Writers and Writing Junkers With Epaulettes
LICHTBLAU, JOHN H.
Junkers with Epaulettes The Politics of the Prussian Army. By Gordon A. Craig. Oxford. 536 pp. $11.50. Reviewed by John H. Lichtblau Former agent, VS. Army CIC in Germany; contributor, N. Y....
...Craig's thesis is that, throughout its history, the Prussian and later the all-German army successfully evaded control by the civilian element of the state, that in consequence it always opposed those groups favoring extension of constitutional controls, and that thus it became one of the main obstacles to democratization in Germany...
...Perhaps the tragedy of Germany lies in this singular inability to overcome its own past, which made all its revolutions mirages...
...As Craig says, "generations of officers were to accept this as a doctrine and were to attempt, with disastrous results, to apply it in the First World War...
...Yet, the constitutional concessions at last granted by the King left the Army completely untouched...
...A revolutionary Germany, which had just overthrown its supreme warlord, seemed in no mood to tolerate an organization which considered democracy synonymous with mutiny...
...However, there was a small but significant minority of top officers who, though belatedly, gathered enough courage to actively oppose the tyrant...
...Would Germany have developed along healthier lines if it, too, had had the collective experience of such a catharsis of its political body...
...The real problem was the demarcation between the prerogatives of the civilian government and those of the Army...
...The Politics of the Prussian Army by Professor Craig of Princeton University is an outstanding example of this trend...
...Here we see for the first time the Prussian Army in the role of a police force...
...The famous phone call of General Groener to President Ebert, in which the former offered and the latter accepted the aid of the Imperial Army to maintain law and order and prevent extreme left-wing uprisings, was probably one of the most consequential acts in current history...
...The next milestone was 1848...
...By 1925, Hindenburg, the chief symbol of the defeated forces, was Reichspresident and in 1932 the Chancellor's office fell also into the hands of a Prussian general-Kurt von Schleicher...
...Had their reforms prevailed, the history of Europe might well have been different...
...Since the Army leaders considered war their exclusive province, in sharp contrast to the advice of Clausewitz, they felt that all decisions affecting the question of war or peace were to be made by them only...
...contributor, N. Y. "Times," "Saturday Review" Now that the 12-year lifespan of the Nazi "thousand-year Reich" has been pretty well covered, historians are again turning to the long pull in German history...
...There can be little quarrel with this indictment, which makes the German generals mercenaries who would rather fight for the wrong cause than not at all...
...Craig's story begins with the Great Elector, who, together with his son, built the hegemony of Prussia on the single idea of a powerful army "made possible only by subordinating the total energies of their subjects to the maintenance of that military establishment...
...It is true that they objected to this role, but their great guilt, in Craig's view, is that "even when they become nominal members of the opposition, the generals continued to fight for Hitler, despite the fact that they had lost confidence in his conduct of the war, despite the fact that his intervention in tactical matters violated their professional standards...
...It is the book's one shortcoming that this event is barely mentioned, as if it were a negligible incident...
...Another significant World War II event ignored by Craig is the formation of the League of German Officers among German prisoners in Russia under the leadership of Generals von Paulus and von Seydlitz...
...It was at the end of that war-which showed that German generals were not only poor diplomats, but even poor strategists-that the greatest threat to their existence appeared...
...However, when the French threat had been shattered, the old ruling element soon squelched all reforms both in the Army and in the state, and Prussia was once again ruled by military despotism...
...All other nations have at least once successfully overthrown their rulers and everything they stood for...
...With painstaking documentation, he traces the further development to the already gigantic military apparatus of Frederick the Great, shows the role of the Junkers, Prussia's landed aristocracy, in forming its officers' corps, and takes us up to the Prussian reform days of the Napoleonic period...
...The formation of the empire in 1871 vastly expanded the powers of the Prussian Army and its supreme leader, now the German Emperor...
...He certainly managed to reduce its leaders to the level of mere technicians who had only a downward responsibility to the troops but no upward voice in determining if, when and how the troops should be used...
...As the post-Nazi German army emerges...
...The July 20, 1944 uprising failed, but it was one of the few bright spots of those dark days...
...The successful wars against Denmark, Austria and France which had been fought in the decade preceding unification had, if anything, increased the struggle between the military and the civilian powers-as even Bismarck had to learn...
...The Politics of the Prussian Army will help greatly in determining whether it is a projection of the past or whether, at last, Germany will get a genuine "citizen's" army, responsible and subordinate to the civilian element of the state...
...After 1018, the 100,000-man army under General von Seeckt became the repository of the old Imperial Army and, with the active aid of the Soviet Union, began again to shape Germany's destiny...
...These were the days when, under the pressure of foreign occupation, men like Stein, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau set about "to bring the army and the nation into a more intimate union...
...Its first attempt to rout the Berlin March rebels was a colossal failure...
...For the first time, Prussian officers conspired to assassinate the ruler to whom they had sworn allegiance because they felt that their patriotic duty required them to do so...
...Whether Hitler finally destroyed the Prussian Army is still not clear...
...Yet it was right in the middle of that revolution that the foundation for its own demise was laid...
...On the whole, however, the author has written an outstanding historical treatise based upon an impressive array of source material...
...For, when the dust had settled, it invariably turned out that the main pillars of the old order had survived to cheat the revolutionaries of their victory...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 51
