The Generals Were Fools
LOWENFELD, ANDREAS F.
The Generals Were Fools The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945. By John W. Wheeler-Bennett. St. Martin's Press. 829 pp. $12.00 Reviewed by Andreas F. Lowenfeld Contributor,...
...By July 20, 1944, nearly every general officer had heard of the conspiracy, and many had expressed sympathy...
...In battle the German officers were brave, and they succeeded in imparting this physical bravery to their troops...
...Without war, the world would sink into materialism...
...Though the final attempt on Hitler's life met with exasperatingly bad luck, the whole affair had been so hesitantly and ineptly handled that it is a wonder it got as far as it did...
...The thought of war as part of the nature of things, though ever more frightening, is no longer startling...
...But the Army was no longer the independent arbiter of Germany's fate, and Schleicher had almost no popular support and no program...
...But even Schleicher, the most politically adept of the German generals, did not know what he was doing...
...Under the leadership of Groner and von Seeckt, the Reichswehr supported the Weimar Republic and protected it from a series of attacks from all sides, including several made in cooperation with the more impatient members of the military...
...Despite the small size of the Versailles Reichswehr, the words "He has lost the confidence of the Army" were enough to bring down every intended victim, just as they had brought down the Kaiser in 1918...
...They were, of course, not ineffective soldiers, and in training and equipping an enormous citizen army they were brilliant...
...The Army did not sanction the Blood Purge...
...But perhaps Wheeler-Bennett is right...
...They all came, all took the oath, and with it swore away all hopes of independence...
...The plotters of July 20, 1944, were the best of a bad lot, but a bad lot it was...
...A good many higher officers were prepared to jump on the bandwagon of a military revolt, but pitifully few were prepared to risk their careers against failure...
...It may be that Wheeler-Bennett overemphasizes the attempts against Hitler...
...All the more has the second part of the statement been proved wrong...
...Throughout the war, an opposition to Hitler existed among the military...
...By 1932, the bourgeois parliamentary democracy was tottering—surely without regrets from the military...
...The German Officer Corps, unexcelled in professional devotion to war as the "highest summit of human achievement" (von Seeckt), proved to be an aggregation of fools and cowards, to whom discipline meant shirking responsibility and duty meant blindly following an ill-considered oath...
...Seeking to use the Nazi movement, Schleicher and the Army were themselves used, and for the longest time they did not even know it...
...But Hitler always knew how to win over the generals, whether by medals, by rapid promotion, or by quick successes...
...Those who use retrospective reliance on the German Officers Corps as an argument against Munich or against Unconditional Surrender had better look elsewhere...
...A month later, old Hindenburg died...
...each time, Hitler acted boldly...
...Thanks in good part to Moltke's offspring, the German General Staff, the first part of this dictum has been largely fulfilled...
...Gradually, the "Field-grey Eminence" Kurt von Schleicher secured control over the Army and used it to undermine one after another of the Weimar governments...
...War is a link in God's order of the world...
...In war, the noblest virtues of man develop: courage and renunciation, devotion to duty and readiness for sacrifice, even at the risk of one's life...
...For example, there were complaints in 1934 about the para-military SA, which the Army regarded as competition, so Hitler ordered it eliminated...
...There followed a series of crises—open rearmament, the Rhineland, Austria, Munich, Prague...
...the prospect of a world war frightened them...
...But it is, and Wheeler-Bennett tells it extremely well...
...But it seems to have spent almost all its energy working out a postwar program, worrying about what Unconditional Surrender meant, and recruiting confederates...
...As one grows impatient with the conspirators, one wishes the author had given a little more space to the generals' other activities—their internecine rivalries, their struggles over strategy (which Hitler dominated more and more), and their changing attitudes as the war progressed...
...The fact that their three top officers (Fritsch, Blomberg and Beck) had been forced out may have hurt their pride...
...12.00 Reviewed by Andreas F. Lowenfeld Contributor, "Review of Politics...
...But, at the same time, von Schleicher and another general were murdered, and the "long knives" of the SS replaced the Army as the keepers of "order" in the Reich...
...Each time, the generals urged caution...
...But they had given their oath, and Hitler understood how to use this so effectively that by 1939 the Wehrmacht of several million had less strength in militarized Germany than the Reichswehr of 100,000 had had in the Republic...
...The Fuhrer treated the Army as one might treat a wild horse: Each time that he gave it something it wanted, he drew the reins a little tighter...
...The German officers were clever enough to outwit a German nation that did not want to be undeceived, and so they preserved their independence and non-partisan superiority (Ueberparteilichkeit) for six or seven years after the First World War...
...While the generals discussed which of them would be his successor, Hitler announced the amalgamation of the offices of President and Chancellor, and summoned all officers to take their personal oath to him...
...By the time the war broke out, the generals were so dazzled that they were content to train their divisions, or to mumble softly behind Hitler's back...
...One might almost ask why this story is interesting...
...Two days before the 30th of June, 1934, the Reichswehr carefully removed SA-Fuhrer Rohm from its rolls—to preserve the honor of the Corps...
...This failing, and an unimaginative, conservative professionalism that only von Seeckt of the older generation transcended, placed them at every point at a disadvantage to Hitler, so that they were both outwitted and impressed by the terrible corporal whom they had sought to use for their own purposes...
...And this book does show enough of the behavior of the German Officer Corps to deflate forever their exalted reputation for brilliance, and to debunk General Eisenhower's statement in 1951 that the German soldier has not lost his honor...
...But they lacked completely what Bismarck called Zivilcourage...
...By involving the Army in the game of cabinet-maker, he had dragged it down from its summit of independent strength, without building up any corresponding basis of power within the Republic...
...There are few historians who can make as exciting as he does a detailed narrative whose outcome one already knows...
...Other questions—such as the invasion of Russia—were more difficult...
...former member, Harvard Russian Research Center "Eternal peace," wrote Helmuth von Moltke, "is a dream, and not even a beautiful one...
...But, with few exceptions, the military were prepared to take advantage of the gangsterism, so long as it was not their responsibility...
...But their good intentions were nearly always undermined by a marshal's baton, a fat check from the Fuhrer, or doubt about how some higher-ranking officer would act...
...Some problems of the war—for example, genocide or civilian bombing—were solved without difficulty: The worst excesses were left to the SS or the Luftwaffe, and for the rest the German officers "obeyed orders...
...Politically, the Army played virtually no role in Germany after 1938...
...From January 1933 on, the story of the Army in politics is one of continuing indignity and decline...
Vol. 37 • February 1954 • No. 7
