Men of Narrow Vision
SHANOR, DONALD R.
Men of Narrow Vision THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS By Hans Hellmut Kirst Harper & Row. 319 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by DONALD R. SHANOR Foreign Affairs Analyst, United Press International When the...
...Against the Tanzes was the third general, Seydlitz-Gabler's chief of staff...
...Kirst is dealing here with the German occupation of Warsaw and Paris, the intrigues among officers of the same and rival branches, the 20th of July plot against Hitler and, although the action is far from the battlefronts, the War...
...Tanz needed violence, however, to maintain this brittle composure...
...A Polish woman is found in her room in Warsaw, disfigured by savage stabbing...
...The privates and corporals of Kirst's world knew when to fight and when to hide, when to obey and when to evade orders...
...The anti-Hitler plotters lost, but their survivors won with the death of Hitler nine months later...
...They taught the new German soldier and reminded the old one that orders from above were often stupid and sometimes criminal...
...The suspects are three generals...
...Seydlitz-Gabler, after the War a respected writer of military memoirs, had welcomed Tanz back to West Germany, assuring him that after a bad period of anti-military feeling in the first years of peace, Germany "has gradually regained its respect for the real values and its readiness to listen to men of long experience...
...Germany's problem now is not the men of pure evil, the Tanzes and the Eichmanns, Kirst suggests...
...It is the men of narrow vision who would permit them to resume their influence...
...The murder mystery makes good reading in itself...
...Like the 08/15 books, The Night of the Generals is a complex work, combining political argument, history, and even a murder mystery...
...Tanz was captured by the Russians, but bounced back as an East German general...
...Tanz and Kahlenberge alternated in victory and defeat...
...The crime is repeated in Paris two years later, in 1944, when all three generals are in the city, and again in East Germany after the War...
...Such a man was Lieutenant General Wilhelm Tanz, commander of the elite Nibelungen (Special Operations) Division, hard, lean, so ramrod stiff that his orderly conjectured: "He swallows a couple of iron bars every morning before breakfast...
...General Herbert von SeydlitzGabler—to go by order of rank— was a corps commander, a man convinced it was patriotic to believe in Hitler despite his private misgivings...
...Yet Germany, while condemning the first group, honors the second as the bearer of a fine tradition on which the nation's future will be built...
...The mystery gets solved in good crimenovel fashion, but the larger question of guilt for the many millions of murders committed during the War is not as easily disposed of...
...Reviewed by DONALD R. SHANOR Foreign Affairs Analyst, United Press International When the West German Army was being organized a decade ago, Hans Hellmut Kirst's 08/15 trilogy served as a catechism for the new soldiers...
...To examine this question, Kirst brings in the night of the generals —the July 1944 plot—and describes his suspects' involvement...
...But when the 20th of July came, it was Kahlenberge who failed to rally the other generals and had to flee Paris, and Tanz who grasped the initiative with a counter-coup...
...The War dominates the book because its strongest character is the personification of war...
...that disobedience was often impossible, but delay and diversion safe and just as effective...
...Who has won...
...They were masters of many other activities familiar to American soldiers, but not the sort of thing that the regimented sons of a militaristic nation were supposed to do...
...His non-combat form of relaxation was inflicting private violence on prostitutes...
...Tanz believed in his Fuehrer...
...Cautious, numbed by the heritage of military tradition, he vacillated when the chance came to depose Hitler in the same way he had tried to avoid a decision on civilian reprisals in Warsaw...
...Major General Klaus Kahlenberge, an intellectual in uniform...
...Kahlenberge made fun of the Final Victory propaganda...
...The 08/15 novels—the name refers to a model of a gun—traced the career of the ingenious Herbert Asch from 1938 to 1945, from peacetime corporal to wartime lieutenant, a military history paralleling that of the author...
...It was rumored that he fought in Russia behind a wall of frozen bodies...
...In both cases, the way was left clear for the truly evil men...
...a businessman after the War, helped lure Tanz to the West, where, confronted with his murders, he committed suicide...
...He was at ease when his machinegunners were raking a Warsaw apartment block, just for practice...
...Kahlenberge...
...There are many similar lessons in Kirst's new novel, which changes the scene from barracks to staff headquarters...
...Where Tanz tormented his orderlies, Kahlenberge got his men out of scrapes...
...Yet the issues remain unresolved...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 13
