Barbarossa (5 page)

This facility, which those who have reasons for belittling have
compendiously labelled Hitler's "intuition" (pronounced
with a sneer), was truly prodigious and, for many years, infallible.
The Devil's hand guided Hitler, just as later on it was to protect
his life. But with the outbreak of war, as the pressure intensified
and responsibilities widened, the absence of a permanent consultative
body began to make itself felt.

The most serious, as also one of the earliest, examples of lacunae
in strategic planning had followed immediately on the collapse of
France. Not only was there no plan in existence for the invasion of
the British Isles, but over a month passed before the
Sea Lion
directive—the order to prepare such a plan—was issued.

And the disadvantages of Hitler's practice of bypassing orthodox
channels applied as much in matters of detail as in grand strategy.
For example, after the campaign in France, Hitler had ordered that
the 37-mm. gun in the Pz III tank be replaced with a 50-mm. L 60.
However, for reasons which shall never be clear (but which owed much
to there being no permanent body which could see a directive of this
kind through to fulfilment and supervise the responsible officers at
the Ordnance Office), the specification was altered to 50-mm. L 42.
The result was that the most successful tank of the war was equipped
with a gun of markedly lower range and muzzle velocity than Hitler
had ordered, which if fitted would have preserved its technical
ascendancy for another year at least.

After the French surrender Hitler approved an OKH suggestion to
demobilise a number of divisions, which is scarcely consistent with
his own plan to attack what was believed to be the largest army in
the world within the coming year.

[The number of men scheduled for demobilisation has been put by
some estimates as high as four hundred thousand, but it is unlikely
that this number was actually discharged.]

The only explanation is that in the absence of a proper
supervisory body and procedure the order somehow leaked past. Yet at
almost the same moment Hitler was directing that the number of Panzer
divisions in the Army was to be doubled and tank production raised to
a level of eight hundred to a thousand units per month. Once again
the Ordnance Office intervened, with a report that an expansion of
this kind would cost over two billion marks, and would require an
additional one hundred thousand skilled workers and specialists.
Hitler agreed to its postponement "for the time being," but
the reorganisation of the Panzer divisions had gone ahead, so that
the net effect was that the tank strength of each division was
halved. In the result there was some compensation in their increased
fire power and the gradual substitution of the heavier PzKw III for
the PzKw II, but the Panzer divisions were never to recover the
numerical strength and mobility with which they had begun the battle
of France. Hitler had also directed that the number of motorised
divisions be doubled, but without making any provision for an
increase in the production of the vehicle industry. The result was
that many of the new formations had to equip themselves with captured
or requisitioned trucks, which were to prove unreliable and difficult
to service under severe conditions.

Examples of this kind could be multiplied, and it is true that the
deficiencies in vigour, authority, and scope of the so-called OKW
Chiefs of Staff were to make themselves increasingly felt as the war
proceeded. But it would be less than just to claim for the generals
of OKH (as they themselves are not slow to do in their own works on
the subject) a particular but thwarted prescience in matters of grand
strategy.

Hitler's sense of history was limited, but highly coloured, and he
drew upon it to justify his assumption of a single and exclusive
responsibility. In the Great War (he would argue) the German General
Staff, directing its country's strategy for four years without
hindrance, had made one error of judgment after another: it pressed
the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, thereby hastening
the entry of the United States into the war; it cast away any hope of
a separate peace with Tsarist Russia after Galicia-Tarnow by its
insistence on the establishment of a kingdom of Poland; then achieved
the same result in 1917, when its annexationist attitude to France
and Belgium ruined the chance of the Papal peace proposals being
carried further. Finally there was its responsibility for the most
catastrophic single action of the century—the despatch of Lenin
and his colleagues from Switzerland to Russia in the famous "sealed
train." Even in the exclusively military sphere it had made
grave errors, mishandling the only two serious attempts to defeat the
Western powers in the field. Falkenhayn had allowed the course of the
attrition battle at Verdun to escape his control and thereby missed
the chance of knocking France out of the war in 1916. Ludendorff's
diminuendo sequence in April 1918 drew so heavily on his armies'
blood and morale that they were incapable of offering prolonged
resistance to the Allied counteroffensives which followed.

When Hitler became Chancellor he found that OKH was still free
with advice, and that its attitude was sadly repetitive in two
particulars—in the unanimity of the views of its members and
the mistakenness (as it invariably emerged) of their appreciations.

The first expansionist move undertaken by the Reich, the
reoccupation of the Rhineland, had called forth a whole sequence of
protests from the General Staff. First Beck proposed that the entry
of German troops be accompanied by a declaration that the area would
not be fortified.

[Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General Staff 1935-38.
Later nominated as head of the new German state by the 20th July
plotters; committed suicide when the plot failed.]

Hitler rejected the notion out of hand. Then Blomberg was
persuaded by the General Staff to put forward a suggestion that the
troops sent across the Rhine be withdrawn on condition that the
French agree to withdraw four to five times as many men from their
own borders. He was "bluntly and brutally snubbed" for his
pains. Finally after a lethargic concentration of thirteen French
divisions had been observed in the Maginot Line, Beck and Fritsch
together had made Blomberg urge the withdrawal of the three
battalions which had entered the demilitarised zone. Again Hitler
refused, and again he was proved right.

The generals were nonplussed. They laid no claim to an
understanding of the subtleties of international politics. But they
had before them the figures of relative strengths. Did common sense
and the simple calculations of a military balance sheet count for
nothing? Answer, no. What counted was the will, and that, with its
full
appareil de mystique
, was held in monopoly by Hitler. "It
is my unalterable will to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in
the near future," he told them, and throughout the summer of
1938 the preparations for this had gone ahead, without regard to the
protesting bleats from almost every senior officer in OKH.

The original intention of the dissident generals had been that the
Commander, in Chief, Brauchitsch, be forced by their unanimous
recommendation to go to Hitler and pronounce to him the magic words
of Hindenburg and Seeckt: that he "no longer enjoyed the
confidence of the Army." Fritsch might have done this; but
Brauchitsch, never. In despair, the Chief of Staff of the Army,
General Beck, resigned. None of Beck's colleagues followed this
example, but many did allow themselves to become privy to a plot for
kidnapping Hitler and declaring a military government. This coup was
planned for the very last moment of peace, when it was established
that Hitler had fixed a zero hour for the attack on the Czechs. It
was thwarted (and the whole course of history perverted) by the
Franco-British betrayal at Munich, but the commanders who had planned
it—Witzleben, Helldorf, Schulenburg, Hoepner—remained in
office.

Thus can be detected two separate but complementary elements in
the decline of the
Generalität
. It had been outmanoeuvred
politically, forsaking one foothold after another in a downhill
retreat from the pinnacle of influence it had occupied for the
preceding half century. And the swift and bewildering march of events
on the international stage had shown it up (it seemed) as a timid
clique at fault in assessing its own strength and hesitant over using
it.

Many factors perpetuated this unhappy condition. None of them were
vital when considered in isolation, but they formed a sum of
perplexity and disillusion; of confused loyalties, considered
self-interest, and escapist devotion to the narrow technicalities of
its appointment.

It is not easy to feel sympathy for the members of the
Generalität
because the ultimate source of their discontent was in their own lack
of moral fibre. What affronted them about Hitler's conduct was not
its immorality but its irresponsibility. Hence their tendency to hang
back, to procrastinate on whatever excuse, and watch to see if the
risk "came off." Furthermore, Hitler's success in
curtailing their independent power had been achieved without
alienating the bulk of the officer corps or disturbing the
foundations of professional efficiency which had been laid by Seeckt.
This meant that those who wished to alter the course of events must
dabble in politics—a field which they entered no longer as
arbiters but as participants, hampered by scruple, plagued by
disunity, and burdened with a lingering contempt for civilians which
was for long to frustrate all efforts to coordinate the two separate
elements of the opposition.

Out of their depth in this unfamiliar element, the generals groped
and fumbled. Some intrigued actively against the regime. Others,
nearly all, listened with sympathy to those who were intriguing,
yearned for the days of decision, and watched for a change in
fortune. Others, and they included the majority in both these
categories, sublimated their frustration in work. The result was a
quality of staff work and a tactical brilliance unequalled by any
other army.

Hitler had effectively shut out the Army from politics, and the
price he paid seemed at first to be even less than the pittance he
had promised Blomberg on board the
Deutschland
. But in one
important respect the Army held out for its rights. It steadfastly
and persistently refused all efforts by the Nazi Party to penetrate
into the conduct and administration of its internal affairs. The
generals clung to their privilege (more formal than real) of being
the "sole bearers of arms within the Reich," and they twice
resisted with success major efforts at infiltration by Himmler (once
through a campaign by the SS to deprive army chaplains of their
military status, on another occasion when it was proposed to
institute "voluntary" classes of Nazi indoctrination in
place of religious services). The Army became a haven for all those
discontented with the regime, a loose fraternal body—politically
inert, it was true, but where the writ and dossier of the SS never
ran.

The result was, quite literally, fantastic. The whole of the
Abwehr (the military intelligence branch) was riddled with dissent.
Admiral Canaris, its head, and his lieutenants, Oster and Lahousen,
not only allowed the organization to be freely used as a medium of
communication and movement by the various malcontents, but
perpetrated the most incredible acts of treachery—Oster warning
the Danish Military Attaché ten days before the impending
invasion of that country and of Norway in April 1940; and doing the
same to the Netherlands before the attack on the Low Countries.

Another department headed by a general steadfastly hostile to the
regime was the
Wi Rü Amt
, the economic and armaments
branch of OKW under Georg Thomas. Neither Thomas nor Canaris allowed
his sympathies to affect the day-to-day running of his department,
any more than their brother officers allowed their own feelings to
intrude on the ruthless efficiency with which they planned and
fought. But the effect, a certain inner weakness, was lasting. The
"conspirators" (by which is meant those who were actively
plotting for a change of regime), although hardly worthy of such a
title at this stage, suffered no restrictions in such an atmosphere.
Passes, movement orders, transfers, all these could be arranged at an
instant's notice. They would receive early warning, too, of plans and
proscriptions that might affect them.

Was this a form of reinsurance by the generals? Or was it simply
the code of the officer and gentleman that allowed them to continue
in the dangerous practice of tolerating seditious conversations in
their presence, of not reporting the continuous and sometimes
farcical indiscretions with which the conspirators bored them? Once
the war had started, the practice of sedition was confined to the
medium levels of the Army. The senior commanders regarded such
activity with no more than a tolerant interest. For too long they had
offered opinions, to one another and to Hitler, and had seen their
validity compromised by the perverse tricks of circumstance. Like
ultraconservative bankers during an inflationary boom, they could no
longer bring themselves to utter the conventional warnings which had
so often led to disappointing investment policies.

A time was approaching when orthodoxy and sober calculation were
to assume their rightful importance, as it was when the fussing of
the conspirators was to become an altogether more troublesome
phenomenon; but dazzled by the brilliance of the Führer's
achievement, the generals could no longer see that far ahead. To a
man they would have echoed Brauchitsch when he told Otto John after
the war, "I could have had Hitler arrested easily. I had enough
officers loyal to me to carry out his arrest. But that was not the
problem. Why should I have taken such action? It would have been an
action against the German people. I was well informed, through my son
and others. The German people were all for Hitler. And they had good
reason to be . . ,"