The Wehrmacht and National Socialist Military Thinking

At the start of November 1941 the German Second Army under Colonel General Maximilian Freiherr von Weichs was preparing for its final assault on the Russian city of Kursk. The Second Army was on the southern flank of Army Group Centre and had been driving on Kursk since the commencement of Operation Typhoon. Yet unlike the stronger and better resourced armies to his north, which were still well short of their objective at Moscow, Weichs was on the threshold of success. It had been a long, wearisome advance fought with dwindling strength and on a shoestring of logistics. A report in Second Army’s war diary detailed just how desperate the state of Lieutenant General Werner Kempf’s XXXXVIII Panzer Corps was before the final attack on Kursk. The corps’s sole panzer division, Lieutenant General Alfred Ritter von Hubicki’s 9th Panzer Division, retained just seven tanks and noted that its units were spread over no less than 260 kilometres of its advance route. The accompanying 95th Infantry Division was also spread thin, and its combat effectiveness had sunk so low that there was not a single piece of artillery left to support the coming attack. As the report concluded: ‘In the assault on Kursk both divisions will give their last, so that after carrying out the attack a rest period will be absolutely necessary.’ ¹ On 1 November the assault began with the city’s outer defences penetrated on the first day, followed by two days of costly urban fighting.

By the evening of 3 November Weichs and Kempf could at last breathe a sigh of relief. Unlike their comrades in the north, who were franticly preparing for another phase of the campaign towards Moscow, Weichs and Kempf had achieved their objective before the onset of winter. The Second Army was a spent force, but it held a major urban centre with the winter quarters, communications, and infrastructure to conserve, and even rebuild, some strength. However, on 3 November, as soon as news reached the OKH (high command of the army) that Kursk had been captured, orders were prepared for a new offensive that took no account of the ‘absolutely necessary’ rest for Kempf’s exhausted forces. Not only was the Second Army to resume the offensive, but the OKH set its sights on Voronezh – a city some 200 kilometres further east from Kursk. This was no mistake – the OKH was well informed about the Second Army’s difficulties – but this made no difference to the orders. The chief of the army general staff from 1938 to 1942, Colonel General Franz Halder, acknowledged that marching on Voronezh ‘is, however, theory. Practically speaking the troops are stuck in the mud and can be happy if enough towing vehicles can be made operational to move provisions forward.’ ² The operation to reach Voronezh was therefore known to be hopeless from the beginning, but that did not change the OKH orders, and there would be nothing theoretical about the sufferings and deprivations of the troops.

On 3 November the Second Army reported that east of Kursk there were no hard roads and that a further advance was ‘not possible’. ³ Weichs pleaded for permission to adopt winter positions: however, this provoked a sharp response from the chief of the operations department in the army general staff, Colonel Adolf Heusinger. He argued that the troops should ‘not gain the impression of a winter base’ as otherwise ‘they will not understand the order to set out again’. ⁴ Realistically, of course, from the standpoint of the troops, it would hardly matter what the officers said; the order to resume the advance rather than establish winter quarters in a city offering shelter and warmth would never be ‘understood’. As Wilhelm Prüller wrote after being told the news at an assembly:

We almost fell over. We innocent angels thought we had in front of us some pleasant weeks which we would spend next to nice warm stoves; we hadn’t a clue what our superiors had in store for us. All those dire prophesies had something to them. Now they’ve caught up with us: we are to advance in the direction of Voronezh! But now comes the most interesting part: we are to go on foot! We’ve become infantry! How fatuous! […] And all you can do the whole time you serve is to marvel. So I laughed, and laughed heartily, out of malicious joy at my own misfortune. ⁵

Encountering this episode during the writing of my last book (The Battle for Moscow ⁶ ), I was finally forced to confront something which had troubled me for a long time. The Voronezh operation was only the latest example of the fact that the German high command’s operational concepts during the Second World War frequently made little or even no military sense.

Since the 1980s an enormous body of research (largely in German) into the Wehrmacht’s Vernichtungskrieg or war of annihilation has consistently shown ideology played if not the principal role then at least a leading one in the high command’s criminal behaviour. Such research is instructive because while violence, racism, and anti-Semitism were clearly present within the older Prussian and Imperial armies, they were nevertheless markedly radicalized under National Socialism. To what extent, then, might the same have been true for the Wehrmacht’s military ethos, which was firmly rooted in the culture of the Prussian and Imperial armies, but aspects of which were accentuated or twisted – sometimes out of all proportion – by National Socialism? Indeed to discount the role of ideology in military thinking would seem to posit the argument that the Wehrmacht’s ideological commitment to the most extreme Nazi policies of murder and exploitation took place in isolation and without any implications for its professionalism in strictly military matters. This article will test the hypothesis that there was an influence from National Socialist ideology upon the military practice of the Wehrmacht.

To begin with it is important to acknowledge that National Socialism is fundamentally at odds with historians’ way of thinking; it often defies logic and requires a measure of conviction in vague concepts such as ‘race’, ‘culture’, and ‘destiny’. The problem is operational histories involving the Wehrmacht (including my own) have seldom engaged with questions of ideology and have therefore not sought to explain events in these terms. Instead we seek answers that we and our audiences understand, but this runs the risk of imposing an artificial rationale onto events, while placing the Wehrmacht in a world where it does not entirely belong. If we are to understand German military thinking in the Second World War we need to make sense of operations according to the world in which the generals lived and operated, even if that is at times intellectually foreign, incomplete, or seemingly illogical. After all, National Socialism eschewed modern conceptions of morality, law, science, and even the very principles of the early modern Enlightenment, ⁷ so why too should National Socialist thinking not have abrogated concepts of warfare to conform more to Hitler than Clausewitz? ⁸

Importantly, what I identify as National Socialist military thinking cannot be understood outside the Prussian/German military tradition, because one builds upon the other. It was less a new way of thinking about war than a radicalization of pre-existing military concepts – one energized by National Socialism, but not created by it. After all, Hitler gained his understanding of warfare from the German army and his experiences of the First World War. It was only later that his radicalized precepts of National Socialism were progressively grafted onto the military ethos, influencing a conservative officer corps not because his ideas were new, but precisely because they were not.

The basic properties of National Socialist military thinking include:

the primacy of individual ‘will’

the routine acceptance of enormous (and unusual) risk in all aspects of military planning

the routine acceptance of extraordinary casualties with almost no reference to a cost/benefit ratio

a diffusion of responsibility for operational failure (with the higher commands consistently pushing liability downwards)

a widespread acceptance of the concept of Endsieg (final victory)

acceptance that anyone (soldier or civilian) dubbed an ‘enemy’ can, and indeed must, be annihilated

an inability to identify faults in the system (questioning orders is itself evidence of a faltering commitment, while failure is typically a consequence of not being ‘hard’, ‘decisive’, or ‘steadfast’ enough).

Such thinking did not begin with the Second World War or even Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. It is less of an indoctrination of the military in the earliest years than a merger of German military thinking with National Socialist ideas born out of a common post-war world view. As Geoffrey Megargee has shown, there was a fusion between the ‘stab in the back’ myth and an emergent existential form of military thought. As Megargee explains:

The myth of the ‘stab in the back’ is also important because of the other lines of thought that it supported. For one thing, it intersected, at several crucial points, with the idea of ‘total war’, which in turn dominated the military’s thinking about the next conflict. ‘Total war’ was not a coherent theory, a national strategy, or a doctrine. It was, instead, a set of common assumptions, but assumptions that were tremendously influential nonetheless. […] In broad terms ‘total war’ was an existential war, a war that called for all the human and material resources that a state could bring to bear. The Great War was, in the view of many officers, a ‘total war’, but one that Germany had not executed properly. They were determined to do better next time, in a number of ways. ⁹

Importantly, post-war German ideas about ‘total war’ (although the term itself was not used until 1935) existed, at least in part, in a metaphysical world, lacking what Michael Geyer has referred to as ‘instrumental significance’. In this world ‘strategy’ thrived on escalatory mobilization and violence until the military calculus shed the pretence of ‘art’ and ‘science’ and transcended into the chimeric. ¹⁰ In the face of the 1923 French occupation of the Ruhr, Hans von Seeckt, the commander-in-chief of the German army, acknowledged Germany’s ‘military powerlessness’, but also erroneously claimed ‘we are also able to attack’. ¹¹ In his study of interwar German military doctrine, Matthias Strohn points out that most officers did not yet accept Seeckt’s bravado. ¹² However, Seeckt’s comments aligned with Hitler’s defiant rhetoric, blurring fact and fiction for political gain, but in both instances the bombastic claims proved to be self-consciously deceitful in the short term and self-deceiving in the long term. By early 1923 Hitler had become important enough to be meeting directly with Seeckt, whom he pressed for more radical action against the French in the Ruhr. ¹³ It was precisely this crisis of self-defence that radicalized Germany’s military thinking, which, as Robert Citino has pointed out, was unique in Western military thought at the time:

Seeckt had a great deal of incentive to seek the new, the novel, and the modern when it came to military doctrine. No other wartime powers – the Americans, the British, and certainly not the French – had any reason to go through the sort of agonizing reappraisal of their wartime methods that Germany did. ¹⁴

Indeed, as we consider the subtle blending of conventional warfare with the intangible concepts of ‘total war’, it is worth illustrating the departure this constituted from the established norms of competing Western military thought.

Jörg Muth’s first-rate work on command culture highlights the extent of difference between German intellectual culture and that of the United States. He also notes that the ideological perversion of the German officer corps was if anything more remarkable precisely because it enjoyed a less dogmatic culture, which encouraged dissent. As Muth notes: ‘This study clearly points out that every German officer has a choice – more so than officers in other armies. Not only did there exist a centuries-old tradition of disobedience and speaking one’s mind to a superior, but that was also taught in the [officer training] school.’ Thus, Muth identifies the army’s highest-ranking officers as culprits, ‘whose personal aims were in many cases so congruent with Hitler’s’. Muth then concludes: ‘Faith in the Nazi regime was to rank higher than common sense. The infusion of highly ideologically charged content into rather technocratic-minded cultural content became one of the reasons for the downfall of the German officer corps.’ ¹⁵

While not without its problems, Martin van Creveld’s 1982 comparative study of German and American military doctrine identified radical differences in ‘fighting power’. His conclusion suggested that Germany’s ‘fighting organization’ had ‘probably no equal among twentieth-century armies’. ¹⁶ Whatever else may be said of such a claim, it is significant that van Creveld was writing in an era that predated the proliferation of works tying the German army to its well-established record of criminal activity, and yet van Creveld conceded ‘indoctrination with National Socialist ideas […] may have contributed to this result’. ¹⁷ Most instructive in Creveld’s study is the differentiation between individuals in German and American military doctrine:

While both manuals emphasize the role of the individual vis-à-vis modern technology, the German one makes ‘the highest demands’ on him; the American one, on the other hand, seems to regard him merely as one ‘instrument’ among many, one whose ‘elemental attributes’ must be understood if ‘gross mistakes’ are to be avoided. ¹⁸

Germany’s ‘highest demands’ are reflected in the best-selling post-war writings of Lieutenant Ernst Jünger (In Stahlgewittern and Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis) which celebrated the iron will of the soldier and his willingness to die for Germany as the essential spirit of the German army. It was a theme further propagated by another young officer, Kurt Hesse, whose book The Psychology of the Commander (Der Feldherr Psychologos) suggested: ‘The power of the race lies primarily in its spiritual health.’ ¹⁹ James Corum suggested that such writings received only limited attention in the Truppenamt under Seeckt, but also noted that ‘soldiers with radical military theories were probably tolerated more in the Reichswehr than in other armies of the period’. ²⁰ Importantly, National Socialist conceptions of war in this period ²¹ are almost indistinguishable from the writings of men such as Jünger and Hesse, suggesting that the early military conceptions of Hitler and his movement were shaped by a common idealization of the everyday soldier which was creeping into German doctrine and, as van Creveld rightly highlighted, posed the potential for ‘gross mistakes’.

While ‘total’ conceptions of warfare increasingly dominated German military thinking, France in the 1920s was likewise engaged in formulating plans for a total mobilization in the event of war, but the debate was framed by spirited disagreement over its implications for the Third Republic. As Eugenia C. Kiesling observed, ‘the law promised to turn France into a garrison state’, ²² which presented issues uniquely apparent to a democracy that the post-imperial, anti-Weimar German generals could not imagine nor accept. Accordingly, French military doctrine became increasingly defensive, ²³ which, for all its misconceptions about future warfare, did not mean that French military thinking was built upon ‘stupidity, incompetence, or decadence’. Rather, as Robert A. Doughty has shown, France’s demise stemmed more from adopting ‘the wrong formula for the problem that appeared in 1940’. ²⁴ Most importantly, the French did not ignore the military calculus in favour of increasingly egregious flights of fantasy that German victory in 1940 disguised.

The conservative officers of the Reichswehr regarded the army as a bastion of moral virtue imparting values such as devotion to the nation, sacrifice, courage, and comradeship in a German society seen as divided and weak under Weimar democracy. It was another parallel belief shared with National Socialism that aligned thinking about saving the nation through vague concepts of ‘strength’ and ‘blood’. As Jürgen Förster observed: ‘Since the First World War had been their most significant experience, both Hitler and the military establishment wanted to transfer the system of values of the front-line soldier to the public at large. Thus, German military tradition and National Socialism could be easily amalgamated.’ ²⁵

Upon becoming minster for defence in 1933, General of Infantry Werner von Blomberg (later field marshal) confronted the enduring problem of finding a German strategic response to the threat posed by French invasion. Blomberg conceded that, even after completion of a basic rearmament programme, ensuring Germany’s defence was highly improbable. He toyed with ideas of a national militia to be immediately established along the French border, but he also knew this could not solve the striking imbalance. Two war games further confirmed Germany’s unambiguous inferiority, but none of this allowed Blomberg to conclude, as his rivals in the political office of the Reichswehr had, that ‘one had to have the courage to acknowledge that potentially there are political-military encounters in which the use of force was without prospect from the very beginning’. ²⁶ Such a conclusion, leaving Germany open to attack, was unacceptable to Blomberg, as well as to the Nazi leadership, and the search for a solution therefore required ever more extreme measures. Nothing was to be spared in the defence of the homeland; everything was to be subordinated to the war effort. As Richard Overy has noted of the period: ‘In German military circles the concept of total war became common currency.’ ²⁷ More to the point, Michael Geyer has observed how the imposition of ideology transformed German military thinking and quickly relocated war outside Clausewitz’s ‘rational’ means to political ends. As Geyer concludes:

Blomberg’s political and military reasoning failed him, because there was no military answer to the problem. In order to try to solve the issues so clearly laid out in the war games, he and many of his officers shifted, in the name of realism, from military analysis into sentiment, musing about how the world worked in principle, since reality was inscrutable. In other words, Blomberg turned from professional military analysis to ideology, because he took the problem of German security very seriously (having been charged to do so) but was unable to solve the problem within the context of professional military thinking. Quite simply, no solution was available within the confines of orthodox and professional thinking about European land warfare. […] The threshold of extremism was much lower than we might expect. ²⁸

Of course not everyone in the army immediately abandoned rational solutions for National Socialist fantasies, but in the spirit of the times, as Geyer suggests, the intellectual path to extremism and Nazi assimilation was much shorter than we might like to think. Colonel General Ludwig Beck, the chief of the army general staff from 1935 to 1938, worried that the army was losing its independence and control over strategy, ²⁹ yet he overestimated the extent to which his fellow officers would support his opposition to Hitler’s policies. ³⁰ In fact Germany’s aggressive rearmament won enthusiastic support among the generals, and when Walter von Brauchitsch was appointed commander-in-chief of the army in 1938 he made it his task to bring the army closer to the party and its leader. ³¹ If few officers recognized the ideological rather than the political radicalism of National Socialism, the goals they shared with their Führer and their determination to fundamentally transform the mind and spirit of the German nation did not preclude – indeed it emphasized – the foremost participation of the German army. National Socialist influences were therefore accepted to ‘unify’ the army with the state and reconcile outstanding differences. By 1938 remaining opposition within the army, such as it existed, was more talk than action, and even this ceased in the face of Hitler’s triumph at Munich. The invasion of Poland and the annexing of land to Germany proved a further popular step among the Prussian-oriented army general staff, while the complaints of men such as Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz, about the murderous tactics of the SS, proved an exception and served to show what would not be tolerated from the army. ³² The unexpectedly rapid victory over France in 1940 served to extend Hitler’s infallibility myth from the political to the military sphere, and it was at this fever pitch of national triumph that the National Socialist conception of warfare confirmed itself to many officers.

Germany’s apparently most dangerous enemies having been crushed, the turn east against an isolated Soviet Union was uncritically accepted within the army. ³³ Hitler envisaged sweeping changes on the grandest of scales, especially in Eastern Europe. The realization of those ideas was as much a military problem as it was a political one, but just as Hitler did not shrink from the latter challenge, his generals remained uniformly convinced that they could solve the former. Importantly, the Prussian-German military tradition had a long history of looking disparagingly upon its Slavic military rivals in the east, but National Socialist conceptions about the Soviet Union’s population led by ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ accorded unprecedented confidence in the Wehrmacht’s ‘natural’ superiority. ³⁴

The German military tradition had always disproportionally favoured the operational conception of warfare, which is to say it placed a decisive importance upon ‘battle’ above all other strategic considerations. It was not just that the operations officer was pre-eminent within the German general staff, but that all other appointments were accordingly undervalued, which relegated logistics, transport, intelligence, and other technical matters to a decidedly secondary status. This sometimes influenced the standard of officers who ended up in these positions and further compounded their diminished reputation. ³⁵ The pre-eminence of operational command in the Prussian-German tradition was further impacted by an almost single-minded desire to seek battle on German terms, meaning that officers’ conception of warfare was overwhelmingly offensive. Even in the face of superior numbers there was a consistent preference throughout German military history to seek offensive solutions, leading to Robert Citino’s well-reasoned thesis that this attacking form of warfare constituted the ‘German way of war’. ³⁶

Such an offensive-minded military was accordingly much less critical of Hitler’s aggressive plans for European dominance, but it was less the embrace of offensive warfare that distinguished German officers under Hitler than the kind of offensives they would advocate. The Prussian army under Moltke the elder and the Imperial Army under Schlieffen conceived of offensives on the border of Germany aimed at defeating neighbouring armies and seizing opposing capitals. Their plans were not always rooted in limited objectives or fully realizable goals, ³⁷ but even this imbalanced relationship between means and ends was greatly radicalized under National Socialism. With the departure of Beck from the general staff, however, Hitler’s policies met no further resistance from within the German army. Already before the invasion of the Soviet Union Germany’s military commitments in the war with Britain, as well as its areas of occupation, stretched its resources thin. Planning for Operation Barbarossa proposed opening an enormous new front with the occupation of Soviet Russia all the way to the Archangel–Astrakhan line. ³⁸ Even before the first shot was fired, such plans threatened a fatal disparity between means and ends, and went far beyond any former plans advanced by the Prussian or Imperial German general staffs. Colonel General Franz Halder was the responsible chief of the army general staff, but he acted with near universal support within the OKH, ³⁹ which suggests the problem was institutional not individual. Indeed throughout the remainder of the war none of Halder’s successors – Kurt Zeitzler, Adolf Heusinger, Heinz Guderian, or Hans Krebs – formulated a strategic initiative which came anywhere near to coping with Germany’s increasingly desperate military situation. It was as though the army was perpetually detached from reality and incapable of understanding the limitations of its own resources. Importantly, this was not simply the result of the constraints imposed by Hitler, although the dictator did play a role, but self-delusion was intrinsic to the army itself and a result of its National Socialist conception of warfare.

The army’s traditional focus on operations convinced the generals their only concern was with the fulfilment of the objective – not the validity of the objective itself. Inadequacies or impediments identified by the planning for Barbarossa only led to new plans or different solutions, but the premise of the task itself – the destruction of Soviet power – remained unquestioned. As far as the general staff under Halder was concerned, its job was to seek the decisive battle of annihilation; political, diplomatic, and economic factors were beyond its strict professional concern and need not be considered in a military context. This remarkable strategic aloofness suited Hitler’s Gleichschaltung (forcible coordination) process and forestalled any serious challenge to his authority until July 1944.

Geoffrey Megargee observed in his landmark study of Hitler’s high command that Barbarossa’s planning was a process in which information was produced to match major decisions already taken, rather than information being gathered upon which to base major decisions. ⁴⁰ The army was simply grafting its ‘battle’ conception of warfare onto the Soviet Union with seemingly no appreciation for the limits inherent in such an undertaking. Yet the picture is more complex because profound problems with the Barbarossa plan were in fact being identified by the army general staff: the real question is why these did not provoke a radical change in thinking.

In November 1940 Halder confided to his diary that the daunting scope of commitments around Europe suggested a limitation of operations in the east to the first objective (i.e. the Dvina–Dnepr line). He believed that ‘starting from there, one could attempt an enveloping operation, but in the endless expanse of space this would have no prospect of success’. ⁴¹ Thus it was apparent to Halder that the war would have to be won in the opening phase according to the army doctrine for a battle of annihilation. Even Lieutenant General Friedrich Paulus’s war game in early December 1940 confirmed that the Archangel–Astrakhan line was ‘far beyond anything that the German forces available could hope to achieve’. Paulus’s post-war account then added, ‘but it is a typical example of the megalomaniac extravagance of National Socialist political thinking’. ⁴² What Paulus neglected to mention is that the army leadership itself set these objectives and continued their planning without addressing the apparent contradiction between a battle of annihilation near to the German-Soviet border and the necessary occupation of the Archangel–Astrakhan line to eliminate Soviet strategic centres of power.

Inexplicably, Halder rejected all doubts or accepted that risks ‘could be borne’, ⁴³ but no amount of ‘gaps’ in the planning ⁴⁴ led to any questioning or debate about the potential success of Barbarossa. The issue was therefore less with the professional competence of the staff work or the processes it utilized, which were revealing Barbarossa’s shortcomings; rather, the problem was at the conceptual level and what was being done, or not done, with the information received.

While the planning for Operation Barbarossa suggests there was more at work in the minds of the generals, allowing them to square circles, the planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union was only the first indication that something was seriously amiss in the army’s conception of warfare. The 1941 campaign against the Soviet Union would fail, but not as a result of Hitler’s interference or the onset of an early winter, as the generals would later argue. The fact remained that from its very conception Barbarossa was impossibly large in scale, stretching German military assets well beyond their ability to maintain effectiveness and predicated upon the most optimistic assessments of a Soviet collapse. Yet even after Barbarossa’s failure no hard questions were asked, and many of the same bewildering miscalculations and inexcusable oversights passed directly into the planning for the 1942 campaign, which, unsurprisingly, ended in a second massive overextension and ultimate disaster at Stalingrad. The generals who later argued individual points of strategy – should a corps have gone this way or that – miss the point that Germany was fundamentally in over its head. The 1943 summer offensive at Kursk again failed and, in parallel with the 1941–2 campaigns, was decided by strategic factors, not the operational or tactical details that the army concerned itself with. The question of what strategy the German army was pursuing after the summer of 1943 until the end of the war assumes that it thought in such terms, but part of the reason why the army held on for so long was that it did not. ⁴⁵

Why then, when commanders and personalities routinely changed, did Germany’s basic approach to warfare during the Second World War remain so hamstrung and unrealistic? One might just as well ask why the army’s allegiance to the regime continued unquestioned, why orders – even criminal ones – were consistently carried out, and why the fighting went on irrespective of the circumstances. The common factor which linked the generals’ behaviour from the beginning of the war to the end was their adherence, to greater or lesser degrees, but adherence none the less, to National Socialism. Yet if National Socialism was central to an officer’s world view, how was this manifested in his military thinking?

The army was particularly susceptible to National Socialism because of the alignment between ‘the nation’ and ‘war’ in Nazi ideology. The idea of a Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community), born of the First World War and hardened in the years of post-war struggle, gave Germans a sense of common purpose as well as of a shared mutual threat from outsiders. ⁴⁶ Indeed the idea of swearing a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler came from the leading generals themselves in 1934 (Blomberg and Walther von Reichenau). It was this personal connection to Hitler, which did not allow for a distinction to be made between the Führer and the state, that made it impossible to separate Germany’s interests from those of its leader. ⁴⁷ The weight of professional obligation and duty were now buttressed by a personal devotion and identification with the Führer. For officers, who repeatedly extolled their men to ever greater service and sacrifice, the success of the whole National Socialist experiment was thus an intimately personal undertaking. As Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer conclude: ‘since faith in the Führer was simultaneously a faith of Germans in themselves, every threat to positive images of Hitler was also a threat to the project in which people had invested so much energy and emotion. The fear was that this project would turn out to be utterly worthless.’ ⁴⁸ Such fear eliminated rational alternatives and heightened the investment of faith until people had become fully dependent upon their charismatic leader, to whom they would remain true even when their mutual downfall was assured. ⁴⁹

In the final period of the war it was precisely Adolf Hitler who carried the hopes of millions of National Socialist Germans. Hitler was the one proven source of salvation for Germany, a man whose past achievements had defied all the odds. He was not the villain dragging Germany down, but rather the last bulwark of hope against the perceived Bolshevik conquest from the east and their Jewish-capitalist allies in the west. The 1944 propaganda slogan ‘Adolf Hitler ist der Sieg’ (Adolf Hitler is victory) may seem peculiar because the irony is all too apparent, but it reflected the very real hopes and desires of those who had invested everything in him. As Goebbels announced on the occasion of Hitler’s fifty-fifth birthday in 1944: ‘The fact that he stands at the head of our nation is for us all the surest sign of coming victory. Never was he so near to us as in the moment of danger, never were we so bound to him as when we felt that he needed us as we needed him.’ ⁵⁰

Given the centrality of Hitler to the Nazi state, and the pervasive influence of what historians refer to as ‘the Führer myth’, it is not surprising that his personal example also had a decisive impact upon the culture of the army. A cornerstone of Hitler’s public speeches and writings was his own life story in which his ‘triumph of the will’ conquered all adversity and led to his rise from army corporal to head of the German state. The message was clear: Hitler’s struggle to power was of his own making; against all the odds, he controlled his own destiny with an indomitable will to succeed. Practical considerations such as Germany’s ruinous economic position, weak democratic institutions, the divisive political climate, and widespread public disaffection after the loss of the First World War were not the emphasis: Hitler was the man who imposed himself on Germany’s troubles and triumphed. After 1933 National Socialist propaganda took up a similar story of a nation reborn in Hitler’s mould, united in purpose and deed by a common insuperable will.

For the Wehrmacht the primacy of ‘will’ was a natural fit to the archetypal military commander who carried his army to victory with bold conviction and fearless assertiveness. Notions of Kampfgeist (fighting spirit) and Siegeswille (desire for victory) were certainly not unique to the Nazi period, ⁵¹ or even to the German military tradition. General Ferdinand Foch noted during his command of the French military academy in 1906 that ‘Victory = Will’. ⁵² Nevertheless, the concept of the Siegeswille was radicalized markedly under National Socialism. One aspect of this was the establishment of ‘Wehrmacht psychology’, which assessed officer candidates at some 22 testing sites around Germany (in 1940). In addition to traditional notions of courage, decisiveness, self-control, perseverance, obedience, and leadership qualities, ‘Wehrmacht psychology’ also placed heavy emphasis upon identifying Willensstärke (literally ‘strength of will’). Brauchitsch emphasized this in December 1938 when he announced that future officers would need to be ‘convinced go-getters’ (Überzeugte Tatmenschen) characterized by ‘steel-hard personalities, strength of will, and resilience’. ⁵³ Jörg Muth’s recent study of German command culture noted that Willenskraft (willpower) was ‘paramount among the capabilities’ of a German officer: ‘the will to become a role model of an officer, the will to succeed in any given task, the will to force a tactical decision, the will to speak his mind, and the will to remain steady under pressure’. ⁵⁴ By the outbreak of the Second World War, Willensstärke was the leading characteristic of the best German officers, and Adolf Hitler was revered as their prime example. The Reich’s press chief, Dr Otto Dietrich, recalled the winter crisis of 1941–2 and compared it to 1812: ‘Napoleon had said in 1812: “The cold destroyed me.” Hitler’s will mastered the situation; his steadfastness held off catastrophe. […] Steadfastness and impelling energy were Hitler’s great traits as a military leader. He was the revolutionizing spirit of the German Wehrmacht; he was its motive force.’ ⁵⁵

Wartime propaganda celebrated remarkable acts of daring where enormous risks were seemingly offset by the single-minded decisiveness of German officers who always triumphed. In one celebrated instance from August 1941, lieutenants Störck and Buchterkirch led a handful of men to the great Soviet bridge at Novgorod-Severskii on the Desna river. Outnumbered and deep behind enemy lines they charged the bridge, killed its defenders, removed explosives, and held their prize until motorized reinforcements arrived. As German propaganda reported: ‘The much feared Desna position, the gateway to the Ukraine, had been blasted open. A handful of men and a few resolute officers had decided [Army Group Centre’s] first act of the campaign against the Ukraine. Russia’s grain areas lay wide open ahead of Guderian’s tanks.’ ⁵⁶ The message was unmistakable: exemplary German officers imposed themselves upon events, refusing to accept their inferiority and succeeding against all the odds. The example also grossly exaggerated the impact individuals could have, suggesting that a handful of men could transform the fortunes of the campaign in the east. The emphasis was not on the Red Army’s confusion, weaknesses, or lamentable strategic direction, but rather on a belief that the ‘spiritual’ dimension of warfare could triumph even against material superiority.

A poem by the celebrated German war correspondent and Nazi propagandist Heinrich Anacker, entitled ‘Stronger than Machines’, also illustrates just how irrelevant material circumstance could be to Nazi visions of victory in the east. Anacker alludes to the severity of German problems in the autumn of 1941, but then dismissively rejects them in celebration of the warlike spirit of Frederick the Great, which he suggests can achieve any goal Hitler sets. Here the expropriation of the German past to serve a radicalized conception of National Socialist warfare is unambiguous:

When our vehicles were hopelessly stuck

And even the tanks were deep in mud,

Then a stronger engine spurred us on

And stirred our last resistance.

It was the warlike will of man,

Old Fritz’ hard Prussian spirit,

That, imperturbably tough and in wordless silence,

Attained the goal that the Führer set us.

For long our trust lay in the steel giants

They left us alone to face the danger,

But our combat-ready hearts burned

And, yet, made the impossible real.

[…]

So it was that the war in the east was then won –

It was not with the apparatus of war nor dead material

That helped the steadfast columns to victory,

But soldiers’ discipline, harder than steel!

It was the warlike will of man,

Old Fritz’ hard Prussian spirit,

That, imperturbably tough and in wordless silence,

Attained the goal that the Führer set us. ⁵⁷

Importantly, the primacy of ‘will’ within the Wehrmacht was neither an artificial construct of Nazi propaganda nor the result of a National Socialist education system affecting only the younger soldiers and officers. Senior officers, long exempt from Nazi influence in their formative years, did not see the radicalized concept as a fundamental departure from older forms of a victory-driven Kampfgeist. General Hans von Seeckt’s thoughts on future warfare, first published in 1929, noted that: ‘Material is superior to the living, mortal human mass, but it is not superior to the living and immortal human mind.’ ⁵⁸ This kind of thinking laid the foundation for much more radical ideas, which even purportedly anti-Nazi generals adopted. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, one of the July plot conspirators and the head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), wrote for an article in 1938: ‘As the officer before the World War was naturally a monarchist […] so it is naturally understandable today […] to be a National Socialist. […] The Wehrmacht has become the tool of the National Socialist will for development.’ ⁵⁹ Exactly how that worked in practice was to assume that military objectives were always possible from the outset and largely a matter of a commander’s determination and ingenuity in finding the best path to success. In this way Auftragstaktik facilitated National Socialist military thinking because, although a military concept, it was not strictly speaking a tactic (as the name implies), nor was it limited to the tactical level of command; rather Auftragstaktik is best understood as a leadership method which could serve a military purpose as well as an ideological one. The primacy of ‘will’ explains why so many German operations, particularly in the east, were attempted in spite of a prohibitive shortfall in men and resources. These can be seen in both the successful early phases of the war and in the long period of retreats and constant crisis. Moreover, because the primacy of will celebrated and embraced the bold, decisive commander, it was easily grafted onto a military culture that considered such ideas organic to its past successes.

The radicalization of the concept of ‘will’ within the Wehrmacht passed largely, although not entirely, undetected by the officers themselves. Hans Meier-Welcker, a general staff officer in the 251st Infantry Division, concluded before the resumption of Army Group Centre’s offensive towards Moscow in mid-November 1941 that Germany was unable to achieve any kind of knockout blow and, in fact, was locked into a ‘long and uncertain war’. He then continued: ‘May all thinking Germans finally become conscious of this realization. Unfortunately, so far everything has been done to prevent recognition of this.’ ⁶⁰ Yet what Meier-Welcker was grappling with was something incongruous to National Socialism because a Nazi world view did not allow for doubt and applied itself unreservedly in the face of adversity. What Meier-Welcker wanted was recognition that Germany was simply too weak to achieve its current objectives, an admission fundamentally at odds with a primacy of will. It is not that Meier-Welcker’s fellow Germans were unthinking, as he implies, but that they thought very differently, empowered by National Socialism to achieve success in spite of the circumstances.

As a case in point, General of Infantry Hermann Geyer, the commander of the IX Army Corps, wrote to his officers in September 1941 to impress upon them how the military situation was to be viewed in spite of his corps’s weakness and Germany’s inability to eliminate Soviet resistance. As Geyer explained:

The positive aspects of every situation must first and foremost be recognized and emphasized. It is well known that the enemy invariably has problems too. It is also well known that all is not lost if all is not given up for lost. It is precisely in difficult situations that a soldier can do more than his best, even if it seems to be more than is humanly possible. Success often only comes at the last minute and hangs upon a single thread. Often one realizes later that, given a little push, the enemy would have fallen over. ⁶¹

Expecting a man to achieve ‘more than his best […] more than is humanly possible’ elevates the spiritual component above flesh and blood, which subtly allows for a feeling of superiority in spite of numerical inferiority. Moreover, the claim that ‘all is not lost if all is not given up for lost’ follows the irrational National Socialist logic of ignoring circumstances by refusing to accept them. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commanding Army Group Centre in 1941, exemplified this perspective when he responded to complaints from Panzer Group 3 that it could no longer operate as a motorized force. As Bock noted: ‘In my reply I made reference to Panzer Army Guderian, which is providing daily proof that motorized forces fighting on foot are capable of outstanding feats – they just have to want to!’ ⁶²

During the 1941–2 winter crisis on the eastern front, Colonel General Erich Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4, objected to the language used in a report from the hard-pressed LVI Panzer Corps, which had stated its ‘attempt’ to hold the vital Szesstra position. Hoepner insisted that no ‘attempt’ be made; the position had to be held because ‘the general situation demands it’. ⁶³ Indeed, the war diary of Hoepner’s panzer group concluded the year 1941 with the observation: ‘A great shadow is cast over the year’s end. December saw a great deal of hope [in victory] shot down. The will must overcome this crisis!’ ⁶⁴ Such a National Socialist perspective was precisely Hitler’s solution to the crisis, and on 27 January 1942 he insisted to his generals that the situation was not lost. As Hitler stated: ‘It is only lost when the last man comes to doubt. As long as there is one strong-hearted man to hold up the banner nothing has been lost. In this respect, I am ice-cold. If the German people are not prepared to give everything for the sake of their self-preservation, very well! Then let them disappear!’ ⁶⁵ No matter how dire the situation there could be no question that the primacy of ‘will’ predominated, with weaponry viewed only as the tool subordinate to the moral qualities of the soldier. ⁶⁶ With the lower and middle ranks looking to the high command to recognize their limitations, and the generals forcing the issue back onto the troops by expecting them to surmount all difficulties in spite of their inferiority, there was no accountability within the German army.

Much later in the war, in January 1944, the army personnel office produced an officer’s booklet titled Wofür kämpfen wir? (‘What do we fight for?’), which began with an order from Hitler emphasizing the need to set a personal example in battle as well as National Socialist ideology. For Hitler the two were inseparable. The best officers acted with a symmetry of thought and deed because a National Socialist world view always equalled success in battle. As Hitler’s order explained: ‘He who fights with the purest will, the staunchest belief and the most fanatical determination will be victorious in the end.’ ⁶⁷ For the National Socialist officer there could be no ambiguity of purpose, no excuse for second-guessing victory, and no allowance for doubting the outcome of the war, no matter how bad things became. On 28 December 1944 Hitler confronted his generals with a grossly exaggerated view of the fighting in the Ardennes, justifying his confidence with the claim that:

I have been in this business for eleven years and during those eleven years I have never heard anybody report that everything was completely ready. Our situation is not different from that of the Russian in 1941 and 1942 when, despite their most unfavourable situation, they manoeuvred us slowly back by single offensive blows […] The question is […] whether Germany has the will to remain in existence or whether it will be destroyed. […] For me the situation is nothing new. I have been in very much worse situations. I mention this only because I want you to understand why I pursue my aim with such fanaticism and why nothing can wear me down. ⁶⁸

Certainly by the end of the war there were German commanders who expressed a healthy scepticism about the primacy of will, especially where it was used as a substitute for material support in desperate situations, but for this reason ‘fanatics of the Will’ ⁶⁹ were more likely to gain favour and secure promotions. ⁷⁰ It is, however, inaccurate to speak of advocates versus opponents as if the primacy of the will was an all-or-nothing belief; throughout the war officers invested varying degrees of faith in the concept, but, importantly, for the vast majority of German officers, a strong measure of faith existed. Even in the last months of the war Nazi propaganda about wonder weapons delivering the Endsieg and a very real fear of the Red Army maintained faith in the war effort, in spite of the dire circumstances. This dissuaded the majority of German generals from ‘defeatist talk’, and even fewer contemplated independently surrendering their commands until after Hitler was dead. ⁷¹ In such difficult times the will to go on resisting was never more important, confirming that a Siegeswille was no mere aberration of Nazi propaganda, but a central pillar of the Wehrmacht’s own self-identification and world view.

After the war Halder wrote in the preface to a study by Colonel General Erhard Raus: ‘It becomes very clear that a strong military leader with great powers of motivation is the most important factor for success.’ ⁷² Moreover, in his private correspondence, Halder argued in a letter to the retired General of Infantry Günther Blumentritt that there was no cause for surrender at any point in the war regardless of the military situation:

The question of when the last war had to be seen as lost makes no sense. A war is a political act and can be militarily hopeless for the longest time while it still offers political chances. Such chances can even come up unexpectedly, as the Seven Years War [1756–63] proved. So the correct answer remains: a war is only lost when one gives up. ⁷³

Certainly in 1941 Halder was unwilling to call off the offensive in the east, in spite of the army’s increasingly battered and worn state. By the battle for Moscow in November 1941 Halder, together with Bock and the chief of operations at the OKH, Colonel Adolf Heusinger, each evoked comparisons with the battle of the Marne in 1914, when, as they saw it, a lack of German resolve to continue the offensive accounted for the lost opportunity to win the war. ⁷⁴ Such comparisons represented a military equivalent to the Nazi Party’s political ‘stab in the back’ myth, in which timid generalship lacking the iron resolve of National Socialism prevented German victory on the battlefield in 1914, just as Jews and communists were able to demoralize the home front in 1918. Neither could be allowed to happen again, and the Wehrmacht’s fervent primacy of will ensured that victories would not be squandered by a lack of resolve, just as defeat would not follow from a military capitulation. ⁷⁵

Clearly the Wehrmacht’s alignment to National Socialist ideals extended beyond its much-discussed participation in war crimes and went to the very core of its professional functions. Similarly the concept of the entscheidende Schlacht (deciding battle), in which war was won on the battlefield by the achievement of a decisive stroke, pervaded the German conception of warfare long before Hitler. As Robert Citino has observed, ‘the notion of calling a halt ran contrary to everything this officer corps believed: the importance of will and aggression, and especially the importance of finishing the war in a single campaign’. ⁷⁶ For this reason German warfare had always been highly offensive and operationally focused to deliver a knockout blow, but while the strategic dimension was certainly neglected, it was seldom entirely ignored. Accordingly, the prosecution of an offensive operation had its limits and only rarely became a law unto itself.

Such consideration was far less a feature of German offensives during the Second World War. The single-minded pursuit of the entscheidende Schlacht or Endsieg, and the success that often accompanied German offensives in the short term, always encouraged further effort in the hope of exploiting the enemy’s vulnerability. The problem with this was what Clausewitz identified as the culminating point of an offensive when the power of the defender, falling back on his centres of power, gathered strength, while at the same time the attacker grew ever weaker. The culminating point was the moment at which the defender proved stronger than the attacker and was able to go over to the offensive. In 1941, 1942, and 1943 the same pattern repeated itself in the east, but there was no learning curve within the Wehrmacht, and the same Nazi rhetoric about an Endsieg continued unabated into 1944 and even 1945. Why did the strategic situation not invalidate this concept in the last year of the war, and why did the German generals pursue their offensives from 1941 to 1943 to the point of disaster each time?

National Socialism was built on a system of absolute beliefs which could never be invalidated or challenged by ‘outside’ factors. Hitler’s infallibility was the single best example and, since he also defined National Socialism, neither he nor the system could ever be found at fault. Thus the closer something was identified with Hitler or the cause of National Socialism, the harder it was to resist for one of its adherents. Identifying faults in the system was really only possible for someone outside the circles of belief, because those inside were committed to ‘working towards the Führer’. ⁷⁷ It was precisely those who cast doubt or questioned their instructions that were seen to weaken the whole system and made Hitler’s goals harder to obtain. The national community, the Volksgemeinschaft, was strengthened by unity, discipline, and obedience to the Führer, nowhere more so than in the Wehrmacht. As Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer have observed: ‘obedience was seen as a higher virtue than reflecting on whether military actions made sense’. ⁷⁸ This is not to suggest that generals never reflected on the sense of their orders, but it was certainly nowhere near as often or as conscious as their post-war accounts suggested. Indeed the generals supported Hitler’s offensive impulse because it mimicked their own. Similarly, they freely drew parallels between ideological uniformity and military effectiveness. Even when Hitler’s strategic direction was questioned at the highest levels, concrete steps to oppose it were few and far between. Much more commonly the generals accepted their instructions, and when commanders did try to have individual orders changed or rescinded, it was typically only in endgame scenarios when a disaster beckoned. At a fundamental level the glaring strategic deficiencies of operations Barbarossa, Typhoon, Blue, and Citadel all went unimpeded through the German general staff.

Nor was the rejection of strategic realities confined to the eastern front. As Martin Kitchen’s first-rate study of Germany’s North African campaign has shown, Rommel, in contrast to his Italian counterparts, was reckless, arrogant, and impervious to doubts. ⁷⁹ Moreover, the highest-ranking German officers captured by the Western Allies were interned at Trent Park, where British intelligence was secretly recording their private conversations for any important disclosures. A study by Tobias Seidel focusing on 17 of the most senior officers and their attitudes between May 1943 and May 1944 sought to confirm his thesis that German officers lacked a common homogeneity in their views. Yet even Seidel was forced to concede that in some respects there was ‘surprising’ uniformity in their assessments, especially in military matters. British and American forces were seen to operate with tactical and operational timidity, while the German officers consistently singled out the superiority of the German soldier. ⁸⁰ Seidel’s study also reflects the utter failure of the officers to comprehend Germany’s difficulties at the strategic level. They blamed Hitler for not first finishing Britain before attacking the Soviet Union, and saw this as costing Germany an otherwise assured victory. ⁸¹ Evidently, the Trent Park transcripts suggest ideological thinking in the military sphere was by no means limited to senior officers who fought in the east. Indeed, Sönke Neitzel’s own study of the transcripts suggests some of the generals were even aware of their complicity in applying radical concepts of National Socialism to their military operations. A remarkably frank conversation between General of Infantry Dietrich von Choltitz and Lieutenant General Kurt Wilhelm von Schlieben made this clear:

[Choltitz:]

I’ve persuaded my men to believe in this nonsense and caused those people who still regarded the officer corps as something worth respecting, to take part, without due consideration. I feel thoroughly ashamed. Maybe we are far more to blame than those uneducated cattle who in any case never hear anything else at all.

[Schlieben:]

No war was ever started or waged with as little forethought as this one, which is carried on with the slogan: ‘It’ll be all right.’ It started like that in 1941: ‘You might attack over there and break through and then go straight on to the Sea of Azov; it’ll work out all right!’

[Choltitz:]

It wouldn’t be so bad if we generals, or the generation before us, for that matter hadn’t taken part. The trouble is we participated without a murmur. ⁸²

Beyond just their participation, what Choltitz and Schlieben seem most disturbed by is how they believed the ‘nonsense’ that impacted their decisions. The absence of a strategic context meant there was no objective forum for discussion, or intellectual culture, to consider what was reasonable; there were only orders for the next operation to attack new positions or hold current ones. In such an intellectual vacuum the elusive Endsieg always beckoned because commanders did not typically question the correlation between the orders at hand and the attainment of ‘victory’. Indeed many operations ordered by the OKH or Hitler would prove extremely wasteful for little or no gain. This is itself a comment on the high command, but also on the commanders at the operational level (division and corps) whose willingness to comply rarely wavered, and who pursued their objectives with a dedication seldom rivalled by other armies. To return to my opening example, the Voronezh operation became a predictable farce, and a costly one for the Second Army, but it was by no means atypical. Even at the grandest scale of operations basic questions were never confronted, in spite of clear failure. Why was Operation Barbarossa not considered a failure by the autumn of 1941? How would the outcome of Stalingrad have changed even if the last few buildings before the Volga had been taken? Was the attainment of the Kursk salient ever a credible goal in July 1943? The point is Germany’s major goals in the east were never realistic to begin with, but that did not stop the Wehrmacht from trying time and again, with the greatest of effort and sacrifice, to achieve them. In this sense their blindness was also their strength, because they did not consider how far they were from their objective, giving genuine hope to the notion of an Endsieg. The scale of the army’s professional oversight reflects the depth of its conformity to National Socialism and its absolutist belief in victory over defeat.

For Germans in the 1930s National Socialism was all-pervasive. No major German institution was insulated against it; no intellectual movement could fully resist it. For the German general staff there was much more that united the conservative officer corps with Nazi policies than divided them. Importantly, ‘working towards the Führer’ was not just something influential people in the Third Reich did; it was the way in which they thought. The generals were, after all, not just the beneficiaries of National Socialism; they were, in many respects, its proponents and supporters, especially once the early tensions with the Sturmabteilung had been resolved. The officer corps shared the order and discipline National Socialism established, the social mores it enforced, and the pro-German world view it projected. Hitler’s movement did not appeal to its contemporaries because it was dangerous, radical, or reckless; its success was rooted in its supposed return to long-established German traditions, a recapturing of lost pride, prosperity, and honour. Hitler was the undisputed leader, to be followed, venerated, and, above all, obeyed. His successes were Germany’s successes, and his track record, while not above the occasional reproach of the conservative generals, nevertheless earned their loyalty.

Yet National Socialism was a radical movement which carried its adherents along with it, step by subtle step, on a path to extremism, an extremism of both thought and deed. Thus, whereas the German Imperial Army killed innocent civilians in the hundreds during the First World War, the Wehrmacht murdered hundreds of thousands in the Second World War. ⁸³ Whereas the number of German soldiers condemned to death by the Imperial Army in the First World War was just 48, the Wehrmacht executed an estimated 22,000. ⁸⁴ Likewise, in the military sphere, whereas Germany’s war plan in 1914 attempted a rash movement over hundreds of kilometres, the army’s plan for 1941 envisaged an advance well over a thousand kilometres in depth along a front with a starting length of 1,250 kilometres (and expanding thereafter). Elsewhere the Wehrmacht planned to reach the Middle East from North Africa and to conduct U-boat operations into the Western and Southern Atlantic. National Socialism’s radicalizing influence on the Wehrmacht was embraced by the responsible military authorities, even to the point at which the failure of earlier campaigns did not act to invalidate the same flawed thinking in future operations. This was less an inability to learn lessons than the incapacity to critique a culture of thinking governed by the absolutism of National Socialism, especially one built on ideas that were seemingly self-evident to German officers. Indeed, even beyond the military sphere, Nazism was largely incapable of conceiving different solutions to problems, so it always radicalized the same behaviour. If anything, failure was the fault of not being National Socialist enough, so the question of why the German generals repeated the same mistakes is moot, because they themselves were not able to escape their Nazi world view.

Until 1943 the principal aim for the German army was to remain on the offensive and attack the enemy whenever possible; that alone promised victory. The conduct of its operations and the achievement of the prescribed goals were always pushed down the chain of command to the armies, corps, and divisions. They had to keep themselves moving in spite of their growing weaknesses and logistical difficulties, but the army high command did not assume any responsibility for their failure to maintain their attacks, just as Hitler never assumed any responsibility for failures which resulted from his orders. To the army high command the strategic picture meant selecting the next enemy formation to be destroyed or city to be seized; that is how one achieved the Endsieg. The implementation was a concern for the lower-order functionaries, and any failure meant trying again and trying harder. The objective remained fixed and was entirely legitimate until the high command decided otherwise, not the soldiers at the front or the assessment of their immediate commanders. Given the common gulf between means and ends within the Ostheer, the primacy of will became the rationale for keeping the onus of responsibility firmly on the men at the front. They could let down their superiors, but, so long as their commanders remained true to their orders, the men had no right to question their superiors. Importantly, because the primacy of will could not be quantified or calculated in any real terms, it always allowed National Socialism a bridge to fill any gaps or disparities which might exist on paper. ⁸⁵ This process meant that there was a continual diffusion of responsibility within the Nazi state, because Hitler, and those at the top of his regime, could never be held accountable. Failure, as a result, belonged to those at the bottom, while success was the triumph of Hitler and National Socialism. At the battle of the Hürtgen Forest in November 1944, the German Seventh Army issued an order to its men effectively charging them with the responsibility of success, while at the same time attributing ultimate victory to belief in Hitler: ‘Every combat squad must be a repository of fanatic battle spirit in our holy struggle for life. Then the bitter strife of the Third Reich at Aachen will end with our success. Faith in the Führer will guarantee our victory.’ ⁸⁶

Even Otto Dietrich, a convinced National Socialist, remarked upon the Third Reich’s distorted view of accountability:

the responsibility was to proceed from the bottom to the top and authority from superior to subordinate. In other words, the Führer was not to be responsible to the people; on the contrary, the people were responsible to him and he to nobody at all. Hitler himself decided what the will of the people was. ⁸⁷

The same was true for the Wehrmacht, as every soldier’s oath stipulated. Of course doubters and detractors can be found in any absolutist system of belief, but the National Socialist state, as well as the Wehrmacht, took an extremely harsh view towards dissenters. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that the Wehrmacht’s officer corps and its adherence to National Socialism were somehow motivated by fear, because fear was only a factor if one opposed the system, which the overwhelming majority did not. Of course after the war the officer caste successfully distanced themselves from their close association with National Socialism by pointing to the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. In reality, however, the conspirators were a small minority from the officer corps and very few of these men had opposed Hitler, or his war of annihilation in the east, until the war had turned decisively against Germany. ⁸⁸ Instead, as General of Artillery Friedrich von Cochenhausen wrote in 1941, leadership principles for the army were to be modelled on Hitler’s example and did not have to accord to a rational understanding of events. As Cochenhausen explained:

The means and methods of leadership can be set out and explained, but not what makes the genius of leadership: the clear and timely grasping of what is important, a lightning-fast drawing of conclusions that often do not follow the strict rules of logic but transcend them, and not least a bold and responsible taking of a risk of untold difficulty. All of this the Führer has often enough shown, and shows anew again and again. ⁸⁹

The acceptance of unusual risk was another characteristic of German warfare which was radicalized markedly under Nazism. As the OKH’s plans illustrated again and again, objectives were selected before the necessary staff work to achieve them was conducted, and if the latter did not equal the former then subordinates would simply have to improvise solutions. After all, failure was more often than not a reflection of the man in charge, not the circumstances he confronted. Such a blatant departure from the rigour of staff work was another clear divergence from the intellectual environment of the Prussian and Imperial armies. Accordingly, a German commander in the Second World War was routinely forced to accept a high degree of risk and pass on equally ambitious orders to his subordinates. Of course ameliorating such risk was the belief within the officer corps that the German army was without rival in the world and capable of much more than other armies. As Hitler stated: ‘To the German soldier nothing is impossible!’ ⁹⁰ This was a claim against which German troops were tested again and again. The permanent state of crisis in the east, which resulted from Barbarossa’s failure, was compounded by the fact that National Socialism was not able to critique itself on any substantive level, and the disastrous military predicament simply required soldiers to bear up under the pressure no matter how confused and untenable the situation might become. As Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim remarked: ‘A soldier who doesn’t stand firm is no soldier, and the more confused things are around him, the firmer he must stand – mentally.’ ⁹¹ Once again the emphasis was on the individual predominating over his environment. His ability to carry out an order, hold a position, or achieve an objective was accorded decisive importance.

The implications of such orders had a very real human cost, especially on the eastern front, but not just among the troops. Officer casualties were in fact disproportionate to the losses among their men, suggesting that the bold, risk-intensive leadership lauded by German propaganda was in fact practised by the officers. ⁹² Indeed the number of German generals killed in the Second World War was more than ten times greater than the number of American generals who lost their lives, suggesting that National Socialist rhetoric was much more than just bravado and bluster for the front-line troops. ⁹³ With officers willingly risking their own lives it is not surprising that the troops were equally expendable in any operation deemed necessary for the Endsieg. As a result the human cost of the war, however high it rose, was always viewed as necessary and required no justification. Such a conception reflects the absolutist war aims of National Socialism in which no casualty list was too high in the service of victory or to avoid defeat. Men were sacrificed at a frightening rate on the eastern front with no understanding of what this meant for Germany’s long-term war effort or the men themselves. As Sebastian Haffner insightfully observed in 1940:

The Nazi leaders love Germany in the way an inconsiderate racehorse owner ‘loves’ his horse; he wants it to win the race, nothing more. To this end it has been trained and ridden as hard and as inconsiderately as possible. Whether the horse shares his desire for glory and wants to be a racehorse; whether it comes to grief or is henceforth lamed for life, are questions that do not concern him. The comparison is not apposite in so far as one can say of horses that they are there to race. But certainly nations and the men composing them are not there to be collective athletic teams, the fate that the Nazis have imposed on the German people. The Nazi leaders aim at converting Germany into a gigantic sports club which is always winning ‘victories’ – and thereby losing its happiness, character, and national identity. ⁹⁴

In the context of the Second World War, Haffner’s sports club analogy saw Germany’s ‘victories’ being won at the expense of its youth, and the officer corps, like the Nazi Party, did not oppose the cost. Time and again in the German army files one encounters military orders where the position was to be obtained or defended ‘at any cost’. Indeed there persists an idea that the callous and unfeeling ‘Nazi generals’, who showed no concern for the plight of their men, only assumed positions of high command towards the end of the war. Ordering German soldiers to stand their ground and die in near hopeless positions was in fact already a feature of the eastern front from the first year of the war. Refusing to countenance retreat as the Red Army attacked his exposed positions in December 1941, Field Marshal Bock was emphatic: ‘either one held out or let himself be killed. There were no other choices.’ ⁹⁵ Sentimentality in National Socialist military thinking was analogous to weakness; the soldiers were there to serve and, if needs be, to die. Commanders were never under pressure to explain casualties, but giving up a position would typically attract intense scrutiny. Understanding his status as Menschenmaterial (literally ‘human material’), one soldier remarked: ‘The individual counts for nothing, the Fatherland is everything. […] What he [Hitler] does can only be done by a man who has terrific nerve and exceptional stamina and who has absolutely no regard for losses.’ ⁹⁶ Such a statement suggests that ordering men to their deaths was viewed as a virtue requiring nerve and stamina; from the National Socialist point of view there was nothing heartless, cold, or insensitive about it. In such a Volksgemeinschaft giving one’s life at the front was the highest honour, and every German soldier was indoctrinated into the cult of the fallen. ⁹⁷ For officers commanding Germany’s life-or-death struggle in the east, there could be no peace with Bolshevism and therefore every sacrifice was justified. As Colonel General Alfred Jodl summed up Germany’s war in 1944:

At this hour I want not to speak from the mouth but to acknowledge from the deepest recesses of the heart, that our trust and faith in the Führer is limitless. That for us there is no higher law and no more sacred duty than to fight to the last breath for the freedom of our people. That we want to rid ourselves of everything soft and disloyal, that all the threats of our enemies only will make us even tougher and more determined. That we will not surrender to the cowardly hope that others could save us from Bolshevism, which will sweep everything away if Germany falls. That we would defend even the ruins of our Heimat to the last bullet, because it is a thousand times better to live in ruins than to live in slavery. That we will win because we must win, for otherwise history would have lost its meaning. ⁹⁸

Such a view says a lot about how National Socialism was its own construct of reality, which only really made sense to its devotees. It also explains why military histories without an appreciation for the role of ideology within the German army have struggled to apply normative explanations to behaviour, which are often artificially imposed. The German army’s military thinking in the Second World War unquestionably reflected its past traditions and culture, but, from the earliest stages of the war, these were also markedly radicalized by National Socialism.