‘Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer. ...” (Richard III)
HAPPY TO have escaped the thankless task of having to act as the occupying Power in Poland, our headquarters arrived on the Western Front on 24th October 1939 to take command of the newly formed Army Group A. The armies under command (Twelfth and Sixteenth) had their forward divisions in position along the frontiers of southern Belgium and Luxembourg and their rear units strung out as far back as the right bank of the Rhine. It had been decided that Army Group H.Q. would be located in Coblenz.
We duly moved into the Hotel Riesen-Fürstenhof beside the Rhine a place which in my early days at the cadet school in the nearby market town of Engers I had regarded as the very peak of elegance and culinary refinement. But now wartime restrictions had left their mark even on this famous establishment. Our offices were situated in a once-charming old building near the Deutsches Eck which until the outbreak of war had accommodated the Coblenz Division. The lovely Rococo rooms of yesteryear were now bare and gloomy. Not far from this building, in a small square lined with ancient trees, stood an obelisk of considerable interest. It bore a bombastic inscription, having been erected by the French commandant of Coblenz in 1812 to mark the crossing of the Rhine by Napoleon’s Grand Army on its march to Russia. Below the original inscription another had been engraved. Its approximate purport was: ‘Noted and approved’, and it bore the signature of the Russian General who had become commandant of Coblenz in 1814.
What a pity Hitler never saw this!
At my suggestion our command staff had received the valuable addition of a second, older General Staff officer for the operations branch. He was the then Lieutenant-Colonel v. Tresckow, who put an end to his life in July 1944 as one of the main forces behind the conspiracy against Hitler. Tresckow had already worked under me in peacetime in the First Department of the General Staff of the army.{2}
He was a most talented officer and an ardent patriot. With his quick brain, his many accomplishments and his cosmopolitan and gentlemanly ways, he had a special charm of his own, and his elegant, aristocratic appearance was fully complemented by his beautiful and equally intelligent wife, a daughter of the former War Minister and Chief of the General Staff, v. Falkenhayn. In those days there could hardly have been a more charming couple in Berlin army circles than the Tresckows.
Tresckow and I were linked by an intimate bond of sympathy that was closely akin to friendship and dated from the time we had worked together in the Operations Branch. Here in Coblenz, too, he was to render me valuable assistance in our struggle for the adoption of our own Army Group’s plan for the offensive in the west. When I later became commanding general of a panzer corps and then an army commander, I asked in each case to have Tresckow as my Chief-of-Staff. However, my request was turned down on the rather original grounds that I ‘did not need so clever a man’. When he was finally offered to me in the spring of 1943 to be chief of my Army Group staff, I could not give him precedence over my Chief of Operations, General Busse, who was of the same age and had proved his mettle in the many battles we had fought together. My only reason for mentioning this is that a gentleman close to Tresckow has given currency to a story that I refused to have the latter because he was not a reliable National Socialist. Anyone who knows me will be aware that I did not select my staff on that basis.
If those months in Coblenz were to become the ‘winter of our discontent’, this arose from the strange suspense of the 1939-40 Shadow War or ‘drôle de guerre’, as the French called it. It would have been easier to bear had we been able to pin our attentions from the outset on systematically preparing the troops under our command for an offensive in the coming spring. Unfortunately Hitler was known to want an offensive late that same autumn and when this proved impossible, at least during the winter. Every time his ‘weather boffins’, the Luftwaffe meteorologists, predicted a period of fine weather, he issued the code-word which was the signal for the troops to start moving into their final assembly areas. On each occasion the meteorologists had to climb down again, either because heavy downpours of rain had made a hopeless mess of the ground or because a sharp frost and falls of snow had raised doubts as to the advisability of using tanks and aircraft. The result was a process of vacillation between warning orders and countermands a most frustrating state of affairs for troops and commanders alike. During this period Hitler’s mistrust of military reports which did not suit his own wishes revealed itself most strikingly. After Army Group H.Q. had once again stated that continuous rainfall made it temporarily impossible to form up for the offensive, he sent his military assistant, Schmundt, to us with orders to examine the state of the ground himself. Tresckow was the ideal man to deal with this. He spent an entire day dragging his erstwhile regimental comrade along well-nigh impassable roads, across sodden ploughland and marshy meadows and up and down slippery hillsides, so that by the time they got back to our headquarters in the evening, Schmundt was in a state of complete exhaustion. From that day on Hitler dispensed with such wholly improper methods of verifying our weather reports.
The person who had most to suffer as a result of this absurd chopping and changing and the consequent wastage of effort was, of course, our Army Group commander, Colonel-General v. Rundstedt, with whom patience had never been a strong point. Very soon our headquarters was swamped with the flood of paper which regularly descends on fighting units and formation headquarters during the quieter phases of war. Thanks to a very proper unwritten law in the German Army that the general commanding a formation be kept free of all minor detail, however, v. Rundstedt was hardly affected and was able to take a long walk every morning on the Rheinpromenade. Since I, too, had to take some sort of exercise, I often used to meet him. Even in that freezing winter, when the Rhine was already covered with ice, Rundstedt still wore only a thin raincoat. When I protested that he would catch his death of cold, he merely retorted that he had never possessed a greatcoat in his life and was certainly not going to buy one at his age! And neither did he, for even after all these years the old gentleman still bore the imprint of his spartan training in the Cadet Corps. Another habit of v. Rundstedt’s served to remind me of my own days as a cadet. On returning to his desk to await the verbal reports which he daily received from myself and other members of the staff, he would fill in the time by reading a detective thriller. Like many other prominent people, he found a welcome distraction in such literature, but since he was rather shy about this taste of his, he regularly read the novel in an open drawer which could be quickly closed whenever anyone came in to see him. It was the very same thing we had done as cadets whenever an instructor came into our quarters during a private-study period!
However, our discontent that winter was due in only small measure to Hitler’s vacillations and their prejudicial effect on the troops—who were in time liable to doubt the good sense of orders which were repeatedly being cancelled to say nothing of the fact that the inter formation training schedules, which had a particular relevance in the case of the newly formed divisions, were seriously upset.
The real cause of our discontent or, to put it more exactly, our uneasiness was twofold.
In the first place it arose from a development which I can only describe as the eclipse of O.K.H. I personally found this development particularly distressing, having fought right up to the winter of 1937-8, as Oberquartiermeister I of the General Staff and assistant to Fritsch and Beck, to ensure that in the event of war O.K.H. would be given its proper position within the framework of overall war policy.
Secondly, Army Group H.Q. sought in vain throughout the winter to get O.K.H. to accept an operations plan which in our own opinion, at all events seemed to offer the only guarantee of a decisive victory in the west. This was not adopted as the basis of the offensive until Hitler had finally intervened and only then after O.K.H., undoubtedly as the result of our badgering, had removed me from my post as Chief-of-Staff of the Army Group.
These two facts the ‘demotion’ of O.K.H. and the struggle over the operations plan largely form the background to the western campaign to which this part of the book is devoted. Its later course is already known in such detail that there is no need for me to go through it all again. All I intend to tell of it is what I saw as a corps commander.
Nonetheless, the ‘winter of our discontent’ was still followed by a ‘glorious summer’!
THE ELIMINATION of O.K.H., or the General Staff of the Army, as the authority responsible for war policy on land is generally assumed to have been effective from the time when Hitler dismissed Field-Marshal v. Brauchitsch and took over the leadership of the army in addition to that of the Wehrmacht as a whole. In actual fact, however, the General Staff was eliminated for all practical purposes even if this was not yet formally the case in the weeks immediately following the Polish campaign.
After my visit to Zossen on 21st October 1939 to receive ‘Operation Order Yellow’ on behalf of Army Group A, as Southern Army Group was henceforth to be designated, I noted in my diary: ‘Musical accompaniment by Halder, Stülpnagel and Greifenberg extremely depressing.’ At that time General v. Stülpnagel, as Oberquartiermeister I, was the right-hand man of Halder, the Chief of the Army Staff, while Colonel Greifenberg headed the O.K.H. Operations Branch.
It was perfectly evident from the remarks of these three gentlemen that O.K.H. had issued a war plan forced on it by Hitler. They, as well as the Commander-in-Chief himself, obviously took a thoroughly negative view of the idea of an offensive in the west and did not consider it the proper way to bring the war to a close. From what they had to say it could also be gathered that they did not think the German Army would be in a position to enforce a decisive denouement in the west. This impression was corroborated both by the Operations Order, which will be analysed in due course, and by the various visits to be paid to Army Group H.Q. by the Commander-in-Chief and his Chief-of-Staff.
Now it was quite clear that opinions might differ particularly during the period of the late autumn and winter of 1939 as to the expediency and prospects of a German offensive in the west. What horrified me was my realization of the extent to which O.K.H.’s status had declined within the scope of the Supreme Command. And this just after it had conducted one of the most brilliant campaigns in German history!
Once before, admittedly, Hitler had disregarded the views of O.K.H. That had been during the Sudeten crisis. But on that occasion something entirely different had been at stake not a matter of military leadership but one of political decision. Hitler’s dispute with O.K.H. primarily with Beck as Chief of the General Staff had arisen not over the handling of an army operation but over the question of whether action against Czechoslovakia would lead to intervention by the Western Powers, and thereby to a war on two fronts which the German Army could not have the capacity to fight. The appraisal of this problem, however, had ultimately been a matter for the political leadership, in whose power it had lain to obviate by political measures any trend towards a war on two fronts. So although the Commander-in Chief had taken on a grave military responsibility by bowing to the primacy of politics on that occasion, he had still in no way renounced the prerogative of military leadership in his own exclusive sphere.
At the time of the Polish crisis no such divergence of views between Hitler and O.K.H. had reached our ears. Indeed, I am inclined to think that after Hitler’s political assessment of the Western Powers had proved correct in the case of Czechoslovakia, O.K.H. hoped that the same would apply in autumn 1939. In any case I believe that through-out those final crucial days of August O.K.H. assumed right up to the last just as we did at Southern Army Group that the whole business would again end in a political settlement similar to that reached at Munich. At all events, if one disregards the wishes he expressed regarding the deployment in East Prussia to which O.K.H. agreed Hitler cannot be said to have interfered in the conduct of operations in Poland.
Now, however, the position was quite different. It is true, of course, that the question of how the war should be continued after the defeat of Poland was a matter of overall war policy which ultimately had to be decided by Hitler as the Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht. However, if the solution were to be a land offensive in the west, this must depend entirely on how, when and whether the army would be able to tackle the task. In these three respects the primacy of the army leadership was inalienable.
Yet in all three Hitler confronted the High Command of the army with a fait accompli when on 27th September-without prior consultation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army he informed the Commanders-in-Chief of all three services of his decision to take the offensive in the west that same autumn and, in so doing, to violate the neutrality of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. The decision presently found expression in an O.K.W. directive of 9th October 1939.
I was bound to infer from the remarks made by the three above-named officers when I took over ‘Operation Order Yellow’ that O.K.H. had resigned itself to this capitis diminutio. It had issued a directive for an offensive of which it steadfastly disapproved and in whose success in the decisive sense, at least it had no confidence. In view of the relative strengths on the
Western Front, one had to admit that such doubts were not unjustified.
I could only deduce, therefore, that O.K.H. had in this case renounced any claim to be the authority responsible for land warfare and had resigned itself to acting as a purely technical, executive organ. The very thing had now come to pass which Colonel-General Beck and I had once sought to prevent by our recommendations for a rational distribution of responsibility at the summit in time of war. What we had called for was one single authority which would alone be responsible for advising the Head of State on questions of military policy and have joint control of army operations and the overall conduct of the war. For at least as long as it took to decide the issue on the Continent, either the Commander-in-Chief of the Army was to have command of the Wehrmacht as a whole or a Reich Chief-of-Staff responsible for running the Wehrmacht should simultaneously make the decisions on army policy. What had to be avoided at all costs was that two different General Staffs those of the Wehrmacht and the army should have a say in the running of the latter.
This was precisely what now appeared to have happened. Hitler and his O.K.W. not only decided what operations the army should conduct, but also when and how they should be conducted. O.K.H. was left to work out the appropriate orders whether or not it agreed with what it was being called on to implement. The Commander-in-Chief of the Army had been demoted from the status of military adviser to the Head of State to that of a subordinate commander pledged to unquestioning obedience. Before very long this was to be made only too plain by the creation of an ‘O.K.W.’ theatre of operations in Norway.
The explanation of how O.K.H. came to be brushed aside like this is to be found both on the personal plane and in the manner in which the question of continuing the war after Poland’s defeat was handled.
The main reason for the trend discussed above lay in the personality of Hitler, in his insatiable thirst for power and his excessive self-esteem, which was engendered by his undeniable successes and encouraged by the lick-spittling of his party bosses and certain members of his retinue. Vis-à-vis his military opponents he was greatly aided by the fact of being not only the Head of State but also, as Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, their military superior. Moreover, he had a genius for suddenly confronting his military collaborators with political and economic arguments which they could not immediately refute and of whose value, in any case, the statesman must perforce be considered the better judge.
In the last analysis, however, it was Hitler’s lust for power which caused him to usurp the role of the supreme war leader in addition to being the Head of State and political chief. A conversation I had with him in 1943 proved most revealing in this respect. It was one of the many times I tried to induce Hitler to accept a rationalized form of command in other words, to resign the direction of military operations in favour of a fully responsible Chief of the General Staff. On the occasion in question Hitler hotly denied having any desire to ‘play the war lord’ though he was undoubtedly attracted by the glory that went with it. On the contrary, he contended, the really decisive thing was that he should have the power and exclusive authority to impose his will. Power was all he believed in, and he regarded his will as the embodiment of that power. Apart from this it is not unreasonable to suppose that after the Polish campaign Hitler feared the achievements of the Generals might impair his own prestige in the eyes of the people, and that that was why he treated O.K.H. so dictatorially from the outset regarding the conduct of the campaign in the west.
Such was the man utterly unscrupulous, highly intelligent and possessed of an indomitable will with whom Generals v. Brauchitsch and Halder had to contend. Not only was he acknowledged by the people as the Head of State: he also ranked as the most senior member of the Generals’ own hierarchy.
Indeed, it would have been an unequal battle even if Hitler’s military opponents had been different men.
The future Field-Marshal v. Brauchitsch was a very able officer. While not belonging to quite the same class as Baron v. Fritsch, Beck, v. Rundstedt, v. Bock and Ritter v. Leeb, he certainly ranked immediately after them and, as events have shown, also possessed all the requisite qualities of a Commander-in-Chief of the Army.
As far as v. Brauchitsch’s character is concerned, his standards of personal behaviour were quite unassailable. Neither would I dispute his will-power, even though it tended in my own experience to be manifested in a somewhat negative inflexibility rather than in creative resolve. He preferred to have decisions suggested to him rather than to take and impose them on his own initiative. Indeed, he frequently evaded decision in the hope of being spared a struggle to which he did not feel equal. In many cases Brauchitsch put up a sturdy fight for the interests of the army one example being his efforts to have Colonel-General v. Fritsch publicly rehabilitated by Hitler, although he was well aware how unpopular this would make him with the latter. The Order of the Day he published on the death of Fritsch was a sign of his courage. At bottom, however, he was no fighter. He was never really the sort of man to get his way by sheer force of personality. Colonel-General Beck, for one, complained most bitterly to me about the half-hearted way in which Brauchitsch had represented O.K.H.’s point of view at the time of the Czech crisis and left him, Beck, completely in the lurch. When, on the other hand, people like Herr v. Hassel, the former ambassador in Rome, blame v. Brauchitsch for wavering over the question of whether to resort to violence against Hitler, they forget the essential difference between plotting from behind a desk when one is no longer in a position of responsibility (as was the case with Herr v. Hassel) and committing oneself, as leader of the army, to a coup d’état which can imply civil war in peacetime and lead to the victory of one’s external enemies in time of war.
Field-Marshal v. Brauchitsch, a man of elegant appearance who bore all the hallmarks of the aristocrat, was never anything but dignified in his bearing. He was correct, courteous and even charming, although this charm did not always leave one with an impression of inner warmth. Just as he lacked the aggressiveness that commands an opponent’s respect, or at least compels him to go warily, so did he fail to impress one as a forceful, productive personality. The general effect was one of coolness and reserve. He often appeared slightly inhibited, he was certainly rather sensitive. Qualities like these might well ensure the support of his immediate collaborators, who respected the ‘gentleman’ in him, but they were not enough to assure him of the full confidence of the troops which a man like Baron v. Fritsch had enjoyed, nor could they impress a man of Hitler’s type. Admittedly General v. Seeckt had been far colder, even to the extent of being unapproachable. But in this case everyone had sensed the inner fire that inspired him and the iron will which made him a leader of men. Neither quality had fallen to the share of v. Brauchitsch, nor had he been blessed with that soldierly boldness which apart from his great qualities as a commander had won v. Fritsch the hearts of his troops.
As far as v. Brauchitsch’s relations with Hitler are concerned, I am convinced that he wore himself out mentally in his struggle with a man of such ruthless will. Disposition, origin and upbringing precluded him, in his encounters with Hitler, from resorting to the weapons which the latter, relying on his position as the Head of State, had not the least hesitation in using. Brauchitsch choked down his vexation and anger, particularly as he was no match for Hitler dialectically. And so it went on until a heart complaint finally compelled him to retire at a time most convenient to Hitler.
It is only fair to add that from the very start Brauchitsch found himself in a much more unfavourable position vis-à-vis Hitler than his predecessor had done. To begin with, ever since Blomberg had relinquished his post as Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, Hitler had not only been Head of State but also the supreme military authority. The final blow dealt to the army by War Minister v. Blomberg had been to suggest to Hitler that he should assume command of the Wehrmacht though, of course, it is open to debate whether Hitler would not have arrived at this solution anyway, with or without Blomberg’s advice.
Most of all, by the time v. Brauchitsch took office Hitler had acquired a very different attitude towards the army, and in particular towards O.K.H., from the one he had had in former years. There is no doubt that when he originally came to power he had shown the military leaders a certain deference and respected their professional abilities. It was an attitude he retained until the last in the case of a man like Field-Marshal v. Rundstedt, despite having twice relieved him of his command during the war.
There were two points in particular which led Hitler to change his view of the army in the last years of peace.
The first was the realization that under Colonel-General Baron v. Fritsch (as indeed under v. Brauchitsch) the army stuck firmly to its traditional notions of simplicity and chivalry and its soldierly conception of honour. While Hitler could certainly not reproach the army with disloyalty towards the State, it was quite obviously not going to throw its military principles overboard in favour of the National Socialist ‘ideology’. It was equally clear, moreover, that this was the very thing about the army that made it all the more popular with wide circles of the people. Although Hitler had originally refused to listen to the calumnies against senior military figures served up to him from various party sources, the rabble-rousing campaign against the army, which was mainly the work of people like Göring, Himmler and Goebbels, ultimately bore fruit. Even War Minister v. Blomberg helped to arouse Hitler’s mistrust, however unintentionally, by going out of his way to stress his task of ‘marrying up the army with National Socialism’. The result of this agitation became evident when Göring, ostensibly as the ‘senior officer of the Wehrmacht’, addressed a group of high-ranking military leaders in spring 1939. In the course of his speech he quite brazenly upbraided the army, as distinct from the other two services, for maintaining an outlook that was steeped in tradition and did not fit in with the National-Socialist system. It was a speech which Colonel-General v. Brauchitsch, who was among those present, should on no account have tolerated.
The second source of tension in Hitler’s relationship with O.K.H. consisted in what he later used to describe to quote the least insulting of his epithets as ‘the everlasting hesitation of the Generals’.
The implication here was twofold. One thing he meant was O.K.H.’s very proper attempts to check the inordinate pace of rearmament, the steady acceleration of which was detrimental to the quality of the troops. Secondly, Hitler maintained that all his successes in the field of foreign policy had been achieved against the opposition of the Generals, who had in each case been too cautious to act. The answer to this is that Colonel-General v. Fritsch i.e. O.K.H. did not raise any objections to Hitler’s plans regarding either the introduction of conscription or the occupation of the Rhineland. Neither did General Beck object (v. Brauchitsch being absent from Berlin at the time) when Hitler decided to invade Austria. It was the War Minister, v. Blomberg, who first opposed general conscription, doing so for reasons of foreign policy which he presently discarded. It was also Blomberg who at the time of the march into the Rhineland advised Hitler unbeknown to O.K.H. to recall the German garrisons from the left bank of the river when the French ordered a partial mobilization. The fact that Hitler very nearly followed this advice, only being dissuaded from doing so by Foreign Minister v. Neurath’s remark that this was not the time to lose one’s nerve, may well have served as a constant reminder of his own fit of weakness to intensify Hitler’s collective resentment against the Generals in future. And when O.K.H. repeatedly pointed out in the years of rearmament that the Army was still far from being ready for war, they did no more than their duty in issuing these warnings. Officially Hitler always agreed with them, yet they may well have increased his dislike of O.K.H.
The first time Hitler’s foreign policy encountered formal opposition was at the conference with the Foreign Minister and three service chiefs on 5th November 1937, at which Hitler revealed his intentions towards Czechoslovakia. The fact that he clashed with the Foreign Minister, v. Neurath, as well as the War Minister, v. Blomberg, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Baron v. Fritsch, was certainly one of his reasons for getting rid of these admonishers at the earliest opportunity.
It is widely believed today that the acceptance of Colonel-General Baron v. Fritsch’s dismissal by Germany’s Generals showed Hitler that he could treat O.K.H. just as he liked from then on. Whether this was the conclusion he drew at the time I should not care to say. If he did, he was certainly mistaken about the Generals’ motives. Far from being a sign of weakness, their attitude was due to ignorance of the true facts of the case, their inability as decent soldiers to believe the State leadership capable of such a base intrigue, and the practical impossibility in such circumstances of carrying out a coup d’état.
Finally, there can be no doubt that the party personalities I mentioned above were for ever harping on the theme of ‘the everlasting objections of the Generals’ in conversations with Hitler.
It is quite certain, therefore, that v. Brauchitsch found himself in an extremely difficult position from the start as far as Hitler was concerned. On assuming office, moreover, he was ill-advised enough to make a number of concessions affecting personnel, including the quite unjustified dismissal of a number of generals with excellent records and the appointment of General Keitel’s brother as head of the Heerespersonalamt.{3}
This was Brauchitsch’s first fatal step.
The devastating blow to O.K.H.’s standing vis-à-vis Hitler came at the time of the Sudeten crisis, when, thanks to the tractability of the Western Powers, Hitler proved himself right in face of all the army’s misgivings and objections. Von Brauchitsch’s action in sacrificing his Chief-of-Staff on this occasion naturally weakened his position even further in Hitler’s eyes.
The second O.K.H. personality who had to deal direct with Hitler after Beck’s dismissal, Colonel-General Halder, was Field-Marshal v. Brauchitsch’s equal as regards military qualifications. At all events, the two men worked together on terms of close confidence, and I am inclined to believe that when v. Brauchitsch agreed with Halder’s recommendations he did so from conviction. Like most of the officers who had begun their careers on the Bavarian General Staff, Halder had a remarkable grasp of every aspect of staff duties and was a tireless worker into the bargain. A saying of Moltke’s, ‘Genius is diligence’, might well have been his motto. Yet this man hardly glowed with the sacred fire that is said to inspire really great soldiers. While it speaks for his high sense of responsibility that he prepared for the Russian campaign by having an operations plan ‘drawn up’ by the Oberquartiermeister I, General Paulus, on the basis of studies made by the Chiefs-of-Staff of the Army Groups, the fact remains that the basic concept of a campaign plan should be born in the mind of the man who has to direct that campaign.
In his outward bearing Halder had not the elegance of v. Brauchitsch. He was incorruptibly objective in his utterances, and I myself have known him put a criticism to Hitler with the utmost frankness. On the same occasion one also saw how fervently he stood up for the interests of the fighting troops and how much he felt for them when wrong decisions were imposed on him. Unfortunately, objectivity and moderation alone were not the qualities which could impress Hitler, and any feeling of sympathy for the troops left him completely cold.
What ultimately led to Halder’s downfall, in my own opinion, was his divided allegiance. Even when he took over from Beck he was already a declared enemy of Hitler. According to Walter Görlitz, in his book The German General Staff, Halder told v. Brauchitsch on taking office that his only reason for accepting the post was to fight against Hitler. He is credited with numerous plans for Hitler’s overthrow, though it is hard to say what real prospects of success these would have had in practice.
On the other hand, Halder was Germany’s and later Hitler’s Chief-of-Staff, after the latter had taken over command of the army. Now, although it may be given to a politician to play the dual role of responsible adviser and conspirator, soldiers are not usually fitted for this kind of thing. Above all, it is traditionally unthinkable in Germany that a Chief of the General Staff should not be on terms of confidence with his Commander-in-Chief. Even if, in the light of Hitler’s actions, it is accepted as admissible for a Chief-of-Staff to plan the overthrow of the Head of State and Commander-in-Chief in peacetime, the dual role of Chief-of-Staff and plotter in wartime inevitably created an insoluble dilemma. As Chief of the General Staff, it was Halder’s duty to strive for the victory of the army he was jointly responsible for leading — in other words, to see that the military operations of his Commander-in-Chief were successful. In the second of his roles, however, he could not desire such a victory. There cannot be the least doubt that Halder, when confronted by this difficult choice, opted for his military duty and did everything in his power to serve the German Army in its arduous struggle. At the same time his other role demanded that he should at all costs hold on to the position which, he hoped, would one day enable him to bring about Hitler’s removal. To that end, however, he had to bow to the latter’s military decisions, even if he did not agree with them. Certainly his chief reason for remaining was that he thought this his best hope of protecting the army from the consequences of Hitler’s military blunders. But in doing so he had to pay the price of executing orders to which his military convictions prevented him from agreeing. The conflict was bound to wear him down inwardly and finally lead to his downfall. One thing is certain: it was in the interest of what was at stake, and not of his own person, that Colonel-General Halder stuck it out for so long as Chief-of-Staff.
I have endeavoured to give a pen portrait of the two personalities under whom, in autumn 1939, there culminated a process which can only be described as the eclipse of O.K.H. From what I have said it will be clear why neither of these officers, first-rate though they undoubtedly were, could be a match for a man like Hitler. At the same time, the fact that O.K.H.’s relegation to a purely executive organ was actually accomplished just after it had scored such brilliant victories in Poland was also due to the way in which Hitler and O.K.H. respectively approached the problem of how the war should henceforth be prosecuted.
Up till and immediately after the outbreak of war, Germany had quite naturally prepared only for defence in the west. Who could have guessed that the Western Powers would let Poland down so ignominiously after giving her a guarantee? Their feeble push into the forward zone of the Siegfried Line along the Saar which was immediately followed by a withdrawal on to French territory could not be regarded as even the preparatory step for any large offensive later on.
As long as such an offensive had been definitely expected, it had only been possible to wait and see whether we should succeed in halting it at the Siegfried Line or in the event of its being launched towards the Ruhr through Luxembourg and Belgium in delivering a counterblow once the necessary forces had been released from Poland. Now, however, an entirely new situation had been created by the inaction of the Western Powers. Even when allowance were made for French methods and the time the British took to act, the Western Powers could not be expected to take the offensive in the immediate future, now that Poland was beaten and the whole of the German Army available for the west. Poland’s fate was sealed at the latest by 18th September, when the Battle of the Bzura was over and the Soviets had crossed her eastern frontier the previous day. This, then, should have been the deadline for an exchange of views between Hitler and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army on what action to take in the west. Yet, judging by the books Published to date (notably those of General v. Lossberg, at that time the senior operations officer at O.K.W., and Ministerialrat Greiner, the O.K.W. war diarist), no such discussions took place.
It may be assumed that the reactions of Hitler and the O.K.H. leaders to the brilliant success in Poland and the unexpected inaction of the Western Powers were entirely different. Hitler undoubtedly interpreted the failure of the Anglo-French forces to take the offensive as a sign of weakness which would permit him to attack in the west himself. Furthermore, what had happened in Poland convinced him that henceforth there could be no task too big for the German Army to tackle.
O.K.H., as will be seen, did not share this view by any means. On the other hand, it was permissible to infer from the attitude of the Western Powers that they had only entered the war to save their faces and that it must thus be possible to come to terms with them. Also, General Halder may have toyed with the idea of paving the way to such an understanding by removing Hitler, so that any German offensive in the west at that particular juncture would have been quite out of place.
Whatever the answer, O.K.H. could be certain that until then Hitler had never contemplated, even after the fall of Poland, the idea of an offensive in the west. I was given infallible proof of this in the winter of 1939-40. On one of the many occasions when Hitler issued the preparatory code-word to put the final troop movements into the assembly areas in train, I was visited by the Chief-of-Staff of the Air Fleet supporting Army Group A, General Sperrle, who told me that his formations would be unable to take off from the waterlogged airfields. When I objected that the Luftwaffe had had months in which to construct solid runways, Sperrle assured me that Hitler had on an earlier occasion strictly forbidden any kind of work associated with a future offensive. In the same connexion it may be noted that the ammunition production had not attained the level necessary for an eventual offensive in the west.
Obviously O.K.H. had misjudged Hitler’s mentality in assuming that his viewpoint was immutable. Greiner tells us that during the second half of September, when the end was approaching in Poland, O.K.H. had had a paper on the further conduct of the war in the west prepared by General Heinrich v. Stülpnagel. The conclusion he reached was that the German Army would not be adequately equipped to break through the Maginot Line before 1942. He had not considered the possibility of going round through Belgium and Holland because the Reich Government had only recently assured these countries that their neutrality would be respected. In the light of this paper and Hitler’s attitude hitherto, O.K.H. had evidently deduced that the policy in the west would continue to be defensive. At the end of the Polish campaign it accordingly ordered the army’s defensive deployment in the west to be reinforced, manifestly without first obtaining Hitler’s approval.
In the completely new situation created by the total collapse of Poland such a policy was tantamount to resigning the initiative to Hitler regarding any future plans. It was certainly not the right way for the military leaders to safeguard their influence on the further course of the war, whatever form this might take. Apart from that, the conclusions reached by v. Stülpnagel could not be regarded as an answer to the problem of Germany’s future war policy. If we were to wait till 1942 to penetrate the Maginot Line, the Western Powers would in all likelihood have caught up with our lead in arms production. In addition, it would never have been possible to develop a decisive operation from a successful penetration of the Maginot Line.
Against the minimum of 100 divisions available on the enemy side since 1939, this was no way to achieve decisive results. Even if the enemy committed powerful forces for the actual defence of the Maginot Line, he would still have been left with an adequate strategic reserve of between forty and sixty divisions with which immediately to intercept even a wide breakthrough of the fortifications. Without any doubt the struggle would have petered out inconclusively into trench warfare. Such could not be the aim of German strategy.
One cannot assume, of course, that Colonel-General v. Brauchitsch and his Chief-of-Staff thought they would achieve anything with a purely defensive strategy in the long run. Nonetheless they did pin their hopes initially on the possibility that the Western Powers would either still come to terms or take the offensive themselves in the end. Unfortunately they were not competent to take decisions in the former contingency, and their hope for an Allied offensive was, as will be shown, unrealistic. The fact of the matter was that from a military point of view the spring of 1940 was not only the earliest but also the latest occasion on which Germany could have hoped to fight a successful offensive in the west.
According to Greiner, Hitler was not informed of the Stülpnagel memorandum, but must still have been aware that O.K.H. was going to cling to a defensive policy in the west. Instead of the timely discussion on the future course of the war that should have taken place at the latest by mid-September, he now confronted the Commander-in-Chief of the Army with the fait accompli of his decision of 27th September and the O.K.W. directive which followed on 9th October. Without any previous consultation with the Commander-in-Chief, he not only ordered offensive measures in the west but even decided on the timing and method to be adopted. All of these were matters which should on no account have been settled without the concurrence of the Commander-in-Chief. Hitler required the offensive to be launched at the earliest possible date in any event before the autumn was out. Originally, according to General v. Lossberg, he fixed 15th October as the deadline. At the latest this would have meant disengaging the armour and aircraft in Poland at the end of the Battle of the Bzura. Furthermore, Hitler had laid down how the proposed offensive operation should be conducted, namely by by-passing the Maginot Line by way of Belgium and Holland.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Army was to be left with merely the technical execution of an operation on which he had deliberately not been consulted and for which, in autumn 1939 at all events, he could certainly not guarantee any prospect of decisive success. For those who wonder how the Commander-in-Chief of the Army could possibly accept such a capitis diminutio of his position by acceding to Hitler’s intentions, Greiner has probably given the right answer in his book, Die Oberste Wehrmachtführung. He suggests that v. Brauchitsch, feeling that he was unlikely to achieve anything by immediate opposition, hoped that if he put up a show of goodwill at the beginning he would ultimately be able to talk Hitler out of his plan. Incidentally, the same view is advanced by General v. Lossberg on the strength of his own knowledge of Hitler and the latter’s attitude at the time. Brauchitsch may also have been counting on the weather to make it impossible to carry out a late-autumn or winter offensive when the day came. If the decision could thus be delayed until the following spring, ways and means might be found of ending the war by a political compromise.
If these really were the thoughts of the Commander-in-Chief and his Chief-of-Staff, they certainly proved right as far as the weather went.
But the notion that Hitler could be ‘talked out of such a fundamental decision, even by General v. Reichenau, to whom O.K.H. duly entrusted the task of doing this, was to my mind quite futile. The only hope would have been if O.K.H. had been able to offer a better solution of its own which would impress Hitler.
As for there being any possibility of ending the war at that time by peaceful negotiation, none emerged. The peace offer made by Hitler to the Western Powers after the Polish campaign met with a flat rejection. Besides, Hitler would most probably not have accepted any reasonable settlement of the Polish question that would have made it possible to reach an understanding with the west. In any case, such a settlement was hardly conceivable now that Soviet Russia had swallowed the eastern half of Poland. Another very doubtful point is how Germany could have achieved an honourable peace without Hitler at that time. How was he to be overthrown? If General Halder had any fresh plan to take military action against Berlin in October 1939, all I can say is that he would have found even less support among the troops than in autumn 1938.
To begin with, then, Colonel-General v. Brauchitsch fell in with Hitler’s intentions, and O.K.H. drafted ‘Operation Order Yellow” in accordance with the policy Hitler had laid down. By 27th October, however, the Commander-in-Chief, backed by his Chief-of-Staff, was trying to persuade Hitler on military grounds to postpone the offensive till a more favourable time of year, by which he presumably meant spring 1940. According to Greiner, the same recommendation had been made to Hitler a few days previously by General v. Reichenau — probably at v. Brauchitsch’s request. Though Hitler did not entirely reject the arguments put up to him, the date he had fixed as long ago as 22nd October for the start of the offensive 12th November continued to hold good.
On 5th November v. Brauchitsch made a fresh attempt to bring Hitler round. This was the day assuming that the attack really did start on 12th November—on which the code-word had to be issued for the troops to begin moving into the assembly areas.
Though this conversation took place in private, [Keitel was not called in until later, Author.] details of it leaked out, and its upshot was what I believe to have been an irreparable breach between Hitler and the Generals. According to what Greiner gathered from Keitel, v. Brauchitsch read Hitler a memorandum comprising all his reasons for objecting to an offensive that autumn. Besides citing such incontrovertible facts as the state of the weather and the unpreparedness of the new formations, he advanced one argument which lashed Hitler into a white fury. It was a criticism of the performance of the fighting troops in the Polish campaign. Brauchitsch advanced the view that the infantry had not displayed the same aggressive spirit as in 1914 and that the discipline and staying power of combat units had not always been entirely up to standard as a result of the tempo of rearmament.
Had v. Brauchitsch been talking to an audience of senior commanders they would have seen his point. Admittedly he was not justified in his charge that the infantry had not shown the same aggressiveness as in 1914 at least as long as he expressed it in those generalized terms. This was due to a misunderstanding of the transformation through which the infantry attack had passed in the years between. The 1914 methods of attack were just not conceivable any longer. On the other hand, it could not be denied and this occurs with untried troops at the beginning of every war that individual units had occasionally shown signs of jitters, particularly when fighting in built-up areas. Furthermore, various higher formation headquarters had found it necessary to crack down on cases of indiscipline. These facts were not surprising if one considered that in the space of a very few years the Reichswehr of 100,000 men had been inflated to an army several millions strong, a large proportion of whom had only been with the colours since the general mobilization. But none of this in the light of the victories in Poland could be adequate reason for concluding that the army was unable to fight an offensive in the west.
If only Colonel-General v. Brauchitsch had confined himself to emphasizing that the newly formed divisions were still precluded by their lack of training and inner stability from going into action and that the offensive could not be carried out with the experienced divisions alone, he would have been on just as safe ground as he was with his objections to the season of the year. A generalization of the kind mentioned above, however, was the very last argument he should have advanced in any conversation with Hitler, who saw himself as the creator of that new Wehrmacht whose fighting qualities were now being called into question. Indeed, Hitler was right to the extent that if it had not been for his political audacity in pushing ahead with rearmament and for the part played by National Socialism in reviving the military spirit even among those social strata where it had been ostracized during the Weimar Republic, this Wehrmacht would never have attained the strength it possessed in 1939. What Hitler chose to overlook was that the achievements of the former Reichswehr were entirely on a par with his own. For had not the officers and non-commissioned officers who stemmed from the old Reichswehr devoted themselves so wholeheartedly to the preliminary planning and material preparations, Hitler would neither have come by the Wehrmacht he now regarded as his ‘creation’ nor could the victories in Poland have been won.
By raising such objections in the presence of Hitler, a dictator whose self-esteem was already inflated, v. Brauchitsch attained precisely the opposite of what he intended. Disregarding all v. Brauchitsch’s factual arguments, Hitler took umbrage at the criticism he had presumed to direct against his Hitler’s own achievements and brusquely broke off the interview. He insisted on adhering to 12th November as the operative date.
Fortunately the Weather God took a hand at this juncture and enforced a postponement a process that was to repeat itself fifteen times before the end of January.
Therefore, even though O.K.H. had ultimately proved its point vis-à-vis Hitler regarding the possible date of the offensive, the upshot was a crisis of leadership whose consequences were to become appallingly obvious in the further course of the war. Its immediate effect was that Hitler and Brauchitsch ceased to meet. The G.S.O. I of the Operations Branch, the future General Heusinger, told me on 18th January 1940 that Brauchitsch had not seen Hitler since 5th November a quite impossible situation with things as they were. A further consequence of the breach of 5th November was the talk given by Hitler to the commanders and chiefs-of staff of all army groups, armies, and corps in the Reich Chancellory on 23rd November. I need not go into this fully, as it has already become known through other publications. Its essential points were Hitler’s emphasis on his irrevocable decision to take the offensive in the west at the earliest possible date and the doubts which he even then expressed as to how long the Reich would remain free from an attack in the rear in the east.
As far as his factual explanation of the fundamental need to take the offensive in the west went, his remarks were well-considered and, I thought, convincing, except for the question of timing. Otherwise his speech constituted a massive attack not only on O.K.H., but on the Generals of the army as a whole, whom he accused of constantly obstructing his boldness and enterprise. In this respect it was the most biased speech I ever heard Hitler make. The Commander-in-Chief of the Army did the only possible thing and tendered his resignation. This Hitler refused to accept, though that was obviously no solution to the crisis. O.K.H. was still in the unhappy position of having to prepare for an offensive of which it did not approve. The Commander-in-Chief was still repudiated as an adviser on overall war policy and relegated to the status of a purely executive general.
Any inquiry into the reasons for such a development in the relationship between the Head of State and the army leaders will show the decisive factor to have been Hitler’s thirst for power and his ever-growing self-conceit, both of which were augmented by the mischief-making of the Görings and Himmlers. Yet it must also be stated that O.K.H. made no small contribution towards its own elimination at Hitler’s hands by the way it handled the problem of how the war should be prosecuted after the Polish campaign.
By deciding to remain on the defensive in the west, O.K.H. resigned the initiative to Hitler — although it should unquestionably have been O.K.H.’s business in the first instance to recommend to the Head of State what steps were to be taken after the army, effectively supported by the Luftwaffe, had defeated Poland so swiftly.
O.K.H. was undoubtedly right to take the view in autumn 1939 that the time of year and the immaturity of the new formations made an offensive inadvisable at that stage. But neither this simple statement of fact nor the arrangements made to reinforce the defensive dispositions in the west provided an adequate answer to the problem of how to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion in the military sense. This question had to be answered by O.K.H. if it were to assert its influence on overall strategy.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Army certainly had every right to recommend the course of political settlement with the Western Powers. But what was to happen if no prospect of such a settlement emerged? With a man of Hitler’s type it was particularly necessary even if an offensive in the west did not seem expedient at that moment that O.K.H. should indicate there and then the military way to end the war.
Consequently there were three questions to consider once the Polish campaign was over:
First, could the war be brought to a favourable conclusion by sticking to defensive tactics, or could this object be achieved only by a victorious German offensive in the west?
Secondly, if such an offensive proved necessary, when could it be launched with any prospect of decisive success?
Thirdly, how must it be conducted to ensure an effective victory on the Continent? As far as the first question went, there were two possibilities.
One was that the Reich would reach a settlement with the Western Powers after the fall of Poland. O.K.H. was bound to regard this sceptically from the outset, partly because of the British national character, which made it fairly improbable that Great Britain would come to terms, and partly because Hitler was unlikely, once Poland had been defeated, to be prepared for a reasonable settlement of the German-Polish frontier question in the sense of a compromise. After all, in order to reach agreement with the Western Powers he had to re-establish Poland, and this he could not do after having made over her eastern part to the Soviets. That much was an accomplished fact which not even another German Government attaining power after Hitler’s overthrow could have removed.
The other possibility of successfully ending the war by remaining on the defensive might occur if the Western Powers should decide, after all, to take the offensive. This would offer the Germans the prospect of attaining a victorious decision in the west in the course of delivering a counterblow. The same idea emerges in the book Gespräche mit Halder, where Halder is quoted as speaking of an ‘operation on the rebound’. According to General Heusinger, however, O.K.H. only began to consider the project much later i.e. some time in December and not at the turn of September and October, the phase so vital for its own position.
Undoubtedly there was something very attractive about fighting an operation on the rebound, for the idea of saddling the enemy with the burden of an offensive against the Siegfried Line or the odium of violating the neutrality of Luxembourg, Belgium, and perhaps even Holland was inevitably an extremely tempting one. But was this not really a case of wishful thinking, at least for the foreseeable future? Could it be supposed that the Western Powers who had not dared to launch an offensive while the mass of the German forces were tied down in Poland — would attack now that the Wehrmacht faced them in full strength? I do not believe and neither did I at the time-that any basis existed for a German ‘rebound’ operation.
This view has found clear corroboration in a ‘war plan’ drafted at the time on the orders of the Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Gamelin. The main train of thought reflected in this document, which later fell into the hands of German troops, was as follows:
Before spring 1941 the Allied forces would not have amassed the material strength to take the offensive against Germany in the west. To attain a numerical superiority of ground forces, fresh allies would have to be won.
The British were not prepared to participate in a large offensive before 1941, except in the event of a partial collapse of Germany. (This remark, which obviously implies a hope of revolution, shows what we should have had to expect from a coup d’état.)
The principal task of the Western Powers in 1940 had to be to safeguard the integrity of French territory and, of course, to hasten to the assistance of Belgium and Holland if they were attacked. In addition, every effort would be made to create further theatres of attrition for Germany. Those named were the Nordic States and if Italy remained neutral — the Balkans. Naturally the attempts to bring in Belgium and Holland on the side of the Allies would continue.
Finally, endeavours would be made to deprive the Reich of its vital imports, both by the already-mentioned creation of new theatres of war and by tightening the blockade through pressure on the neutral Powers.
From this ‘war plan’ it becomes palpably clear that the Western Powers intended to wage a war of attrition in as many different theatres as possible until such time as they had attained the clear preponderance which would allow them though in no case before 1941 to launch an offensive in the west.
Although O.K.H. could not at the time in question know of this Allied war plan, it was only too likely that the Western Powers would fight a long-term war in the sense indicated.
In view of the bloody prospects an assault on the Siegfried Line would entail, the hope that the French and British peoples would tire of the ‘phoney war’ was hardly a realistic basis for any O.K.H. decisions. In no event could Germany wait until the enemy had built up his armaments (and in the light of Roosevelt’s attitude, allowance must be made here for American aid) to a point where he was stronger on land and in the air as well as at sea. Least of all could she afford to do so with the Soviet Union at her back. The latter, having by this time obtained all it could hope for from Hitler, had hardly any more vital interests in common with the Reich, and the stronger the Western Powers grew, the more precarious the position of Germany would become.
As far as the military leaders were concerned, therefore, the situation after the Polish campaign was this: The answer to the first of the above three questions i.e. whether the war could be brought to a successful conclusion by remaining on the defensive in the west — must be in the negative, unless the political leadership could still manage to reach a compromise with the Western Powers. The right of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army to advise Hitler to resort to compromise is beyond all doubt, if only because of the military risk a prolongation of the war would entail. Such action would, of course, involve accepting a temporary delay on the Western Front. Irrespective of that, however, it was both the duty and the right of the army leaders to give Hitler military guidance. They had to tell him what military steps were to be taken if no political solution of the conflict could be reached!
In other words, it was up to O.K.H. to present Hitler with an alternative military plan if it proved impossible to achieve the political compromise with the Western Powers for which even Hitler evidently hoped in the first instance. One must not assume that Hitler would continue as hitherto to reject an offensive in the west once Poland was beaten, nor must one wait until he took a military decision on his own account.
No military recommendation on the prosecution of the war could consist in maintaining the defensive in the west unless it were thought that Britain could be brought to her knees by aerial and submarine warfare an assumption for which no real foundation existed.
On the military side, therefore, assuming that a political understanding proved unattainable, the only recommendation one could make was that the war in the west be conducted offensively. When such a recommendation was submitted, moreover, it was essential that O.K.H. should assure itself of the initiative in deciding on the timing and method.
As far as timing went, O.K.H. was in agreement with all the commanders on the Western Front that no decisive success could be gained from launching the offensive in the late autumn or winter.
The principal reason for this was the season. In autumn and winter the Wehrmacht would be prevented by weather conditions from playing its two big trumps, armour and Luftwaffe, to their fullest effect. In addition, the short period of daylight at this time of the year renders it virtually impossible to win even a tactical decision in the space of a single day, thereby cutting down the speed of operations.
The other reason was the still inadequate standard of training of all the new formations set up on the outbreak of war. The only troops really fit to go into action in autumn 1939 were the active divisions. None of the others had had enough experience of handling weapons or of operating as integral parts of a larger formation: nor did they as yet possess the requisite degree of inner stability. Furthermore, the refitting of the armoured formations following the Polish campaign was still not complete. If it were intended to start an offensive in the west before the end of autumn 1939, the mechanized divisions in Poland should have been released at an earlier date, but that was a point which had not occurred to Hitler. Over and above all this, serious deficiencies existed in the Luftwaffe.
Thus it was clear that an offensive in the west could not be justified before spring 1940. That this afforded time to seek a political solution of the conflict was welcome from the point of view of the military, little as it counted with Hitler after the rejection of his peace offer at the beginning of October.
Since the problem of method, namely the strategic preparation of an offensive in the west, is the subject of the next chapter, there is no point in going into it any further here.
Only this may be said in advance. The offensive plan imposed by Hitler on 9th October was a half-measure. Instead of being aimed at a complete decision on the Continent, it was initially at any rate concerned only with an interim objective.
This was the point that provided O.K.H. with its opportunity to bring home to Hitler that his military advisers had something better to offer than a partial solution not worthy of the stake involved. Always providing, of course, that O.K.H. itself believed that by launching an offensive it could achieve a complete decision on the Continent.
It is still not known what prompted the O.K.H. leaders to remain so non-committal on future policy in the west during those vital weeks after the Polish campaign that the military decision was actually placed in Hitler’s hands. They may have been moved by a very proper desire to make him seek a political compromise. They may also have rightly shunned a repetition of the violation of Belgian neutrality and all that went with it. At the time, however, an outsider was left with the impression that the O.K.H. leaders considered it doubtful, to say the least, whether any German offensive would be decisively successful.
Be that as it may, O.K.H. left the initiative to Hitler to make the military decision. By further bowing to Hitler’s will and putting out the orders for an operation with which its leaders privately disagreed, it resigned for all practical purposes as the authority responsible for land warfare.
When, shortly afterwards, the operational proposals put up by H.Q. Army Group A gave O.K.H. a chance to regain its lost position, it let the opportunity slip through its fingers.
By the time the western offensive, thanks to these same proposals, had achieved a degree of success exceeding even Hitler’s original expectations, the latter regarded O.K.H. as a body which he could bypass even in matters of grand tactics.
Hitler had taken over the functions which Schlieffen believed could at best be performed in our age by a triumvirate of king, statesman, and war lord. Now he had also usurped the role of the war lord. But had the ‘drop of Samuel’s anointing oil’ which Schlieffen considered indispensable for at least one of the triumvirs really fallen on his head?