The REAL Reason Hitler Lost WW2
Last modified 2026-02-23
The answer, in brief is: Traitors and Saboteurs within the German Military caused the loss in the East against Russia, and in the West on D day. By claiming that Hitler was on the way out and about to be overthrown, they strengthened the resolve of the warhawks in Britain and France to end the phony war and go ahead and trust the USA backing to win the war. These traitors persuaded Franco to remain neutral and not help Hitler (because Hitler was supposedly about to be overthrown), even though Hitler saved Spain from Communism and Franco owed Hitler a HUGE debt. Spain would have been key for Hitler to control the Strait of Gibraltar and thus the entrance to the Mediteranean Sea.
So surreptitious (stealthy) was the German resistance movement, its ruinous influence may never have come to light but for a single incident. A bungled attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, prompted an ongoing state investigation. This exposed the conspiracy to sabotage the German war effort. It led to the death by firing squad, suicide, or execution after trial of 160 plotters. The would-be assassin was Count Claus von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of the Reserve Army since July 1, 1944. Stauffenberg concealed in his brief case a time bomb, weapon of choice for terrorists worldwide, and smuggled it into the July 20, 1944 conference at Rastenburg. Providentially, the briefcase had gotten moved far enough away from Hitler (by accident) during the last few moments before the bomb went off, saving the leaders (fuhrer's) life.
During Hitlers life, God spared him more than six times from near death experiences. In summary, the whole allied world could not have brought Hitler down. Remember tiny little North Vietnam driving out the most powerful nation on earth at the time, the USA. Send enough GI's home in body bags and the Americans would have soon lost their appetite for dabbeling in un-necessary foreign wars.
It took GERMANS to defeat Hitler and the prosperous Germany he created. BUT, (I can hear the objection now) Hitler declared war on the USA right after Pearl Harbor, what were we to do, just lay down and take it? The truth hidden from you is that before Pearl Harbor (Dec 7th, 1941 when FDR manuevered Japan into attacking us, via his oil embarge on Japan) FDR was sending billions (todays dollars) of armament, destroyers, ammo, etc. to the allies as well as attacking German shipping and subs, while Hitler held his peace and made no defense nor reprisal to keep the (officially "neutral") USA out of the war). We were already making war on Germany before Hitler declared war on us.
The Below excerpt is from Chapter 6 of the book HITLERS REVOLUTION by Richard Tedor. You may buy the whole book off Amazon.com for $19 new, $14 used (as of 2026-02-23). I count it as one of my most valuable books in my library. It explains Hitlers rise to power, what Hitler was really like, and why Hitler was forced into WW2.
Other excellent books, like this one, are
HITLER DEMOCRAT by General Leon DeGrelle.
WHAT THE WORLD REJECTED - HITLERS PEACE OFFERS 1933-1940 by Friedrich Stieve.
THE MYTH OF GERMAN VILLANY by Benton L Bradberry
WITH HITLER ON THE ROAD TO POWER by Otto Dietreich.
THE YOUNG HITLER I KNEW by August Kubizek
https://ia801302.us.archive.org/10/items/Hitler_Adolf_-_Mein_Kampf/Hitler_Adolf_-_Mein_Kampf.pdf Free Download
GERMANY'S WAR by John Wear (Origins, Aftermath, and Atrocities of WW2)
GERMANY'S HITLER by Heinz A Heinz (This is the Only Authorized Biography and is one of the most suppressed English language books ever to emerge from Germany. But it is absolutely vital reading for anyone interested in fully understanding why Hitler won the total adulation and support of the German people. Professional journalist and author Heinz A. Heinz interviewed Hitler's old schol friends, army colleagues, landlords, his jailer and early party comrades to provide an unprecedented insight into the German leader's background and pre-WW2 policies. Included are vivid and unique descriptions of Hitler art school, his World War 1 battlefield experiences, early politics, the amazing truth behind the November 9th Putsch, Hitler in prison, and the struggle to power from 1926 to 1933. It ends just after the Austrian Anschluss and the end of the Czech/Sudenten crisis.
This book was the foremost Hitler myth-buster of its day, and is full of personal and political insights. Read, for example abourt the handicapped child who was amazed that the Reich Chancellor personally delivered his Christmas present; how Hitler always refused to take his salary and instead ordered the state treasury to divert it to to poor relief work; and of the massive social reforms that boosted German living standards to ghe best in Europe. It Also contains all original illustrations. OstaraPublications.com
Other books of lesser value, but which go into much more detail are:
HOW BRITAIN INITIATED BOTH WORLD WARS by Nick Kollerstrom.
JEWISH DOMINATION OF WEIMAR GERMANY by Eckard Verlag
FROM THE KAISERHOF TO THE REICH CHANCELLERY by; Joseph Goebbels
THE NAMELESS WAR by Archibald Ramsay
THE PROGRAMME OF THE NSDAP by Gottfried Feder
SAVAGE CONTINENT by Kieth Lowe (What Germany suffered after WW2)
TRUTH FOR GERMANY (The Guilt Question of the Second World War) by Udo Walendy
TRUTH IS A LONELY WARRIOR (Unmasking the Forces Behind Global Destruction) by James Perloff.
JEWISH AUSTRIA by Francois Trocase
I RESCUED HITLER by www.siegrunen.com
INTO THE DARKNESS by Lothrop Stoddard (what life was like for the average German civilian in Germany during WW3)
HOLY REICH by Richard Steigmann Gall (NAZI conceptions of Christianity from 1919 thru 1945)
HITLERS SUPPRESSED AND STILL SECRET WEAPONS, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY by Henry Stevens
HITLERS SECOND BOOK (German Foreign Policy) by Arthur Kemp OstaraPublications.com
ESCAPE FROM THE BUNKER by Harry Cooper
HITLER AND THE SECRET ALLIANCE by Michael Ivinheim www.sharkhunters.com (how and why tens of thousands of Germans including Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun were able and allowed to escape to Argentina after WW2).
Chapter 6 (of the book HITLERS REVOLUTION by Richard Tedor)
What the Waffen SS could have finally achieved toward a European Confederation what caliber of leadership the Adolf Hitler Schools would have produced, or how education and advancement of Germany's non-affluent classes might have reshaped the nation will never be known. Military defeat in 1945 ended the era of German self-determination, quelling a revolution of historical consequence that may never be emulated. Germany's overthrow we broadly attribute to the larger populations and superior industrial capacity of the Allies, but a seldom-publicized, insidious factor also contributed to the outcome of the war. This was the systematic sabotage, conducted by disaffected, malevolent elements within Germany, of the Reich’s peacetime diplomacy and wartime military operations.
Unlike the Bolsheviks, Hitler did not exterminate the aristocracy to promote labor. He personally considered the role of the nobility “played out” It would have to prove itself to regain its former prestige, but only by competing against other classes within the parameters of the Reich’s social programs. A tract published for officers declared, “The new nobility of the German nation, which is open to every German, is nobility based on accomplishment.” Many from the country’s titled families accepted the challenge. They enrolled in the NSDAP or the SS or served with valor in the armed forces during the war. A small percentage, concentrated in the army general staff and in the diplomatic corps, resented the social devaluation of their high-born status. Rather than contribute to the new Germany, they conspired against her. Together with a self-absorbed minority of misguided intellectuals, clerics, financiers and Marxists, they intrigued to bring down both the National Socialist government and their country as well.
An especially harmful characteristic of this subversive resistance movement was that its leaders held sensitive positions in public office and in the military.
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Major players included Leipzig’s Mayor Carl Goerdeler, Ribbentrop’s subordinates Baron von Weizsacker, Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin and Erich Kordt, and chief of military intelligence Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. They and their fellow conspirators knew that Hitler was too popular for them to incite a national insurrection against him. They sought assistance beyond Germany’s borders, from England. The subversives established contact with British politicians in June 1937. With Canaris providing a smoke screen, Goerdeler covertly travelled to London using foreign currency provided by the banker Schacht. He met with Halifax, Churchill, Eden, Vansittart and Montague Norman of the Bank of England. Goerdeler told his hosts of an approaching “unavoidable confrontation between Hitler and the conspirators,’ giving the impression that plans for a coup were well under way.’
That December, Ribbentrop submitted to Hitler a confidential analysis of attitudes in Britain. He warned that the English were by no means weak and decadent and would go to war were German ambitions considered a threat to their empire. In secret discussions with Vansittart, Churchill and British diplomats, Weizsicker falsely claimed the opposite, that Ribbentrop was advising the fuhrer that London was too spineless to seriously oppose the Reich.’
During the Sudetenland crisis in the summer of 1938, the resistance attempted to persuade the British to reject Hitler’s proposed territorial revisions. Its envoy, Kleist-Schmenzin, was a patrician landowner and monarchist. He enjoyed a certain reverence among peers for his fight to reduce the wages of Pomerania’s farmers during the 1920s. He once maintained, “The nobility must adhere to the sovereign manner developed over centuries, the feeling of being master, the uncompromising feeling of superiority.
On August 19, Kleist-Schmenzin told Churchill that in the event of war, German generals were prepared to assist in a revolt to establish a new government in Berlin “within 48 hours.” The envoy also supplied the British Secret Service with classified information regarding the Reich’s defense capabilities. Just as Goerdeler had previously described German rearmament as a “colossal bluff” in London the year before, Kleist-Schmenzin told the English that the German army was unprepared for war. The British agent Jan Colvin wrote later that every single sentence Kleist uttered would suffice on its own to earn him a death sentence for treason.
The back gate of Number 10 Downing Street swung open on the evening of September 7, 1938, to admit Erich Kordt with a private letter from Weizsacker for Halifax. The German baron wrote of how “the leaders of the army are ready to resort to armed force against Hitler's policy. A diplomatic defeat would represent a very serious setback for Hitler in Germany, and in fact precipitate the end of the National Socialist regime.” Thanks to his lofty position in the Reich’s Foreign Office, Weizsacker knew that the fuhrer’s determination to recover the Sudetenland was no bluff. By encouraging London toward a showdown, he hoped to provoke an armed confrontation.
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Chamberlain however, received more accurate reports from his ambassador in Berlin. Henderson had already written Undersecretary Cadogan in July that although Hitler did not want war, the Germans were preparing for every eventuality. The astute Henderson also lanced Weizsacker’s mendacious claim that Ribbentrop was advising the fuhrer that the British have no backbone: “Certainly Ribbentrop did not give me the impression that he thought we were averse of war. Quite the contrary: he seems to think we were seeking it."
Chamberlain prudently concluded the Munich accord with Hitler on September 30, peacefully transferring the Sudetenland to Germany. The resistance movement considered this a “crushing defeat” for its machinations. Disappointed, Kordt declared that “the best solution would have been war.” Undaunted, its members exploited covert diplomatic channels to flood London with more bogus news about Germany. Goerdeler told the English on October 18 how supposedly Ribbentrop was boasting that Chamberlain “signed the death sentence of the British Empire” in Munich: “Hitler will now pursue a relentless path to destroy the empire.”!
As the Polish crisis charged the diplomatic atmosphere in the summer of 1939, the resistance again poured oil on the fire. After meeting with Danzig’s Commissioner Burckhardt in June, the British diplomat Roger Makins stated in a Foreign Office memo, “Great Britain should continue to show an absolutely firm front. This is the course advocated by Baron von Weizsacker and by most well-disposed Germans.” Assistant Undersecretary Sargent summarized, “Weizsacker is constant in his advice that the only thing which makes Hitler see reason is the maintenance of a firm front and no premature offer to negotiate under pressure.” Weizsacker, the number-two man in German foreign affairs, contributed to the inflexibility of the other side."
The resistance continued to supply Chamberlain with descriptions alleging the desperate economic situation in Germany, Hitler’s unpopularity and the army’s readiness to mutiny. The better-informed British emissaries in Berlin maintained a sober perspective. Henderson's subordinate, Ogilvie-Forbes, wrote Halifax about the conspirators on July 4, 1939: “I have a deep-rooted mistrust of their advice and their information. They are quite powerless to get rid of the Nazi leaders by their own efforts and they place all their hopes for this purpose in war with England and the defeat of Germany. One can have little respect for or confidence in Germans for whom the destruction of a regime is a higher aim than the success in war of their own country.”
Despite such warnings, Henderson saw with dismay how his government based some policy decisions on intelligence provided by the resistance movement. To be sure, Chamberlain was aware of the risk posed by war.
An all-out conflict with Germany would compel England to seek American aid, increasing U.S. influence abroad. Waging war against the Reich was therefore contingent on an immediate collapse of enemy resistance. Told by conspirators in August 1939 that German generals anxiously await London's declaration of war so that they can topple the government, and that Hitler is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Britain’s prime minister reacted.’
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The director of the Central European Section of the British Secret Service, Sigismund Best, recalled, “At the outbreak of the war our Intelligence Service had reliable information that Hitler faced the opposition of many men who occupied the highest functions in his armed forces and his public offices. According to our information, this opposition movement had assumed such proportions as to be able to lead to a revolt and overthrow the Nazis."
French Foreign Minister Bonnet wrote in his memoirs, “We expected an easy and rapid victory. The declaration of war by England and France on Germany of September 3 was supposed to clear the way for the military coup so sincerely promised to us.” Right after the war's start, Chamberlain noted in his diary, “What I hope for is not a military victory - I doubt very much that this is possible - but a collapse of the German home front.”’ Ribbentrop himself wrote in 1946, “We didn’t know then that London was counting on the conspiratorial group of prominent military men and politicians, and therefore came to hope for an easy victory over Germany. The circle of conspirators in this way played a decisive role in the outbreak of the war. They thwarted all of our efforts to reach a peaceful solution . . . and very likely tipped the scales for the English decision to declare war.”
The Early Campaigns
Germany's campaigns in World War II are a popular subject for study by historians and military analysts; however, when researching Hitler's strategies, successes and failures, few take into account the pernicious influence of the resistance movement. Just as turncoats in the diplomatic service helped block an understanding with England in 1939, high-ranking members of the army consistently disrupted the war effort once hostilities opened.
Though less than five percent of German army officers identified with those betraying their country, the unfaithful few often occupied positions in planning and logistics, enabling them to cause havoc disproportionate to their number. The Gestapo eventually maintained a watch list but generally did not investigate the army. This allowed subversion of combat operations to continue virtually undetected.
The Prussian aristocrat Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a staff officer and remorseless saboteur, expressed the spirit of the plotters: “Preventing Hitler's success under any circumstances and through whatever means necessary, even at the cost of a crushing defeat of the German realm, was our most urgent task”?
Appointments to key posts in the general staff gained the conspirators insight into military strategy as it was formulated, information they communicated to the enemy. The former army chief of staff, Halder, testified in 1955, “Almost all German attacks, immediately after being planned by the OKW, became known to the enemy before they even landed on my desk?”
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The German armed forces lacked the element of surprise from the first day of the fighting. On August 30, 1939, two days before Germany invaded Poland, Kleist-Schmenzin delivered the detailed operational orders to the British embassy in Berlin with instructions to “pass this on to Warsaw."!
A few months after the Polish campaign, a member of the Reich’s Foreign Office in Berlin who was smuggling microfilm was arrested by the SD. The film contained precise information about the strength and locations of the German occupational forces in Poland. The former SD chief wrote later:
“In the OKW they were more than a little surprised at such an accurate and comprehensive report, especially as the statistics were correct to the smallest detail.” He speculated that “only senior German officers” could have provided the material.”
Among the loosely-affiliated subversive groups, military intelligence, the Abwehr, was especially destructive. Its chief, Canaris, was a master of disinformation. In his memoirs, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz stated that the Abwehr “delivered not a single useful report about the enemy throughout the entire war.’? Canaris recruited the equestrian monarchist Hans Oster to run the Central Department of the agency. A general staff officer during World War I, Oster had left the army in 1932 for violating its code of honor. Canaris reinstated him as an ersatz lieutenant colonel in 1935. When war broke out anew, Oster began drawing acquaintances hostile to the state into the Abwehr as “specialists.” From October 1939 on, Oster furnished copies of every agency report, plus whatever could be obtained from the OKW, to the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Giysbertus Sas. He urged Sas to use the information to reinforce Holland’s defenses against Germany and to relay the reports to the Western powers. On April 3, 1940, Oster provided him the details of the imminent German invasion of Norway in order for him to forewarn Oslo.”
One month later, Oster gave Sas the target date of the German surprise offensive in the West. The Dutch disbelieved the information. Similarly instructed, Belgian Ambassador Adrien Nieuwenhuys opined skeptically, “No German would do something like that! Believing to have tipped the Allies off in time, Oster calculated that the abortive offensive would cost the German army 40,000 dead. In his own words, he still considered himself “a better German than all those who run after Hitler.” German telephone security personnel monitoring the Dutch embassy line knew that Sas had received classified intelligence about the western campaign, but were unable to localize the source. To divert suspicion, Oster tried to frame Baroness Steengracht, the wife of a German diplomat. Only Ribbentrop’ intervention prevented Oster, the son of a pastor, from using the Abwehr’s resources to implicate an innocent woman for treason.”
Canaris not only protected Oster, but betrayed military secrets on his own. The fact that he had served as a U-boat captain during World War I did not prevent Canaris from providing the British Secret Service with details of German submarine development during the 1930's. Senior Abwehr officers
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profited from the war, accepting bribes in exchange for draft deferments, and the police arrested Hans von Dohnanyi, a “specialist” recruited by Oster, for public graft. Abwehr directors in Munich sold paintings, tapestries and currencies on the black market. Canaris himself arranged for his agency courier plane to regularly fly in fresh strawberries for himself from Spain.” Abwehr corruption and incompetence became so rife that Hitler eventually relieved the crafty admiral of his post and placed the agency under Himmler.
The house-cleaning, however, was far off in 1940, when Canaris struck another serious blow to the German cause. After London rejected Hitler's generous peace offer that July, the fuhrer contemplated how to continue the war against England. Considering an amphibious invasion of the British Isles too risky, he decided to attack the enemy's overseas possessions. Capture of the British base at Gibraltar, controlling the nautical lifeline to Egypt and the Suez Canal, was an option. Not only would the conquest virtually cripple England’s position in the Mediterranean, but the operation was within Germany’s resources. Prerequisite was Spain entering the war on the German side, and Madrid already favored Germany and Italy. In July 1940 the Spanish head of state, Francisco Franco, publicly stated, “Control of Gibraltar and expansion into Africa is both the duty and the calling of Spain He was prepared that summer to declare war on Britain. Hitler could then transfer troops to southern Spain to stage the expedition against Gibraltar.
Berlin sent Canaris to negotiate the alliance because of his good relations with prominent Spaniards. In collusion with Weizsacker, however, he accomplished the opposite by privately informing Franco that Germany’s position was desperate, with almost no hope of winning the war. He advised his host to keep Spain neutral, reassuring him that Hitler would not send troops into Spain to force Madrid’s cooperation. Had Canaris persuaded Franco to support the Reich, “It’s more than possible that such a decision by Spain at this moment would have meant the end of the war,’ wrote Spanish Foreign Minister Serrano Stiner.! With Germany’s position thus strengthened, Hitler would have possessed a more formidable hand when dealing with Molotov that November. He may have been able to resolve his differences with the USSR without resorting to arms.
Betrayal in the East
Germany possessed a superb intelligence-gathering network for the war in the East. Her specialists had already cracked the complex Soviet radio encryption and monitored its traffic. Since 1934, code breakers at the Hillersleben installation had been tapped into secure telephone lines connecting Moscow to its European embassies. In 1937, the Germans began deciphering Soviet photo-telegraphic communications.
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In addition to reading diplomatic correspondence, they gained knowledge of Russian armaments production, the location and capacity of the factories and shortfalls in industry.”
Theodor Rowehl’s Long Range Reconnaissance Squadron, subordinate to the Luftwaffe Supreme Command, flew high-altitude missions over the USSR beginning in 1935. Air crews photographed Soviet naval installations, armaments and industrial complexes, military fortifications and troop concentrations. Thousands of pictures of the Russian interior provided ample images to produce accurate maps. In 1947, the USA used Rowehl’s photographs to prepare its own maps of the Soviet Union.
During the first weeks of the Russian campaign, advancing German troops captured many official documents which Soviet administrators had failed to destroy or evacuate. The cache offered a comprehensive picture of the USSR’s infrastructure, analyses of civilian attitudes and so forth. Luftwaffe communications specialists deciphered Soviet military radio traffic, promptly and consistently delivering details about Russian troop strength, status of available ammunition and fuel, planned aerial and ground attacks and the marching routes of enemy divisions. The post-war American Seabourne Report concluded that German code breakers maintained 80 percent accuracy in their knowledge of all planned Soviet military operations and armaments production.
Monitoring stations forwarded this vast quantity of intelligence to the Abwehr for assessment. Canaris, Oster and fellow conspirators relayed almost none of the findings to Hitler. They instead stored the cache of Soviet documents in Angerburg, East Prussia, never evaluated. Military cartographers prepared maps of the East without referencing Rowehl’s pictures. The army received inaccurate maps depicting dirt roads, which became impassable quagmires after rainfall, as modern, paved highways. This misinformation often confounded the tactical advance of German mechanized forces.
In early 1941, members of the German military mission in Rumania learned from locals and from Red Army deserters of formidable new Soviet armor sighted during Stalin’s occupation of Bessarabia. Witnesses provided details about the Russian KV-I and KV-II heavy tanks plus sketches of a third model that was faster, well-armored and boasting equally good firepower. Georg Pemler, a reconnaissance flight officer, pored over aerial photographs taken by Rowehl’s squadron above the Pruth and Dnestr River areas. He discovered images depicting the mystery tank on railroad flatcars, en route to Red Army units stationed near the Reich's frontier. Called by Pemler to examine the pictures, Rumanian Colonel Krescu told him, “Until now, we thought that this tank is still in development and being tested. That manufacture has progressed so far that the troops are already receiving deliveries, is a discovery of great importance.... The supreme command must be informed of this at once!
Gathering the photographs and relevant data, Pemler personally flew to Berlin to disclose his findings. Intelligence officers accepted his report but did not forward it to the OKW. When the new Soviet tank, the T-34 appeared in battle in June of 1941, it shocked German Front Line Troops. Its innovative sloping armor was too thick for German tank guns to penetrate, and it rendered German anti-tank ordinance obsolete.
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Picture of A Soviet BT-7 and two T-34 tanks abandoned by their crews. German Intelligence was aware of superior Soviet armor before the campaign, but with-held the information (from Hitler). Red Army Units began receiving T-34 tanks as soon as May of 1941.
While German intelligence concealed Soviet armaments capability from OKW planners, Canaris assured Hitler that only one single-track railroad joined the Russian source of raw materials in the Urals to industrial centers in Moscow.” An Abwehr liaison in Rumania, Dr. Barth, told his associate Pemler, “The leadership of the armed forces is grossly underestimating the strength of the Red Army. I personally cant avoid the impression that this is even promoted by certain men. We have confirmed confidential information, for example, that in one particular tank factory around 25 heavy tanks are produced daily. Since then we've identified three such plants.... The chief of the general staff scribbles a question mark here, sending the report back for re-evaluation without informing the fuhrer.
Barth was referring to Halder, who had become chief of staff in September 1938. A post-war “de-Nazification” panel judged Halder’s earlier conduct a “complete betrayal of his country.’After the conquest of Poland in 1939, he formed a secret planning staff to overthrow the government and placed General Stulpnagel in charge.
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One German Historian described him with admiration as an “old-school European nobleman". Halder urged Hitler to invade Russia, downplaying the hazards of the campaign. On February 3, 1941, Hitler directed Foreign Armies East, a branch of military intelligence, to assess the Red Army's ability to deploy large formations in the expansive Pripyat marshland. This consisted of swampy terrain in the south-central sector of the future front. Receiving the finished report on the 12th, Halder made an alteration before forwarding it to the fuherer. He deleted the Foreign Army East's conclusion that it would be possible for the Russians to shift troops within the marsh, thus posing a threat to the flank and rear advancing German divisions.
Two months into the campaign Hitler remarked that the entire operation would have been planned differently, had he known the enemies actual strength.
Picture of Halder and Hitler during 1937 army maneuvers. Early in 1941, Halder described the Red Army as “too primitive” to conduct offensive operations. In September 1942, the Fuhrer relived him of duty as army chief of staff.
Once the fighting broke out, the Soviets received timely reports on German military operations from the Supreme Command of the Army, i.e. the OKH, right from Hitler's headquarters. The communications chief there, General Erich Fellgiebel, secretly installed a direct telephone line to Switzerland to transmit classified information. Stationed in Bern was Han Gisevius, another of Canaris’s Abwehr “specialists.” He relayed the reports to Moscow. Other agents in Switzerland such as Rudolf Rossler participated, identified, but tolerated by Swiss intelligence. The sophisticated intelligence network was nicknamed the Red Orchestra by the SD. Schellenberg wrote later that the information it leaked “could only have come from the highest German sources.
When the SD finally shut down the Spy ring in 1942, it
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arrested 146 suspected operatives in Berlin alone, The courts condemned 86 of them to death for treason. They had transmitted over 500 detailed reports to the Kremlin, In October 1942, the Gestapo arrested 70 more Communist operatives in the Reich's Air Ministry and in the Bureau for Ariel armaments.
On June 22, 1941, the Soviet military's first and second waves included 20,000 combat aircraft, 23,200 tanks, and 79,100 cannons among the 303 divisions deployed. Hitler took on this force with crucial information with-held, his intelligence agencies consciously understating enemy resources, and officers forewarning the enemy of German attacks. On August 1, five weeks into the campaign, the Red Army deployed 269 divisions, 46 of them armored, and 18 brigades against the invaders. An intelligence report the fuhrer received two weeks earlier had fixed Russian strength at just 50 rifle divisions and eight tank divisions.“ On August 10, German soldiers overran the command post of the Soviet 16" Army east of Smolensk. The field police discovered copies of two OKH plans for the German attack. They found another German operational plan upon capturing Bryansk soon after, which the OKH had presented to Hitler on August 18. Gisevius later boasted, “We had our spies all over the war ministry, in the police, in the ministry of the interior, and especially in the foreign office. All threads connected to Oster.”
Advance knowledge of German plans helped the Red Army embroil the invaders in costly battles of attrition around Smolensk in July and August. The Germans regained the initiative when Hitler decided on August 21 to shift his panzer divisions southward toward Kiev. “The senseless operation now decided upon,’ fumed Halder in his diary, will “scatter our forces and stall the advance on Moscow.’” The Germans in fact destroyed four Soviet armies and mauled a fifth around Kiev, an immense battle of encirclement, capturing much of the Ukraine. Hitler told his architect Giesler, “I saw in these flanking thrusts and envelopments the only chance of beating the Russian mass-formations.... I had to literally wrest operations away from my generals.... Not even this success persuaded my generals of the only possible strategy in Russia.” Weary of wrangling, the Fuhrer ultimately endorsed Halder’s brainchild; a frontal attack against Moscow. Operation Typhoon began on October 1, but deception and sabotage determined the outcome. Quartermaster General Wagner reported the stockpile of provisions for the attack to be “satisfactory,” Against the minimum requirement of 24 supply trains per day for Army Group Center, however, between eight and 15 reached the front daily during August, twelve in September, Even during fair weather, hundreds of fully-laden freight trains sat idle in switch yards between Berlin and Krakow.
Largely responsible for the delay in supplies were the director of Main Rail Transport South, Erwin Landenberger in Kiev, and the director of Main Rail Transport Center, Karl Hahn in Minsk. Hitler ordered both men arrested for sabotage.
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Released from Sachsenhausen concentration camp months later Hahn described himself to another officer as a mortal enemy of the Nazis.
Hitler personally selected their replacements, Erhard Milch and Albert Speer assumed responsibility for getting the trains rolling again. The situation improved within weeks, Speer prioritized locomotive manufacture, while Milch reorganized rail and canal transportation to the front. Milch warned subordinates, “I have permission to hang any railroad official from any tree, including senior managers, and I'll do it!” The OKH gradually reduced Army Group Center's striking power during Operation Typhoon. On October 11, it transferred away the 8th Army Corps with three divisions and the 1st Cavalry Division. The 5th, 8th and 15th Infantry Divisions soon followed. The 9th Army Corps with four divisions went into “reserve.
On November 3, the OKH announced the intention to withdraw seven panzer divisions from the eastern front for replenishment.” At the same time, the Luftwaffe sent nearly a fourth of its personnel in Russia on leave. The high command transferred out 13 fighter groups, leaving just three groups of Fighter Squadron 51 left to support the offensive from the air.”
Typhoon made progress nonetheless. Northwest of Moscow, the 1st Panzer Division took Kalinin. Instead of wheeling southeast to invest the capital, the troops advanced northward. Eyewitness Carl Wagner recalled, “The capture of Kalinin opened a great tactical opportunity for us. We now held the cornerstone of Moscows defense system and could push toward the poorly secured northern flank of the city. The place was ours for the taking, with good roads and less than a day’s travel time. Instead, our panzers and the 9th" Infantry Army supporting us received the order to attack the completely insignificant town of Torzhok, more than 100 miles north of Kalinin. We felt that the new directive from the OKH didn’t make any sense”
The worst handicap confronting German combatants was the dearth of cold-weather gear. The Reich's industry had manufactured enough quilted winter uniforms to equip at least 56 divisions. Also, prefabricated shelters and barracks heaters had been loaded into 255 freight trains awaiting rail transport east. On November 1, Hitler inspected winter apparel earmarked for the Russian front, and Quartermaster Wagner assured him that the gear was already en route to the field armies in sufficient quantity.? Nine days later, Wagner confided to Halder that most quilted uniforms would not go forward until the end of January. They remained loaded on trains in Warsaw for months.” Hitler did not learn of the shortages until December 20, when General Heinz Guderian flew in from the central front and told him.
Luftwaffe personnel all received cold-weather apparel only thanks to Milchs personal supervision. The OKH was no less remiss about advising Hitler of intelligence reports predicting a planned Soviet counter-offensive. During November, the Russians transferred most of their Siberian rifle divisions from the far east to the Moscow sector. German aerial reconnaissance monitored the augmenting concentration of enemy reserves.
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Picture of German artillerymen enjoying a hot meal during a lull in the fighting in Russia. They wore standard-issue army field uniforms, affording insufficient insulation during the 1941/42 winter.
Long-range observation planes reported an alarming increase in the number of Soviet transport trains conveying fresh formations to the Kalinin-Moscow sector. The OKH disregarded the information. Sweden supplied the Germans with accurate statistics of the planning and scope of the approaching Red Army offensive, but the Abwehr group receiving this intelligence did not forward it to Berlin. In mid-November, Foreign Armies East assessed that Soviet divisions are 50 percent understrength, with more than half the officers and men untrained. In fact however, many of the 88 rifle divisions, 15 cavalry divisions and 24 armored brigades about to attack the German lines were well-equipped and at full roster. On the evening of December 4, 1941, only hours before the onslaught began, Foreign Armies East concluded that the combat effectiveness of the Red Army is insufficient for “the Russian to be capable of a major offensive at this time, unless he introduces significant reinforcements.”
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At the end of its strenght, caught by surprise, the ill-clad German army gave ground that winter. Hitler was exasperated over the failure to realize his strategic concept in the face of opposition from the general staff. He cited "the total underestimation of the enemy, the false reports of enemy reserves, and the strength of its armaments" and "the incomprehensible treason" as contributing to the German Army's first major defeat of the war per Hermann Giesler EIN ANDERER HITLER, p. 426
Despite the retreat before Moscow, the Germans maintained favorable positions for a 1942 summer campaign. Hitler fixed the main thrust toward the Caucaus mountain range, the oil fields, the refineries of which supplied 80% of the Soviet petroleum. He ordered Army Group South correspondingly reinforced. With the capture of Voronezh on July 8th, 1942 the German Panzer divisions were poised to cross the Don river, but the Furher initially forbade the crossing. Not wanting to weaken the offensive by splitting his forces. He command instead that the 4th Panzer army turn south to join the main advance toward the oil fields. Soviet formations in the south were in retreat and seriously demoralized.
Picture of Infantrymen atop a Panzer 4 operating east of the Don river in Russia. The German High Command split Army Group Souths powerful mechanized forces during the 1942 campaign season.
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German radio specialists arrested two former Polish army officers in a Warsaw suburb, who transmitted detailed information to Moscow about the Caucausus offensive. Abwehr officials, the rank, and file of whom did not share the treasonous sentiments of Canaris and Oster reported this to the Fuhurs headquarters. It revealed that Stalin knew about the Germans' military preparations. Receiving the report, General Fellgiebel decided that it was "too alarming" and would only upset the Fuhrer. He buried the news.
With the element of surprise compromised, Army group South began Operation Blue on July 28. Army Group A pushed towards the Caucasus.
To the northeast, Army Group B consecutively advanced on Stalingrad to cover the flank. This was an industrial complex strung along the Volga River. notorious for the working populations primitive housing, Hitlers operational plan called for the destruction of Stalingrads arms production through bombardment or siege. Capture of the metropolis was not an expressed goal. The Caucasus was the primary objective of the campaign.
The high command soon watered down the offensive. Halder wrote in his diary on June 30th that the chief of the OKW staff, Alfred Jodl had told Hitler during a situation conference "with great emphasis that the fate of the Caucasus
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will be decided at Stalingrad. Therefore, it was necessary to transfer elements of Army Group A to B.... In new packaging, an idea is served up that he had introduced to the fuhrer six days earlier. Halder shifted the 4th Panzer Army from the southern front on July 30, to serve as the “spearhead for the attack on Stalingrad,” Despite protests from Army Group A’s field commanders, Halder also took away the elite Grossdeutschland mechanized division. One historian summarized, Now two equally strong army groups with almost the same number of Panzer and motorized formations were operating in two different directions. The northern group attacked with four panzer and three motorized divisions; the southern with three Panzer and three motorized divisions. The formations slotted for the main purpose of the campaign were weaker than those covering the flank.” Army Group South proved unable to conquer the Caucasus region, which would have paralyzed the Red Army’s capacity to conduct offensive operations. The northern force became bogged down in a costly and pointless effort to capture Stalingrad. During the advance toward the Caucasus, the OKH robbed Army Group A of another trump: the 60,000-man Italian Alpine Corps. This consisted of three well-trained mountain divisions, each of them equipped with 5,000 pack mules. Instead of deploying the elite corps in the mountains, the OKH directed it to march northward to reinforce Stalingrad. Thus the soldiers, clad in wool uniforms for wear in the cooler, high-altitude climate, began a punishing foot march in warm weather across the Asian steppe. As mountain divisions, they possessed no anti-tank guns or heavy artillery, making them virtually defenseless against Soviet armor.
On August 27, General Rinaldo Dallarmi wrote Mussolini about the corps orders: “We came to Russia certain to go to the Caucasus, superbly suited for our training, weapons and equipment, and where we could join the best German and Rumanian mountain divisions in an almost sport-like competition to achieve the most. Then we're re-directed into the Don region, into flat territory and without adequate weapons. We received rifles from 1891 and four ridiculously small cannons, useless against the Russian 34-ton tanks. There are only so many Alpini. That's not a human resource that should be treated frivolously.
The southern offensive foundered when a major Soviet counterattack struck Army Group B in November. This compelled Army Group A to retreat from the Caucasus to avoid becoming flanked. The Russians surrounded and destroyed the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. Historians blame Hitler for the catastrophe, but the verdict does not weigh the flagrant disregard of his orders, misleading intelligence he received, or militarily senseless troop movements carried out by the OKH without his knowledge.
For instance, the left flank of Army Group B ran southeastward along the Don River, from Voronezh to Stalingrad. Defending the positions were the Hungarian 2nd Army, the Italian 8th Army, the Rumanian 3rd Army and the
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German 6th Army. The 4th Panzer Army covered the right flank. Hitler knew that the poorly equipped foreign contingents could not repulse a potential Soviet offensive. In August, he ordered the 22th Panzer and two infantry divisions transferred to support the Italian 8th Army. The Hungarians were also to receive reinforcements, including heavy artillery and new German 75mm anti-tank guns. Halder virtually ignored the order, dispatching only weak, token units a few weeks later,”
In late October, the fuhrer directed that the crack 6'th Panzer Division and two more infantry divisions be shifted from France to buttress the Rumanians and the Italians. The OKH delayed the full transfer of these formations until December. It was equally tardy about stationing new Luftwaffe field divisions behind the armies of Germany’s allies, as Hitler had called for. The 22nd Panzer Division, which he thought was at full strength, sorely needed replenishment. Of its 104 panzers, just 32 were operational. The OKH concealed this fact from its commander-in-chief. On September 9 and 16, the war diary of the OKW staff recorded Hitler's orders to reinforce the Italian 8'th Army. The diary noted on October 6, “The Fuhrer repeats his anxiety over a major Russian attack, perhaps even a winter offensive in the sector of our allies’ armies, driving across the Don toward Rostov. The reasons for apprehension include strong enemy troop movements and bridge-building over the Don in many places.’ Once more the OKW diary, from November 5: “The feared Russian attack over the Don is again discussed. The number of bridges under construction there is constantly growing. The Luftwaffe wants to show pictures. The Fuhrer orders strong air attacks against the bridge sites and suspects enemy assembly areas in the woods along the banks."
Reconnaissance confirmed Hitler’s concerns. From the comparatively high ground they defended southwest of Sirotinskaya, men of the 44th Hoch and Deutschmeister Infantry Division observed concentrations of Soviet troops and materiel along the Don, opposite positions of the Rumanian 3 Army. In a nearby sector, Russian deserters told Italian interrogators that they had been ordered to remain in concealment during the day. The Abwehr liaison to whom the Italians relayed this intelligence, replied that German aerial observation was more credible and had reported nothing, when in fact, the opposite was true. Max Ladoga, a radioman with the long-range reconnaissance squadron, wrote, “The Russians there are constantly bringing up strong reinforcements. Our daily flights have captured it all, filmed and reported it” The observer Pemler recalled that flight crews sent timely warnings up the chain of command, which no one took seriously.
Other sources delivered details of Red Army preparations. The Abwehr had launched Operation Zeppelin in July 1942, during which hundreds of anti-Communist Russians parachuted behind Soviet lines and provided information to the Germans. Over the next several months, they counted 3,269 railroad trains ferrying Soviet troops toward the Stalingrad combat
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zone, plus another 1,056 trains carrying war materiel. German aerial reconnaissance discovered on November 10 that the Russians had transferred the 5th Tank Army there as well. On November 11, the commander of Nachrichtenaufklérung 1 (Communications Evaluation Section 1) submitted to the OKH a comprehensive analysis of intercepted Soviet military radio traffic. It identified enemy reserves transferred to the Stalingrad area of operations. The report accurately predicted that that Russians were about to launch a pincer attack to surround the German 6th Army: “The deployment may already be substantially progressing”
Foreign Armies East was responsible for assessing these reports. In the spring of 1942, Halder had arranged for his former adjutant, Reinhard Gehlen, to become its chief. Remarking cynically before the war that “Germany shouldn't be governed by a Bohemian corporal? Gehlen later acknowledged actively supporting the resistance.” In August 1942, he reported with a straight face that since the previous February, due to a shortage of officers, the Red Army had not formed a single new combat division.”
Gehlen disclosed to Hitler neither the progress of Zeppelin nor the proximity of the 5th Tank Army, which he claimed was stationed far to the north. Even though the Red Army had massed 66 percent of its armor opposite Army Group B, Gehlen warned that the Russians were planning instead to attack near Smolensk farther north. He reassured the fuhrer’s headquarters on November 11, “There is no indication of a possible attack soon.... Available (Soviet) forces are too weak for major operations."
The Russian offensive began on November 19, 1942. Tanks steamrollered the Rumanian positions as Hitler had feared. In a major pincer operation, they drove southward to surround Stalingrad. The Soviet 57th Army plunged headlong into General Hans-Georg Leyser’s full-strength, motorized 29th Infantry Division, which counterattacked without authorization from the general staff. Its 55 tanks of Panzer Battalion 129 struck furiously along a railroad line de-training masses of surprised Russian infantrymen and supplies. Sealing off this enemy penetration, the 29th turned southwest to assault the flank of the Soviet 4th Corps. Before the operation began, the division received the suspicious order to break contact and withdraw into the Stalingrad perimeter.” This enabled the Russians to continue their encirclement of the 6th Army.
Believing that the Luftwaffe could airlift sufficient supplies into Stalingrad, but also based on Gehlen’s report that the Soviets had no reserves left, Hitler decided to supply the trapped garrison by air until a relief operation could be prepared. Junkers transport planes and Heinkel bombers delivered provisions to the 6th Army’s airfields and evacuated wounded on return flights out. Organizing the missions was quartermaster Colonel Eberhard Finck. An active conspirator, he arranged for a substantial number of flights to carry useless cargo.
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In addition to food, medical supplies and ammunition, the beleaguered troops at Stalingrad received thousands of old newspapers, candy, false collars, barbed wire, roofing paper, four tons of margarine and pepper, 200,000 pocketbooks, shoe laces, spices and so on.”
Picture of Panzer IVs in Russia early in 1944. The previous winter, those of the 6th Panzer Division were diverted from the advance on Stalingrad to stop a Soviet flank attack on the Chir River, dooming the rescue operation.
The German army launched a relief expedition on December 13, spearheaded by General Erhard Raus’s 6th Panzer Division. Ten percent above full strength, the formation possessed 160 tanks, including Panzer IVs fitted with the new high velocity cannon, 4,200 trucks, 20 heavy armored cars and 42 self-propelled assault guns. This formidable division led the attack to within 30 miles of Stalingrad. When on December 23 it received the incomprehensible order to withdraw, its officers at first assumed it to be a mistake. Deprived of this armored spearhead, the remaining units proved too weak to press the attack toward Stalingrad.
Shortly before his death in the 1950’s, Raus expressed the torment his conscience still suffered for not disobeying the order and continuing the advance. There were 220,000 German soldiers and foreign auxiliaries on the 6th Army’s roster in mid-January 1943, two weeks before the garrison surrendered.” Six thousand survived Soviet captivity.
The battle of Stalingrad not only proved a crushing military defeat for Germany but, for her civilian population, became the psychological turning point of the war. The chief of the Gestapo, General Heinrich Muller, summarized the dissonance in the fuhrer’s headquarters:
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“Many older officers of high rank sabotaged Hitler’s plans.... Although I’m no military expert, I know that Hitler was right about military matters more often than these people. Hitler would issue an order, and because some general would find Hitler personally offensive, this officer would indirectly disobey the order. Then when a disaster occurred, the same man and his friends dumped the blame on Hitler. And they often lied right to his face.
Picture of: Panzer IV crews awaiting the order to advance against Russian positions during Citadel. Soviet sources greatly exaggerated the number of German tanks lost in the battle.
Believing Army Group South to be substantially weakened, the Soviets exploited their victory by opening an immediate offensive. The Germans rallied and inflicted a serious and surprising defeat on the Red Army at Kharkov in March 1943, stabilizing the German front. During late spring, the OKW began concentrating its best divisions for a new offensive with limited objectives. Two mechanized army groups were deployed around Belgorod and Orel to launch a pincer movement to destroy a Soviet concentration near Kursk. Hitler privately complained that the proposed Operation Citadel made him “sick to his stomach,’ though some of his best military strategists supported this unimaginative plan.” The OKW hoped to restore Germany’s prestige in the eyes of her allies, as well as morale in the armed forces, with a major victory.
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It also anticipated netting several hundred thousand prisoners who could be integrated into Germany’s industrial workforce. Citadel began on July 5, 1943. Passages quoted from the memoirs of German infantrymen in the first wave suggest that subversives in the OKH had betrayed this operation as well. Kurt Pfotsch, a grenadier in the Leibstandarte, wrote this: “The first day of the attack with a huge commitment of Panzers, artillery and elite divisions, dive bomber attacks and rocket launchers, such as never before seen in warfare, and we're stuck here lying flat till Ivan shoots us to pieces. I realize with a shudder, there’s no element of surprise! . . . It looks instead as though he knew how and where the German attack would take place:
Officers of the Waffen SS led by example, here fighting in the front line during combat operations at Belgorod.
Herbert Brunnegger, serving in the SS Totenkopf division, recalled that the day before the offensive, “Two deserters, waving a white flag, come over to us from the Pirol woods. . . . The deserters tell us what we still don’t know; the scope and exact timetable of our offensive!” During the battle, Brunnegger continued, “I learn from one of our artillery officers that this operation was already postponed twice because the attack schedule had been betrayed” Hitler called off the slow-moving, costly advance in less than two weeks.
The fighting at Orel-Belgorod coincided with Anglo-American landings in Italy. This compelled the OKW to transfer troops to the Mediterranean
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theater, so the Red Army went over to the offensive. It never relinquished the strategic initiative for the balance of the war. Traitors on the general staff continued to work for their country’s defeat. General Rudolf Schmundt said this of the plotters: “They stick together through thick and thin, sabotage the fuhrer’s orders whenever they can, naturally in such a way that the evidence never points to them. They’re always scattering sand in the machinery of our armed forces. Each one watches the other's back. Officers who don't belong to their clique they try to banish to some insignificant post.
In the summer of 1944, law enforcement authorities cracked the resistance movement and began trying the ringleaders for treason. One of the defendants, the former social democrat Wilhelm Leuschner, testified about a conversation he had once had with Ludwig Beck.
A general staff officer during World War I, Beck had become chief of staff in 1935. He had retired from active service before the second war, but the former general still intrigued against Hitler. His fellow plotters considered him the military head of the anti-government movement. Leuschner’s recollection of Beck’s words, quoted here, offer disturbing insight into the designs of these so-called Germans: “Beck explained that there are now enough people we can depend on in positions of command on the eastern front, that the war can be controlled until the regime collapses. They arrange, for example, retreats of their units without ever informing neighboring formations, so that the Soviets can penetrate the gap and roll up the front on both sides. These neighboring units are therefore also forced to retreat or are captured.”
The following illustrates what it meant to be captured by the Red Army, as Leuschner so indifferently described. In June 1944, the Soviets began a major offensive against Army Group Center. The Germans had shifted reinforcements too far south, to the sector where Gehlen had falsely warned that an enemy operation would take place. Foreign Armies East apparently took no notice of the 138 Soviet divisions and 5,200 tanks (in all 2.5 million Russian soldiers), massed opposite Army Group Center. The army group’s first general staff officer, a tenanted aristocrat named Henning von Tresckow, had gradually filled the entire staff with anti-Hitler officers.“
The Russian attack, Army Group Center’s report for the first day stated, was “a complete surprise, since according to the current evaluation of the enemy, no one presumed such massing of enemy forces. In the path of the Soviet juggernaut was the fully operational German 4 Army. Much according to Beck's recipe for defeat, it received no orders. Uninformed of the plight of neighboring formations, it suffered from an “inexplicable lack of direction” from the headquarters of Army Group Center. Tresckow made no effort to reestablish communications or to airlift supplies. His staff dispatched not one observation plane to reconnoiter the progress of advancing enemy mechanized forces, which would have been necessary for determining a retreat route for the 4th Army. The Germans lost a total of 350,000 men during the Soviet offensive, of which 150,000 became prisoners of war.
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Roughly half of these men soon died from shootings along the march to collection areas, starvation or neglect during the torturous rail journey, jammed into freight cars, toward the Russian interior. The Soviets paraded 57,600 survivors through Moscow. The mob lining the street cursed, threatened and spat at the helpless prisoners. This was the fate that Tresckow, Gehlen, Beck and company visited upon their countrymen who wore the same uniform.
Normandy
Throughout the struggle against the USSR, the German soldier fought in the Mediterranean theater as well. First engaged in Libya and in the Balkans, he eventually defended Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy against slowly advancing Allied forces. He also guarded Europe's Atlantic coast in preparation for the AngloAmericans long-heralded invasion. Until the Allied troops that were massing in England crossed to Normandy on June 6, 1944, the German garrison in France experienced comparative tranquility. Pre-invasion France was a suitable environment for subversive staff officers to reinforce their position without distraction. They transferred abettors to the corps and divisional headquarters where the armed forces were most vulnerable, and contrived to coordinate their sabotage with the Western Allies.
The resistance liaison agent was Count Helmuth von Moltke, a wealthy landowner hoping “to exterminate the National Socialist ideology.” He maintained contact with Goerdeler, Halder and Beck, and told an English acquaintance in 1942 that he and his friends consider a “military defeat and occupation of Germany absolutely necessary for moral and political reasons.’ Canaris sent Moltke to Istanbul the following year to establish contact with the Americans. There he met with two professors affiliated with the USS. intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
After the interview, the pair submitted a report to OSS chief Bill Donovan, describing “the readiness of a powerful German group to prearrange and support military operations of the Allies against Nazi Germany.’ The OSS drafted the “Hermann Plan,” based on negotiations with Moltke, which it forwarded to the Allies combined chiefs of staff. It stated that the German group is prepared “to develop as far-reaching a military plan of cooperation as possible with the Allies... so that rapid, decisive success on a wide front is secured.” Moltke’s accomplices offered to fly a general staff officer to England “to arrange with the western Allies the opening of the German west front” in case of a planned invasion.”
US. records on the progress of the negotiations remain classified to this day. Washington withholds the names of German contact persons and agents who never came to light through arrest by the Gestapo, post-war admission in personal memoirs and interviews or by accident.
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In October 1945, representatives of the U.S. military government in Germany and the War Department convened to discuss “views on documents which should be destroyed, or to which the Germans were to be denied all future access.” The conference chairman, Lieutenant Colonel S.F. Gronich, recommended, “Serious consideration must be given to plans for the organized destruction of papers which possess no value for the Allies, and... which must not be permitted to fall into German hands after the departure of the occupational forces."
Among the inaccessible records are those pertaining to US. collusion with German subversives before and during the Normandy invasion. The reader must decide whether incidents cited below, in which German command centers issued orders which were militarily incomprehensible given the tactical situation, are the product of pre-arranged sabotage or examples of gross misjudgment by well-trained and thoroughly experienced professional staff officers.
Prior to the beginning of Operation Overlord, the Allies’ code name for the invasion, the Germans possessed a communications, espionage and reconnaissance network capable of discerning the enemy’s plans well in advance; technicians in the German Postal Investigation Office had even tapped into the Atlantic cable. In early 1944, they monitored a conversation between Churchill and Roosevelt about the approaching landings.” At the same time, a specially-trained SD agent parachuted into England from a captured B-17 bomber. He had been reared in the United States, so the German-born operative could convincingly pose as a British officer of engineers. Arriving in Portsmouth, he visited unit after unit inquiring about how he could improve the troops’ equipment. He supplied Berlin with detailed messages regarding invasion preparations using a radio transmitting a virtually untraceable signal.
In April 1944, the U.S. 4th Division conducted a mock landing, Operation Tiger, at Slapton Sands, to simulate the planned attack on Utah beach along the Normandy coast. The German operative sent his superiors advanced warning of the exercise, where a large number of ships and troops would be concentrated in broad daylight. He even transmitted the precise location of the building where U.S. Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley intended to observe the maneuver. Though the 9th Air Fleet of the Luftwaffe had enough bombers available to launch a surprise raid on the Allied ships as the SD agent recommended, it neglected the opportunity.? On the second day of the exercise, German speed boats attacked on their own initiative, torpedoing four large landing ships, causing the death of hundreds of Allied troops.
The question of whether the Allies would land at Calais, where the English Channel is most narrow, or further south at Normandy, supposedly tormented German intelligence. In February 1944, an Arado 240 twin-engine observation plane joined the 3 Test Formation, an air force reconnaissance unit.
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Thanks to its exceptionally high speed, the Arado began safely flying two to three missions daily over English ports. Curiously, the Luftwaffe staff abruptly transferred it to Reconnaissance Squadron F100 on the eastern front in March, depriving the Atlantic defenses of this valuable spotter.”
Though incapable of the Arado’ performance, Messerschmidt 410 and Bf 109 combat aircraft were able to patrol the English coast during variable weather, descending from a high altitude to gain speed. The pilots identified hundreds of landing vessels assembled at Southampton and Portsmouthon April 25. They discovered no similar concentration in the English harbors of Dover and Folkestone, which were opposite Calais.
Along the Atlantic Wall, the Germans constructed massive concrete shelters to protect coastal batteries from damage by Allied aerial and naval bombardment.
German signals personnel monitoring enemy radio traffic between Plymouth and Portsmouth established beyond any doubt that these ports were the staging zones for an invasion army. Nevertheless, the general staff took no corresponding measures, such as transferring more troops to Normandy or laying nautical mines.” The Germans also employed a captured American Thunderbolt fighter to photograph the enemy ship build-up that spring. Shortly before D-Day, the Allied landings on June 6, however, the OKW suspended all reconnaissance flights over England without explanation.
At Tourcoing, headquarters of the German 15 Army, Lieutenant Colonel Helmut Meyer operated a sophisticated radio monitoring station.
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Its 30 specialists were each fluent in three languages. They intercepted English radio traffic on June 1, 2, 3, and 5 announcing the invasion. This discovery Meyer sent up the chain of command, but no one alarmed the front-line units.
In May 1942, Hitler had ordered the systematic construction of fortifications along the Western European coastline. In addition to large artillery emplacements reinforced by thick concrete walls, his plan called for a myriad of smaller steel and concrete structures. These included shallow, one-man wells to conceal machine gunners, bunkers for anti-tank or anti-aircraft guns, protected storage for munitions and shelters for personnel.
The building of this Atlantic Wall, defending the beaches of Calais, Normandy, and Brittany, consumed immense quantities of cement and iron, and employed thousands of artisans and laborers. In May 1943 alone, 260,000 men were at work on the project.”
Defending the coast was Army Group B, consisting of the German 7th and 15th Armies. The commander of the army group, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, believed that the invasion should be repulsed right on the beaches. Were the invaders to penetrate inland, the German army would succumb to their quantitative superiority and control of the skies.
The basic plan was that once the enemy landed, the coastal artillery and front-line infantry divisions would keep him pinned down until German armored formations could counterattack. The Allies intended to land 20,000 men in the first wave, and have 107,000 ashore by the second night of the invasion. The German 7 Army, which would bear the brunt at Normandy, was 128,358 men strong. Many were veterans of earlier campaigns, occupying numerous fortified, well-concealed positions constructed of solid building materials.
The 91st Airborne Division, comprising another 10,555 men, supplemented this force. The OKW subordinated the 4,500-man Parachute Rifle Regiment 6 to the 91th. This was a superbly trained and resolutely led formation especially suitable for combating Allied paratroopers. Supporting the 7th Army were three armored divisions comprising 56,150 men, and the Germans had three more Panzer divisions in France. By all estimates, the defenders, even considering Allied air power, had sufficient forces on hand to repel the invasion. In fact, the American chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, estimated that there was a 50 percent chance the Allies would be unable to hold the Normandy beachhead.”
During the final weeks before D-Day, German staff officers neglected opportunities to strengthen the Atlantic Wall and arranged troop and supply movements that substantially weakened its defensive capabilities. One German surveillance unit infiltrated French resistance cells with 35 of its operatives. They furnished Colonel Oskar Reile, the unit’s commander, with a list of lines of communications, power stations, rail and traffic junctions, and fuel depots the French planned to sabotage once the invasion was underway.
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In August 1942, an outnumbered German garrison held the French port of Dieppe against a 6,000-man Allied landing force. The Germans repulsed the surprise raid within hours, killing or capturing over 3,400 Anglo-American troops and shooting down 107 British planes. It was an ominous prelude to D-Day.
They also revealed the locations of where partisans intended to ambush German troops en route to the combat zone.
Reile delivered a comprehensive, written report to General Heinrich Stulpnagel, the military commander in France. The report included the prearranged sentences the BBC would broadcast to alert the French resistance that the invasion fleet is at sea. Stulpnagel, however, was secretly attempting to win the cooperation of this Communist-oriented terrorist organization for the coup against Hitler. He took no action on Reile’s information.
Rommel implored the OKW to release several million French-made teller mines in storage since the 1940 campaign. He wished to incorporate them into the network of wire obstacles along the beaches. After months of stalling, the OKW delivered them a couple of days before the invasion, too late to emplace. The Germans’ own coastal mines, equipped with both magnetic and pressure detonators and difficult to disarm, had been in production since 1943. Some 2,000 of these powerful explosive devices had been stowed in an underground airplane hangar at Le Mans, but instead of using them to mine coastal waters, supply personnel received orders to transfer the mines to Magdeburg, Germany, as a “precaution against sabotage.”
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On May 15, 1944, the German high command transferred the second group of Fighter Squadron 26 from Normandy to Mont-de-Marsan in southern France. Only days before the invasion, it also relocated elements of Fighter Squadron 2 to airfields around Paris. The Luftwaffe still possessed 183 FW190 daylight fighters in camouflaged bases near the coast, but on June 4, 26" squadron commander Joseph Priller received orders to fly another 124 fighters to French towns far from Normandy. Ground personnel and ordnance would travel there by truck, hence temporarily neutralizing the squadron's combat effectiveness.
Priller telephoned General Werner Junck, chief of the 2nd Fighter Corps and protested, “This is just pure insanity! If we're expecting an invasion, the squadrons have to be here, not gone away somewhere. And what happens if the attack takes place right during the move? ... Are you all nuts?” Junck brusquely replied that his irate subordinate cannot judge “important developments of state” from the perspective of a squadron commander.” On the morning of June 6, Colonel Priller and his wing man, Sergeant Heinz Wodarczyk, strafed the first wave of the Allied landing forces. Two FW190s were all that the Luftwaffe could scramble after years to prepare a defense.
Frequent Anglo-American bombing raids on German cities forced the Luftwaffe to deploy fighter squadrons to defend the Reich's air space. Weeks before the invasion, an operations staff prepared additional airfields in western France to rapidly transfer the planes to combat Allied landing forces. The plan called for temporarily shifting 600 fighters. Transport personnel then received orders to collect a portion of the fuel, munitions, and spare parts stockpiled at the provisional French airbases and move them back into Germany. As a result, only 200 planes could relocate to these runways, followed by another 100 on June 20th.
The plan initially envisioned the further transfer of most of Germany's night fighters. Their experienced pilots could have taken a deadly toll of the slow-flying Douglas transport planes (ferrying Allied airborne troops to drop zones) and the British four-engine bombers (towing gliders) hours before the amphibious landings began. Instead, the high command pointlessly shifted the squadrons back and forth between Holland and the Reich. During April and May, Luftwaffe bombers flew nocturnal missions against Portsmouth and Plymouth. A raid by 101 medium bombers on the night of April 30 caused considerable damage to Plymouth’s harbor installations, but on May 30, with the invasion armada congested and taking on troops and supplies, the Luftwaffe discontinued the missions.
The Germans concentrated a substantial amount of artillery on the Atlantic Wall, whose crews conducted frequent firing exercises. Many batteries rested in massive concrete bunkers that could withstand repeated hits from naval or aerial bombardment. Observation posts and range finders were in reinforced emplacements to direct the fire.
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However, ten days before D-Day, orders came to move over half the artillery ammunition into storage in St. Lo, and the crews of the observation bunkers received instructions to dismount all range finders for immediate shipment to Paris for inspection.’ On June 6, German coastal gunners had to fire on Allied warships by sighting down the barrel.
A coastal battery with camouflage netting. During the Normandy invasion, four battleships bombarded the fortified gun position at Houlgate. The battery sustained over 1,000 hits, some from 15-inch diameter projectiles and from aerial bombs, without serious damage.
Once the invasion began, the gun crews began receiving deliveries of ammunition from the St. Lo depot. The projectiles were often of the wrong caliber. One 88mm battery was issued a load of special rounds for spiking the barrels. On the day of the invasion, Rommel ordered the transfer to Normandy of the fully-motorized 3 Flak Corps, headquartered south of Amiens, but the corps commander, General Wolfgang Pickert, did not learn of the invasion until well into the afternoon. He first had to drive to Paris to get confirmation. His batteries, which were also effective against armor, did not reach the front until June 8 and 9. Even arriving late, the corps shot down 462 aircraft and destroyed over 100 Allied tanks.
One of the worst disadvantages for the defenders was the absence of senior officers the morning of June 6.
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The day before, the commander of the 7th Army, General Friedrich Dollmann, had ordered all divisional, regimental, and artillery chiefs to Rennes to take part in war games. He also personally postponed an alarm exercise for his army scheduled for the night of June 5/6. Had the drill run its course, the troops would have been on full alert when the invaders came. Other commanders were on inspection tours, hunting, or visiting Paris nightclubs.
Even Rommel was away. His chief of staff, General Hans Speidel, was an active conspirator, and had encouraged Rommel to return to Germany for a family birthday party. Among the few generals to remain at his post was Dietrich Kraiss, who kept his 352th Infantry Division on alert on his own initiative. Defending “bloody Omaha” beach, his men inflicted serious losses on the first wave of U.S. troops.
The trump card of the German defense scenario was armor. During 1943, the Waffen SS established two new tank divisions, the 9th Hohenstaufen and 10th Frundsberg. Formed into the 2 SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser, their mission was to help repulse an invasion in the West, and their training emphasized countermeasures against airborne landings. In March 1944, despite objections from Hitler, the OKW transferred the corps to the southern Ukraine to rescue General Valentin Hube’s surrounded 1 Panzer Army. Hausser’s divisions accomplished the task, but the supreme command kept them in the Ukraine as an army reserve. The OKW shifted the corps from sector to sector, performing no useful purpose and disrupting training.
Corporal Franz Widmann recalled, “Then comes the report from the western front on June 6 that the Allies have landed in Normandy. We, the Hohenstaufen and Frundsberg, who had drilled and prepared for this landing for months, sat around in Russia doing nothing and waited for the Russians to attack” Finally on June 12, Hausser received orders to return with his corps to France. The fatiguing rail journey across Europe ended over 150 miles from the invasion front. Since the June nights were short, much of the road march west took place in daylight. This not only exposed the vehicles to attacks by enemy fighter-bombers but the inordinate driving distance reduced engine life of the tracked vehicles by half."
The army’s most formidable formation was the Panzer-Lehrdivision. Its 229 fully operational tanks included upgraded Panzer IV’s and high-performance Panthers. The division had 658 armored half-tracks serving as personnel carriers or mounting anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers, flame throwers, and cannons. The OKW stationed this mechanized monolith nearly 100 miles from the Normandy coast. On June 4, the high command ordered the division to load its Panther tanks onto a freight train for transfer to Russia. They were en route east when the invasion began. “Taking away the Panther battalion robbed the division of its strongest attack force,” wrote its last commanding officer after the war." The U.S. Army later calculated that it averaged a loss of five Sherman tanks to neutralize a single Panther in combat.
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Picture of a German panzer grenadiers ride a Panther tank during the fighting in Normandy. The Panther was fast, maneuverable and well-armored.
With the landings under way, the Commander-in-Chief West, Gerd von Rundstedt, formally requested immediate release of the three armored divisions in Normandy from the OKW reserve for deployment at the front. From Hitler's headquarters General Alfred Jodl refused, explaining, “according to the reports I’ve received, this attack can only be a feint. .. . don't think now is the time to release the OKW reserves.” In Rommel’s absence, Speidel had persuaded the fuhrer’s headquarters by telephone that until the situation becomes “clarified,” the OKW has to “keep its nerve and wait.” Speidel confided in his own chronicle of the invasion that he “repeatedly updated Jodl on the situation” throughout D-Day.’ Rundstedt’s chief of operations, Colonel Bodo Zimmermann, telephoned the OKW to protest the senseless delay. The OKW’s Baron Horst von Buttlar-Brandenfels, another general conspiring against the government, shouted in reply, “You have no right without our prior permission to alarm the armored troops. You are to halt the panzers at once!”
The OKW posted the weakest of the three reserve armored divisions, the 21%; closest to the coast. Despite the urgings of its commanding officer to authorize an attack against British paratroopers who had landed nearby, Speidel delayed the order for several hours after the invasion had begun. The 21st suffered repeated aerial attacks and lost 50 tanks on the march.
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It finally advanced on direct orders from Rommel, who had just returned to Normandy. Speidel had stalled contacting his commander-in-chief until 10:15 am. The marshals arrival put an end to Speidel’s dilatory tactics. Speidel had however, effectively sabotaged the timely deployment of all three armored divisions. The third of these, the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, was on alert and ready to move at 4:00 am.’ In position near Lisieux, it received an order to transfer 30 miles further from the coast.
However, a new directive arrived for the division to about-face and advance toward Caan late in the afternoon. “That meant a change of direction, more time lost and for our strung-out armored unit, one more day's march under rotten conditions,” recalled the Panther crewman Georg Jestadt. “We had the impression that the whole movement of our army’s components was like an anthill someone had struck with a stick.” Jestadt reflected on the corresponding influence on morale: “Disappointment, even anger spread among the men. Almost every soldier saw that something here just isn’t right?
The modus operandi of various army staffers was to keep the troops on the roads as long as possible, often exposing the men to daylight strikes by Allied aircraft. As columns of the Panzer-Lehrdivision approached Caan, according to a surviving officer, “they were discovered by enemy aerial reconnaissance and a short time later attacked with machine guns, rockets, and bombs. .. . Soon black pillars of smoke from the burning vehicles revealed the route for fresh waves of fighter-bombers. Even today, many years later, recalling this march causes nightmares for everyone who participated.” The division lost ten percent of its armored vehicles before reaching the combat zone.
Simultaneously traveling to the coast was the non-motorized 277th Infantry Division. General Dollmann, aware of the good progress it was making by rail from southern France, ordered it to detrain in Angers and proceed on foot; a 14-day march to Normandy. The 277th"’s commander, General Albert Praun, drove ahead to Dollmann’s headquarters in Le Mans to have the order rescinded. There Praun observed the staff’s female telephone operators dressed in swimsuits, sunbathing in hammocks and on the roof of the bunker.
The OKW held back two armored divisions at Calais, the 2" and the 116", until too late for them to decisively influence the battle. Colonel Alexis Freiherr von Roenne, chief of Foreign Armies West and a protégé of Gehlen, sought to mislead Hitler, Rommel, and Rundstedt. He delivered bogus reports suggesting that the Normandy operation was a feint intended to divert German formations from Calais.” Two more transplants from the eastern front caused terrible consequences for the German defense at Normandy. These were General Wagner, remiss in shipping cold weather gear to the troops in 1941, and Colonel Finckh, who had mismanaged supply deliveries to Stalingrad the following winter. Finckh became quartermaster for Rommel’s army in June 1944. Almost immediately, deliveries to the
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Picture of The wreckage of a German column on a Normandy road, strafed by Allied fighter-bombers during the 1944 invasion of France.
front of fuel and munitions slowed down drastically. The German method of employing French waterways at night to convey materiel remained successful and undetected by the Allies until Finckh interfered. Under his direction, the artillery received just one tenth of its allotted ammunition, despite sufficient stores in the depots.’” Rommel wanted Finckh court-martialed.
Among the supplies that never reached the front, subsequently falling into U.S. hands, were 500,000 gallons of aviation fuel and 175,000 day’s rations for the troops, including 2.5 million cigarettes. What German soldiers did receive was often useless. At Carentan for example, transport planes airdropped provisions to Parachute Rifle Regiment 6. The German paratroopers, low on small arms ammunition, found some containers filled with condoms.’
Hitler believed that treason played a decisive role in the success of the Allied landings. Regarding the German defense of Cherbourg, Rochus Misch of the fuhrer’s staff recalled, “Pictures reached us from Sweden showing a German colonel in command of a bunker installation defending the invasion coast, toasting two English officers with champagne. Naturally without having fired a single shot.... Nothing, absolutely nothing worked right on the German side concerning the invasion. There was but one explanation; betrayal and sabotage.”!
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Picture of Both disabled, a German Panzer IV and a U.S. M-10 were photographed yards apart on a Normandy battlefield.
In his memoirs, Corporal Otto Henning of the Panzer-Lehrdivision attributes the fall of Cherbourg to “unknown individuals in the fuhrer’s headquarters,’ who stalled the transfer of fully equipped reserves to Normandy while the 7th Army bled. The eyewitness Henning’s verdict: “One can't avoid the impression that here, the most varied orders were intentionally twisted, while other, equally important orders were simply never forwarded.”
German headquarters staffers failed to alarm front-line units, air crews, and naval forces in a timely manner. They delayed counterattacks, issued frequently conflicting orders, and commanded anti-aircraft batteries to hold their fire during the Allied aerial bombardment of the Le Havre naval base. They transferred combat-ready formations away from the enemy, and plotted against their own government. Speidel, who in Rommel’ initial absence directed Army Group B during the critical first stage of the invasion, spent much of the morning of June 6 playing table tennis with fellow staff officers.
It is inconceivable that the German army in France, major component of an experienced combat force accustomed to fighting at unfavorable odds, could function in such chaotic fashion after months of preparation and rehearsal for a crucial battle.
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In January 1944 by comparison, withdrawing German troops in Italy occupied the Gustav Line south of Rome. Their engineers had begun fortifying it the previous October. Despite being outnumbered by Allied forces ten to one, with virtually no armor or air support, the German defenders held their position for four months. At Cassino, the key position on the Gustav Line, a New Zealand division spent four days trying to neutralize a single German panzer concealed in the ruins, suffering nearly 300 men killed. The Germans at Normandy possessed hundreds of Panzers and stronger, more systematically prepared defenses, yet forfeited the initiative on the first day of combat.
The “Good Germans”
So surreptitious (stealthy, secret, covert) was the German resistance movement, its ruinous influence may never have come to light but for a single incident. A bungled attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, prompted an ongoing state investigation. This exposed the conspiracy to sabotage the German war effort. It led to the death by firing squad, suicide, or execution after trial of 160 plotters. The would-be assassin was Count Claus von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of the Reserve Army since July 1, 1944. There were approximately half a million soldiers, trained and fully equipped, awaiting transfer to the front. In charge of the Reserve Army was General Friedrich Fromm. To weaken the field formations, he contrived ways to delay the deployment of the ersatz troops under his administration. During the first month of fighting in Normandy for example, the Germans suffered 96,000 men killed, wounded or captured. Under Fromm’s direction, the western army received just 6,000 replacements and 17 new tanks.
Stauffenberg represented Fromm at the fuhrer’s headquarters in Rastenburg during situation conferences. His job was to report on the progress of replenishing the combat divisions with reserve personnel. Stauffenberg understood his mission as the fabrication of plausible excuses for why only a fraction of the troops languishing in homeland garrisons were moving forward. An officer on Goebbels’s staff summarized the deceptive explanations Stauffenberg offered Hitler: “The air raids are responsible, he says. Then only the gas masks are lacking, next the NCOs still have some mandatory course, or a particular type of ammunition isn’t available, or rather can't be delivered because of the destroyed transportation network, an arsenal suffered a direct hit where the rifle bolts for a whole regiment were stored. ... Always at the last minute something gets in the way.” Stauffenberg’s conscious lies did not prevent him from telling fellow officers that Hitler was at fault for Germany’s military setbacks.
Stauffenberg concealed in his brief case a time bomb, weapon of choice for terrorists worldwide, and smuggled it into the July 20 conference at Rastenburg.
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He prudently left the session before the explosion and boarded a courier plane for Berlin. The blast superficially injured Hitler but mortally wounded a stenographer and three officers. Several other participants suffered injuries. Among those to die was Rudolf Schmundt; he had recently used his personal influence with the fuhrer to promote Stauffenberg’s lackluster career.’ Another victim was the staff officer Colonel Heinz Brandt, a member of the resistance whom no one forewarned of the day’s agenda.
Hitler holds his injured arm after a bomb attempt on his life on July 20, 1944. From left are Géring, Himmler, and cavalry General Hermann Fegelein.
At the OKW offices on Bendler Street in Berlin, accomplices awaited news of Hitler’s demise to launch Wéilkure, the coup to overthrow the National Socialist government. There among others were ex-general Beck, ex-general Erich Hoepner, ex-field marshal Erwin von Witzleben, and General Friedrich Olbricht. When Stauffenberg arrived, he told them that the commander-inchief did not survive the bombing. Olbricht therefore set the revolt in motion. Back at Rastenburg, General Fellgiebel, who was privy to the planned assassination, did not contact the Berlin conspirators to warn them of its failure. Instead, he was among the first to congratulate Hitler on his narrow escape from death.’ Fellgiebel was able to briefly block communications between Rastenburg and the outside world, but could not indefinitely disrupt telephone service.
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Hitler reached Goebbels in the capital. He also spoke on the line with Major Ernst Remer, commander of the Berlin Watch Regiment. He ordered Remer to arrest the conspirators.
One reason for the coup’s rapid collapse was the lack of cooperation the usurpers received from the army. Signals personnel on the Bendler block monitored the fuhrer’s telephone conversation. Aware of the circumstances, they did not transmit teletype orders formulated by the plotters to military units. Colonel Fritz Jager, a member of Stauffenberg’s circle, visited several barracks to muster a company of riflemen to seize the radio station, the propaganda ministry, and to arrest Goebbels. He could not find a single soldier willing to carry out his orders.
Stulpnagel and a handful of like-minded aristocrats supported the coup from their Paris headquarters. They managed to mobilize a battalion of German Security Regiment No. 1 to arrest members of the SD and the Gestapo, including the SS police chief in Paris, Carl Oberg, in their office. Stulpnagel’s associates persuaded the battalion's troops that the SD had rebelled against Hitler; only through this fiction did they gain the men’s cooperation. In Berlin, one of the teletype orders Witzleben drafted for the army falsely blamed “an unscrupulous clique of party leaders who are nowhere near the front” for the mutiny he himself helped instigate.
Military members of the resistance movement had no connection with the rank-and-file of the armed forces. “They have nothing within them in common with the German soldier; charged the Volkischer Beobachter on July 22.Major Remer wrote of July 20, “The presumed death of Adolf Hitler left all the officers and also the troops in a state of shock. Never in my life, even after the collapse (in 1945), have I witnessed such profound sorrow.’ In the opinion of a veteran of the 19 Panzer Division, the assassination attempt came “at the most unfavorable time imaginable, at a time when unified, firm leadership was essential. The troops felt this way regardless of their diverse ideological viewpoints, even among those who inwardly rejected Hitler. Everywhere we heard the expression, ‘stab in the back, and were relieved that the fuhrer’s central authority remained intact.” The fuhrer’s adjutant, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, stated, “In as much as the senior generals had lost that unswerving confidence in Hitler, in the same measure the ordinary soldier trusted in his leadership. I have no doubt that only this fact held the front together.”
Right after the assassination attempt, signals personnel at Rastenburg discovered Fellgiebel’s secret telephone line to Switzerland that had served to communicate military intelligence to Soviet agents. The Gestapo questioned staff officers, some of whom were already on the watch list, making arrests when suspicion of subversive activity surfaced. Colonel Below told the fuhrer of word received from his cousin: Since the round-up began, his army corps on the eastern front was finally receiving supplies at consistent and timely intervals.
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Discovery of the sabotage “totally depressed” Hitler, Goebbels told an associate. The fuhrer’s personal security officer, Hans Rattenhuber, said this to Giesler: “The betrayal of the fighting front hit him harder than the attempt on his life. He just repeated to us that he has long reckoned with being shot at by someone in this reactionary clique. But something this underhanded he never would have expected from an officer, certainly not this shabby betrayal of the soldier who risks his life every day for Germany.”!
In the past, Hitler had not acted on warnings from NSDAP subordinates about the general staff’s disloyalty. A military liaison officer in the propaganda ministry, Colonel Hans Martin, recalled that Goebbels claimed to “possess a great amount of irrefutable evidence that a defeatist attitude among many officers of the OKW, especially in the OKH, is assuming serious proportions.” The Fuhrer nonetheless shielded them from attacks by Goebbels and Himmler. The officers had sworn an oath of fealty to him, and “he firmly believed in their code of loyalty and honor,’ wrote another Goebbels aid, Wilfred von Oven.
Hitler expressed bitterness over the affair on July 24: “I took over the old officer corps just as it was, preserved its traditions, and respected them,” he told his staff. “I advanced the officers’ careers and their economic status whenever I could. I recognized their achievements and rewarded them. I promoted and decorated them. Each of them who reported to me I shook hands with as a comrade. And now every officer up to general who comes to me I have to have searched in a vestibule first, in case he’s bringing in some killing device like this Count Stauffenberg, who had nothing better to do than sneak a bomb under my conference table to rid the world of me and his own comrades.”!
The German public reacted to news of the assassination attempt “with horror and loathing,” the former Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan recorded in his autobiography. “In the evening I addressed the population outdoors in the cathedral square in Magdeburg. The whole town took part in this demonstration of loyalty, with deep emotion. It seemed to me that in view of the fateful, life-or-death situation of the war, the people stood behind Adolf Hitler as one.” The Lutheran bishop of Hannover, who was personally unsympathetic to National Socialism, publicly condemned Stauffenberg’s “criminal scheme. At Carlshof hospital, Hitler visited officers who had been seriously injured in the July 20 bombing. He offered General Karl Bodenschatz an analysis of the murder plot: “I know that Stauffenberg, Goerdeler, and Witzleben thought through my death to rescue the German nation. ... But these people really had no fixed plan of what to do next. They had no idea which army would support their coup, which military district would help them. First of all, they had not established contact with the enemy. I’ve even found out that the enemy refused their offer to negotiate.”
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Hitler after visiting Carlshof hospital, where he spoke with General Bodenschatz and other officers who were injured in the July 20 bombing. Adjutants Otto Giinsche and Julius Schaub accompanied the Fuhrer.
Hitler’s information was accurate. In April 1941, the Reich’s Foreign Office assigned Hans Buwert to manage France's Hachette Publishing House. In late 1942 the Berlin police chief, Count Heinrich Helldorf, and a general staff officer, Count Heinrich Dohna-Tolksdorf, brought him into Stulpnagel’s circle. Buwert met with Allied representatives during a trip to Spain and Portugal. “Contact with the Allies turned out badly,” he wrote later.
In the summer of 1940, the Churchill cabinet had adopted the policy of “absolute silence” toward the German resistance. Even before the war, the British Foreign Office had cautioned against such an alliance. In November 1938, Undersecretary Sargent had warned in a memo, “An open and capable military dictatorship could be even more dangerous than the NS regime.”
The subversives encountered another obstacle with respect to the United States. At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Roosevelt publicly announced that the Allies will accept nothing less than the Reich’s unconditional surrender. What this portended for Germany, FDR’s private notes from December 1944 reveal: “Whatever measures may be taken against Japan and Germany, they must in any case include the reduction of their industrial output, to prevent them from competing on the world markets against the English, French, Dutch, Belgians, and other exporters, and against us as well.”
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U.S. General Albert Wedemeyer wrote, “The western Allies made not the slightest attempt to divide the Germans by promising the enemies of the Hitler regime acceptable peace terms.”
The Allies’ attitude was no secret to members of the resistance movement. Count Ulrich Schwerin von Schwanefeld, a staff officer and determined advocate of Hitler’s murder, continued his intrigues even though acknowledging that FDR will not mollify surrender conditions." Just two days before Stauffenberg bombed Hitler's situation conference, the conspirator Otto John returned from fruitless negotiations with Allied representatives in Madrid. He informed his fellow plotters than even were the Fuhrer dead, unconditional surrender is still in force.
The staff officer Tresckow, who described Hitler as “a mad dog that has to be put down," also realized that the demise of his commander-in-chief would have no influence on the Allies’ war effort. Dr. Eugen Gerstenmaier, a former conspirator and president of the West German parliament after the war, stated in a 1975 interview, “What we in the German resistance during the war didn't really want to see, we learned in full measure afterward; that this war was ultimately not waged against Hitler, but against Germany.”
Right after Stauffenberg’s botched assassination attempt, British radio stations for Europe broadcast the names of Germans known to the English to be conspiring against Hitler.? This enabled the Gestapo to round up the subversives more quickly. A BBC editorial dismissed the coup as a product of Prussia’ military caste, the very stratum which the Anglo-Saxons are waging war to eradicate. The German people, the BBC continued, would be deceiving themselves to entrust their leadership to such people. Fritz Hesse, who monitored the Allied reaction, ventured, “Not much further and the English and American radios would have congratulated Hitler on his survival.’ The Fuhrer, shocked at the hostility manifest in some Allied news coverage, remarked to Ribbentrop, “These people hate Germany even more than they do me???
On July 25, John Wheeler-Bennett, a British historian assisting the Foreign Office in London, submitted a memorandum on the consequences of the recent events at Rastenburg: “It may now be said with some definiteness that we are better off with things as they are than if the plot of July 20 had succeeded and Hitler had been assassinated. ... The Gestapo and the SS have done us an appreciable service in removing a selection of those who would undoubtedly have posed as ‘good’ Germans after the war. . . . It is to our advantage therefore that the purge should continue, since the killing of Germans by Germans will save us from future embarrassment of many kinds,’ Churchill, Eden, and the Foreign Office staff accepted WheelerBennett’s viewpoint. An in-house analysis prepared by the OSS also regarded Hitler’s escape as a blessing, explaining that it robbed the conspiring German generals of the opportunity to dump the blame for losing the war on him alone.
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One German general who clearly understood the Allies’ outlook was Walter von Brauchitsch, commander of the army until December 1941. In April 1940, Halder had presented him with a written proposal to overthrow Hitler and reach a settlement with the West. Brauchitsch rebuked him with the words, “What's going on here is pure treason. . . . In wartime this is unthinkable for a soldier. This battle isn’t about governments anyway, but a battle of diametrical ways of life. So getting rid of Hitler will serve no purpose."
A Contrast of Motives
In July 1944, the armed forces journal Offiziere des fuhrers (Officers of the fuhrer) published an essay by Walter Gross of the Racial Policy Office. It presented the usual argument that bloodlines contribute more to a person's intrinsic characteristics and qualities of leadership than academics and material circumstances. With respect to the military, Gross added this: “On the fuhrer’s orders, the officer’s career became open to every German man without consideration of social origin and education. Some expressed misgivings. They saw this as the intrusion of a radical socialist principle, andadanger to the accomplishments and bearing of the officer corps. Dozens of times I’ve encountered objections to this National Socialist innovation; objections from those who point to the lofty, inherent value of a leadership class cultivated over generations of selecting the best from soldiers’ and officers’ families.”
Gross parried this protest with the observation that any traditional, exclusive system stifles the development of unexplored human resources within the nation: “Beyond such socially elevated families, there also rests within a people thousands upon thousands of individuals of comparable aptitude, submerged in the broad masses. They possess the same value to the community and are capable of accomplishing just as much in a particular field as the best of the old, cultivated families. .. .Wherever people with similar and equally precious qualities lie undiscovered, then it is possible and indeed necessary to find them, and place them in communal life. With the right training, they can achieve the utmost they’re capable of. .. . The standard for determining whether the inherent prerequisites are present or are lacking, is one and the same for both groups; it lies exclusively in accomplishing the task at hand”
When Hitler reinstated national defense before the war, the men occupying positions of command had entered service during the time of the old army. Many senior officers displayed little imagination or adaptability to warfare’s innovations such as armor, aviation, and elastic defense. Their shortcomings became especially apparent in the campaign against Soviet Russia. Some generals lacked the boldness, initiative, and raw nerve to outthink, outmaneuver, and outfight such an imposing military goliath and were dismissed.
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Replacing them were often men from ordinary backgrounds. Hitler himself stated in 1944, “More than 60 percent of the new officer corps rose through the ranks, creating a bridge to the hundreds of thousands of workers, farmers and members of the lesser middle class.”
Though deprived of imperial privilege, the scions of Germany’s distinguished families retained their ancestral honors, and found the same path of opportunity open to them as to all of their countrymen. Most men of their younger generation dutifully entered frontline service during World War II, doing credit to their traditional standing. The inveterate conservatives and reactionaries among the aristocracy gravitated to the diplomatic corps and to the general staff, where they could inflict maximum damage to the German cause at minimal risk. Solitary and aloof, the resistance movement allied itself with the only group capable of destroying the social revolution that had transformed Germany: the enemy. To topple a form of government, the subversives accepted the enemy’s war aims, with all the consequences for their own country.
During a session with the Western Allies in Madrid on April 17, 1944, the conspirator Otto John asked that the demand for unconditional surrender be rescinded. The Anglo-American representatives replied that they intend to allow the Russians to be the first to invade Germany and enter Berlin. The Germans deserve to be punished, they maintained, and the job was better left to the Soviets. The Russians discharged the task as follows: In October 1944, the German 4th Army repulsed an offensive toward Konigsberg in East Prussia by the Soviet 11th Guards Army. Recapturing Nemmersdorf, German soldiers discovered 72 murdered civilians, including the ravaged bodies of young women whom the Russians had nailed to barn doors.
In Schillmeyszen in the Memel territory, the German artillery gunner Erich Czerkus was among the counterattacking troops re-entering the village, which was his home town. This is what he discovered after the withdrawal of the Soviet 93 Rifle Corps: “I found my father in a barn, lying face-down with a bullet hole in his neck. In a stall lay dead a man and a woman with their hands tied behind their back, both bound together by a rope. In another farm we saw five children with their tongues nailed to a large table. Despite a desperate search I found no trace of my mother. While looking, we saw five girls bound together with rope. Their clothing was completely stripped away and their backs badly lacerated. It appeared that the girls had been dragged a long distance.”’ The Germans documented countless other atrocities.
The Soviets renewed the invasion of East Prussia in January 1945. They surrounded Kénigsberg. The German army conducted a relief operation beginning on February 19. Several German divisions, including the 5th Panzer, simultaneously attacked outward from the invested city. In the town of Metgethen, advancing troops recovered the bodies of 32 women whom the Russians had raped, murdered, and thrown into a shell crater. Master Sergeant Kurt Goring, a German tank commander participating in the attack, offered this testimony: “Then we reached Metgethen. We were appalled to see what had happened here. At the rail station was a refugee train standing on the tracks, with women and young girls. They had all been raped and murdered. We wrote on the side of the rail car, ‘Avenge Metgethen’ The fighting went on without quarter!
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Picture of: After driving the Soviets from a Prussian village in a counterattack, German troops discovered the mutilated corpses of civilians massacred by the Red Army. Soviet atrocities were commonplace throughout the war.
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Another eyewitness participating in local German counterattacks was Sergeant gunther Adam, who recalled this: “We attacked and recaptured a town displaying the same crimes of these beasts. On a snow-covered, trampled-down village street was what remained of a young woman. It looked as though she was wearing a fur coat. She was lying on her back, her arms and legs outstretched. (The Soviets) had run her over with a tank and crushed her. This bloody, ground-up mass was frozen solid and the most horrible thing I ever saw during the war.... In a house, we found some men who had been beaten to death. In blood-soaked beds were ravaged women, who were still alive. Then worst of all, we found the head of a baby spiked to a bed-post?
Red Army units overrunning German POW camps ruthlessly impressed the Russian inmates into first wave infantry battalions, or treated them as deserters. At the Alt-Drewitz camp, they fired on 30 American prisoners the German guards had failed to evacuate, killing some. This was the Soviet army, which Stauffenberg, Tresckow and their associates enabled to enter Germany.
The Western powers also waged war against German civilians, but from the air. In July 1943, the British Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army’s 8"
Air Force conducted several nearly consecutive bombing missions against Hamburg. In the bombardment 30,482 residents perished by being blown apart, incinerated, asphyxiated, or buried by rubble. Among them were 5,586 children. Fires destroyed 24 hospitals, 277 schools, and 58 churches. Trains evacuating refugees included passenger cars carrying grey-haired children, aged overnight from the terror raid.
Among the eyewitnesses was Gerd Bucerius of the resistance movement. In a Hamburg suburb, he watched the approach of the English bombers from his rooftop: “Finally, I shouted! Too long I have waited for the Allies to destroy the world-enemy Hitler. ... What horror, what sorrow, I naturally thought back then. But also, you dead want it this way. And whom did I worry about during the attack? The pilots! They were valiant and did what Thad hoped of them.” After the war, the U.S. Army conducted a survey of German morale. Responding to the query about what caused the population the greatest suffering under Hitler, 91 percent of Germans who were polled cited Allied air raids. Just two percent completing the questionnaire marked “loss of freedom” or “Nazi crimes.”’
“July 20 demonstrated that thoughts about high treason had no roots in the majority of the people? Schwarz van Berk summarized. “What deprived the would-be usurpers of the last grain of sympathy was the clearly apparent intention of those involved not to risk their lives for what they claimed was an urgent necessity in the interests of their country, but to personally survive and satisfy their ambition for future positions of authority.’
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This SS officer also emphasized that the Gestapo was not the force that maintained cohesion and kept the Germans in line. This, he argued, was an illusion nurtured among those opposing the government. “The people and the troops fought bitterly and doggedly in the awareness that this struggle was literally a question of national and personal existence. Especially on the eastern front, there were as good as no deserters in the front lines. There were practically no saboteurs on the workbenches in the armaments factories at home. ... The nation stood as never before in common cause, summoning all its moral strength to survive.
Of the 70 military officers implicated in the plot to overthrow or assassinate Hitler, 55 were aristocrats. This class-conscious clique resorted to sabotage, treason, and murder to achieve its ends. Also dissatisfied with elements of the Reich’s foreign and domestic policies were members of the Waffen SS. Youthful and idealistic, they fought both to preserve their continent from foreign invasion and for revolutionary change, not to restore anachronistic distinctions in title and rank of the former imperial age. The SS men promoted their social and political agenda through loyalty, service, and sacrifice. They gained influence through courage and commitment, working within the legal framework to reform rather than destroy the existing order. They were prepared to give up more than they expected to gain as individuals, for the benefit and growth of the European community.
A comparison of two persons, one an icon of the resistance and the other an ordinary German infantryman, illuminates the essence of the contrast: The son of a prominent psychiatrist, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer covertly assisted the Abwehr in its intrigues against the German war effort. His relatives traded profitably on the black market. Visiting Geneva in 1941, he told fellow clerics, “The Christian faith must be rescued, even if an entire nation must perish” (He apparently saw no contradiction in aiding the Soviets). ... “I pray for the defeat of my fatherland.” Nowhere near the fighting front, Bonhoeffer occasionally travelled and enjoyed a comfortable existence until April 1943, when the authorities jailed him for undermining the war effort.
In August 1940, the 17-year old Fritz Hahl volunteered for the Waffen SS. Assigned to the Wiking division, he saw his first action against the Red Army on July 1, 1941. During the balance of the war, Hahl was on the front line 861 days. He suffered seven wounds in combat. He wrote after the war, “Today I can no longer comprehend how as a young man from 17 to 22 years of age,
I found the strength to keep my self-control again and again, to conquer my fears and then continue fighting, and despite the setbacks still believe in a good outcome. One argument alone determined my actions and those of my generation: Together with my troops, like all German soldiers, we wanted to protect our homeland with its women and children from the Soviets — and without regard for ourselves.”
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Picture of: A volunteer of the Wiking division, armed with a captured Soviet sub-machine gun, on the watch for Europe.
The Legacy
Upon Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Allied occupational forces began the mass arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of thousands of Germans who had been variously affiliated with the National Socialist government. Among those detained was the renowned authority on international law, Friedrich Grimm. Ten years before, Hitler had solicited his counsel when planning to reinstitute compulsory military service. Now Grimm sat opposite an Allied officer who showed him samples of new leaflets printed by the victors. They were in German language for distribution throughout the conquered country. Describing German war crimes, the flyers were the first step in the re-education program designed for Germany. Grimm suggested that since the war was over, it was time to stop the libel. “Why no, we're just getting started,” the officer replied. “We'll continue this atrocity campaign, we'll increase it till no one will want to hear a good word about the Germans anymore, till whatever sympathy there is for you in other countries is completely destroyed, and until the Germans themselves become so mixed up they won't know what they're doing!”
The perpetual campaign of negative publicity kept old wounds open for decades.
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To this day, it precludes objective analysis of a system developed by one of our most advanced, productive, and creative civilizations, which raised it from economic distress and social discord after World War I to prosperity and harmony within a few short years. In the aftermath of the 1939-1945 war, which deeply scarred the countries that fought, decimating the younger generation of some, there is merit in exploring notable elements of the ideologies involved. The lessons learned may contribute to a better understanding among peoples for the future.
With respect to Germany, much can be gained from investigating not just what Hitler did, but why. Condemning the National Socialist state as a criminal abomination was the precursor to the present mindset that nondemocratic governments are unenlightened at best, as tyrannies withholding freedom from the population or as “rogue states.” To esteem liberal democracy as humanity’s crowning political achievement leads to complacency, diminishing in its supporters the self-critical eye so useful for correction and improvement.
Reform is a product of restlessness and dissatisfaction. This was the genesis of the Enlightenment, the intellectual challenge to the royal regimen that had barred the common people from opportunity. First to give political expression to new ideas were the American colonists, unaccustomed to immoderate authority, and the French, spirited and self-assured. Their governments shifted focus to advancing the individual, contrary to the monarchial structure maintaining the control of an exclusive, self-serving minority.
In Germany, the enlightened age evolved differently. The Germans’ contemplative, methodical approach led to a gradual integration of liberal values with elements of the old order. Flanked by powerful neighboring states, a strong central authority was still necessary to preserve national independence. Together with the unification of the Reich in 1871, liberalism enabled the Germans to mature and prosper. The royal house, unable to keep pace with the progress of the times, failed dismally in foreign policy and at waging war, and ultimately vanished in 1918. The Weimar Republic, shackled by crippling tribute to the Allies, was unable to restore prosperity.
Dissatisfied, the Germans turned to a new ideology. When Hitler came to power, which was by no means an easy and rapid process, he more or less occupied a political vacuum. He reached beyond democracy and the imperial era, reviving ideas of the German intellectual movement of the early 19th Century. The National Socialists promoted individual liberty, but not a laissez faire policy regarding commerce; profit and advancement at the expense of the community they considered detrimental and discordant. “Liberalism indeed paved the way for economic progress, but simultaneously abetted the social fragmentation of nations,’ concluded the protocol of the Science of Labor Institute's conference at Bad Salzbrunn in March 1944. “The starting point for any orderly society is the people's collective good; it subordinates all individual interests. It insures life and progress of the personality.
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Social policy can therefore not be limited to serve only the momentary advantage of particular persons or groups.”
Performing one’s “duty to work” was the prerequisite for belonging to the national community and benefiting from citizenship. This complimented the traditional German work ethic, which seeks fulfillment in creative endeavor and industriousness. The National Socialists defined education as “opening the road to social advancement.” Among the academic institutions were leadership schools. These based enrollment more on the sound moral character of the pupil than on scholastic performance. Stressing patriotism and communal service, discouraging egocentric or elitist attitudes, educators trained the young to place the welfare of all before personal gain, to respect group achievement over individual accomplishment. In this way, they hoped to produce future leaders who would not abuse their authority but sincerely regard the public trust as a sacred responsibility. These were values applicable for both political careers and in private enterprise.
No matter how promising a state form may appear on paper, the integrity of the men in charge significantly determines the benefit of its programs. Though he set the standards for the social and political structure of the new Germany, Hitler afforded subordinates considerable latitude to implement fresh ideas and modifications. He allowed competition among government agencies with overlapping jurisdiction. He intervened only after the rivals had demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of their opposing viewpoints, and then usually in favor of the more revolutionary solution.
Encouraging initiative, Hitler inspired unconventional thinking and risk-taking from those in authority. Thus he backed Fritz Reinhardt’s novel economic proposals against those of the conformist Schacht. The fuhrer cast his lot with Robert Ley, after years of his DAF leader's grappling with the conservative labor ministry over increasing expenditures to improve workers’ social welfare. He approved founding the Adolf Hitler Schools, which disregarded the ministry of education's curriculum and didn’t even teach the NSDAP program. Himself a nationalist, Hitler did not interfere as the Waffen SS gradually dismantled nationalism and challenged the racial policy of the National Socialist party.
At times, the German leader actually seemed reluctant to exercise the power he possessed. Even during wartime military conferences with the generals on his staff, some of whom he considered cowards, the fuhrer seldom dropped the hammer. Adjutant Colonel Below wrote, “Hitler rarely gave a direct order. He confined himself to persuading his listeners so that they would come to the same point of view. .. . After December 1941, when Hitler took command of the army, he only gradually accomplished his purposes through direct orders. He still tried to win conference participants for his intentions in part through lengthy explanations.”
Hitler sometimes displayed a willingness to acquiesce to contradictory viewpoints, demonstrating the latitude he granted party and state functionaries.
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In 1933, Reinhardt’s “Now Program” offered young women financial incentives to leave their jobs to marry and start families. This enabled outof-work men to fill the vacated positions, helping relieve unemployment. Once the work force was fully employed, the government continued sponsoring programs to keep women in the home, both to promote traditional family life and to maintain a healthy national birthrate. To be sure, prior to 1933 Hitler had already warned the NSDAP’s male members that he would not tolerate any further perceptions of women as “baby-making machines or playthings.”’” As chancellor, he facilitated opportunities for the female gender to pursue vocational careers, though restricting them from politics. Germany still maintained certain previous discrepancies, however, such as reduced salaries for women performing the same job as men.
During World War II, German women filled many positions in the armaments industry, on a lower wage scale, as more males entered military service. In April 1944, Ley, who had campaigned for equal pay for women for years, confronted Hitler on the subject. The fuhrer explained that Germany’s planned post-war social structure envisions women as the hub of the family, adding that this does not imply a negative opinion of their intelligence or occupational capability. Ley retorted that successful German women have a modern cognizance of their role in society and consider Hitler's ideas archaic. In the course of the meeting, Ley tenaciously defended his stand against an avalanche of counter-arguments his leader presented. The Fuhrer finally relented by offering a compromise, that women should receive less base pay, but be eligible for incentive awards and bonuses to compensate for the disparity.' In general, Hitler’s personal view had little influence on developments: In the winter semester of 1943/44 for example, 49.5 percent of students enrolled in German universities were women.
In most governments, politicians promising reform are the least anxious to implement it. Few of them wish to improve a system through which they attained prominence. Those who succeed in a particular political milieu are the mortal enemies of change. Hitler stood against this custom. A child of the working class, he led the NSDAP to power without compromising with democratic factions in the Weimar Republic. Once chancellor, he owed no loyalty to the political parties entrenched in the government or to special interest groups in industry and commerce. Though consolidating his authority, Hitler did not create a system designed to perpetuate it. Through frequent public speeches, he used his station to inspire the Germans with love of country, appreciation for the nobility of work, and a sense of belonging. He believed that once these values guided his countrymen, it would be possible to gradually relax state controls.
The government's role was not to secure the continuous supremacy of a dominant party or class, but to discover society’s more creative and trustworthy elements and promote their careers. This was to be an eternal process, guaranteeing that fresh blood and new ideas steadily flow forth from the wellspring of the population.
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Picture of: A young German woman employed in an ammunition factory. The influx of women into the armaments industry led to new laws in 1942 to protect them in the workplace.
Wrote the philosopher Nietzsche, who endeavored so ardently to kindle the German psyche, “When a nation genuinely leaps forward and grows, each time it bursts the cordon that had till then defined its repute and standing as a people. But when a nation retains much that is fixed, then this is proof that it prefers to stagnate.”
The Enlightenment instructed mankind that governments deserve obedience only insofar as they discharge their responsibility to serve the public. In democracy, Western civilization believes it has achieved the state structure that holds those in power to this obligation. Liberal nations more or less abide by this arrangement, no longer exploring or tolerating alternatives. Somewhere in their development, they stopped short of the comprehension that no single form of government is best for every age or for every culture. To be truly representative, a system must conform to the character and requirements of the people in its charge, and not vice versa.
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Hitler also accepted liberalism as important for nurturing the inventive impulse of humanity. He wanted each generation to advance and mature, every individual motivated to realize his or her potential while rising together as a community. He demanded two prerequisites: one, that society become educated in a spirit of civic responsibility, and two, that the state encourage profound reverence for German history, art and ethnic traditions, to keep his countrymen on the evolutionary course that molded them into a proud and unified people. The historically maligned leader of National Socialist Germany interpreted the duty of government as to foster, never restrict, the creative energy of a nation and to expedite its progress, for without progress there is no future and in the future rests the hope for a better life. This was the substance of Hitler’s revolution.
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Footnotes (see the book)