Barbarossa (3 page)

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| THE STATE OF THE WEHRMACHT

On the afternoon of Sunday, 5th November, 1939, it was raining in
Berlin. Through the empty streets a single black Mercedes, without
escort, brought the Commander in Chief of the German Army from Zossen
to the Chancellery, where he was to receive, at his own request, an
audience with Hitler.

General (as he then was) Walther von Brauchitsch was suffering
from a painful attack of "nerves"—an unexpected
complaint for a commander whose armies had lately completed a rapid,
victorious, and almost bloodless campaign. The source of his
apprehensive condition was to be found in a bulky memorandum which
lay in his briefcase and which, as he had promised to his colleagues
on the
Generalstab
, he would personally read out to the
Führer. This document, though it bore the signature of
Brauchitsch, had been prepared by many hands and rambled over diverse
subjects in the military field. Its purported motif was to
"recommend" against launching an attack in the West that
autumn, but in essence it was a historical throwback, an attempt to
formulate an ultimatum whose substance was as much political as
military and whose purpose was to assert the primacy of the Army over
all the other organs of government in the Reich.

This was a particularly embarrassing task for Brauchitsch. One,
indeed, which he had been urged by his colleagues to undertake on
several occasions in the past, and which he had always managed to
sidestep. Brauchitsch, who owed his appointment to Hitler, and who
saw more of the Führer than any other soldier outside the
immediate Nazi entourage, can have had few illusions about the value
of any protest he might be allowed to utter or, indeed, concerning
the violence of the reaction which it would provoke. Why, then,
having evaded it so often in the past, did Brauchitsch now consent to
take on the Führer face to face?

The development which had succeeded in uniting those elements in
the Army which were opposed to the Nazi regime and the more strictly
professional soldiers who concerned themselves exclusively with
military efficiency arose out of the Führer's interference in
the planning and conduct of military operations. Hitler had insisted
on being shown every order, down to regimental level, for the first
three days of the Polish campaign in September. Many he criticised,
some he altered, one—the operation to seize the bridgehead at
Dirschau—he completely recast in a more audacious pattern,
against the advice of every officer along the chain of command which
finally led up to Colonel General Halder, Chief of Staff of the Army
and, effectively, No. 2 under Brauchitsch.

[Colonel General Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff;
appointed 1938, dismissed September 1942.]

The generals, who had already suffered the rebuttal of their
traditional claim to be heard in matters of state that impinged on
military policy, now sensed a direct threat to their most jealously
guarded precinct—the details of tactical combat planning—and
this on the very first occasion that the Army had taken up arms since
1918. And their distaste cannot have been lessened by the fact that
in every case Hitler's revisions had been justified in battle.
Brauchitsch, therefore, had found himself (and not for the last time)
in a most delicate position: suspended between the unanimous
protestations of his colleagues and the certain wrath of his Führer.

Hitler, who may have suspected that something was afoot, received
his Commander in Chief in the main conference room of the
Chancellery, under the bust of Bismarck, instead (as would have been
more usual) of one of the smaller antechambers. After a certain
amount of verbal shadowboxing, in an atmosphere that must have been
anything but comfortable, Brauchitsch declared that "OKH would
be grateful for an understanding that it, and it alone, would be
responsible for the conduct of any future campaign."

[
Oberkommando des Heeres
, the High Command of the German
Army.]

This suggestion was received "in icy silence."
Brauchitsch then went on, with one of those curious and mendacious
impulses which sometimes seized him (and of which other examples will
be found in this book), to say that ". . . the aggressive spirit
of the German infantry was sadly below the standard of the First
World War" and that there had been "certain symptoms of
insubordination similar to those of 1917-18."

By this time the interview had already lost all semblance of an
exchange between equals—much less the
deus-ex-machina
quality which was the traditional attribute of an encounter between
the head of state and the Commander in Chief of the Army. Brauchitsch
never really got started on his main purpose. As his peevish
complaints died away, Hitler started to work up a tremendous rage. He
accused the General Staff, and Brauchitsch personally, of disloyalty,
sabotage, cowardice, and defeatism. For ten, fifteen, twenty minutes
the Führer poured forth a torrent of abuse upon the head of his
timorous and bewildered army commander, creating a scene which
Halder, with truly English understatement, has recorded as being
"most ugly and disagreeable."

It was the first of the occasions on which Hitler abused his
generals. They were to occur more frequently, last longer, and be
more "disagreeable" in the years to come. This was also the
first occasion on which Brauchitsch remonstrated with his Führer,
and the last. The Commander in Chief drove shakily back to his
headquarters, where ". . . he arrived in such poor shape that at
first he could only give a somewhat incoherent account of the
proceedings."

Brauchitsch's fundamental error—or rather that of the
conservative army generals whose emissary he was—was the error
latent in all measures that are based on a historical throwback. It
arose from a blindness to the pattern of evolution and, in
particular, to the manner in which the power structure within the
Reich had developed. For this structure was no longer a duumvirate,
shared between the façade of civil administration and the
authority of the military, but a lumpish hexagonal pyramid with
Hitler at its summit. Obedient to the Führer but in deadly
rivalry with one another, were four major private empires within the
Reich administration and a host of secondary ones, revolving around
personalities, crackbrained schemes, forgotten sectors of the economy
or administration, whose numbers were to proliferate as the war
lengthened.

One of the most rational and intelligent of these personalities,
Albert Speer, has said, "Relations between the various high
leaders can be understood only if their aspirations are interpreted
as a struggle for the succession to Adolf Hitler."

["Hitler's architect. Promoted to be Minister of Armament and
War Production 1942.]

While (as was the case in the early 1940's) the prospect of
succession was a remote one, the Nazi Diadochi competed with one
another to win Hitler's favour and to enlarge their own dominion.
[The Diadochi were the surviving generals of Alexander the Great, who
quarrelled over the division of his empire. Several authorities
(e.g., Trevor-Roper and Alexander Dallin) have adopted the term to
describe the senior Nazi leaders.]

The result was that in addition to the Army there were many other
foci of power, none of which was indispensable, yet each of which was
manipulated by the Führer to preserve the internal balance.

First, there was the Nazi Party machine itself, controlled by
Martin Bormann and enjoying through him and Hess the privilege of
daily access to the Führer.

[Bormann was Chief of the Party Office after Hess's flight to
Britain in May 1941; Hitler's personal secretary from April 1943.
Disappeared April 1945 after Hitler's suicide.]

The Party had its own press, controlled education, regional
government, and a variety of paramilitary organisations such as the
Hitlerjugend
.

[The Hitler Youth organisation, paramilitary in character, was for
boys and girls of submilitary age.]

Then there was the SS hierarchy, presided over by Himmler and
including the Gestapo, the RSHA (Reich Central Security Office), the
assassination squads of the SD, and the notorious "asphalt
soldiers" of the Waffen SS.

[Heinrich Himmler was Reichsführer SS 1929; Police President,
Bavaria, 1933; Chief of the Reich Political Police 1936; Minister of
the Interior 1943; C. in C. of the Home Army, July 1944; C. in C. of
the Rhine and Vistula armies December 1944-March 1945. Committed
suicide at British Interrogation Centre, Lüneburg, 23rd May,
1945.]

A third enclave was the personal creation of Goering and included
the entire Luftwaffe, all the productive capability that supplied it,
and the administrative organisation of the Four-Year Plan, of which
Goering was the director.

Beside these three the conservative officers and gentlemen of the
Heeresleitung
, the German Army Command, carried no exceptional
weight or authority. If it came to a showdown, Hitler had at his
disposal a highly armed police, an air force and ground organisation,
and a regional administrative machine. And as the stresses of the war
multiplied, so did the fragmentation of the German body politic, so
that there came to be nearly a dozen primary foci of power whose
departmental rivalry was aggravated by personal animosities (Goebbels
hated Bormann, Goering despised Ribbentrop and mistrusted Himmler,
Rosenberg was not on speaking terms with Himmler and Koch, and so
on)—and which were coordinated only through their direct
allegiance to the Führer.

[Paul Joseph Goebbels. Reich Propaganda Minister, Gauleiter for
Berlin. Plenipotentiary for Total War after 20th July, 1944.
Committed suicide in Berlin 1st May, 1945.

Hermann Goering, Prime Minister of Prussia from 1930. C. in C. of
the Luftwaffe; chairman of the Reich Defence Council; held the rank
of Reichsmarschall, senior officer of the armed services. Committed
suicide in Nuremberg 15th October, 1946.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, Ambassador in London 1936-38. Foreign
Minister 1938-45. Hanged at Nuremberg, October 1946.

Alfred Rosenberg, Chief of foreign political section in the Party
office. Minister of Eastern Territories from April 1941. Hanged
Nuremberg, October 1945.

Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia 1930-45. Reichskommissar of
the Ukraine 1941-44. Extradited to Poland 1950 and disappeared.]

Yet when all this has been said the fact remains that the German
failure in the East was essentially a military failure. The Army
proved unequal to the task which the state demanded of it, and so the
state, living by the sword, could not survive when the sword was
shattered. A fundamental cause of this failure was the continuous
tension between the senior officers and staff of the Army (OKH) and
the organisation of the Supreme Command (OKW) headed by Hitler. While
military operations were uniformly successful, this tension was
dormant. But once the Wehrmacht came under strain, relations between
the two started to go sour. Hitler despised the generals for their
caution, he resented their class-consciousness, and he believed (with
some reason) that they were the only potential source of political
opposition left in Germany. The generals, for their part, distrusted
the Nazi Party because of its proletarian origins and its evident
irresponsibility in matters of state. As individuals, it is true,
several of them were converted by Hitler's "ideals" during
the heyday of Nazi success, but under the stress of failure Party and
military alike were to undergo a disastrous polarisation.

Thus, in analysing the causes of this failure and the tensions
which aggravated it, we must first look outside the balance sheet of
purely military affairs, of battalions and equipment, of brilliant
tactics, bravery in combat, misguided strategy, and take up the clues
from the history of the Army in the period between the wars.

All was not well with the German Army. A curious malaise had crept
over that magnificent body, having its origins in the progressive
erosion of its powers of decision. In the 1920's, under the brilliant
and calculating Seeckt, the German Army had enjoyed undisputed
sovereignty as the arbiter of governments and policies.

[Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, Commander in Chief of the German
Army 1919-30.]

But in the 1930's extraneous factors had begun to make themselves
felt. Partly these were technological—the advent of new weapons
and new services threatened the primacy of the well-drilled soldier;
partly they were political—in the shape of Adolf Hitler, the
Nazi Party, and their private brigades of well-armed rowdies, the SA.

During this period Hitler had substantial popular support, but not
a majority. Already Chancellor, he was determined to succeed
Hindenburg as President, and to achieve this he needed the support of
the Army.

[Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, 1847-1934. Chief of the
General Staff 1916-19; President of Germany 1925-34.]

The Army itself was anxious to reassert its power in domestic
politics, and believed that in Hitler it might have found an
acceptable protégé—provided that he fulfilled
certain conditions. What followed, the Deutschland Compact, was a
classic example of an agreement, not uncommon in history, in which
each side believes that it has gained the advantage because of its
simultaneous (but undeclared) resolve to double-cross the other
within the framework of the agreement. In the mistaken belief that
because the support of the Army would make Hitler, withdrawal of that
support could at any time unmake him, the War Minister, Blomberg, had
agreed to back Hitler's claim to succeed the ailing Hindenburg in the
presidency. In return he extracted a promise that Hitler would curb
the SA, and "assure the hegemony of the Reichswehr on all
questions relative to military matters."