The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [330]
Nuremberg testimony therefore needs to be treated with extreme caution, especially such claims as that of Dönitz’s that National Socialism probably ‘would have collapsed soon after a German victory’.10 It was perhaps inevitable that the survivors should have blamed everything upon Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, Heydrich and Ley, who were conveniently all dead by the start of the trials. Admittedly some of the Nazis, such as Julius Streicher, who pronounced that Jesus Christ was ‘born of a mother who was a Jewish whore’, conformed precisely to type.11 Mainly, however, they argued vehemently that they had known nothing about the Holocaust, would have resigned if they had known that Hitler planned war, but could not do so after it had broken out, for moral and patriotic reasons. Yet for all their lies and claims to have stood up constantly to Hitler – as we have seen, Kleist even claimed to have outshouted him regularly at meetings – the fact remains that virtually no one resigned a position of power unforced, even when the war was clearly going to be lost.
Just as the Nuremberg defendants attempted to place total blame on the dead Führer for all the crimes of the Nazi state, so a slew of books written by the German generals in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to attribute the military defeat solely to him and his closest acolytes Keitel and Jodl. The phrase Lost Victories was even used by Manstein for his autobiography, a book that has – along with Guderian’s memoirs Panzer Leader – rightly been condemned as ‘arrogant’ and ‘self-serving’.12 The general thrust of this historical and autobiographical genre was succinctly summed up in the letter written in 1965 by General Günther Blumentritt, who had been purged from the General Staff in September 1944, despite not having been involved in the Bomb Plot:
Hitler was militarily speaking no genius. He was a dilettante, interested in small details, and he wanted to hold everything, stubborn, dour, ‘hold everything to the last’. He had no doubt also good military ideas. Sometimes even he was right! However he was after all a layman and acted following his feeling or intuition, not his reason. He did not know what was realistically possible and what was impossible.13
Stalin once described Hitler to Harry Hopkins as ‘a very able man’, but this was something that the German generals denied in a large body of literature that was published after the war.14 It has been suggested that the criticisms of Hitler’s strategy made by Franz Halder and Walter Warlimont stemmed from ‘the professional jealousy of a successful amateur’, and that the generals’ memoirs, taken together, constitute ‘the alibi of the incompetent corporal meddling in military matters he did not understand and preventing them from winning the war’.15
Although the German generals spoke much of their duty and honour after the war, in the event only a small number of them made one attempt to destroy Hitler with a 2-pound bomb, otherwise the vast majority served him with remarkable loyalty. Even Count von Stauffenberg’s plot seems to have been more concerned with getting rid of a useless strategist than a bold attempt to introduce democracy, equality and peace to Germany. Individually, the generals had good reason to carry on fighting to the end: Manstein ordered the massacres of civilians, Jews and POWs; Rundstedt sat