany— History—20th century. | Germany. Heer—Military life—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Germany. | Command of troops—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns. | World War, 1939–1945—Occupied territories. | World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities. | War crimes—Germany—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / World War II. | HISTORY / Europe / Germany. | HISTORY / Military / Strategy. Classification: LCC D757.1 .S54 2016 | DDC 940.54/1343—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003731 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

Preface Introduction

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Part I: Military Ascent, Moral Decline 1 2

The Army in the New Reich, 1933–36 The Road to War, 1936–39

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Part II: Triumph and Hubris 3 4 5 6 7 8

Poland, 1939–40 ‘Sitzkrieg’, 1939–40 The Greatest Victory, 1940 Occupying the West, 1940–41 Planning Operation Barbarossa, 1940–41 Barbarossa Unleashed, 1941

45 61 72 89 110 134

Part III: Losing the Initiative 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Barbarossa Undone, 1941 Resistance and Reaction, 1941: Western Europe and Southeast Europe Winter Crisis, 1941–42 The Desert War, 1941–42 Southern Russia and Stalingrad, 1942–43 Faces of Occupation, 1942–43: The Soviet Union Faces of Occupation, 1942–43: Western Europe and Southeast Europe The Initiative Lost, 1943

161 190 203 219 242 274 297 317

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Part IV: Beleaguered 17 18 19 20 21

Takeover in Southern Europe, 1943–44 The Eastern Front, 1943–44: The Ostheer Retreats The Eastern Front, 1943–44: The Frontsoldat Endures Italy, 1943–44 Fortress Europe Breached, 1943–44

341 356 376 397 418

Part V: Defeat, Destruction and Self-Destruction 22 23 24

The Greatest Defeat, 1944 The Army ‘Recovers’, 1944–45 The Army Self-Destructs, 1945 Conclusion

435 468 497 521

Acknowledgements Appendices Appendix I: Table of Acronyms Appendix II: Glossary of German Phrases Appendix III: Table of Equivalent Ranks Appendix IV: Figures Appendix V: Maps Notes Bibliography Index Notes on Illustrations

537 539 541 543 548 550 554 555 604 616 636

PREFACE

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his book tells the story of the German army under the Third Reich. It examines the army’s military performance, its relationship with the Nazi regime, its role in military occupation, and its culpability in war crimes. The end of the Cold War saw the release of a vast range of primary sources. This more comprehensive base of information, now made available to western historians, enabled better informed debate in this area, creating an outpouring of new scholarly literature on many aspects of the second World War. The present book is the first general history of the German army under the Third Reich to draw upon this new literature and the new perspectives it provides. The book takes a narrative approach to its subject. The first two chapters deal with the period 1933 to 1939. These chapters primarily consider the context of, and build-up to, the main period on which the book focuses, that of the Second World War itself, during which all four of the book’s concerns play central roles. Literature and sources In keeping with its broad-based approach, the book draws primarily upon English-language and German-language secondary literature. For illustrative purposes, it also draws upon select primary sources: official German army documents, drawn from the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (BA-MA) in Freiburgim-Breisgau; excerpts from soldiers’ letters (Feldpostbriefe) from the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (BFZ), excerpts of both from various published collections, and various former officers’ memoirs. The selection of official documents consists largely of i) material produced by the German high command, and by larger field formations, concerned with the troops ideological and ‘nationalpolitical’ instruction, and ii) material produced by a selection of German army

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divisions, together with the corps and army-level commands to which they were subordinate, covering issues such as combat, logistics, and the determinants of troop morale. Divisions were selected on the basis of the comprehensiveness of archival material pertaining to them, be they official sources or Feldpostbriefe. The divisions were also selected with a view to assembling a small representative sample of different types of army division. Hence a small number of divisions frequently appear at various points in the text. The division that combines the most extensive sample of Feldpostbriefe with extensive official material is the 12th Panzer Division. Most of the letter excerpts that the book utilises are drawn from the Sterz collection at the BfZ. The main reason for this was accessibility, for an extensive series of excerpts from the letters has been selected, type up and listed by division, all for the benefit of researchers. Excerpts from the Schnepf collection, which the BfZ acquired only recently, have also been used. This is the first book to utilise material from this particular collection. Use of terms The book refers to the German army as ‘the German army’ and not as the Wehrmacht. Whilst many works emply the term ‘Wehrmacht’ to denote the German army, this is actually incorrect. ‘Wehrmacht’ directly translates as Armed Forces, and technically speaking the Wehrmacht comprised not just the army, but also the air force (Luftwaffe), navy (Kriegsmarine), and, from 1944, the Waffen-SS. The term ‘Wehrmacht’ is thus used to denote Armed Forces throughout the book. Other branches of the Armed Forces do receive attention throughout the book, however. This is particularly the case with the Waffen-SS, which fought and operated alongside the army but also rivalled it for resources; and also with the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe features in the story in three respects. Like the Waffen-SS, it was both a fellow armed service for the army but also a rival for manpower and resources. In addition, high-ranking Luftwaffe officers frequently acted as commanders of ground forces at army group level and above. In this capacity, they commanded large numbers of army troops. Online resources Every effort has been made to provide fully accurate information throughout the text and endnotes. Where any remaining updates are made following the book going to press, these are listed in an online document accessible via the following link: http://www.gcu.ac.uk/gsbs/staff/drbenshepherd/. This link also provides access to scanned examples of primary sources used in this study, for the benefit of readers interested in investigating such sources further.

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eventy years after its collapse in 1945, the Third Reich remains a potent source of public and media fascination. Images of the Nazis’ annual rallies at Nuremberg can still impress and horrify. The spectacle of Nazi troops and weaponry, orchestrated in vast torch-lit arenas, seems to capture the essence of Fascism: mindless obedience, servility and military power. These same images, images that were designed to energize the German people and frighten Nazism’s opponents at home and abroad, were staple ingredients of newspapers and newsreels around the world during the 1930s. For foreign observers, to experience this display and to then see and hear the subsequent news reports as Germany overran its weaker neighbours during the late 1930s and early 1940s was to imbibe a terrifying impression of a country with an unstoppable war machine and an insatiable desire for expansion. The fear, for European peoples especially, was: ‘When will they turn on us?’ Images designed to inspire the susceptible and terrify opponents even now have the power to chill and, for many people, prompt the question: ‘How could they lose?’ It was the German Wehrmacht, or armed forces, that achieved the Third Reich’s spectacular military conquests. And above all other branches of the Wehrmacht – the air force (Luftwaffe), the navy (Kriegsmarine) and, later, the militarized formations of the Waffen-SS – it was the German army that made the largest contribution. The German army, then, was the main sword arm of the Third Reich, of its national leader, Adolf Hitler, and of the ideology they espoused. Erwin Rommel, the most famous German general of the Second World War in Western eyes, affirmed this truth when he wrote in December 1938 that ‘the army of the Wehrmacht is the sword of the new German worldview’.1 The army and the Nazi movement did not come together overnight. Yet Nazism and militarism were ideal partners, for warfare held a central place in Nazi ideology. This was due above all to the ideas of Hitler himself.

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There remains debate over just how important the different formative stages of Hitler’s early life were to the development of his ideas. Certainly, two stages that did lay foundations for Hitler’s racist, Social Darwinist worldview were his time as a struggling artist-cum-drifter in Vienna between 1908 and 1913, and his service as a soldier of the Royal Bavarian Army on the western front between 1914 and 1918.2 Germany’s defeat in 1918, the political chaos that blighted the country in its aftermath, and its subsequent humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles were events that all radicalized Hitler further. In 1919 he joined the German Workers’ Party (DAP), shortly after it wins renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), becoming its principal speaker before ascending to the post of party chairman in 1921. Hitler’s writings during the 1920s espoused the then widely held belief that Germany had lost the war not in the field, but owing to a ‘stab in the back’ inflicted by civilian leaders, Communists, and Jews. Yet Hitler believed war was necessary not only to right this grave wrong, expand German territory and restore Germany’s status as a great power. Rather, these were all means to the same end to which Hitler believed wars should ultimately be fought – revitalizing and strengthening the German race itself. According to Hitler’s worldview, war was a biological and political necessity if the German nation and German people were to thrive in an international order characterized by a perpetual struggle between races for domination. ‘I believe,’ he proclaimed in a speech of May 1928, ‘that I have enough energy to lead our people whither it must shed its blood, not for an adjustment of boundaries, but to save it into the most distant future by securing so much land and space that the future will receive back many times the blood shed.’3 From the late 1920s onwards, economic crisis assailed the already fragile stability of the liberal democratic regime, the Weimar Republic, that had governed Germany since its defeat. From 1930 onwards, Hitler and the Nazis amassed enormous electoral support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles, appealing to Germans’ sense of economic grievance, and promoting panGermanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. As Germany plunged ever deeper into political and economic chaos, Hitler became a key player in the country’s politics. He coopted a large chunk of Germany’s conservative elite, the military leadership included, becoming chancellor in 1933 and then national leader, Führer, the following year. During the late 1930s, Germany flaunted its expansionist intent by seizing Austria and much of Czechoslovakia. These acts of annexation brought growing international concern and condemnation, but no military consequences. However the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 finally led Britain, France and the dominions of the British Commonwealth to declare war on Germany. In May and June 1940, the German army trounced the armies of France, Britain and their allies in the west in a triumphant campaign, achieving in six

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weeks what its First World War predecessor had failed to achieve in four years. The army’s tactical and operational performance completely outclassed that of its opponents, inflicting upon them the most spectacularly swift military humiliation in modern European history. Thanks to its efforts, together with those of the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, the Third Reich now dominated the European continent. Only Britain, together with her Empire and Commonwealth, continued to resist in an apparently hopeless struggle. The superiority and triumph of German arms were conveyed in countless photographic and newsreel images. Among the most famous were German infantry storming across the River Meuse, Panzers scything through opposition, Hitler and his entourage on a victorious sightseeing tour of Paris, and jubilant crowds hailing massed ranks of smartly attired troops in the Berlin victory parade of July 1940. Hitler’s army appeared invincible. This astounding record of military success goes a long way to explaining why the German army of the Second World War still enjoys a reputation as the most proficient, effective fighting force to take the field of modern land combat. At the peak of its powers, so runs popular belief, the army combined peerless standards of training with unmatched expertise in armoured warfare. The high point of the German army’s achievements encompassed not only the swift crushing of France in the spring of 1940, but also – despite immense logistical challenges and a numerically superior enemy – the conquest of most of the European Soviet Union during the second half of 1941. Erich von Manstein, widely regarded as the army’s finest general of the Second World War, attributed these achievements in his postwar memoir, Lost Victories, to ‘the decisive factor’ of ‘self-sacrifice, valour and devotion to duty of the German fighting soldier, combined with the ability of commanders at all levels and their readiness to assume responsibility. These are the qualities which won us our victories.’4 Whether or not this was the decisive factor, the causes of the army’s success warrant serious investigation. Before asking how the German army eventually lost, then, we need to ask how it won, so repeatedly and spectacularly, during the early years of the war. The qualities of the German soldier, and the ability of commanders at all levels to think and act independently and effectively, were indeed key to German victory. Yet further essential preconditions for the German army’s victories lay in its size, organization and technology. In every one of these respects, moreover, the German army also possessed weaknesses as well as strengths. It was the sum of the far greater weaknesses of its early opponents that further helped it to prevail. All these factors, too, then, warrant careful examination. The question of why the German army eventually lost is two questions in one: why the army’s string of triumphs was gradually brought to a halt – a process that was complete by the end of 1942 at the latest – and why it then

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suffered a succession of catastrophic defeats. The emphatic downturn in the army’s military fortunes was apparent to all but its most delusional commanders by the summer of 1943, as defeats in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and most dramatically in the Soviet Union, placed it irrevocably on the defensive. The culprit, according to the postwar memoirs of Manstein and other former generals, was Hitler. When it came to Hitler’s military failings, Manstein had plenty to say. What Hitler had lacked, Manstein claimed, was ‘all sense of judgment regarding what could be achieved and what could not’. Manstein also blamed ‘his overestimation of the power of the will. . . . In the face of his will, the essential elements of the “appreciation” of a situation on which every military commander’s decision must be based were virtually eliminated. And with that Hitler turned his back on reality.’5 Manstein wasn’t finished there, for he also claimed that ‘this overestimation of his own willpower, this disregard for the enemy’s resources and possible intentions, was not matched by a corresponding boldness of decision. The same man who, after his successes in politics up to 1938, had become a political gambler, actually recoiled from risks in the military field.’6 Manstein partly put this down to Hitler’s fears for his own prestige, his refusal to give up any piece of land he had captured, and a mind-frame that ‘conformed more to a mental picture of masses of the enemy bleeding to death before our lines than to the conception of a subtle fencer who knows how to make an occasional step backwards in order to lunge for the decisive thrust’.7 According to Manstein, Hitler had also debilitated Germany’s military performance thanks to a chaotic highcommand structure, one he himself had imposed to create ‘clashes deliberately in order that he alone should at all times have the decisive say’.8 Valid as all these criticisms may be, they contain not the slightest suggestion that the generals themselves, or the army’s own basic structures and premises, may have been at least partly to blame for its degradation and eventual destruction. The German army was in fact debilitated not just by Hitler, but also by economic and organizational weakness, and by the German army leadership’s regard – or rather disregard – for logistics, intelligence and grand strategy. In time, the effects of all this fatally damaged the German army at the operational level. Much of the blame lies not just with Hitler, but also with the generals themselves. And just as the weaknesses and mistakes of the German army’s early opponents were crucial to its early victories, so is it also important to examine closely the causes of Allied strength during the war’s latter half. Manstein and other former generals attributed the Allies’ eventual victory to their increasingly overwhelming superiority in manpower and material, particularly their strength in the air. But the causes of eventual Allied victory were more complex than simple brute force.

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A third question is how and why the army maintained its momentous struggle for so long. From 1943 onwards, the German army executed a fighting retreat of unparalleled tenacity, against an increasingly formidable Red Army in the east and a Western Allied coalition powered increasingly by the economic and military might of the United States. It did so to the mounting ruin of itself, its homeland and Nazism’s victims across occupied Europe, long after all plausible hope of victory had evaporated. For Manstein, the ‘how’ was attributable to those same qualities of self-sacrifice, valour, devotion to duty and proficiency of command that had won the German army its victories: ‘these alone enabled us to face the overwhelming superiority of our opponents.’9 Yet these are only part of the answer. That the Allied armies did not advance as smoothly and proficiently as they might have done was also due to their own deficiencies. The German army was also able to fight on against them for darker reasons about which, unsurprisingly, Manstein had similarly little to say. Just one example was the increasingly terroristic discipline that it inflicted upon its own troops. All three of these initial questions concern the German army’s fighting power. For many years after the Second World War, the talk among military scholars in the west was all of the superior qualities that the German army and its troops had displayed between 1939 and 1945. Much of this was due to the Cold War, a setting in which both German-speaking and English-speaking scholars, students and general readers of military history had an interest in eulogizing the German army. This was because the army of the liberal democratic federal republic of West Germany, the Bundeswehr, was both a NATO ally and the successor to the German army of the Third Reich. Moreover, the former German generals who now eulogized their old army had had experience of fighting in the Soviet Union. Readers in the west thus took an even greater interest in what they were saying. They took a greater interest still because the ex-generals were conveying a version of the German army’s story during the Second World War that maintained that quality could prevail against quantity. This, of course, was an attractive message for readers in the west, not to mention NATO planners, who contemplated the possibility of a conventional war between NATO and the numerically superior forces of the Warsaw Pact.10 The end of the Cold War brought the slaying of some scholarly sacred cows, and new opportunities for scholars to tap into a wealth of material in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. For these reasons, it provided an opportunity to scrutinize the performance of the German army and its Allied opponents in a more detailed and objective way. As to ‘why’ the overwhelming bulk of the army continued to defend a criminal regime leading its country to destruction, rather than turn on that regime as a few courageous officers eventually tried to do, Manstein’s memoirs said

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very little. At his trial for war crimes in 1949, he stated: ‘no senior military commander can for years on end expect his soldiers to lay down their lives for victory and then precipitate defeat by his own hand.’11 But that was saying very little also. And with reason – for swathes of the army, most prominently the bulk of its senior commanders, were to varying degrees culpable for the Nazi regime’s crimes. Following the Third Reich’s collapse in 1945, newsreels that had once conveyed German military might now conveyed the criminal horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich in pursuit of its goals. In addition to its peerless reputation as a fighting force, another element of the German army’s popular image is as a body of men who managed to distance themselves from these horrors: men who fought for their country out of patriotic duty rather than Nazi fanaticism, remaining aloof from the Nazi regime and untainted by its crimes. It was claimed, in other words, that while Germany’s reputation was blackened by the Nazis – and particularly by their ideological and criminal vanguard, the SS – the German army had generally fought correctly and retained its honour. Certainly, a multitude of former generals, including Manstein, insisted in their postwar memoirs that they had had no truck with those ‘utterly unsoldierly’ criminal orders with which the regime had furnished them – orders that, had they then transmitted them to their own men, ‘would have threatened not only the honour of our fighting troops but also their morale’.12 The fact that this viewpoint was generally swallowed in the west after the Second World War was partly due, again, to the Cold War. During the 1960s, however, West German scholars began to challenge this viewpoint just as a new young generation of West Germans was challenging the Nazi associations that it believed had tainted its parents’ generation. The end of the Cold War brought a further surge in scholarship. This was due, again, to the opening of new archival sources. From the 1980s, moreover, the wartime generation began to retire from the scene, and in more recent years is increasingly departing from it altogether. Although it is poignant to contemplate the passing of a generation, where the scholarship of the Third Reich is concerned it has undoubtedly created space for freer debate and more critical study. Decades of more recent scholarship have now demolished the image of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’.13 No serious account of the German army during the Nazi period can any longer avoid concluding that it was complicit in abhorrent crimes; indeed, it was also callously ruthless in the pursuit of its own military objectives. This was not only because Nazi ideology permeated the German army far more extensively than Manstein and his ilk would ever have admitted; it was also because of a mixture of utilitarian calculation, ruthless military attitudes and sometimes brutalizing pressure of circumstances. Yet it is also important to acknowledge and investigate why some soldiers, units and higher commands were more

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complicit than others, and indeed how far and why others still may not have been complicit at all. All this raises a fourth imperative question – of how the army could behave in this way, and of how far.This introduction, then, has so far posed four broad questions concerning the conduct, achievements and failures both moral and military of the German army under the Third Reich. The answers lie in examining the history of the army and its personnel, their strategy and operations, their tactics and technology, and their morality and ideology. But a prefacing question concerns just what caused the German army to align with Nazism in the first place. This question underpins all the others, and it is one to which this introduction now turns. *** The officer corps of the German Empire of 1871 to 1918 was dominated by the highly conservative Prussian officer corps. Prussia had been the most powerful of the individual kingdoms that unified as the new empire following the Franco-Prussian War. The traditional mainstays of the Prussian officer corps were the sons of Protestant clerics, of senior civil servants, and above all of the aristocratic and landowning Junker class, whose ancestral home lay in the lands east of the River Elbe. The ethos of the imperial officer corps made three particular demands upon its members. The first was unquestioning loyalty to the state. The second was that officers disengage from the complexities of German politics and society. Such an environment inevitably made officers more distrustful of any group, particularly of Jews and socialists, who were outside the conservative nationalist mainstream. The cultural climate of the officer corps did not entirely muffle more enlightened attitudes: for instance, the officer corps of the comparatively liberal southern German state of Württemberg was more accepting of Jews.14 But within such a socially and politically conservative institution as the wider officer corps, liberal influences were marginal at most. Extending membership of the officer corps to ‘patriotic’ bourgeois circles during the late nineteenth century did not change this. All this sapped officers’ moral and political faculties to such an extent that, when they finally contemplated either aligning themselves with Nazism or recoiling from it, most of them fatefully chose the former. The third demand, which followed directly from the second, was an almost myopic focus on soldiering. Here, the arch-conservatives who headed the officer corps made one concession to change: they knew a modern mass army needed a large, technically proficient officer corps. After all, the growth of industry, technology and populations across Europe during the decades before the First World War meant that armies were becoming not just larger, but also – with

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advances in firepower, transportation and communications, not to mention the rise of air power – more technocratic. Indeed, this was a major reason why the officer corps needed to widen its membership. But it nevertheless remained fixated on the narrow business of soldiering – tactics and operations – albeit in a technically updated form. This made it proficient at winning small engagements, battles and indeed campaigns. But officer cadets were taught little, if anything, about the wider means by which wars are won – economic resources, logistics, international diplomacy, high-level intelligence and, above all, strategy. It would prove to be a particular conceit of the German officer corps, during both world wars, to believe that its superior tactical and operational performance could overcome Germany’s acute strategic weaknesses. Those officers holding senior command positions in the Third Reich broadly belonged to one of two generations. The elder, born primarily during the 1870s and 1880s, hailed largely from the conservative aristocratic mainstay of the Prussian officer corps. The future senior commanders who belonged to this group predominantly served as junior and middle-ranking staff officers during the First World War. The second group, much larger and less aristocratic in origin, had mainly been born during the 1890s, and mainly served on the front line during the First World War. This was the Frontkämpfergeneration.15 The war had a profoundly hardening effect upon both groups of officers. The effect was especially profound among those who experienced the industrialscale carnage of the western front in Belgium and northern France. The staff officers of the First World War also drew broader but equally harsh conclusions as to how future wars were to be won, believing that victory in modern industrialized war would go to whichever side most effectively mobilized the sum total of its technological, economic and human resources. This included not just military personnel but also civilian populations, whether in Germany or in its occupied territories. Such officers embraced the ‘total’, allencompassing nature of modern industrialized warfare as surely as their frontline colleagues did. They also came to ascribe central importance to effective propaganda, iron discipline on home front and battlefront, and suppression of ‘defeatist’ elements. Indeed, many of the officers who would later hold high command under the Third Reich perceived acute danger from defeatist elements, whether real or imagined, as they sought scapegoats for the gruelling stalemate that bedevilled Germany’s war effort from late 1914 onwards. Such officers were overlooking Germany’s fundamental strategic handicap: for most of the First World War, the Germans were condemned to a fight on two fronts against an enemy coalition with superior economic resources, and to a British naval blockade that denied them resources and precipitated widespread starvation among the German population. They also overlooked the failings of the German high command, a body whose inept grasp of high-level

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logistics, international diplomacy and, above all, strategy worsened Germany’s plight immeasurably. For instance, the high command’s reckless effort to blockade Britain with a campaign of unrestricted submarine (U-boat) warfare hit US shipping hard, and played the greatest role in antagonizing the United States into the war on the Allied side in 1917. Similarly inept were the high command’s efforts to overcome the British blockade through more effective production and distribution of food. In unison with right-wing civilian nationalists, army officers’ search for scapegoats for Germany’s waning military fortunes fixed not upon their own high command, but upon civilians: democratically minded domestic politicians whose commitment to the war they deemed too feeble; socialists who, they believed, were actively undermining the war effort; and Jews. Many officers believed Jews were disproportionately represented among both politicians and socialists, and – echoing centuries-old forms of anti-Semitism – that Jewish businessmen, black-marketeers and swindlers were capitalizing on the human misery the war was causing. A particularly noxious belief that arose following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia was that Jews were the puppet masters of Bolshevism. Indeed, the political condition of Germany during the second half of the First World War hardened anti-Semitic prejudices across much of German society, as well as within the officer corps. The idea that an infernal ‘Jew-Bolshevik’ intelligentsia ran the new revolutionary Russian state was one to which many army officers and, even more ardently, the Nazis would eventually subscribe. Yet the list of enemies in the German army officer’s fear-filled imaginings during and after the First World War went beyond Jews and Bolsheviks. Fighting on the eastern front also intensified many officers’ anti-Slavic prejudices. These were founded on centuries of antagonism between Germans and their eastern neighbours, and more recently on fears about the expansion of tsarist Russia. Indeed, it was these fears that had helped to impel the German high command towards war in 1914. AntiRussian sentiments were further stoked by the atrocities the Russian army inflicted upon German civilians during its brief invasion of East Prussia in August 1914. Many officers also experienced the ‘primitive’ conditions of the westernmost territory of Russia at a formative time in their lives though direct, violent encounter with the ‘backward east’ between 1915 and 1918.16 *** When Germany was forced to sue for peace in November 1918, virtually all the officers who would eventually comprise the leadership of Hitler’s army believed that the soldiers of the Kaiser’s army had been undone by defeatism, spread by cowardly or seditious groups on the home front. But this was putting

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the chicken before the egg, for German civilians had lost their will to continue the war largely because they knew that the German army, though still fighting in autumn 1918, was ultimately going to be undone on the front line. Regardless, the ‘stab in the back’ became a potent myth among army officers, as indeed it did among the nationalist right in Germany. Such officers were hardly going to be enamoured of the new democratic regime, the Weimar Republic, which replaced the now defunct imperial regime. Then, following national defeat and the Kaiser’s abdication, Germany was shaken by violent upheaval. Radical left-wing forces inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia tried to seize power across central Europe. The vulnerable new Social Democrat-led government in Germany was forced to call upon units of the army and the right-wing vigilante Freikorps (Free Corps) to suppress the revolts that had sprung up in various German towns and cities. This they did with brutal efficiency and often, in the case of the Freikorps, bloodthirsty abandon. It was during this period that the contempt for socialism that many officers felt turned to hatred of Bolshevik revolution. Moreover, such was the link many drew between Jews and the far left that it further hardened their anti-Semitic prejudices. Coupled with the harsh lessons many officers drew from the First World War was the bitter resentment they felt at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, imposed upon their defeated nation in 1919. The treaty imposed massive financial reparations, reduced Germany’s land mass, demilitarized the Rhineland – thus forbidding Germany from stationing troops along much of its western frontier – stripped Germany of its overseas colonies and saddled it with all the guilt for causing the war in the first place. For the army, three of the treaty’s terms were especially galling. The army was reduced to a dwarf 100,000-man body, the Reichswehr. The elite General Staff, which had directed Germany’s military policy and operations since 1871, was disbanded. Finally, much of the ancestral land of the traditional Junker officer class was ceded to the newly created state of Poland, or cut off from the rest of Germany by the new ‘Polish Corridor’. The Reichswehr leadership did not just seethe helplessly at all this. It looked to a time when Germany would be able once more to rearm openly, create a larger, genuinely powerful army and win back its position of power on the international stage. The Reichswehr leadership asserted, and indeed the civilian Defence Ministry accepted, that war would be a necessary part of this process. In 1926, the Truppenamt (Troops Office), a new planning body designed covertly to continue the work of the old General Staff, issued a memorandum stating that Germany would need to reoccupy the Rhineland, and secure the return of Upper Silesia, the Saar and the Polish Corridor. This, the Truppenamt predicted, would precipitate conflict with France, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia and possibly Italy – all necessary, it believed, if

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Germany was to reclaim its continental and eventually world-power status. These immensely ambitious plans were based on the assumption that, with the right conditions and the right means, Germany could win a series of short, sharp wars over its opponents, just as Prussia had done during the wars of German unification between 1864 and 1871. The plans took no account of how powerful this potential array of opponents might be, or of the alliances it might forge with major powers further afield. This, then, was a further legacy of the stab-in-the-back myth. The myth absolved Germany’s military leadership from needing to engage with the broader strategic reasons for its defeat in the First World War. In doing so, it also made the military leadership more likely to identify the wrong formula, founded on the German army’s tactical and operational talents, for future victory.17 *** The particular lessons the Reichswehr drew from Germany’s defeat led it to devise a three-pronged strategy, one that it believed would enable the country to triumph in a future war. The first prong involved developing new tactics and weaponry, and, through them, concepts for successful military operations. The Reichswehr leadership was determined covertly to circumvent the Versailles Treaty’s armaments provisions. Indeed, among other things, it established a clandestine armoured-warfare training school in collaboration with the Red Army of the Soviet Union. The conservative Reichswehr and the Communist Red Army may have seemed strange bedfellows, but they found common cause as the armies of nations that were international lepers for most of the 1920s. Denied contact with other foreign armies, they pooled their expertise and resources to considerable mutual benefit. The Reichswehr was also determined to secure the best possible human material for its officers and rank-and-file troops, train them to exceptional standards, and attain a level of tactical and technical proficiency unmatched by any other army of the period. The drastic reduction in the size of the German officer corps would greatly aid this endeavour. Though its expansion before and during the First World War had reduced the dominance of the aristocratic Junker landowning class, its diminished size now enabled it to be socially selective again. Much more importantly, it now became not just a social elite, but also a professional one. This smaller, streamlined officer corps was able to jettison a great deal of dead wood and become more proficient in the process. The rise of the military technocrat, the ‘specialist in mass destruction’, was an international phenomenon during the interwar years, but it was especially pronounced within the Reichswehr. Smarting from defeat and humiliation, the

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INTRODUCTION

Reichswehr officer corps felt particularly spurred to excel at its craft, the more so as it absorbed a new generation of young officers eager for professional advancement.18 The Truppenamt was at the forefront of these efforts. Over the course of the 1920s, it aimed to combine the technical and organizational prowess of the old General Staff with the destructive power of industrialized, mechanized warfare. Forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to develop an armoured force, the Reichswehr initially practised armoured manoeuvres using wooden contraptions mounted on tricycles. Comical though the spectacle was, the intention was deadly serious, and the Reichswehr eventually developed an unrivalled proficiency in armouredwarfare tactics. The most important Reichswehr armoured manoeuvres took place in 1928, 1930 and, in particular, 1932. On the latter occasion the Reichswehr outdid all those other armies who actually possessed an armoured-warfare capability when its manoeuvres experimented with radio as a means of improving command and control. This would greatly improve communication on the battlefield and eventually give the Panzers a clear advantage over their armoured opponents during the first two years of the Second World War.19 The essence of the Reichswehr’s armoured doctrine was not new, but born of older principles embedded in the Prussian-dominated military culture of the German army. Prussian military doctrine had been developing since the seventeenth century, reaching its apogee in the wars of German unification. It preached rapid and aggressive manoeuvre, concentrated attack on the opposing army’s weak spots, and breakthrough to defeat and destroy its forces decisively. The revolution in defensive firepower and fortifications during the years before the First World War had rendered attack prohibitively costly, and precipitated the stalemate of the western front. Offensive-minded Prussian-style operational doctrine was now rendered temporarily redundant. But, by 1917, Germans units in the field were developing a new suite of tactics, storm-troop tactics, which would restore movement and effective offensive firepower to the battlefield. It was to these tactics that the Truppenamt would turn during the 1920s. Storm-troop tactics were a bottom-up phenomenon, originating in German victories on the Italian and eastern fronts in 1917. A brief but heavy bombardment, mixing gas shells and high explosives, aimed at maximum disruption by targeting enemy headquarters and communications rather than the troops in the trenches. The storm troops then raced forward in independently operating squads, bristling with wire-cutters, light artillery, light machine guns, grenades, and flame-throwers – equipment designed to enable them swiftly to break into and then through the enemy’s lines.20 Such tactics succeeded not simply because the storm troops were effective, but because they had coordinated the storm troops with artillery, follow-up infantry and pioneers in an effective combinedarms operation. Disastrously for the Germans, storm troops were unable to

INTRODUCTION

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achieve decisive victory on the western front in the spring and early summer of 1918. They faced well-resourced British, French, and US forces who coordinated their defence with great skill and resilience. The Allies then steadily pushed the Germans back through the late summer and autumn, in a series of combined-arms operations of their own. These operations, unlike those of the Germans, were able to employ tanks and air power. But Reichswehr armoured warfare specialists of the 1920s believed that replacing storm troops with tanks (Panzers), combining them with air power and other troop branches, and coordinating the whole according to Prussian-style operational art, could prove a recipe for rapid and decisive victory in the future. To ensure that both its frontline officers and more senior commanders would be equal to the task of conducting offensive mobile warfare, Reichswehr doctrine and training promoted Auftragstaktik, or ‘mission tactics’, a concept that had suffused Prusso-German military thinking since the nineteenth century.21 Although contemporaries and historians debated, and continue to debate, the exact meaning of the term, a recent extensive study drew on German military training manuals from the period 1871–1914 to maintain that Auftragstaktik was a complex approach, with several interdependent elements, to the increasingly unpredictable conditions of the battlefield. The officer who practised it successfully would be decisive, independently minded and offensively minded. This did not mean, however, that he could defy orders and lunge in any direction he wanted. He would lead his own men with authority, but would also obey his superiors, recognize the wider operation’s goal and, perhaps most importantly, be able to judge and respond to a particular battlefield situation in whatever way served that goal most effectively.22 Manstein conveyed this particular idea effectively in his memoirs, writing: ‘the granting of such independence to subordinate commanders does, of course, presuppose that all members of the military hierarchy are imbued with certain tactical or operational axioms. Only the school of the German General Staff can, I suppose, be said to have produced such a consistency of outlook.’23 Officers could get the mix wrong, though they often got away with it and indeed sometimes plucked victory from peril; a classic example was General Hermann von François, a corps commander in the German Eighth Army, which fought the Russian invasion of East Prussia in 1914. During that campaign, François first managed, through his own recklessness, to ruin a careful plan to ambush and destroy the Russian First Army, but then played a starring role in annihilating the Russian Second Army.24 The Second World War would produce numerous examples of such commanders. Essentially, however, the officer who mastered Auftragstaktik was the officer who employed the right mix of all the aforementioned qualities to suit the particular battlefield situation.25 Reichswehr doctrine also applied Auftragstaktik to defensive

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warfare. Such was the Reichswehr’s numerical weakness that it could not hope to hold its first line of defence were Germany to be invaded; instead, it instructed delayed resistance, essentially a fighting retreat from the first line of defence that would take advantage of the troops’ manoeuvrability and flexibility.26 The second element in the Reichswehr’s strategy was to get the nation physically organized for war, particularly through effective control of the economy. Of course, putting the German economy on a war footing could not be done covertly, and the Versailles Treaty hugely restricted what it could achieve on this front.27 But this reality did not stifle the Reichswehr’s ambitions, and in 1924 it established a Wirtschaftsstab (Economic Staff). The Wirtschaftsstab’s task was to forge strong links with German industry and make plans to develop a true ‘defence economy’, or Wehrwirtschaft.28 Finally, the Reichswehr leadership sought the kind of national leadership that would fortify the morale of both troops and civilians over the course of a future war. This, like the true ‘defence economy’ officers longed for, required a regime that genuinely shared the Reichswehr’s goals and stood ready to mobilize the German people in their cause. For almost all officers, the Weimar Republic was not that regime. By contrast, Wilhelm Groener, a former general and then national defence minister between 1928 and 1932, angered rightwing circles by accepting in principle that the country’s democratically elected leaders could control the Reichswehr’s development and deployment. Groener also took a much more measured view than most senior officers about what the Reichswehr’s goals should be: he believed Germany should avoid ventures beyond its military means and recognized that it needed international cooperation in order to survive. Groener particularly recognized that, because Germany was reliant upon US loans to pay off its war reparations, it was hardly going to be in a position to fight France.29 But when the USA withdrew its loans during the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, any hope for internationalist moderation from the Reichswehr leadership evaporated.30 As unemployment in Germany eventually soared to eight million, the Weimar party system was pulled to both extremes as the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and the Nazis soaked up votes from the mainstream parties, and Communists clashed bloodily with the brown-shirted ‘storm troopers’ of the Nazis’ paramilitary wing, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Section). Governments became increasingly untenable and short-lived, however many emergency decrees they might try to govern by. As the economic and political mayhem unfolded, the Reichswehr leadership steamed ahead with its three-pronged strategy. Now more than ever, it wished to see liberal democracy in Germany killed off and replaced with a regime more akin to itself. Initially, the Reichswehr leadership considered a conservative authoritarian

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dictatorship, but it knew such a dictatorship required sufficient popular support to govern. This was something the Reichswehr could not command, either on its own, or through the short-lived authoritarian chancellorships of Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher in 1932. By this time, the Reichswehr leadership was contemplating an alliance with the only political party that appeared to have the potential both to command popular support and to stop the Communists – the Nazis. Many of the Reichswehr’s conservative-minded most senior officers had serious doubts about the Nazi movement, particularly the left-wing economic radicalism of some of its elements and the brutal, unruly thuggery of the SA. Yet the Nazis had long trumpeted their belief in militarizing German society. And a growing number of senior officers were coming to believe that the Nazis offered the only viable key to gaining mass support, mobilizing the German people for war, inspiring popular feeling among the vast majority and suppressing any dissenting minority that might spread the kind of defeatism that had allegedly wrecked the German war effort in 1918. Such officers reasoned that, under the Nazis, the German people would be inculcated with militaristic values, support the army’s expansion and technological renewal, and imbibe the nationalistic spirit necessary for Germany to wage a future war successfully. Lieutenant General Werner von Blomberg, writing as Hitler’s minister for war eighteen months after the Nazis took power, proclaimed: a commitment to nationalism is the clear basis of all military activity. We must not forget, however, that the ideology that shaped the new State is not only nationalist but National Socialist. National Socialism derives the basis for its actions from the vital necessities of the whole nation and from the duty of working together for the totality of the nation. It is founded on the idea of the community of blood and fate of all Germans. There is no dispute about the fact that this law is and must remain the basis for the service of the German soldier.31

Finally, on 30 January 1933, the aged Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the last president of the Weimar Republic, appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. More conservative senior officers were reassured that Hitler had at least agreed to head a cabinet whose members were mostly traditional conservatives themselves – men who, presumably, would keep the Nazis’ more extreme elements in check. Events would, of course, unfold in a vastly different way.

xxiv

1. Adolf Hitler at the 1937 Nuremberg rally with, among others, Minister for War Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg (centre front); Blomberg’s number two, Lieutenant General Walther von Reichenau (front row right); and General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, commander-in-chief of the army (second row left).

2. A Panzer Mark II on exercise in 1938.

3. German infantry fighting in Warsaw, September 1939.

4. Hitler at a military situation conference during the Polish campaign with Colonel General Wilhelm Keitel (centre), chief of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht); and Major General Alfred Jodl (left), the OKW’s chief of operations.

5. Ludwig Beck.

6. Walther von Brauchitsch.

7. Franz Halder.

8. Heinz Guderian.

9. Fedor von Bock.

10. Gerd von Rundstedt.

11. German troops passing through the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, in June 1940, at the close of the triumphant six-week campaign in the west.

12. German soldiers fraternizing with civilians during the early months of the German occupation of France in the summer of 1940.

13. German artillery firing upon Red Army positions during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941.

14. Soldiers of a propaganda company distributing copies of the frontline newspaper Der Stosstrupp (The Shock Troop) during the advance into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

15. German soldiers tormenting an elderly Jew in the Ukraine during the first stage of Operation Barbarossa.

16. A German soldier with an MG 34 machine gun guarding a mass of Red Army soldiers taken prisoner after the battle of Kiev in September 1941.

17. German soldiers on the eastern front during the winter of 1941–42.

18. Soldiers of the Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK) in desert conditions.

19. German infantry fighting in Stalingrad during the autumn of 1942.

20. German soldiers, among a crowd of onlookers, taking photographs of hanged Soviet partisans.

21. Erwin Rommel.

22. Albert Kesselring.

23. Friedrich Paulus.

24. Erich von Manstein.

25. Walter Model.

26. Ferdinand Schörner.

27. German troops entering British captivity at the end of the North African campaign in Tunisia, May 1943.

28. Panzers advancing in the face of Soviet artillery fire during Operation Citadel, Kursk salient, July 1943.

29. A column of German mobile assault guns (Sturmgeschütze) proceeding down a road in Thessalonika, Greece, in 1944.

30. On the eastern front, during 1943 and the first half of 1944, the German army subjected the regions through which it was retreating to a massive, indiscriminate scorched-earth campaign.

31–33. Although the German army was on the defensive from 1943 onwards, its resilience was boosted by the large quantities of high-quality small arms that German industry was producing.

34. A German infantry officer on the eastern front, 1943.

35. Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda, greeting a mixed group of soldiers from the army and the Waffen-SS, March 1944.

36. German troops in the mountainous environment of the Italian campaign of 1943–45.

37. German troops apprehensively scanning the skies for Allied aircraft, Normandy, summer 1944.

38–40. Three of the high-quality, if not entirely flawless, Panzer models that the German army deployed, often to great effect, against the advancing Allies during 1944. From top to bottom: the Tiger, the Panzer IV, and the Panther.

41. German troops advancing through the Ardennes during the Wehrmacht’s last major offensive in the west, December 1944.

42–43. Two faces of the German army’s destruction, Germany, 1945. On the left, teenage recruits surrendering, with obvious relief, to the Americans. On the right, American GIs taking down the corpse of a German soldier hanged by his own side for supposed cowardice.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ARMY IN THE NEW REICH, 1933–36

D

uring their first eighteen months in power, the Nazis destroyed the existing German constitution and with it all sources of opposition, real or potential. They began incarcerating opponents and other ‘undesirables’ in a growing network of concentration camps. In June 1934, Hitler wiped out a swathe of political opponents, then declared himself Führer upon President Hindenburg’s death two months later. The army leadership, passively and sometimes actively, aided and abetted this entire process. It also increasingly subordinated itself to the Nazi regime. It did so not just for the military, political and – for some officers – ideological reasons according to which it had allowed the Nazis into power in January 1933, but also because of the phenomenal expansion of the army that the regime brought about. In 1933, the German army was a 100,000-man Reichswehr. By 1936, it contemplated a future wartime force of 2.6 million men, half a million more than the Germany army in 1914.1 Such breakneck expansion transformed it into a true ‘people’s army’, diluted the conservative character of the officer corps and made the army as a whole more subject to National Socialist influence. *** Driving this expansion was Hitler’s hugely ambitious programme of foreign and military policy.2 To the German public and the international community, Hitler presented a forceful yet peaceful image. His objective, he claimed, was to abolish the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, restore to Germany its military power and its rightful place among the great nations, and unify the German-speaking peoples of Europe. He did not publicly reveal – though anyone familiar with his writings of the 1920s would have known it – that these were only the first steps in a foreign-policy grand design of immense, radical

3

4

HITLER’S SOLDIERS

ambition. The inspiration for this design lay in Hitler’s Darwinian conviction that waging war and conquering foreign territory for living space (Lebensraum) were essential to the German people’s continued vitality, and to their victory in the struggle for domination among nations and races. An essential precondition of this, Hitler believed, was to indoctrinate the German people with National Socialist thinking and a correspondingly warlike mentality. The Nazis would found a racial community, a Volksgemeinschaft, that – at least according to the rhetoric – would cut across all social and economic divides and unify all Germans fulfilling the right racial, social and political criteria. Nazi social and economic policies and Nazi propaganda, Hitler proclaimed, would engender pride in the Volksgemeinschaft and in the German nation. In particular, the Nazi regime would indoctrinate future German soldiers through propaganda, youth groups, the education system and the new Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD), while the armed forces would complete the process by training and further indoctrinating the troops themselves.3 More generally, the Nazis would work to instil a militaristic, warlike pride within the German people as a whole. The Nazis certainly had cause to feel optimistic on this particular score, for they were operating against a long-standing backdrop of popular militarism across much of German society. The Weimar years had seen a proliferation of veterans’ associations and a mushrooming of bestselling war-orientated literature. Hitler foresaw the next stage of German expansion as making central Europe a key area of German domination and economic exploitation. This would require a final reckoning with France, which had constructed an alliance system across central Europe – a reckoning that would also bring the even greater long-term benefit of destroying France as a great-power rival. This in turn would clear the way for the most important phase of Hitler’s foreignpolicy programme, the push to capture Lebensraum and vast economic resources in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And there is much to indicate that Hitler would not have stopped there – that he would have used the economic resources of a German-dominated Europe as a basis for truly global power. This would have brought Germany into war with the United States and, if she refused to engage with the new global order, with Britain also. Three of the most important army figures during the period between 1933 and 1936 were Lieutenant General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, commanderin-chief of the army from February 1934; Major General Ludwig Beck, chief of the Truppenamt between 1933 and 1935, before becoming head of the new army General Staff; and, most importantly, General von Blomberg, whom Hitler appointed minister for war in his new cabinet from January 1933. In May 1935, Blomberg became commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the Wehrmacht.

THE ARMY IN THE NEW REICH

5

Fritsch was a socially detached bachelor, immensely diligent and respected. He also detested Jews and democrats, making his feelings clear since the early 1920s with a directness remarkable for a serving senior officer. In 1924, he had written that ‘Ebert (the president of the Republic), pacifists, Jews, democrats . . . and the French are all the same thing, namely the people who want to destroy Germany.’4 All this, of course, made it easier for him to work with the Nazis. Beck was a strong advocate of rearmament and national expansion, but he was also shrewd. During the early years of the Third Reich, while the rebuilding German armed forces remained too weak to contemplate offensive action, he was instrumental in planning defensive strategies in the event of war, and in promoting Germany’s defensive security in the meantime. A first step towards creating greater defensive security, though it necessitated some nose-holding by officers of Junker stock, was the non-aggression pact Germany signed with Poland in 1934.5 In the longer term, Beck believed Germany should rearm enough to deter Britain and France from trying to prevent a new German hegemony in central Europe. He was also convinced of France’s long-standing intention to keep Germany in a permanent state of subjugation, writing that France ‘stands in the way of every extension of German power . . . and should for this reason be seen as Germany’s firm enemy’.6 Only later would the far more alarming scale of Hitler’s foreign-policy ambitions become clear to Beck. Blomberg was not an out-and-out Nazi, but he was prone to romantic, indeed naïve, political notions, and was easily influenced. A visit to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, for instance, left him highly impressed by Communism. Here, he perceived, was a totalitarian political system that had granted its armed forces enormous power and prestige. ‘It [the Red Army] lacked for little,’ he later recalled, ‘and I nearly came home a consummate Bolshevik.’7 Blomberg became convinced that Nazism would do the same for the armed forces in Germany, and set about assimilating the armed forces with the Nazi regime with an almost giddy enthusiasm. Among other things, he ordered that military uniforms display Nazi symbols, military personnel greet one another with the Nazi ‘Heil’ when in civilian attire and the army hold weekend courses to train SA storm troopers as border guards.8 Blomberg would take assimilation to even greater lengths from 1935 onwards. Spurring on Blomberg in all this was Colonel Walther von Reichenau, the ambitious head of Blomberg’s ministerial office. On his appointment to the latter post in February 1933, he declared: ‘our path leads forwards, which means: join the new state and claim the position that is our due!’9 Many of Reichenau’s army colleagues scorned his bumptious manner and thrusting careerism. They also derided the obsequious enthusiasm with which Blomberg applied himself to enmeshing the army in the new regime, nicknaming him the Gummilöwe, or ‘rubber lion’.10 Yet while many in the army’s senior officer corps

6

HITLER’S SOLDIERS

harboured reservations about the Nazis, precious few behaved accordingly. Indeed, many aristocratic officers derided Blomberg’s closeness to the largely middle-class Nazi leadership not because they were anti-Nazi, but because they were snobs.11 At this stage, only a small number of senior army officers were committed Nazis. But many aged between about forty and fifty, most of whom had been Frontkämpfer during the First World War, were particularly exhilarated at the opportunities the new regime offered.12 Technically minded officers such as Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Guderian, aged forty-four when the Nazis came to power, were dazzled at the prospect of developing and commanding an expanded, technically cutting-edge army. The Nazis’ espousal of all things military and the fact that their own leadership numbered so many war veterans also helped them win the approval of many Frontkämpfer among the senior officer corps. Harder to convince were the older, most senior officers, such as General of Infantry Gerd von Rundstedt and Lieutenant General Fedor von Bock. Such men belonged to that group, born between the mid-1870s and mid-1880s, who had served mainly as staff officers during the First World War. As a socially homogeneous group, hailing predominantly from aristocratic Prussian stock, they held the officer corps’s traditionally conservative attitudes. They longed for Germany to regain its great-power status, but were deeply uneasy about the Nazi movement’s revolutionary elements. On the other hand, they tended from the start to blame the regime’s early ‘excesses’ on extreme Nazi elements, rather than on Hitler. Moreover, older officers, like many of their younger colleagues, already widely shared Nazi ideology’s disdain for Slavs, Bolsheviks and Jews, even if they felt it less intensely than the Nazis themselves did. When, in February 1933 and again in February 1934, Hitler conveyed to the army’s most senior officers his long-term ambition of waging a racial war in the east, they did not take his utterances especially seriously. Major General Maximillian Freiherr von Weichs would go on to command army groups in southern Russia and the Balkans during the Second World War. He transcribed Hitler’s words at the February 1934 meeting, later recalling: ‘the soldier was used to taking a politician’s words not entirely seriously. To justify his political aims he often selects aspects that don’t correspond to his true intentions.’ But neither did the generals recoil from the vision Hitler was presenting to them. According to Weichs, ‘these sinister intimations were probably soon forgotten’.13 And the officer corps as a whole did believe the Nazi regime would infuse the German people with the unified, militaristic spirit that it would need to stay the course in a future war. Hitler also directed at the officer corps copious rhetoric about the army being the second pillar of the new Nazi state, alongside the Nazi Party. Officers lapped this up, acceding to a process that would in fact see the army increasingly subordinated to the Nazi regime.

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7

The officer corps deluded themselves all the more easily because of the resources showered upon the army, and upon the armed forces generally, during the regime’s early years. The first key announcement as to how much cash was to be allocated to rearmament seems to have come in June 1933. The annual allocation of about 4.4 billion Reichsmarks eclipsed the hundreds of millions the Weimar Republic had spent annually.14 And 4.4 billion Reichsmarks was just the start; in 1935, the armed forces’ share of government expenditure rose to 73 per cent.15 Big business bought into the Nazi economic programme, albeit with some reservations, partly because rearmament promised enormous profits and business opportunities, partly because the Nazis had obligingly destroyed the trade unions, and partly because the Nazis were able to manipulate big business by divide and rule, particularly coopting those sections of commerce and industry that had most to gain from rearmament. Initially, rearmament was to be financed secretly through loans, granted by the various large companies that stood to gain from it. Blomberg was allowed to bypass the Finance Ministry, present his demands to a three-man committee and, if he did not get his way, go straight to Hitler. The regime also spent far more on rearmament than on civilian work-creation schemes. Even ostensibly non-military projects had a military use. For instance, the new network of Autobahnen (motorways), on which work commenced soon after the Nazis assumed power, would be able to convey 300,000 troops from east to west within two days.16 From March 1935, Hitler would stop rearming secretly and announce his intentions openly. *** Meanwhile, the Nazi movement faced an internal power struggle, one that would entangle and then taint the army leadership. The struggle was between the leadership of the SA, particularly chief of staff Ernst Röhm, on the one hand, and the army leadershi