Abstract
This is an impressive, but not entirely persuasive book. It rests on a remarkable command of voluminous primary and secondary sources, and it is – dangling participles aside – generally well and clearly written. One of its central assertions – that Germany lost the Second World War because achieving Hitler’s chief objective of living space (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe was simply beyond the nation’s capacity – is sound, though not original, as Stephen Fritz acknowledges. And the book’s second recurring theme – that Hitler’s generals neither dissented from the pursuit of this unobtainable goal nor knew better ways to break free of the Reich’s deficiencies – holds up well until the narrative reaches the spring of 1942. But then misgivings arise.
For one thing, after that date, Hitler’s meddling in both military operations and weapons production became steadily greater and more damaging. As the author cannot help but point out, the Führer’s characteristic vacillation between impatience and indecision grew worse; so did his tendency to fixate on detail and lose focus on operational objectives. He increasingly insisted that sheer determination would suffice to bring victories, responded to the inevitable trade-offs required by Germany’s shortages of men and material ‘by attempting to do everything at once’ (p. 254), and fled into fantasies about the impending effects of ‘miracle weapons’. The illusory and counterproductive nature of his faith in these is perhaps best conveyed by an example Fritz does not cite, the fact that more slave labourers died while making V-1 and V-2 rockets (26,500) than enemy citizens perished from being struck by them (15,386).
A second difficulty is that Fritz’ effort to demonstrate the ‘rationality’ of the choices Hitler made as the Allies closed in on him – that is, to show that his actions bore a logical relationship to the information he had and that no other available actions at the time offered greater prospects of success – sits uncomfortably alongside the book’s view that Hitler’s quest to conquer Lebensraum was hopeless. If Hitler’s goal was delusional, what sense does it make to say that his strategic or tactical choices were rational or even plausible in that context, especially since Fritz observes that in Hitler’s mind ‘events reinforced his preconceived ideas’ (p. 130), always leading him into flights forward to stave off impending disaster? At the end of November 1941, the senior Nazi engineer Fritz Todt told Hitler that he had to negotiate an end to what had become an unwinnable war, and others advised him similarly afterwards. Instead, he fought on in 1943–1944 in the diminishing hope of somehow stalemating his adversaries and then in 1945 in order to lay the basis through a glorious martyrdom for the resurrection of his ideas at a future date. The latter decision cost the German army more soldiers in each month from January to April than were lost at Stalingrad and more lives in total than in all the battles of 1942–1943 (pp. 343-344), not to mention the toll on the Reich’s civilian population, of whose fate the Führer had washed his hands. Saying that Hitler’s persistence was consistent with his solipsism, as Fritz does in the last two chapters, threatens either to distract readers from such murderousness or to make them see the Nazi leader’s putative ‘rationality’ as deranged. Fritz takes pains to head off either result, but his is a precarious balancing act.
That said, students of military history, and of the Second World War in particular, will learn much from this book. The descriptions of campaigns and explanations for their outcomes are cogent and well-reasoned. Fritz’ debunking of postwar pretensions to ‘lost victories’ on the part of Hitler’s surviving generals rings true, if rather unsurprising, and his identification of moments when the Nazi Führer exhibited shrewd military judgement will prompt reconsideration. Above all, readers will come away with an appropriately suspect view of the uppermost ranks of German military leadership during the Second World War.