MY APPOINTMENT as commander of Don Army Group brought me for the first time under Hitler’s direct orders as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) and the Army (Heer). Only now did I find myself in a position to see how he tried to fulfil the duties of a supreme war leader besides those of a Head of State, for hitherto I had felt his influence on military decisions at best indirectly and from afar. Because of the strict secrecy surrounding all matters of an operational nature, I had been unable to form any valid opinion of my own.
During the campaign in Poland we had been unaware of any interference by Hitler in the leadership of the army. On his two visits to v. Rundstedt’s army group he had listened sympathetically to our interpretations of the situation and agreed to our intentions without making any attempt to intervene.
As for the plan for the occupation of Norway, no outsider had known anything whatever about it. Hitler’s attitude regarding the offensive in the west has already been discussed in detail. It was certainly both deplorable and alarming that he should have completely passed over O.K.H. in this matter, yet it had to be conceded that his view that the solution must be an offensive one was fundamentally correct from the military point of view, even if the same could not be said of his original timing. Admittedly he had laid down the outline of a plan which as has already been pointed out could hardly have produced a complete solution. At that stage he had probably not thought it possible to attain results on the scale ultimately achieved. Nevertheless, when the plan put up by Army Group A offered him this possibility, he had immediately grasped the idea and adopted it himself even though he imposed certain limitations which betrayed his aversion to risks. His fatal mistake of halting the armour outside Dunkirk had not at the time been apparent to an outsider, for the sight of beaches bestrewn with abandoned equipment tended to deceive anyone not yet aware how successful the British had been in getting their troops back across the Channel.
The absence of a ‘war plan’ permitting the timely preparation of an invasion did, however, reveal a failure of Wehrmacht leadership in other words, on the part of Hitler himself. On the other hand, it was impossible for anyone not actually on the spot to judge whether or not the decision to turn on the Soviet Union was unavoidable for political reasons. The Soviet deployment on the German, Hungarian and Rumanian frontiers certainly looked menacing enough.
As commander of a corps and later of Eleventh Army I learnt just as little of Hitler’s influence on the plan for an attack on the Soviet Union and the conduct of operations in the first phase of the campaign as I did of the plans for the summer offensive in 1942. There had certainly been no interference by Hitler in the handling of the Crimean campaign. Indeed, he had agreed to our intentions without hesitation when I went to see him in spring 1942 and had doubtless done everything to make our success at Sevastopol possible. I have already mentioned that I considered Eleventh Army to have been wrongly used after the fall of the fortress.
Now that I had come immediately under Hitler in my capacity as an army group commander, however, I was to get my first real experience of him in his exercise of the supreme command.
When considering Hitler in the role of a military leader, one should certainly not dismiss him with such clichés as ‘the lance-corporal of World War I’.
He undoubtedly had a certain eye for operational openings, as had been shown by the way he opted for Army Group A’s plan in the west. Indeed, this is often to be found in military amateurs otherwise history would not have recorded so many dukes and princes as successful commanders. In addition, though, Hitler possessed an astoundingly retentive memory and an imagination that made him quick to grasp all technical matters and problems of armaments. He was amazingly familiar with the effect of the very latest enemy weapons and could reel off whole columns of figures on both our own and the enemy’s war production. Indeed, this was his favourite way of side-tracking any topic that was not to his liking. There can be no question that his insight and unusual energy were responsible for many achievements in the sphere of armaments. Yet his belief in his own superiority in this respect ultimately had disastrous consequences. His interference prevented the smooth and timely development of the Luftwaffe, and it was undoubtedly he who hampered the development of rocket propulsion and atomic weapons.
Moreover, Hitler’s interest in everything technical led him to overestimate the importance of his technical resources. As a result, he would count on a mere handful of assault-gun detachments or the new Tiger tanks to restore situations where only large bodies of troops could have any prospect of success.
What he lacked, broadly speaking, was simply military ability based on experience — something for which his ‘intuition’ was no substitute.
While Hitler may have had an eye for tactical opportunity and could quickly seize a chance when it was offered to him, he still lacked the ability to assess the prerequisites and practicability of a plan of operations. He failed to understand that the objectives and ultimate scope of an operation must be in direct proportion to the time and forces needed to carry it out — to say nothing of the possibilities of supply. He did not or would not realize that any long-range offensive operation calls for a steady build-up of troops over and above those committed in the original assault. All this was brought out with striking clarity in the planning and execution of the 1942 summer offensive. Another example was the fantastic idea he disclosed to me in autumn 1942 of driving through the Caucasus to the Near East and India with a motorized army group.
As in the political sphere (at all events after his successes of 1938), so in the military did Hitler lack all sense of judgement regarding what could be achieved and what could not. In autumn 1939, despite his contempt for France’s powers of resistance, he had not originally recognized the possibility of attaining decisive success by a correctly planned German offensive. Yet when this success actually became his, he lost his eye for opportunity where conditions were different. What he lacked in each case was a real training in strategy and grand tactics.
And so this active mind seized on almost any aim that caught his fancy, causing him to fritter away Germany’s strength by taking on several objectives simultaneously, often in the most dispersed theatres of war. The rule that one can never be too strong at the crucial spot, that one may even have to dispense with less vital fronts or accept the risk of radically weakening them in order to achieve a decisive aim, was something he never really grasped. As a result, in the offensives of 1942 and 1943 he could not bring himself to stake everything on success. Neither was he able or willing to see what action would be necessary to compensate for the unfavourable turn which events then took.
As for Hitler s strategic aims (at least in the conflict with the Soviet Union), these were to a very great extent conditioned by political considerations and the needs of the German war economy. This has already been indicated in the introductory remarks on the Russian campaign and will emerge again in connexion with the defensive battles of the years 1943-4.
Now, questions of a political and economic nature are undoubtedly of great importance when it comes to fixing strategic aims. What Hitler overlooked was that the achievement and most important of all the retention of a territorial objective presupposes the defeat of the enemy’s armed forces. So long as this military issue is undecided and this may be seen from the struggle against the Soviet Union the attainment of territorial aims in the form of economically valuable areas remains problematical and their long-term retention a sheer impossibility. The day had yet to come when one could wreak such havoc on the enemy’s armament centres or transport system with raiding aircraft or guided missiles that he was rendered incapable of continuing the fight.
While strategy must unquestionably be an instrument in the hands of the political leadership, the latter must not disregard as did Hitler to a great extent when fixing operational objectives the fact that the strategic aim of any war is to smash the military defensive power of the enemy. Only when victory has been secured is the way open to the realization of political and economic aims.
This brings me to the factor which probably did more than anything else to determine the character of Hitler’s leadership his over-estimation of the power of the will. This will, as he saw it, had only to be translated into faith down to the youngest private soldier for the correctness of his decisions to be confirmed and the success of his orders ensured.
Obviously a strong will in a supreme commander is one of the essential prerequisites of victory. Many a battle has been lost and many a success thrown away because the supreme leader’s will failed at the critical moment.
The will for victory which gives a commander the strength to see a grave crisis through is something very different from Hitler’s will, which in the last analysis stemmed from a belief in his own ‘mission’. Such a belief inevitably makes a man impervious to reason and leads him to think that his own will can operate even beyond the limits of hard reality whether these consist in the presence of far superior enemy forces, in the conditions of space and time, or merely in the fact that the enemy also happens to have a will of his own.
Generally speaking, Hitler had little inclination to relate his own calculations to the probable intentions of the enemy, since he was convinced that his will would always triumph in the end. He was equally disinclined to accept any reports, however reliable, of enemy superiority, even though the latter might be many times stronger than he. Hitler either rejected such reports out of hand or minimized them with assertions about the enemy’s deficiencies and took refuge in endless recitations of German production figures.
In the face of his will, the essential elements of the ‘appreciation’ of a situation on which every military commander’s decision must be based were virtually eliminated. And with that Hitler turned his back on reality.
The only remarkable feature was that this over-estimation of his own will-power, this disregard for the enemy’s resources and possible intentions, was not matched by a corresponding boldness of decision. The same man who, after his successes in politics up to 1938, had become a political gambler, actually recoiled from risks in the military field. The only bold military decision that may be booked to Hitler’s credit was probably the one he took to occupy Norway, and even then the original suggestion had come from Grand-Admiral Raeder. Even here, as soon as a crisis cropped up at Narvik, Hitler was on the point of ordering the evacuation of the city and thereby of sacrificing the fundamental aim of the entire operation, which was to keep the iron-ore routes open. During the execution of the western campaign, too, as we have seen earlier, Hitler showed a certain aversion to taking military risks. The decision to attack the Soviet Union was, in the last analysis, the inevitable outcome of cancelling the invasion of Britain, which Hitler had likewise found too risky.
During the Russian campaign Hitler’s fear of risk manifested itself in two ways. One as will be shown later was his refusal to accept that elasticity of operations which, in the conditions obtaining from 1943 onwards, could be achieved only by a voluntary, if temporary surrender of conquered territory. The second was his fear to denude secondary fronts or subsidiary theatres in favour of the spot where the main decision had to fall, even when a failure to do so was palpably dangerous.
There are three possible reasons why Hitler evaded these risks in the military field. First, he may secretly have felt that he lacked the military ability to cope with them. This being so, he was even less likely to credit his generals with having it. The second reason was the fear, common to all dictators, that his prestige would be shaken by any set-backs. In practice this attitude is bound to lead to the commission of military mistakes which damage the man’s prestige more than ever. Thirdly, there was Hitler’s intense dislike, rooted in his lust for power, of giving up anything on which he had once laid hands.
In the same context mention may be made of another trait of Hitler’s against which his Chief of-Staff, Colonel-General Zeitzler, and I both battled in vain throughout the period in which I was commanding Don Army Group.
Whenever he was confronted with a decision which he did not like taking but could not ultimately evade, Hitler would procrastinate as long as he possibly could. This happened every time it was urgently necessary for us to commit forces to battle in time to forestall an operational success by the enemy or to prevent its exploitation. The General Staff had to struggle with Hitler for days on end before it could get forces released from less-threatened sectors of the front to be sent to a crisis spot. In most cases he would give too small a number of troops when it was already too late with the result that he usually finished up by having to grant several times what had originally been required. The tussle used to last for whole weeks when it was a question of abandoning untenable positions like the Donetz area in 1943 or the Dnieper Bend in 1944. The same applied to the evacuation of unimportant salients on quiet stretches of front for the purpose of acquiring extra forces. Possibly Hitler always expected things to go his way in the end, thereby enabling him to avoid decisions which were repugnant to him if only because they meant recognizing the fact that he must accommodate himself to the enemy’s actions. His inflated belief in his own will-power, a certain aversion to accepting any risk in mobile operations (the retour offensif, for example) when its success could not be guaranteed in advance, and his dislike of giving up anything voluntarily such were the factors which influenced Hitler’s military leadership more and more as time went on. Obstinate defence of every foot of ground gradually became the be all and end all of that leadership. And so, after the Wehrmacht had won such extraordinary successes in the first years of war by dint of operational mobility, Hitler’s reaction when the first crisis occurred in front of Moscow was to adopt Stalin’s precept of hanging on doggedly to every single position. It was a policy that had brought the Soviet leaders so close to the abyss in 1941 that they finally relinquished it when the Germans launched their 1942 offensive.
Yet because the Soviet counter-offensive in that winter of 1941 had been frustrated by the resistance of our troops, Hitler was convinced that his ban on any voluntary withdrawal had saved the Germans from the fate of Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1812. In this belief, admittedly, he was reinforced by the acquiescent attitude of his own retinue and several commanders at the front. When, therefore, a fresh crisis arose in autumn 1942 after the German offensive had become bogged down outside Stalingrad and in the Caucasus, Hitler again thought the arcanum of success lay in clinging at all costs to what he already possessed. Henceforth he could never be brought to renounce this notion.
Now it is generally recognized that defence is the stronger of the two forms of fighting. This is only true, however, when the defence is so efficacious that the attacker bleeds to death when assaulting the defender’s positions. Such a thing was out of the question on the Eastern Front, where the number of German divisions available was never sufficient for so strong a defence to be organized. The enemy, being many times stronger than we were, was always able, by massing his forces at points of his own choice, to break through fronts that were far too widely extended. As a result, large numbers of German forces were unable to avoid encirclement. Only in mobile operations could the superiority of the German staffs and fighting troops have been turned to account and, perhaps, the forces of the Soviet Union ultimately brought to naught.
The effects of Hitler’s ever-increasing predilection for ‘hanging on at all costs’ will be dealt with in greater detail in connexion with the defensive battles fought on the Eastern Front in 1943 and 1944. The reason for his insistence on it may be found deep down in his own personality. He was a man who saw fighting only in terms of the utmost brutality. His way of thinking conformed more to a mental picture of masses of the enemy bleeding to death before our lines than to the conception of a subtle fencer who knows how to make an occasional step backwards in order to lunge for the decisive thrust. For the art of war he substituted a brute force which, as he saw it, was guaranteed maximum effectiveness by the will-power behind it.
Since Hitler placed the power of force above that of the mind and, while having every regard for a soldier’s bravery, did not rate his ability to the same extent, it is hardly surprising that, in the same way as he over-rated technical expedients, he was possessed of ‘la rage du nombre’. He would intoxicate himself with the production figures of the German armaments industry, which he had undoubtedly boosted to an amazing extent, even if he preferred to overlook the fact that the enemy’s armaments figures were higher still.
What he forgot was the amount of training and skill required to render a new weapon fully effective. Once the new weapons had reached the front, he was content. It did not worry him whether the units concerned had mastered them or not, or whether a weapon had even been tested under combat conditions.
In just the same way Hitler was constantly ordering new divisions to be set up. Though an increase in the number of our formations was most desirable, they had to be filled at the cost of replacements for the divisions already in existence, which in course of time were drained of their last drop of blood. At the same time the newly established formations initially had to pay an excessively high toll of killed because of their lack of battle experience. The Luftwaffe Field Divisions, the unending series of SS divisions and finally the so-called People’s Grenadier Divisions were the most blatant examples.
A final point worth mentioning is that although Hitler was always harping on his ‘soldierly’ outlook and loved to recall that he had acquired his military experience as a front-line soldier, his character had as little in common with the thoughts and emotions of soldiers as had his party with the Prussian virtues which it was so fond of invoking.
Hitler was certainly quite clearly informed of conditions at the front through the reports he received from the army groups and armies. In addition, he frequently interviewed officers who had just returned from the front-line areas. Thus he was not only aware of the achievements of our troops, but also knew what continuous overstrain they had had to endure since the beginning of the Russian campaign. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why we never managed to get Hitler anywhere near a front line in the east. It was hard enough to persuade him to visit our Army Group headquarters; the idea of going any further forward never occurred to him. It may be that he feared such trips would destroy those golden dreams about his invincible will.
Despite the pains Hitler took to stress his own former status as a front-line soldier, I still never had the feeling that his heart belonged to the fighting troops. Losses, as far as he was concerned, were merely figures which reduced fighting power. They are unlikely to have seriously disturbed him as a human being.{17}
In one respect, however, Hitler’s outlook was entirely soldier-like in the matter of war decorations. With these his first and foremost aim was to honour the brave among the fighting men, and the regulations he issued regarding the award of the Iron Cross at the beginning of the campaign were a model of their kind. This decoration, he decided, should be conferred only for deeds of bravery and outstanding leadership which meant that, as far as the latter category was concerned, it could be won only by formation commanders and their senior staff officers. Unfortunately many of those responsible for awarding the decoration failed all along to observe this lucid and admirable ruling partly, it must be admitted, as a result of the delay in creating a cross for meritorious war service, the Kriegsverdienstkreuz, which was intended for those who, though employed on duties rendering them in-eligible for the Iron Cross, still deserved distinction. With Hitler it was always harder to secure a Knight’s Cross for a deserving General than for an officer or man at the front.
As for the retrospective tendency to deride the many different badges and insignia that Hitler created in the course of the war, people should merely bear in mind what feats our soldiers accomplished during the many long years of its duration. Badges like the close-combat clasp (the Nahkampfspange) and the Eleventh Army Crimean Shield were at all events worn with pride. Besides, the number of medal ribbons worn by soldiers on the other side shows that the question of war decorations is not to be dismissed with a lot of silly talk about ‘tin gongs’.
The deficiencies I have just described were bound to detract considerably from Hitler’s fitness to play the self-appointed role of the supreme military leader. They could still have been counterbalanced, however, if only he had been prepared to take advice from and place genuine confidence in an experienced and jointly responsible Chief of the General Staff. He did, after all, possess a number of the qualities indispensable to a supreme commander: a strong will, nerves that would stand up to the most serious crises, an undeniably keen brain and as I said before a certain talent in the operational field combined with an ability to recognize possibilities of a technical nature. If only he could have seen his way to compensate for his lack of training and experience in the military sphere — particularly as regards strategy and grand tactics — by utilizing the skill of his Chief-of-Staff, quite an efficient military leadership might have emerged despite all the shortcomings mentioned above. But this was precisely what Hitler would not accept.
Just as he considered the power of his will to be in every way decisive, so had his political successes and, indeed, the military victories early in the war, which he regarded as his own personal achievement caused him to lose all sense of proportion in assessing his own capabilities. To him the acceptance of advice from a jointly responsible Chief-of-Staff would not have meant supplementing his own will but submitting it to that of another. Added to this was the fact that he was imbued by origin and background with an insuperable mistrust of the military leaders, whose code and way of thinking were alien to him. Thus he was not prepared to see a really responsible military adviser alongside himself. He wanted to be another Napoleon, who had only tolerated men under him who would obediently carry out his will. Unfortunately he had neither Napoleon’s military training nor his military genius.
I have already shown in the chapter dealing with the plan for the invasion of Britain that Hitler had so organized the Supreme Command that no one was vested with the authority to advise him on grand strategy or to draft a war plan. The Operations Staff (Wehrmachtführungsstab) of O.K.W., which was theoretically qualified to discharge such a task, in practice merely played the role of a military secretariat. Its only raison d’être was to translate Hitler’s ideas and instructions into the terminology of military orders.
But there was even worse to come. Hitler’s designation of Norway as an ‘O.K.W.’ theatre of operations in which O.K.H. had no authority was only the first step in the disruption of land operations. In due course all the other theatres were gradually turned over to O.K.W. Finally only the Eastern one remained as an O.K.H. responsibility, and even then it had Hitler at its head. Hence the Chief-of-Staff of the Army was left with just as little influence on the other theatres of war as were the Commanders-in-Chief of the two other services in matters of grand strategy. He had no say whatever in the overall distribution of the army’s forces and often did not even know for certain what troops and material were being sent to the various theatres. In the circumstances it was inevitable that the O.K.W. Operations Staff and the General Staff of the army should clash. Indeed, Hitler probably created clashes deliberately in order that he alone should at all times have the decisive say. Naturally such faulty organization of the supreme military leadership was bound to contribute decisively to its breakdown. Another consequence of Hitler’s over-estimation of his will-power and military ability was that he attempted more and more to interfere by separate orders of his own in the running of subordinate formations.
It has always been the special forte of German military leadership that it relies on commanders at all levels to show initiative and willingness to accept responsibility and does everything in its power to promote such qualities. That is why, as a matter of principle, the ‘directives’ of higher commands and the orders of medium and lower commands always contained so-called ‘assignments’ for subordinate formations. The detailed execution of these assignments was the business of the subordinate commanders concerned. This system of handling orders was largely the reason for the successes scored by the German Army over its opponents, whose own orders generally governed the actions of subordinate commanders down to the very last detail. Only when there was no other possible alternative left did anyone on our side encroach upon the authority of a subordinate formation headquarters by specifically laying down the action it should take.
Hitler, on the other hand, thought he could see things much better from behind his desk than the commanders at the front. He ignored the fact that much of what was marked on his far too-detailed situation maps was obviously out of date. From that distance, moreover, he could not possibly judge what was the proper and necessary action to take on the spot.
He had grown increasingly accustomed to interfering in the running of the army groups, armies and lower formations by issuing special orders which were not his concern at all. While I had hitherto been spared such interference in my own sphere of command, I was fore warned of it by what Field-Marshal v. Kluge had to tell me when I met him on a railway station on my way from Vitebsk to Rostov. At Central Army Group, he said, he had to consult Hitler before any operation involving forces of a battalion or more could be mounted. Even if I personally did not experience such intolerable interference later on, there were still to be quite enough clashes with the Supreme Command as a result of Hitler’s meddling.
In contrast to his passion for individual orders, which were usually nothing but a hindrance to command staffs and detrimental to operations, Hitler was loath to issue long-term operational directives. The more he came to regard the principle of ‘holding on at all costs’ as the alpha and omega of his policy, the less prepared was he to issue long-term directives which took account of the normally foreseeable development of a strategic situation. That such methods must ultimately have placed him at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the enemy was something he refused to see. His mistrust of his subordinate commanders prevented him from giving them, in the form of long-term directives, freedom of action, which they might put to a use that was not to his liking. The effect of this, however, was to do away with the very essence of leadership. In the long run even an army group could not get along without directives from the Supreme Command certainly not when it formed part of a larger front and was bound to its neighbours on either flank. We often thought nostalgically of our days in the Crimea, when we had been able to fight in a theatre all of our own.
It still remains for me to show in as far as I can do so from personal experience what pattern the disputes took which inevitably arose between Hitler and the army leaders as a result of his attitude to questions of military leadership. Many of the accounts on record depict him as foaming at the mouth and even taking an occasional bite at the carpet. Although he did undoubtedly lose all self-control on occasions, the only time he ever raised his voice or behaved badly when I was present was during the episode with Halder which I have already mentioned.
Hitler obviously sensed just how far he could afford to go with his interlocutor and what people he could hope to intimidate with outbursts of rage that may often have been simulated. I must say that as far as my own personal contacts with him went, he maintained appearances and kept things on a factual plane even when our views collided. On the one occasion when he did become personal, the extremely sharp retort it evoked was accepted in silence.
Hitler had a masterly knack of psychologically adapting himself to the individual whom he wished to bring round to his point of view. In addition, of course, he always knew anyone’s motive for coming to see him, and could thus have all his counter-arguments ready beforehand. His faculty for inspiring others with his own confidence whether feigned or genuine was quite remarkable. This particularly applied when officers who did not know him well came to see him from the front. In such cases a man who had set out to ‘tell Hitler the truth about things out there’ came back converted and bursting with confidence.
In the various disputes I had with Hitler on operational matters in my capacity as an army group commander, what impressed me most was the incredible tenacity with which he would defend his point of view. There was almost invariably a tussle of several hours’ duration before his visitor either attained his object or retired empty-handed, at best consoled with empty promises. I have known no other man who could show anything like the same staying power in a discussion of this kind. And while the maximum time involved in any dispute with a front-line commander would at worst be several hours, the Chief-of-Staff, General Zeitzler, often had to battle for days on end at the evening conferences in order to get Hitler to take the necessary action. Whenever one of these contests was in progress, we always used to ask Zeitzler what ‘round’ they had reached.
Besides, the arguments with which Hitler defended his point of view and I include the purely military ones here were not usually of a kind that could be dismissed out of hand. After all, in any discussion of operational intentions one is almost always dealing with a matter whose outcome nobody can predict with absolute certainty. Nothing is certain in war, when all is said and done.
Whenever Hitler perceived that he was not making any impression with his opinions on strategy, he immediately produced something from the political or economic sphere. Since he had a knowledge of the political and economic situations with which no front-line commander could compete, his arguments here were generally irrefutable. As a last resort all one could do was to insist that if he did not agree to the proposals or demands submitted to him, things would go wrong militarily and in turn have even worse repercussions in the political and economic fields.
On the other hand, Hitler frequently showed himself to be a very good listener even when he did not like what was being asked of him, and on such occasions he was quite capable of objective discussion.
Naturally no relationship of any intimacy could develop between this fanatical dictator — who thought only of his political aspirations and lived in a belief in his ‘mission’ — and the military leaders. The personal element obviously did not interest Hitler in the least. To him human beings were merely tools in the service of his political ambitions. From his own side there sprang no bond of loyalty to the German soldier.
The ever-more-apparent defects in Germany’s military leadership, some of which arose from Hitler’s character and others from the quite impossible organization of the Supreme Command outlined earlier on, naturally raised the question of whether anything could be done to bring about a change. I prefer to leave the political aspects aside here as indeed I have done everywhere else in this book. I made no less than three attempts, in the interest of a more rational conduct of the war, to persuade Hitler to accept some modification of the Supreme Command. From no other quarter, as far as I know, was the inadequacy of his military leadership ever put to him quite so bluntly.
I was fully alive to the fact that Hitler would never be prepared to relinquish the supreme command officially. As a dictator he could not possibly have done so without suffering what for him would have been an intolerable loss of prestige. In my opinion everything depended, therefore, on persuading Hitler while nominally retaining the position of Supreme Commander to leave the conduct of military operations in all theatres of war to one responsible Chief-of-Staff and to appoint a special Commander-in-Chief for the Eastern theatre. These attempts of mine, which unfortunately proved unavailing, will be discussed further when I come to deal with the events of the years 1943-4. For me they were a particularly precarious undertaking, for Hitler knew full well that I was the very man many people in the army would like to see in the position of a proper Chief-of-Staff or as Commander-in-Chief in the east.
It is not my intention here to go into the question of changing the leadership of the Reich by violent means, as exemplified by the events of 20th July 1944, although I may do so one day. Within the scope of these war memoirs it is enough to say that as one responsible for an army group in the field I did not feel I had the right to contemplate a coup d’état in wartime because in my own view it would have led to an immediate collapse of the front and probably to chaos inside Germany. Apart from this, there was always the question of the military oath and the admissibility of murder for political motives.
As I said at my trial: ‘No senior military commander can for years on end expect his soldiers to lay down their lives for victory and then precipitate defeat by his own hand.’
In any case, it was already clear by that time that not even a coup d’état would make any difference to the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. At the time when I held a command we had not, to my mind, reached the point where such action had to be regarded as the only possible solution.