MY MILITARY KNOWLEDGE is based solely upon my experiences at the front during the First World War. I therefore lack the qualifications to judge Hitler’s abilities as a general and to pass definitive judgments upon his tactics and strategy during the war. Moreover, my knowledge of the relationships among Hitler as Supreme Commander, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW-Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) and the three services, is limited to what I learned later from public sources, since I was not present at secret military conferences. But my personal observations of what went on at Hitler’s various headquarters may, by their very military innocence, have some value. What details I can supply and what light I can throw on the connections between events may make it easier for the public to form its own opinion about Hitler’s military capabilities. To start with, there is the question most often asked about Hitler as general. What military equipment did Hitler bring to his task? Here was a former enlisted man who became Supreme Commander and took over the direct leadership of the German armies in the field. How well fitted was he for this role?
During the war of 1914-1918 Hitler had been a courier between various front-line staffs. He was a passionate soldier. He often recounted how happy he had been in August 1914 when he read the bulletin announcing the outbreak of the war. He had felt the war a personal opportunity. He saw it as opening the gateway to the world of great adventure. The fixed forms of the bourgeois life he hated would break up and in the anarchy which would ensue he hoped to fulfill his craving for greatness. He was then twenty-five years old and hailed the war as the arena for the display of his love of combat and his hope for fame.
It has often been said that every soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. Hitler not only strove toward such advancement; he achieved it. His path was very different from the slow rising in the ranks of a soldier. He went to war with a pocket edition of Schopenhauer’s works in his pack. In the war he was promoted from private to corporal and won the Iron Cross, First Class. Later he declared that in November 1918 he had dreamed of being at the head of a division. He could then have “established order” in Germany and inspired a “total resistance” which would have turned the tide of the war. The dénouement of the war which he did lead from 1939-45 gives little grounds for the supposition that he would performed this miracle in 1918.
The fact is that from his early youth Hitler displayed a degree of interest in military affairs wholly astonishing in an artistic nature such as his. Long before he took power he possessed a very wide knowledge of military matters and the technology of armaments. He had read a great deal of military history; he was familiar with the technical literature on warfare, both that of Germany and of foreign countries. And he would sit up late carefully reading all new publications. In this field he was truly a phenomenon; even in peacetime his theoretical knowledge put many a general and admiral in the shade. Hitler possessed an incredible memory for military history, for the course of battles and of entire campaigns. He had an extraordinary knowledge of weapons. For example, he knew all the warships in the world, insofar as they were listed in Weyher’s Handbook of Navies or other such reference books. He could recite from memory the age, displacement, speed, strength of armor, turrets, and other armament of every ship. There was little missing in his knowledge of the most modern tanks and guns of all the countries in the world. He frequently visited the big arms factories and shipyards of the Reich in order to keep a personal check on the progress being made; on such visits he planned and probed, discussed technical matters with engineers, considered and made decisions. He made a point of being supplied with photographs of the various stages of construction of big guns and ships and was constantly concerned with such problems. The building of the West Wall was directed by him down to the smallest detail, in accordance with the actualities of front-line fighting.
During the winter of 1938 he once sent for me and told me, to my amazement, that he had heard I had been a front-line artillery observer in the World War. He wanted, he said, to devise the simplest, safest, and most practical artillery observation post for the standard bunkers of the West Wall, but he was making a point of not asking armchair theoreticians how they thought these bunkers should be constructed; he wanted the design based upon direct practical experience. After he had taken possession of the Sudetenland, he promptly visited the lines of Czech bunkers in that territory in order to study their construction. Similarly, after the invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia he checked personally on the military setup and fortifications in those countries.
To sum up, Hitler possessed an extraordinarily comprehensive theoretical knowledge of warfare, and had in addition the practical experience of four years of soldiering as a front-line corporal. The building of the German Wehrmacht that went to war in 1939 was his work. He had created it, and it was his ambition to lead it. Motorizing it and equipping it with large, swift, independently operating tank formations modeled on those the British had developed toward the close of the First World War, was his idea. The tanks, he believed, had been the decisive weapon in that war. The strategy and tactics of bold tank breakthroughs to completely disorganize the enemy front from the rear was his conception. He was the father of Blitzkrieg armies and he wanted personally to harvest the glory he expected them to win.
When he set up his headquarters in a train and arranged for it to start rolling eastward as soon as the war began, so that he would be able to intervene directly in military operations, he never guessed that he would reside for six years in that mobile headquarters. During all that time, shifting constantly from place to place, he lived with the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, planned all the campaigns of the war personally, and directed the execution of those plans. His view of the government of his country was restricted to its military operations; his functions as chancellor became subsidiary. As leader of the nation, of course, his place was at the seat of the government; there he should have been holding all the threads in his hand and supervising the armed forces along with other departments of the government. But he was too selfishly arrogant to see this; he lacked the wisdom to recognize the limits of one man’s abilities; he wanted to know and to do everything himself.
As it was, he conducted the war, but not the nation. The eighteenday campaign in Poland increased Hitler’s self-assurance in military matters, although the far superior forces of the Germans made the outcome a sure thing. He accepted the plaudits, but at the same time ordered the press to keep silence about his tank tactics in the battles in Poland, because he intended to launch further surprises against his adversaries. During the Polish campaign Hitler’s headquarters was in his special train. He took frequent trips by automobile to the combat areas, visited the advancing troops, and personally directed the movements of front-line divisions. He drove up to Warsaw, flew over the city, and participated in the victory parade through its streets.
The invasion of Scandinavia was Hitler’s idea. During the winter of 1939-40 he drafted the first plan for the seizing of Norway and Denmark. He was afraid that England would use Scandinavia to create a bridgehead on the Baltic Sea, thus threatening the long, unprotected northern coastline of Germany. This he wanted to anticipate. The attack upon Norway Hitler always considered his riskiest campaign. To load German battalions on frail torpedo boats in waters always dangerous at the end of winter, to expose them to the storms of the sea and the British navy, to send them to Narvik and numerous other coastal points where they would have to capture the batteries they needed for their defense, since supply lines could not be maintained—this was an operation whose daring was unequaled in military history. Hitler himself said that afterwards, when he recollected the dangers, those days and nights of terrible suspense, he had to shudder. For all the splendid efficiency of the officers and soldiers who participated in this undertaking it was purely a gamble that luckily succeeded. His plan to occupy Iceland also and build a bastion there had to be abandoned; here England got in first.
From a purely military point of view the French campaign of 1940 was Hitler’s greatest achievement in strategy. This successful offensive against the West, in the course of which Belgium and Holland were ruthlessly overrun, bears all the marks of a Hitlerian plan—although, as in the Polish campaign, the German forces had all the advantages in the matter of armaments.
The sketch of this campaign, determining the direction each army was to take and the strength of each—all this was Hitler’s intellectual property, although the preliminary draft was apparently supplied to him by General von Manstein. I can assert this definitely because the matter was the subject of many lively discussions during the campaign and long afterwards. In opposition to the German General Staff, Hitler rejected the “Schlieffen plan.” Schlieffen had always called for encircling the enemy by strengthening and extending the right wing. Hitler characterized this scheme as absolutely mistaken, since the German right wing, if extended to the coast, would come to a dead halt at the Channel and be unable to encircle anything. The Channel formed an insurmountable obstacle and the enemy would always be able, by retreating, to present an unbroken front to the German assault. Again and again Hitler dropped contemptuous remarks about the “petrified strategy of the General Staff” and the “Schlieffen worshippers” on it. He declared that in a modern war of movement only a frontal breakthrough along a narrow line would make it possible for the attacker to take the enemy in the rear. The advantage of surprise would then always be on the side of the attacker in choosing the point for the breakthrough. With this in mind he himself drafted the main plan of attack for the West and picked the Ardennes-Sedan-Channel direction as the point of breakthrough.
Later on there was a great deal of talk about an incident which caused Hitler extreme agitation a few weeks before the starting date of the offensive. A German major who had been sent as a courier to take the secret plan of the offensive to western Germany had disregarded orders and used a plane. Flying in fog, he had overshot his destination and made an emergency landing some ten kilometers over the border, in Belgian territory. It was therefore taken for granted that the plan of attack would be in the enemy’s hands. Hitler had to decide whether to throw everything over, or to risk going ahead with the existing plan. He counted on the enemy’s suspicion, reasoned that they would take the major’s emergency landing for a staged trick and the deployment plans in his briefcase as fakes. They would believe all the more firmly that the Schlieffen plan was going to be used, would send their main forces to the north where they would be trapped in the proposed encirclement. Consequently, Hitler did not change one jot of his plan, although he took it for granted that the enemy now knew all about it.
On the morning of May 9 it was announced that Hitler and his entourage would take a special train that evening to Hamburg, to inspect a shipyard there. Everything was made ready for this journey. After the train had covered about two thirds of the way to Hamburg, it was suddenly switched to the West, toward Cologne. On May 10, about six o’clock in the morning we left the train at the Euskirchen station to proceed by automobile. As we did so, the first squadrons of planes flew overhead in the cloudless sky, their direction toward the west. Without asking I realized at once that the great offensive had begun.
An hour later Hitler stood upon a solitary hill near Muenstereifel in front of his small, camouflaged bunker, waiting impatiently for the first reports of the glider plane attack upon the Belgian fort of Eben Emael, and for news of the parachute drops upon the bridge of Moerdijk and the Dutch forts. From this “eyrie,” the first of his headquarters posts, Hitler directed the first part of the campaign in the West. From here he took his first trip to the front, visiting a corps staff in the Belgian town of Bastogne where, four and a half years later, his attempt at a breakthrough to the Meuse was to fail; and here he received his reports of the battles at Brussels, Ghent, Lille, and Dunkirk. The news of the taking of Paris and the French army’s request for an armistice reached him in the “Wolf ’s Ravine,” his second headquarters in the West, near Rocroy.
Early in the morning of June 23 he visited Paris for two hours. Virtually unrecognized, he made a brief tour of the city, with a special stop at Napoleon’s grave. He directed the end of the campaign in the West from one of the peaks of the Black Forest, his “Pineland” retreat—a small group of bunkers in a clearing among pines to the west of Freudenstadt. From there, following the movements of the troops, he crossed the Rhine to Strassburg and drove on into the Vosges. On June 27 the armistice with France was signed, in his presence, in the forest of Compiègne.
Hitler was now beginning to feel himself the master of Europe. However, after the air battle over England he did not dare to venture the leap across the Channel. Other reasons may have entered his mind, but I do not believe these played a part in his final decision not to invade England. The surprising swiftness of events in France had not given him enough time to make the comprehensive preparations which would have been necessary for so decisive a step. Success, Hitler thought, was highly improbable. The difficulties of maintaining a frail “bridge of ships” against England’s naval power and the perils of the sea were far too great. He did not want to gamble with his victory on the continent.
He spent New Year’s Eve of 1940 on the Obersalzberg in Berchtesgaden, and there he raised his glass at midnight to Final Victory in the coming year.
Hitler the soldier had reached the top of the ladder which he himself had set up. In three victorious campaigns he had won the reputation of a military genius as well as a successful leader of battles. Even if we discount good luck and the technical advantages in armament that the German army then held, there remains enough real achievement to justify this reputation. His technique depended on lightning-like armored breakthroughs, followed up by the encirclement and annihilation of the enemy. This same strategic and tactical principle which established his fame as a soldier also destroyed it. For as a commander Hitler knew no other strategy; it was the only way he knew to overcome the enemy. For three years he employed it profitably until, at the climactic point which was Stalingrad, he was driven to the defensive. Then, once he had lost his superiority in arms on land and in the air, he lost the initiative also.
Hitler’s strategy was good only for offensive warfare. But he clung to it on the defensive also and repeatedly tried to put it to use under reversed conditions. In this he was following a habit of his in many other fields: Whenever he had succeeded in doing something one way, he would repeat the same maneuver again and again. This man who always wanted to talk and never to listen, who was given always to outbursts of temper and to imposing his will upon others, who as dictator crushed all dissenting opinions, inevitably revealed—once he no longer possessed absolute power and physical superiority—all the weaknesses of his nature. He was incapable of adjustment, unable to adapt to changed circumstances. The successful strategist on the offensive was utterly at a loss when he was forced on to the defensive.
Hitler had not mastered the general’s art of conducting an elastic defense in order, once the enemy had exhausted himself on the attack, to come up with a successful counteroffensive. That is what Foch had done in the summer of 1918; that was what the Russians would do so effectively at Stalingrad. But Hitler remained rigid on the defensive; he clung desperately to his positions, no matter how insecure they had become. Instead of withdrawing his forces in time, regrouping them in order to save them so that he might prepare new surprises for the enemy by emerging suddenly from newly-occupied defensive positions, he ordered the “hedgehogging” of outflanked positions. Then he would leave the hopelessly encircled troops behind in the vague hope that later he might be able to relieve them or use them as a bridgehead for a new offensive.
On the basis of his successes during the first three years of the war he always, in the last three years when the tables were turned, overestimated his own forces and underestimated those of his enemies. And because he did not know how to yield the smallest territory, in the end he lost everything.
Hitler directed the Balkan campaign of April 1941 from his headquarters in the special train at the railroad station of Mönichkirchen, south of Wienerneustadt. Crete, and the offensive against Russia in the summer of that year, seemed at first to increase his reputation as a military genius.
I do not know who drafted the plans for the summer campaign in Russia, or whether the execution of the campaign corresponded to the original plan. From conversations I happened to hear on this subject I gathered only that Hitler was discontented with the shifting of the center of gravity from the southern sector, which he considered by far the most important, to the central and northern sectors. I know he blamed the General Staff for this shift. At any rate, soon after the start of this adventure he realized that the advance was proceeding far less swiftly than he had originally hoped. He had expected a blitzkrieg across the Russian steppes; nothing of the kind took place. In subsequent post-mortems Hitler often declared that the beginning of the campaign against Russia had been delayed for six weeks because of the intervening Balkan War. It was just these six weeks, he later maintained, that he had lacked in the autumn; otherwise he would have defeated Russia before the severe winter descended.
After the two great encirclement battles of Viasma and Briansk he believed he had destroyed the bulk of the Russian armies in the field. This was a fantastic underestimation of the strength and tenacity of the foe, as well as a complete misunderstanding of the territorial and climatic situation. He was convinced that the road to Moscow lay open to his panzer corps, and that the real decisive stroke of the campaign had already been delivered. The military men in his entourage supported him in this view. In passing on this information at a press conference in Berlin I committed a blunder that seriously diminished my journalistic reputation. But the statement I gave to the press had come directly from Hitler as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. In view of the sensation this affair aroused I shall tell the story in full.
In giving information to the public on offensives in progress, Hitler was often excessively restrained, so long as there was the slightest chance that he might give the enemy any hint of the extent, direction, and aims of his operations. Many Germans did not understand this at the time. But this, for example, was the policy he observed in the early part of October 1941, although great battles had long been in progress. On October 9—his headquarters during this period was in a forest near the Masurian Lakes—as he was coming from the room where he held his situation conferences, he called out to me in passing. The time had come, he said, to make up for all the restrictions that had been placed on information to the press. The public could now be informed about the latest operations, which had been kept under wraps. I was to come to see him in half an hour.
When half an hour later I reported to him, accompanied by my secretary, he received me in his study in the bunker. He was in high spirits. Pacing the room with vigorous strides, he dictated to me word for word the statement I was to give to the press in Berlin next day. My secretary took down every syllable he spoke. Hitler said to me—to sum up once more the message that created such a stir—that after all the preceding battles, these two last great battles of annihilation had taken such a toll of the enemy in respect of men and war materials that he no longer had the strength to resist the victorious German panzer armies with any prospect of success. Although a number of more or less major battles might be necessary before the enemy was completely defeated, the German armies were now over the hill; for all practical purposes the campaign in the East was as good as decided. Our foes’ dream of a two-front war had already burst like a bubble.
At this moment Hitler was firmly convinced that the war was as good as over, and he expressed this conviction to me in an emotional outburst—although in my press conference I did not go so far as to quote him in this. But I had no reason to doubt what the supreme commander spontaneously told me about the events in the East. Moreover I was specifically ordered to publish this statement. Nevertheless, in order to make sure, I personally submitted my secretary’s stenographic copy, in the form I intended to use for publication, to General Jodl, chief of the Army Liaison Staff, so that he might check it over.
Shortly afterwards the unexpectedly sudden, premature, and extraordinarily bitter winter set in. The German armies, which had counted on at least four weeks more of mobility, were instantly brought to a halt and their vehicles literally frozen into the mud. At one blow a higher power had altered the whole situation. The frightful difficulties to which the German troops before Moscow were exposed during the following weeks belied the statement I had issued in good faith. Nonplussed, Hitler said nothing about it, and I had no choice but to take the blame of false prophecy upon myself, in order to spare the German head of state. As a matter of fact, before the beginning of this battle for Moscow, which he considered so decisive, Hitler issued a printed proclamation to the troops expressing the same ideas. This proclamation was signed by Hitler himself. But after the winter disaster no one seemed to remember it.
It is true that a higher power had taken the field during those October days in Russia. Napoleon had once said, “I can fight men, but not the elements.” Nevertheless, this wrong prediction of Hitler’s in this early part of the Russian campaign showed for the first time his fatal inclination to overestimate enormously his own military strength. He was trapped by his own unbroken chain of previous successes and his sovereign contempt for the abilities of the enemy. Later this tendency developed into that unreasonable optimism which he displayed publicly on all occasions, thus reviving the hopes of all those who believed in him and looked up to him. By his iron energy and convincing outbursts of temperament he was able to encourage the strong and revive the spirits of the weak.
In order to clarify Hitler’s general attitude toward public relations I shall add another incident, of lesser importance than the above, which took place at an earlier time. On the last Sunday in June of 1941—many Germans will remember it still—ten “special communiqués” were announced over the radio at intervals of about an hour. This strange method of supplying the public with information by storing up communiqués, and then issuing them in rapid succession in order to make an impression, was both foolish and unsuccessful. It aroused great resentment. Hitler himself had personally prepared these ten special communiqués. He had kept back military successes for several days and then ordered the propaganda minister, in spite of the latter’s objections, to make them public in this unusual form. Hitler thought the idea brilliant. Then criticisms from an irritated public began pouring in. These criticisms were reported to Hitler, who ignored them and responded with violent fury to all recommendations that the practice be discontinued. When I brought him the reports of dissatisfaction, I too seized the opportunity to inform him in a calmly objective manner that Sunday radio listeners were thoroughly annoyed at having to keep to their apartments on such a fine day. He snapped at me that I did not know anything about propaganda; he knew the mentality and the feelings of the broad masses of the people better than I and all the other intellectuals put together. Embittered over his unreasonableness and self-righteousness, I said that if such was his opinion of my abilities I should like to request that he employ me rather as a soldier in the field. Brusquely, he cut me off, ordering me to be still, obey, and do my duty in this war. There were things he, too, did not like, but he was not able to throw everything up and quit.
With Hitler there was no such thing as handing in your resignation. He recognized only complete subservience to his orders, or “desertion.” He, on the other hand, claimed for himself the right to dismiss an official arbitrarily, without giving any reasons.
On December 15, 1941 Field Marshal von Brauchitsch was relieved of his command. Hitler personally assumed supreme command of the army. This represented the formalization of the role he had in practice long played. But Brauchitsch’s dismissal at this moment meant far more than the elimination of an intermediary between leader and army who had become superfluous to Hitler. The lack of proper winter equipment for the soldiers in the East had deeply shocked the German people. Brauchitsch was the scapegoat. Hitler wanted to pose before the German people as the righteous one, who was coming down hard on those responsible for the mess in the army supply system. But in order to understand the situation aright it is necessary to know something that was later credibly reported to me. Brauchitsch, and precisely Brauchitsch, had from the first advised against continuation of the German offensive against Moscow that winter and had recommended that it be resumed only after the capture of Leningrad and thorough new preparations. Thus he was opposing Hitler’s own view, and it is clear why Hitler wanted him to go. But for Hitler on top of that to dismiss Brauchitsch so ostentatiously in December, thereby branding him with the blame for the fiasco of the winter’s campaign and all its dreadful concomitants, when Brauchitsch himself had warned against the campaign—that was a piece of monstrous unfairness.
In this incident Hitler was displaying a highly inglorious trait which was to become more and more prominent in his character. He put the blame for all his own mistakes on others. To witness his bursts of indignation, his denunciations of “these scourges of the people” when he heard of any grievous piece of news, one could well believe in his deep sincerity and responsibility at any given moment. But when afterwards the true facts came to light, and the trouble was traced to a quite different source, he refused to recognize it. He never accepted correction and never admitted to having been wrong. This absence of self-criticism and this tendency always to put the blame on others was all the more serious because Hitler knew that, since he was absolute dictator, the accused had no chance to justify himself. It was this trait which developed into his mania for discarding deserving army commanders right and left after every defeat. In such cases he was deaf to their protest that they had not acted freely, but had simply followed his own orders. Whenever anything failed, he regularly hurled charges of “treason and sabotage.” Consequently, toward the climax of the drama, when the number of his defeats and blunders mounted, he began running amok against everyone and everything.
Undoubtedly there was resistance, treason, and sabotage during those many years of bitter history. The lack of resolution within the German officer corps during this war undoubtedly weakened the striking power and the capacity for resistance of the German armed forces in those last decisive years. Many people thought this weakening came from Hitler’s own inadequacy, that it was caused by his exaggeration and lack of measure, his free throwing around of insults, his arbitrariness and injustice—whereas Hitler thought it was the officers’ lack of spunk that provoked him to this conduct. By his own behavior, Hitler alienated the army men. His hasty, ill-considered, often contemptuous judgment of the officers of his army produced the mood which he then—rightly or wrongly—so often ranted against and which at the end he blamed for the collapse of the army’s resistance.
With the best of military intentions he set up the élite divisions of the Waffen-SS. But the creation of this service produced a spirit of mistrust in the German officers corps. So much internal friction resulted that in some it took up more of the strength of the German army than could possibly have been compensated for by the SS formations’ military efficiency, splendid as this was.
Hitler overburdened himself, and after five years of warfare he made demands upon the troops which they were simply no longer able to meet. With such self-deception he made matters harder for himself. And since he threateningly insisted that the impossible should be made possible, he could only blame himself for a large part of the lack of honesty in the reports from the lower levels of the army leadership—about which he often complained so bitterly.
Thus he himself conjured up the spirits he could no longer shake off. By his own uncontrolled temperament, his arrogant superiority, and his insulting distrust, he converted the initial coherent harmony and fraternity into confusion and hostility, a whirlpool from which there was then no escaping—in spite of the almost superhuman resistance of his will to being sucked in by that dread current.
In the inferno of the mighty struggle this will of his manifested again and again remarkable surges, a pitching of his psychic energies to the highest levels. How compellingly evident that was during that Russian winter of 1941-42, when Hitler’s will was laid down before the German armies, an immovable barrier preventing them from pouring back in wild retreat.
On New Year’s Eve of 1941 Hitler’s power of will and steadfastness won their greatest victory. Field Marshal von Kluge wanted to withdraw the Central Army Group. He was firmly resolved upon the retreat. At midnight Hitler spoke to him over the telephone from his headquarters to persuade him to hold, for otherwise he feared that the entire eastern front would collapse. The fierce battle over the telephone, while his associates waited to bring him their New Year’s greetings, lasted for more than two hours. Kluge warned and pleaded; he appealed to reason and declared that he would not take the responsibility for the abysmal dangers he foresaw. He spoke in the names of the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who were waiting during those freezing days and nights for the word to retreat to better positions, the word that would release them from their agony. He gave the best of reasons for his resolve, and swore that it was his plain duty to order a retreat.
But in spite of everything, Hitler was fighting for the future of the army, for the foundation upon which the whole war in the East rested. He shattered Kluge’s arguments. The supposedly prepared positions in the rear did not exist. Why should the army be better off moving backwards than holding where it was? The climatic conditions were the same anyhow. Hitler argued and soft-soaped, raged and shouted, kept at it and at it, insisted and commanded, and won his point. The center remained where it was and held. The eastern front escaped a great peril. Its positions and basis of deployment for the next year’s fighting remained. By the end of the spring of 1942 the army was again ready to take the offensive.
Napoleon had said in 1812: “The cold destroyed me.” Hitler’s will mastered the situation; his steadfastness held off catastrophe. To be sure, the question remains whether the German people would have been better served, ultimately, by a retreat rather than an advance into the endless spaces that a year later brought about collapse and started Germany on the road to defeat.
Steadfastness is a great virtue in a soldier, but it is not the specific quality that makes a great commander. 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. He sparked its organizational machinery, which even the enemy recognized as magnificent. He was aware of its tendency toward overthoroughness and bureaucratic rigidity and he fought untiringly against that tendency. Wherever he found instances of clever improvisation by the enemy, he held them up as examples to be followed. For he knew that the German talent for organization should be supplemented by flexibility. Ultimately this concern led him to interfere so far down the line of command that he was constantly meddling with the lower levels of army leadership. This gave offense to many, besides being inconsistent with his ambition to be a commander operating on the highest plane. He quite rightly reproved many of the lower levels of command for lacking the spirit of improvisation. But as a commander, Hitler himself, with his intellectual rigidity and monotonous repetition of previous patterns, lacked originality just as much as the lowliest lieutenant.
From 1942 on, none of Hitler’s offensives produced a successful encirclement. On the contrary, from the end of that year on he was the one whose troops were encircled. The Russians had learned from the experiences of the past year and retreated when necessary. But Hitler could learn nothing and would take no advice. Since he was unable to yield in anything, the thought of moving back, of withdrawing before forces temporarily stronger than his own, was unendurable. Such an idea had no place in the dictatorial structure of his mind. Once the possibilities for taking the offensive vanished, the fire of his spirit went out. Stalingrad proved to be the grave of the Sixth Army and the turning point in the fate of Germany. There Hitler’s will, the dynamic basic element of his existence, was broken—and along with it Germany’s fighting spirit.
The commander in chief’s genius was a spark that flashed only when he took the initiative, only when he followed where his own will led him. That spark died the moment he had to yield, the moment he had to master obstacles imposed upon him by the actions of others.
From the middle of August 1942 on, there lay upon Hitler’s desk, polished and ready for the press, the special communiqué which was to be issued upon the fall of Stalingrad. That event was expected to occur hourly. Hitler’s headquarters had by then been moved forward into the Ukraine and were now in a small pine wood near Vinnitsa. Three months later, at the traditional meeting in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, he defiantly told his Old Guard, “I am in Stalingrad and I shall remain in Stalingrad.” A little earlier, at three o’clock in the morning of that same day, while his train was at the Calau station on the way to Munich, he had received the report of the Allied landing in French North Africa. Hard though this is to comprehend, the landing struck him as a complete surprise. He was now harvesting the fruits of his policy in France.
On November 20 Stalingrad was cut off. On February 1, 1943 the city, along with 80,000 German soldiers, fell into the hands of the Russians. During those six months from August to February there took place the decisive crisis which shattered Hitler’s spirit.
After this collapse of his far-reaching hopes for conquest of the Caucasus, he had a violent disagreement with the generals of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. He stopped eating with them at the headquarters casino; from then on, until the end of the war, he dined alone most of the time. He maintained that his orders, which he delivered orally during the daily discussion of the situation, were not transmitted at all, or transmitted wrongly. He ordered Bormann to set up a special stenographic staff. Henceforth every word he spoke during these hours-long conferences had to be taken down and filed; this was done right up to the end of the war. He dismissed his Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Halder, replacing him with Colonel General Zeitzler. He made his principal military adjutant, Colonel Schmundt (who was later killed in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944), chief of the Army Personnel Office. Thereafter all appointments to army posts were directed, through Schmundt, by Hitler personally. In consequence, stability in the army leadership became the exception, and constant change became the system.
Meanwhile the Russians had broken through on both sides of Stalingrad and had overrun the Rumanian and Italian armies. Then Hitler made his ghastly decision, strategically a monstrous piece of folly. As yet the encirclement around the Sixth Army was only a thin belt; there was still a chance for this army to break through to the west. Instead Hitler ordered it to dig in and wait until it was relieved by a counterattack. This counteroffensive, undertaken with utterly inadequate preparation, was smashed by the Russians, who continued their advance.
This suicidal ostrich policy was born of inner uncertainty, insufficient political clarity, and a passion for gambling. But from then on it became Hitler’s invariable pattern; intoxicated by his own “fanatical steadfastness,” despising all the rules of mobile warfare, he ordered his troops to dig in whenever the enemy achieved a breakthrough.
The reconquest of Kharkov by the commander of the Adolf Hitler Division of the SS was one of Hitler’s last successes; he postponed the Memorial Day for National Socialist Heroes to March 15 so as to have this triumph included in his speech. But his last great offensive in the East was a dismal failure. This “Operation Citadel” at the end of June 1943 was supposed to break through between Belgorod and Orel, but after ten days the attack had to be called off without the public’s ever hearing that it had been begun.
Hitler refused to build an East Wall, say along the Dnieper. On principle he would not permit the construction of fixed positions in the rear of the German fronts. The knowledge that there were better positions behind them would, he maintained, undermine the fighting spirit of the front-line troops. Then, when the initiative passed to his enemies, he habitually belittled all their armored breakthroughs as small raids; the enemy must be punished for his “impudence” and “shamelessness” by being cut off and “starved to death” behind the German lines. Therefore, when big breakthroughs took place he ordered whole armies, corps, and divisions to remain behind as isolated islands. Supposedly these groups were to close gaps by executing flanking movements—when in fact those gaps had already become gigantic holes through which a flood of enemy troops was pouring to form new fronts in the rear of the encircled German units. These units, after heroically holding out, would eventually be crushed by superior forces.
From the Volga to the Oder, Hitler sacrificed the German army by this strategy in a vacuum. The same story was repeated during the great Russian offensives in the Central Sector, at Vitebsk and Orsha Bobruisk, later from the Baranov bridgehead and on both sides of Warsaw into East Prussia, Poland, and Pomerania; it was repeated all the way to Cracow and the Neisse River.
In the days of his successes Hitler had often gone to visit the troops, to inspire them and strengthen their morale by his presence. But after the disasters began he visited the fighting troops only a single time.
That was in February 1943 when the fall of Stalingrad and the dangerous concomitant retreat threatened to carry along the entire German southern sector. Hitler flew to join Manstein at Zaporozhe, and by his personal appearance and intervention succeeded, after a three-day stay at the Dnieper front, in bringing the withdrawal to a halt. Thereafter he never again, throughout the remaining years of the war, took the road to the front to join his soldiers. Although in critical situations he was urged to do so countless times, nothing could persuade him to repeat the experience. In defeat he lacked the vigor and faith which he should have had to radiate to the fighting men. Formerly the direct influence of his personality upon the masses had been his great strength; now he could no longer throw that influence into the scales. Inwardly, he was no longer what he had once been; for that reason he kept away from the front, and for that reason he became alienated from reality. He, too, became an armchair general; he issued his orders without consideration for the limitations of his own forces and without regard for the real strength of the enemy.
I recall with what contempt and misunderstanding of the situation he criticized Patton’s decisive breakthrough in Normandy. In all seriousness he expressed the hope that “the more Americans the better” would pour through the gap almost ten kilometers wide, so that the German troops would then be able to “close the trap.” He kept on saying this until the German army—which had been ordered to carry out this mission—was itself entrapped and only remnants of it succeeded in escaping across the Seine. Then he blamed the army commanders in the West for the fiasco and put through one of his usual shake-ups. He charged the command in the West with having begun the attack prematurely, thus squandering its effectiveness before strong German forces could combine.
During the Ardennes offensive of December 15, 1944 he once more seized the initiative. He had begun planning this offensive right after the attempted assassination of July 20. His greatest problem, one he discussed for weeks, was whether the point of the attacking army ought to reach the sea to the north or to the south of Antwerp; that the offensive would succeed he did not for a moment question. He counted on cutting off the entire British army from its base of supplies and wiping it out. The certainty he publicly displayed once more revived the hopes of the German people. But this fantastic hope was buried in the bottomless mud of the roads in the Ardennes, and the simultaneous attack across the Vosges also failed. Thereupon Hitler made a decision which even he characterized as reckless and dangerous, in view of the Allied crossing of the Rhine and the Russian breakthrough toward the Oder. While the enemy was approaching the vital heart of the Reich, he sent the Sixth Panzer Army from the Rhine to Budapest where at his command several German divisions had allowed themselves to be encircled. Instead of protecting the Ruhr or Berlin, he spent weeks planning another grand counteroffensive. The attacking troops were to cross the Danube south of Budapest, take the city from the rear, and, if opportunity offered, advance eastward into the vacuum left by the advancing Russians. In support of this idea he declared that the vital oilfields west of Budapest must be saved. Transportation and deployment of the Sixth Panzer Army consumed six precious weeks; but after a few days the Russians broke through elsewhere and the planned offensive was converted into a disastrous retreat which resulted in the loss of Vienna and large parts of Austria. Around the same time, between February and March, Hitler ordered Field Marshal Model to hold his positions in the Ruhr, which the Allies had meanwhile bypassed. The Ruhr, Hitler averred, would later be relieved by an attack from the south. Once more he was hoping to turn the spearhead of the enemy’s offensive the other way and cut off the encircling troops.
One last time, in the midst of the death agony, Hitler bounded to his feet again. And again his new resolve sprang from delusory hopes—that he might save Berlin and avert the fate which had already descended upon Germany. On April 22, 1945 the Russians unexpectedly pushed forward into the northeastern suburbs of Berlin. At first Hitler gave everything up for lost and prepared to put an end to his life. But on the night of April 22-23 he gathered his energies once more. Previously he had issued the watchword: “Berlin will be defended on the Oder.” Now—at five minutes before midnight—he ordered all army groups which still remained to come to the relief of Berlin. He wanted to strip his western front completely, gather all his forces in Berlin, and defeat the Russians there. Then, having won one final victory, he hoped to negotiate an armistice with the supreme commanders of the Western Powers—for he expected them to stop at the Elbe. In line with this fantastic plan he ordered Wenck’s army to march toward Berlin from the Elbe, Steiner’s and Holste’s corps to approach from the north. But although time was pressing, he ordered Busse’s army in the east to wait in order to join later with Schörner’s army group, which would be moving up from the southeast, thus forming a pincers around the east of Berlin. In this way he expected to cut off and annihilate the Russians fighting inside the capital. His Chief of the General Staff and the other generals implored him to allow Busse, who was close to Berlin, to go into action at once; otherwise all would he lost. There simply were not enough troops to hold back the Russians. Hitler refused to listen; in defiance of all advice he clung to his plan. To the end he carried out his suicidal strategy. He wanted all or nothing, gambled to the last. And for the last time he overestimated himself. The superior forces of the Russians smothered all movements in the bud and crushed Berlin.
On the night of April 23-24, 1945 the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht moved out of Berlin, shifting its headquarters to North Germany. Hitler remained behind in Berlin, accompanied by Goebbels and Bormann and a few others. Here he was to meet his destiny. On the afternoon of April 30, 1945 he put an end to his life.
I had been dismissed by Hitler on March 30, 1945. The events which took place thereafter at the headquarters I learned later, from eyewitnesses whom I have known for years. Hitler had relieved me of my post because I refused to have any part in the “atrocity propaganda” against the Allied troops, which Goebbels had started on orders from Hitler in order to incite the German civilian populace to carry on senseless guerilla warfare. I had also spoken against the insane “werewolf program”; and had earlier argued against Hitler’s intention of declaring Germany’s non-recognition of the Geneva Convention.
Any picture of Hitler’s total personality as a military man would be incomplete without an account of his relationship to the navy and his attitude toward the conduct of the war in the air.
Hitler loved big ships. From boyhood on he had been enthusiastic about them; the sight of ships delighted him, and as head of state he wasted a great deal of time and money on naval vessels. But it was an unrequited love. Hitler’s fondness elicited no response and his hopes in the navy were not fulfilled, so that later he turned away in disillusionment. One after the other, those masterpieces of German shipbuilding sank beneath the waves—not because they were poorly handled or fought badly, but because Hitler recognized too late that success in modern naval warfare requires, first, the closest cooperation with a well-developed air force and, secondly, the use of the latest techniques in shortwave radio. When the English navy was driven off from the coast of Norway by the then superior German Luftwaffe, Hitler realized that the age of the battleship’s independent supremacy was gone forever. But he did not fully grasp the significance of this new development in naval warfare until that wakeful night when the Bismarck went down on the high seas, after a brave, solitary struggle. From then on he damned the German navy, which he had formerly adored. The big ships which had not yet been sunk he had laid up. All his efforts and hopes in the maritime sphere were now given over to the rapid expansion and development of the submarine arm of the navy. For a long time he overestimated the ratio of sinkings to new construction and therefore concluded that the U-boats would ultimately have a decisive effect upon the whole war.
For years he deceived himself and others by his estimates of the productive capacities of the United States and Great Britain. The boasts that later proved to be cruel reality, Hitler called bluffs. In 1813 Napoleon remarked to Prince Metternich that he possessed a sure means of determining the military strength of his enemies: mathematics. By figuring the natural wealth in men and raw materials of a country he could determine the maximum military effort of which it was capable. It is curious that Hitler employed the same method to convince his associates that the “mammoth figures” of his enemies were not to be believed. On the basis of the Allies’ coal production he calculated their maximum possible steel production; from the available supplies of rubber and metals he arrived at statistics for the maximum possible production of arms and other war materials. Production is the same everywhere, he declared with assurance, and therefore his foes’ potential was in reality far smaller than their exaggerated figures would indicate. As a result, he constantly promoted an optimism that proved false.
The barometer of his expectations in the submarine war rose and fell as Germany got ahead or fell behind in the technological race. The magnetic mine gave her a brief lead, which was soon overcome. In the field of ultrashort waves the Allies came out far ahead. The use of radar for locating submarines from airplanes initially inflicted such enormous losses that U-boat activities virtually came to a halt. German submarines were forced to remain almost constantly under water; for a time they were practically eliminated from the war. Then the U-boats were equipped with “snorkel” for obtaining air while under water; this permitted them to move about again. Mass production methods were building a series of sensational new U-boats of great speed intended for use completely under water. But there was time to get only a few of these into action before the war ended. The loss of the Baltic ports put a sudden end to this one great and well-founded hope. The new submarine undoubtedly would soon have given an entirely new turn to the U-boat war.
Hitler’s position on air warfare can only be called tragic—from the military point of view. He himself had no feeling for planes; he did not like flying and had a psychological aversion to the whole idea of aviation. This revolutionary in military matters had no sympathy for the most revolutionary weapon of the century. From remarks he dropped now and then one gathered the impression that he felt rather uncomfortable at the prospect of future developments that were alien to his nature. There may well be some connection between this feeling and his offers to discuss air disarmament. The creation of the German Luftwaffe was Göring’s work. Deeply concerned as he was with the other arms of the service, Hitler at first scarcely bothered about the aircraft construction program. He entrusted it completely to Göring. When the war began and he recognized the value of the air force in his campaigns, he gave full praise to Göring’s work, and saw to it that the Luftwaffe was used with great vigor. It is one of the great mysteries of Hitler’s military thinking that he did not draw the obvious conclusions from his own illuminating experiences with the air arm. He was the first in the war to possess a strategic air force—but he recognized too late the importance of air strategy for the war as a whole. He put through intensive production programs for the most modern tanks, cannon, and warships, but did little to further technical progress in the air. He lacked the farsightedness to push the development of an efficient big bomber—the weapon which in the later phases of the air war was to give our enemies such a decisive advantage. No one can say what a turn the war might have taken if in 1940, with the advantage he already possessed in the air, he had also possessed a model of a big bomber and had given priority to its mass production. Instead he depended completely upon Göring whose so-called experts experimented for years on dozens of different types of planes—until it was too late, until the Allies dominated the air and forced him on the defensive.
The fighter plane program went even more badly. Toward the end of 1942 Hitler finally recognized the extreme peril; he wanted—as he said—to clear the skies above Germany and save the Reich from destruction. In 1944 mass production of fighters was pushed with all the energy of Germany’s industry above and below ground. A monthly production—so Hitler said—of 4,200 planes had been reached (6,000 was the target). But as soon as the first 300 planes came up against the enemy, the fearful truth was known. Even the improved mass-production fighter was a failure, a “flying coffin” unable to cope with the fire of the enemy bombers and their fighter cover. After this completely unexpected disaster in plane production came the last act in the fearful tragedy of the air war that shattered Germany. The fighter program was halted. The last hope in plane production was the jet alone, capable of a speed of 500 miles per hour. It was one of the best German planes, but there was no time for it to be put into effective mass production. At the time Hitler thought it better to build the first series of 100 planes as bombers to be used against the ships of the coming invasion fleet. Göring was for building fighters; Hitler criticized him for his “fighter obsession.”
Hitler deeply shared those last great popular hopes based on the “new weapons.” In instinctive harmony with the soul of the people, who were boiling with rage over the enemy bombings, he coined the phrase “Vengeance” weapons, a name he insisted on even when his generals advised against it. Goebbels then proposed the term “V-weapons,” having earlier burned his fingers by going too far in his propaganda. Hitler fanned all the hopes. He expected a great deal of the V-1, which could be launched both from the ground and from planes. After long preparation and month-long postponements, the V-1 was put into action at last. After the first week Hitler was so disappointed by the results that he forbade the weapon’s being mentioned in the radio and press, although he himself had previously whipped up a great propaganda campaign for it, replete with exaggerations which went far beyond the alarmist foreign descriptions of the observed effects.
Shortly afterwards he had the V-2 announced. He gave express instructions for emphasizing that more powerful and more terrible V-weapons were to follow. But the V-2, though it was later employed on the battlefields of the West and especially against the port of Antwerp, was also a bad disappointment to Hitler.
He frequently talked in general terms about the possibility of unleashing atomic energy for military purposes, but in my presence he never said a word about the prospects for an atomic bomb in the near future for Germany. He knew how to keep great secrets, so that no conclusions could be drawn from his silence. But today we know that Germany did not have the bomb.
In the last year of the war Hitler realized that the ultimate cause of all his defeats lay in his inferiority in the air. He reproached not only Göring, but himself also for not having seen to the development of the Luftwaffe much earlier. But by then it was too late; he had closed his eyes to the idea for too long.
Hitler was aware of the terrible effects of the bombings upon the cities of Germany. He knew the frightful suffering and the heroic endurance, an endurance beyond praise, of the German population. Nevertheless he, who in the years of good fortune, when he was being hailed on all sides, had enjoyed spending much time among the people, did not once in all the long years of misfortune visit a single bombed German city to offer consolation to the suffering people. He was often asked to do so, but he always pretended that such visits were militarily unfeasible. I shall mention one scene that was typical of his behavior on this score.
In 1943, after the first terrible bombing of my birthplace, Essen, I set out for a visit to the population. Before leaving I told Hitler of my plan while we were at table together. I was hoping he would give me some personal greeting to take to the hard-hit inhabitants of the city of Krupp. He ignored my remark, seemingly not hearing it. After returning from Essen I tried to give him a report of my impressions. During our lunch, I was unable to draw him into a conversation on the subject. I therefore followed him into an anteroom, intending to speak of what I had seen and of the reaction of the populace of Essen. As soon as he saw me behind him, he suddenly burst out—before I could say a word—with an almost insulting complaint about some ridiculous, unimportant press item which he had read in some newspaper. Then he hurried off to his rooms. It was obvious that he had thought up this far-fetched complaint on the spur of the moment in order to put me off. He simply did not want to hear my impressions of the terrible effects of the bombings in the cities of the Ruhr.
Hitler did not want to see how the people of Germany were suffering. He could not bear their unspoken reproaches that he had plunged them into unendurable misery. He felt responsible to the people because he was their Leader, but he did not have the power to alter the circumstances. The dark side of his nature, coming more and more to the fore in the horror of obliteration bombings, was alienating him from the people, just as the light side of his dual character had once brought him so close to them.
Hitler’s attitude toward aviation was rooted in his character. His mind was restricted to the narrow range of national interests; he lacked all supranational breadth of vision and therefore could not appreciate the international, progressive elements of modern aviation and electronics. This narrowness of his, which I have mentioned so often in other connections, was here ruinous to Germany’s military effort. In spite of all his passionate experiments in the national and social fields, he was a figure of the past, not of the future. That, it seems to me, was the deepest cause of his failure in air warfare. Occasionally he would make remarks to the effect that modern developments in aviation—the domination of soulless, inanimate forces—were depersonalizing human life and cheapening life’s essential content. In such a world, he would declare, life no longer seemed to him worth living. As a private person he might have had the right to think such thoughts; as a leader he was in duty bound to act otherwise.
We may, then, sum up the picture of Hitler as a soldier winning glory and honor in the beginning, achieving defeat and suicide in the end. As a soldier, as in all his other aspects, Hitler was the victim of the duality of his nature, the ambivalence of his character. In his latter days as a soldier he was precisely as incompetent as he had been brilliant in the earlier days; in the second half of the war he had as much bad luck as he had enjoyed good luck in the first half. His superiority in the air and in military technology, his offensive strategy, his break-through tactics, and his encirclements, passed to his opponents and were used against him.
Hitler was the soul and conscience of the German Wehrmacht. But by the very intemperateness and violence of his passions he was also its ruin. He was a corporal who became a military genius; but in order to win recognition as a great commander he all too frequently showed himself an overweening corporal.
Even war has its laws and its moral limits. These he despised; he made the antediluvian law of violence the sole guide of his military actions. He recognized no code of military fairness; guided only by considerations of military expediency, he introduced savage methods into warfare. During the last months of the war, in spite of all representations by his associates, he resolved to declare Germany’s non-adherence to the Geneva Convention, in order to intimidate German soldiers so that they would not allow themselves to be taken prisoners, and in order to frighten them with the prospect of terrible reprisals against their families.
The German people, who approved these methods no more they did the inhumanities of the war in the air, will pronounce a just verdict upon Hitler, once they have come to a clear understanding of his nature. Up to the very end he threw the whole weight of his authority behind the promise of victory, if victory was doubtful, he declared, it was so only if the German people themselves, by their attitude, threw it away. He ordered the people to fight for that victory and branded any questioning of victory as a crime against the state.
Hitler was the standard-bearer throughout the war. He appealed to the patriotism and loyalty of the Germans and declared that no German conscious of his duty might desert the flag. But he himself deserted the flag, shirking his responsibility, and left the people to their fate. His departure from life was in terms of, “After me the Deluge!”
Perhaps history will revise the present generation’s judgment of Hitler as a soldier. But so overpowering has been the misfortune he brought down upon the Germans of today, and upon other nations as well, that they cannot possibly respect him for his soldierly achievements. He himself destroyed the foundations of any such respect.