Hitler's Panzers (56 page)

In the background lay as well the
tu quoque
argument that Allied forces had been guilty of similar behavior, ranging from Americans’ shooting inconvenient prisoners in Sicily to mass rapes perpetrated by French
goumiers
in Italy and tolerated by the command structure. Nor, with effective deadly force in their own systems resting in the military, were governments especially enthusiastic about establishing the kinds of precedents involved in prosecuting senior officers for not denouncing and disobeying policies established by state authority.

In wider contexts, any hope of reconstructing a Europe devastated by war, occupation, and liberation depended heavily on restoring comity among states and peoples—especially given the obvious refusal of the British and Americans to consider anything but a limited occupation of “their” Germany. Even before the war, a major consideration in appeasing Hitler and seeking to integrate his Reich into Europe’s order had been the sense that Germany’s contributions to Europe’s history, culture, and civilization were too seminal to be excluded at will and permanently.

Within what became the Federal Republic, Vaclav Havel’s familiar argument against comprehensive punishment has retroactive force. Justice and reconciliation are concepts easier enunciated than implemented, especially in the context of the Third Reich. German society as a whole was complicit—arguably enthusiastically complicit—in Hitler’s regime and Hitler’s war. In practical terms, very few adult individuals were completely free of involvement. The nature of that involvement was such, moreover, that retribution involved half the German people perpetually sitting in judgment on the other half—with the halves differing for each situation. A reconstructed government and society would tear itself apart with new conflicts—unless it was created on what amounted to a totalitarian model.

That last was essentially the case in the Soviet Zone that became the German Democratic Republic. The experience of the Third Reich was addressed by fiat and implemented instrumentally: officially denying any connection between the “new” GDR and its immediate predecessor, and overlooking or redefining the awkward pasts of individuals useful to the new New Order.

“Collective amnesia” is too strong a term for what happened in the Federal Republic.
Stunde Null
(Zero Hour) is closer to the mark, if understood as drawing a line under the past for the sake of a present and a future. Memories remained so strong that one can best speak neither of denial nor repression, but rather of taboo: taboo against asking awkward questions in private and public. Beginning in the 1960s the memories have been eloquently evoked and comprehensively evaluated. In particular the concept that German soldiers remained free of the Reich’s crimes and bore a “clean shield” as men fighting honorably for their country has been discredited beyond revival. But like drastic medical procedures and psychological processes, such voluntary fundamental reconstructions can only be performed effectively in a general context of health and stability. Without the “economic miracle” and the restoration of at least marginal international respectability, “mastering the past” was likely to have remained little more than a cosmetic project. Even then the examples of post-World War II Japan and post-Soviet Russia indicate that Germany’s behavior remains more exception than rule.

During the 1950s most senior panzer officers found niches in a Federal Republic that was more a niche society than generally realized. Guderian and Manstein were by all odds the most visible, writing widely translated memoirs that continue to define many aspects of the tankers’ war. Only a cut below these works in external influence is Friedrich von Mellenthin’s
Panzer Battles
, a detailed, at times tendentious, operational/tactical analysis of his campaigns as a staff officer in North Africa and Russia. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin made most of his reputation in Italy as a panzer general without armored troops. His
Neither Fear Nor Hope
probably ranks fourth in familiarity among English translations of tanker memoirs, probably because it is informed by a hostility to Nazism defined by Senger’s Catholicism—which did not deter him from doing his duty to the German people by serving Hitler’s Reich.

Other Panzermänner turned to the pen at home. Balck’s
Ordnung im Chaos
presents the Russian front from the division and corps perspective. Kurt Mayer’s
Grenadiere
, published in 1957 and later translated into English, has done much to confirm the image of the Waffen SS as a force of bold adventurers. History rather than autobiography was the preferred métier for more senior officers. Hoth published a narrative of his panzer group during Barbarossa. Raus authored a number of specialized reports for the US Army.

In wider contexts, Hasso von Manteuffel spent four years in the Bundestag as a Free Democrat, and was a guest lecturer at West Point. Herbert Gille became a journalist, founded a magazine for Viking’s veterans, and actually owned a bookstore. Balck and Mellenthin made virtual second careers in the late 1970s as think-tank consultants advising the US Army how to fight outnumbered against the Soviet Union in the Fulda Gap and win panzer-style.

The panzers’ direct influence on the emerging Bundeswehr was limited. Manstein served as Konrad Adenauer’s senior defense advisor for a time, but the Federal Republic took extreme pains to keep out of leadership positions anyone whose attitudes or behavior might give the new armed forces a tone encouraging the denial of previous experiences. The ex-Wehrmacht officers accepted for service were almost all lower-ranking; major and below. Traditions were established
de novo
, in line with historian Manfred Messerschmidt’s prescient warning against concentrating on achievements at the expense of intentions. Lines of heritage emphasized reformers and resisters. Unit designations were severely numerical. Naming buildings after former generals regularly generated criticism.

In operational contexts, the Bundeswehr in its developed form did closely replicate panzer formats and experience. Ten of its twelve divisions were armored or mechanized. Its Leopard tanks owed more in concept to the Panzer III and IV than the Tiger, and arguably the Panther as well, in their combination of gun power, mobility, and reliability. That was a sharp contrast to the British, for example, whose post-Centurion lines of tank development emphasized protection and hitting power in the fashion of the later panzer models. Its principal companion, the Marder, borrowed an old name for a development of the SdKfz 251: an armored personnel carrier that was a full- tracked fighting platform as opposed to a half-track battle taxi.

Politically the Bundeswehr was just as committed to a forward defense as had been its predecessor in Russia, albeit for essentially different reasons. With 30 percent of the Federal Republic’s population and a quarter of its industrial capacity within 100 miles of the Eastern frontier, trading space for time in the Manstein/Guderian tradition was impossible. Analysis of the defensive operations in Russia between 1943 and 1945, however, strongly suggested that mechanized forces properly trained, equipped, and commanded retained the capacity to check effectively any conventional offensive in central Europe. Model and Raus became fashionable, albeit unacknowledged, mentors of a tactical doctrine calling for quick ripostes: trip-hammer blows executed at the lowest possible levels with the purpose of stabilizing the battle line to a point where nuclear escalation became a calculable option as opposed to a logical development.

The Bundeswehr’s operational approach was never put to the test. Of arguably wider consequence was the effect of the panzer experience on Western, especially American, understanding of how World War II was fought on the Russian Front. It was thinly fictionalized in pulp magazines like the long-running weekly
Der Landser
, which endures in several variants and combines varying elements of pathos, nostalgia, and raw triumphalism. It was narrated in general-audience histories, and analyzed in sophisticated operational studies. The subtext was the same: German soldiers fought to the end in an honorable war against a brutal enemy. Russians were objectified as a faceless, soulless mass, a fundamental threat to Western civilization. Atrocities were the responsibility of the civilian party apparatus and the Waffen SS. The latter in turn sought to justify its war in a series of campaign and unit histories focusing on operational detail, many of them multivolume, increasing numbers translated into English by presses specializing in what is sometimes called “Wehrmacht porn.”

This romantic/heroic self-image became the basis for presenting the Eastern Front in terms of a lost cause in language similar to the “gun-powder and magnolias” aura surrounding the Confederacy. Responding to a growing market, book clubs, magazines, and the History Channel, war gamers, military reenactors, and the Internet, contributed to a self-reinforcing popular myth that continues to flourish long after the reunification of Germany and the implosion of the USSR. Jacket blurbs, tables of contents, websites, and game designs combined to prevent any serious engagement with either the true nature of the war in the East, or the true extent of the suffering the Germans inflicted on tens of millions from the basest of motives.

The German monopoly of Eastern Front narrative was made possible in good part by the USSR’s Cold War determination to control every aspect of the master story of the Great Fatherland Patriotic War. Entire campaigns, like the 1942-43 disaster at Rzhev, simply disappeared from the Soviet account. Ordinary soldiers’ experiences were submerged in the Soviet aggregate. Most publication on the war was official, so turgidly propagandistic and hagiographic that it remained untranslated and unmarketed in the West. Heroic romanticizing had no effective competition, so, like Darwin’s finches, it filled every interpretive niche.

The release of Russian primary sources since the fall of the Soviet Union has enabled balanced analysis at academic levels. David Glantz and Catherine Merridale are only two of a generation of scholars at this new cutting edge. Popular writers are beginning to follow. Availability of technical data, orders of battle, uniforms, and regalia have made the Red Army of World War II the latest thing in gamer chic and reenactor fashion.

Russia’s war story nevertheless continues to emphasize the collective. In contrast, most German material is individual. Even unit histories, in contrast to their US counterparts, tend to be structured around biographies and personal narratives. This reflects a German cultural pattern of processing war as a Bildungserlebnis: a developmental experience. The German way to tell what Tim O’ Brien calls “a true war story” in turn reinforces a central Western myth. From David and Goliath and the 300 Spartans to Tolkien’s trilogy and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, heroism is defined as individual struggle against odds not only overwhelming but faceless, objectified, dehumanized. A difference in American perspectives on the Eastern Front is correspondingly likely to persist.

Americans do focus naturally and inevitably on the war in the West at the expense of Russia. Within that parameter, however, the standard works, from Stephen Ambrose’s
Band of Brothers
through Audie Murphy’s memoir
To Hell and Back
to long-running comics like
Sgt. Rock
, depict German soldiers, tankers in particular, not as romanticized role models but as dangerous and deadly enemies.
Hogan’s Heroes
has arguably done more to foster an innocuous image of the Wehrmacht than all of the faux heroic stories with a Russian setting ever published in English.

Whatever their images, Hitler’s panzers are best described and understood as a technocracy—not merely in terms of material but of mentality. Their history during World War II is of being set tasks beyond their means, arguably more so than any other element of the Wehrmacht. The resulting emphasis on operational proficiency reflected the sheer magnitude of their responsibilities, but also the lack of moral insight, of conscience, that informed their leadership.

Steadily escalating operational requirements were an analgesic, an excuse not to think beyond the next month, the next week, the next day. But war by its nature tends toward entropic violence without structure, purpose, or meaning. Effective war-making correspondingly depends on a comprehensive, definable, and specific culture. That culture is not merely utilitarian, something assumed and discarded at will or whim. The culture of war is an end in itself. Its traditions, rules, and conventions are part of the fighter’s soul: a survival mechanism in a fundamental sense.

Call this honor. Call this as well something the panzers abandoned—from expediency, from ambition, from temptation—and not least from principle: the end justifying the means. Call this something that was expected to be reclaimed—sometime in an undefined future. Martin van Creveld offers two relevant consequences of honor’s absence. One is the wild horde. Lawless and disorganized, committed to destruction for destruction’s sake, it can neither give nor inspire the trust necessary for civilization. The other is the soulless machine. It makes war mindlessly and mechanically, never developing beyond an identity as a self-referencing, self-defined elite. Hitler’s panzers incorporated both. Yet never did men fight better in a worse cause.

That said, individual and cultural identities can be fluid. Not every German soldier was an archetypical Nazi. Nor did Nazis always behave in character. Life happens in a gray middle that readily becomes muddled. Since 1945 Germans have sought to enunciate and internalize an important lesson from their past. That lesson remains best expressed by playwright Carl Zuckmayer: “Whoever was the Devil’s general on this earth, and who bombed the path for him, has to be his quartermaster in Hell.” It is a fitting epitaph for Hitler’s panzers.

INDEX

A7V

A-10 Thunderbolt

Achtung—Panzer!
(Guderian)

“Action Groups,”

Adolf Hitler Bridge