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By Root 1520 0

the Reich Chancellery, Arthur ‘Willy’ Kannenberg.2 If Hitler had been capable of something as unFührerlike as personal friendship, Kannenberg would have been one of his friends. The choice of gift could not have been more apposite, nor better timed. It had been Schlieffen who, as chief of the German General Staff between 1891 and 1906, had devised the eponymous plan for Germany to win a two-front war by a sweeping movement through Belgium, principally featuring a strong right-flanking enveloping movement that would capture Paris. He had died in 1913, a year before his plan was put into operation, and his last words are said to have been ‘Keep the right flank strong!’ Despite that, it was fatally weakened by his successor Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. The result was the four years of trench warfare of the Western Front in which Hitler had fought, and the two-front war that Germany was to lose.

Hugo Rochs wanted his book to be both a work of strategy and a ‘character study for the German people’, believing the Prussian aristocrat to have embodied the virtues of hard work, self-effacement and decency – Schlieffen had opposed the bombardment of innocent civilians during the Franco-Prussian War, for example – though it was not those lessons that Kannenberg hoped the Führer would glean from his victory gift.3 From the extensive marginalia in the book, it is clear that Hitler read and thought deeply about what Schlieffen and Germany’s past could teach the present. Thirty-two of his pencil marks cover the twenty pages of Chapter 4, entitled ‘The Schlieffen Battle Plan for the Two-Front War’, which warned of the dangers to Germany of fighting two wars simultaneously in east and west. Yet the professionally sycophantic Kannenberg had highlighted a passage which read:

But then again: as long as Schlieffen stood at the head of the general staff, the defence of the Reich lay in good hands. Schlieffen believed that he and his army were equal to any coalition. Rightfully so!… Schlieffen possessed the rare faith in victory that derived from the irresistible, invincible force that is shaped by the effect of a true leader – Führer – who, like a force of nature, crushes all resistance.4

This passage seems to make little sense: why ‘Rightfully so!’, when Germany lost because of the two-front war, and was therefore obviously not ‘equal to any coalition’? But if its ultra-nationalist message, complete with its reference to a ‘Führer’, was the message Hitler took from Rochs’ book, it goes some way towards explaining why he made precisely the same mistake as the Kaiser and Hindenburg in fighting a two-front war, at exactly the same time that he was also emulating King Charles xii of Sweden and Napoleon by invading Russia. For a man who prided himself on his historical knowledge, Hitler learnt little from the past.

The pencil marks the Führer made in the margin of Chapter 4 of the Schlieffen book also highlighted Rochs’ view that ‘Once the situation in France has been decided, the French–English army destroyed, and Germany stands victorious on the Seine, everything else will – according to Schlieffen – follow on its own accord.’ Rochs noted that Schlieffen knew he must ‘reckon with the entire Russian army as an additional enemy’ and fight ‘in the face of a Russian deluge’.5 Since Hitler most probably annotated this before ordering Keitel on 29 July 1940 to draw up plans for the invasion of Russia, these pencil marks, in the opinion of the historian of his bibliophilia, ‘represent the earliest recorded evidence of Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union’, at least since the pretty heavy hints he had made sixteen years earlier in Mein Kampf. So the plans to attack the USSR seem to have been formed in Hitler’s mind in 1940 while he was influenced by the idea that an unnamed Führer could ‘crush all resistance’ largely by the effort of his will to victory, ‘like a force of nature’, making this Führer and his army ‘equal to any coalition’. However unlikely it might sound, that is what happened.

To have attacked the Soviet Union without having