• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1194 0

only people who realized that Germany was doomed, and also possessed the power to do something about it, were its generals. Beyond the Army’s feeble attempt in July 1944, they failed to act upon their knowledge to save the German people from Hitler. This is the basis for their claims upon the contempt of history. On 10 September, two months after the dismissal of Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt as C-in-C West, he was once more summoned to Hitler’s presence and invited to resume his role. He was sixty-eight, and showing signs of age, stress and some over-indulgence in alcohol. He was taking a cure at Bad Tolz when Hitler’s message came. The lean, leathery old veteran tersely accepted recall to duty, observing later that he considered it his duty as a German officer. “Duty” and “honour” were words constantly on the lips of Wehrmacht generals, both then and afterwards. Yet von Rundstedt’s pretensions were crippled by his participation in the so-called Court of Honour which presided over the dismissal of many officers from the German Army for their roles in the July bomb plot, in most cases as a preliminary to their execution. Von Manstein, who was regarded for some years after the war as an honourable man as well as a brilliant commander, has been exposed by modern research as deeply implicated in massacres of Jews and prisoners in the east. He happily accepted large cash hand-outs from Hitler, which in a moment of sublime optimism he used to buy an estate in East Prussia as late as October 1944. If von Manstein, von Kluge, von Rundstedt and others had faithfully followed Hitler’s military instructions in the second half of the war, it would have been over much sooner. As it was, however, again and again they defied the Führer’s demented orders, in the exercise of their best professional judgement.

The deaths of some five million Germans, as well as those of millions more of their enemies and captives, may be blamed as much upon such “men of honour” as von Rundstedt, who continued to support Hitler and to direct his armies, as upon the Nazi leadership. He appeared a caricature of the aloof, unemotional, aristocratic Prussian General Staff officer. In the 1944–45 campaign, von Rundstedt was granted little latitude by Hitler. The field-marshal remarked acidly that he was permitted only to post the guards outside his own headquarters. Yet he continued to show outstanding gifts as a commander, directing the defence of western Germany against overwhelming forces, his Führer’s interventions foremost among them. There was nothing to love in von Rundstedt, but his professional skills commanded the respect of his subordinates and his enemies.

Militarily, Germany’s generals in the winter of 1944 could not escape a fatal conundrum. Even if Hitler’s decisions were demented and his refusal to sanction retreats condemned hundreds of thousands of men to die, what alternative strategy could be deemed rational, except surrender? Phased withdrawals to shorten the front and save troops from encirclement, which senior commanders constantly advocated, were militarily logical but offered no realistic prospect of changing the outcome of the war. The Allies profited at least as much as the Wehrmacht by every German withdrawal from a salient or abandonment of a beleaguered “fortress.” Guderian, von Rundstedt, Model and their disgraced comrades such as von Manstein knew that any course of action could only delay the inevitable. It is hardly surprising that a substantial number of senior officers in the final months suffered nervous collapses or shot themselves. The strain of presiding over carnage which could not save Germany, but which merely deferred the day of reckoning for the Nazi leadership, proved unbearable for many officers, save the most brutally insensitive such as Schörner. Most of the military leaders who continued to serve Hitler to the end justified themselves by pleading that they were pursuing the salvation of the German people from Soviet vengeance. Yet such claims can hardly explain the ingenuity and determination with which they