Hitler's Panzers
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Such concepts were best nurtured in an environment where the kinds and levels of friction inevitable in maneuvers conducted on large scales with conscript forces did not exercise a sobering impact. In the fall of 1930, the Reichswehr maneuver amounted to a full- fledged mobilization exercise. All ten divisions were included in the scenario, though for the sake of economy most were represented by their staff and intelligence sections. The maneuver nevertheless featured full telephone and radio nets, a postal service, and all the rest of a modern administrative system. It also incorporated simulated tank forces. The maneuver’s purpose was to test commanders and senior staffs. The emphasis was on challenging “fog and friction” by speed, maneuverability, and flexibility. The fast pace and complex scenarios resulted in high levels of confusion, duly noted by foreign observers. But the resulting melees in a sense reflected the outcome sought by a developing German doctrine for combat against superior forces: jump down their throats and kick them to death from inside.
The Reichswehr’s developing skill in motorized operations at both theoretical and practical levels was further highlighted in the maneuvers of September 1932, held in the area of Frankfurt an der Oder. The respective commanders would be heard from again. Their names were Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock. Blue, the defending force under Rundstedt, had two cavalry divisions and only a single infantry division. Bock’s Red invaders, intended to represent Poles, included an entire cavalry corps, with cyclists and motorcyclists, motorized artillery, and motorized reconnaissance elements. The combat vehicles and the motorized formations were almost all simulated. Results were mixed, particularly when horses and motor vehicles attempted to cooperate directly. But the speed and scope of the exercises impressed all observers. Some motorized units advanced 300 kilometers in three days—a pace unmatched since the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages. It would have been difficult to transform the Reichswehr into a defen sively oriented force—even had a government with the will and power to do so existed.
The army’s prospective mechanization was hardly a closely guarded secret. In a public lecture to a patriotic organization, Defense Minister Wilhelm Groener described a future army with a fully motorized cavalry, a developed system of antitank weapons, and a force of light and medium tanks able to support infantry and operate independently. This was by now a standard boilerplate. But considered in a wider context, it might seem surreal—along with this entire chapter. A German army expressly forbidden the use of aircraft and armored vehicles nevertheless systematically investigates, analyzes, and begins to implement in exercises the techniques of modern war. Instead the present text repeatedly refers to foreign observers taking notes at Reichswehr maneuvers, but does not mention their filing any specific charges of violating the terms of Versailles. Just what was going on?
Weimar Germany was a sovereign state. Its soldiers could not reasonably be prevented from speculating on the nature of the wars they might have to fight. When the issue came up, German spokesmen made a convincing case that the very circumstances of German disarmament required the Reichswehr to be highly cognizant of possible threats it could not match directly. In practical contexts, moreover, the Germans kept well to the treaty’s terms. The few dozen imitations and improvisations that took the field for a few days each autumn were hardly fear-inspiring, and were quickly dismantled. The collaboration with the Soviet Union was likewise known to the Allied agencies responsible for enforcing the armistice terms. Their combined contributions to Germany’s military system were correctly judged as marginal.
From the perspectives of France and Britain and from the perspective of the League of Nations as well, standing on details was considered counterproductive when compared with the prospects of drawing Weimar Germany into a general program of European disarmament. In 1927 the Foreign Office successfully negotiated the withdrawal of the Inter-Allied Control Commission, which since 1919 had supervised the nuts and bolts of disarmament. The diplomats saw this as a step toward national security in an international context. The Reichswehr considered it an opportunity to pursue and expand its programs in preparation of a bigger future. In the years that Adolf Hitler was coming to power in Germany, the Reichswehr would establish the foundations for a Wehrmacht that developed into a uniquely formidable instrument of war.
CHAPTER TWO
MATRICES
GERMANY BECAME AN official member of the League of Nations’ Preparatory Commission on Disarmament in 1926. The adjective, not the noun, was the key word in that body’s title. Its history is a story of gridlock. German policy makers were by no means secretive or cynical. They insisted openly and emphatically that collective security depended on equality of armed forces at mutually acceptable levels. That meant revision of Europe’s status quo not necessarily on Germany’s terms, but in Germany’s favor. Reducing numbers and limiting weapons—particularly the “offensive” weapons like tanks and aircraft, so often excoriated by disarmament advocates—could only improve Germany’s relative position.
I
DISARMAMENT OFFERED OTHER prospects. By the mid-1920s the Reichswehr was internationally admired for the quality of its personnel, the level of its training, and not least its high morale. Its numerical weakness limited its operational worth against its neighbors’ exponentially stronger conscript forces. Reducing those armies’ numbers would highlight the advantages of a professional, long-service force. And it would be the Reichswehr that possessed the advantage of direct experience with such a system.
By the mid-1920s Germany’s military helplessness in practical contexts was beyond reasonable denial. In the east, man for man and company for company, the Reichswehr might be exponentially superior to Polish conscripts. But what if the Poles kept coming until the Germans ran out of ammunition? German plans involved creating local volunteer forces as a second line. But the probable survival time of an SA Standarte or a Stahlhelm detachment against a Polish battalion in the open field was measurable in hours—perhaps minutes. In the west, the Ruhr occupation of 1923 and the bloody record of contemporary French imperialism from Syria to Morocco indicated that anything like the civilian-based Volkskrieg (People’s War) advocated by some enthusiasts might salvage German national honor, but at a price neither politicians nor soldiers were willing to consider.
A Truppenamt war game in the winter of 1928-29 was set in the context of a two-front war with France and Poland—hardly an illogical scenario. Even with allowances for Poland keeping strong forces to watch its Soviet frontier, even by incorporating projected possible augmenting of the Reichswehr’s force structure, the most favorable outcomes involved delaying actions fought in a militarily hopeless cause.
The Reichswehr was not “militaristic” in the sense made famous by Alfred Vagts. Its generals were not content to supervise drills, organize parades, and conduct elaborate exercises with simulated armies. The conclusion that increasingly permeated senior Reichswehr leadership was nevertheless simple and startling. Because Germany could not wage war, war must be avoided. As a corollary, revising Versailles by abrogating its disarmament clauses was likely to make Germany’s last condition worse than its first. A program of military expansion designed to raise the republic’s armed forces to the levels of even Poland or Czechoslovakia was likely to have a general ripple effect: an arms race forcing Germany into a competition it had no chance of winning, a stern chase to nowhere. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, there was no practical chance that Germany’s voters would underwrite such a policy in the absence of a tangible, immediate threat.
Substantive concessions on the issue of arms limitation would not have guaranteed European stability. They did offer a window of opportunity for continued, positive German participation in a modified treaty framework. But any serious steps to restoring Germany’s military strength in any parameters ran directly counter to France’s continued commitment to maintaining its security directly, through its own armed forces and a system of alliances. With economic and diplomatic independence in
creasingly becoming the new European order, with an increasingly factionalized polity influenced by increasingly strong anti-war sentiments, France was essentially unable to move toward a compromise with Germany on arms control even if the will to do so had existed.
By 1930 even internationally conscious Reichswehr personalities like Groener were growing frustrated by a policy seeming to offer nothing but indefinite postponements. The long-projected plans for expanding the Reichswehr to a 21-division force were made increasingly comprehensive. An initial Aufstellungsplan of April 1931 and a Second Armaments Program in early 1932 provided for assembling essential material: uniforms, personal gear, rifles, and machine guns. By 1933 about two-thirds of the hardware was in place. It was, however, easier to produce equipment than to find men. The Great War veterans as a class were getting long in the tooth for service in the combat arms. The Restructuring Plan of November 1932 offered placebos: integrating police units and volunteer home guard formations, enlisting a few thousand men for three-year terms, encouraging men to volunteer for a few weeks’ elementary training. An alternate prospect—and a corresponding challenge—was, however, emerging. And it was here that the army began finding common ground with the emerging National Socialists.
The Nazi Party has been compared by scholars to almost every possible human organization, even medieval feudalism. The one adjective that cannot be applied is “patriarchal.” Hitler’s public persona was that of leader, elder brother, perhaps even erotic symbol, but never a father. Change—progress—was the movement’s flywheel. Nazi nostalgia found its essential expression in domestic kitsch. It had no place in military matters. The Reichswehr and the “Movement”—die Bewegung, as the Nazis preferred to be known—thus had the common ground of emphasizing a commitment to the future rather than a vision of the past. Hitler’s initially enthusiastic wooing of the soldiers was based on his intention of using them first to consolidate his hold over both the Nazi party and the German people, then as the standard-bearers of territorial and ideological expansion until they could safely be replaced by the SS. The Reichswehr for its part also saw the Nazis as means to an end, albeit the more pedestrian one of increasing the armed forces’ resources.
National Socialist views of war differed in important, arguably essential respects from those of the Reichswehr. But on such subjects as anti-Marxism, anti-pacifism, and hostility to the Versailles Treaty, the military’s values were not incongruent with those avowed by Nazi theorists and propagandists. Those positions were also respectable across a broad spectrum of Weimar politics. Germany wanted normalcy in the years after 1918, but was unable to achieve it at the price of abandoning the illusions and delusions of the Great War. The gradual turn to Nazism that began in the late 1920s, represented a “flight forward,” an effort to escape that cognitive dissonance, as much as it reflected a belief in the Nazis’ promises to make things better.
The Reichswehr was not a fascist coup or a right-wing conspiracy waiting to happen. From its inception, the Reichswehr had regarded itself not as an independent player but a participant in a common national enterprise based on rearmament and revision. Refusal to identify the armed forces directly with the Republic facilitated the transfer of loyalties from the Empire. It enabled avoidance on one hand of the problems of a Soviet model of military professionals reduced to technicians while commissars wielded real power and, on the other, of the risks of saddling Germany with an officer corps of mercenary technocrats. Yet as the gulf between soldiers and politicians widened, as the Republic’s crisis deepened with the depression, few officers saw their responsibilities to the state in any but the narrowest terms. The results of the war game of December 1932, with its predictions of domestic collapse should Nazis and Communists combine against an overextended, outnumbered, and probably outgunned Reichswehr, were presented with a kind of malicious pleasure that reflected more than simple anti-republican sentiment. It suggested instead a fundamental detachment from a “system” that remained fundamentally alien to an army with its own independent, comprehensive ties to state and society.
In the early 1930s, Germany was being swept by a wave of popular militarism and quasi-militarism, extending across the political and cultural spectrum. The Communists’ Red Front Fighters’ League, the Social Democratic Reichsbanner, the right-wing Stahlhelm, and above all the National Socialist SA attracted increasing numbers of young men who thought they were tough and were willing to prove it. Beer mugs, lead pipes, and an occasional knife were not likely to intimidate external enemies. But however much Reichswehr planners and Reichswehr officers might dislike the revolutionary premises underpinning these organizations, the possibilities inherent in bringing storm troopers into uniform and under army discipline were too enticing to be ignored—to say nothing of the corresponding risks of leaving them to their own devices and those of their leaders, including Adolf Hitler.
The Reichswehr understood better than any army in Europe or the world that total war and industrial war had generated new styles of combat and new methods of leadership. The officer no longer stood above his unit but functioned as an integral part of it. The patriarchal/ hegemonial approach of the “old army,” with professional officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) parenting youthful conscripts and initiating them into adult society, was giving way to a collegial/affective pattern, emphasizing cooperation and consensus in mission performance. “Mass man” was a positive danger in the front lines. What was necessary was “extraordinary man”: the combination of fighter and technician who understood combat both as a skilled craft and an inner experience. The street brawlers of 1931-32 were promising raw material for a new military order. In passing, those would be exactly the qualities eventually cultivated in the panzertruppen.
Mechanization temporarily receded into the background with the Nazi seizure of power in March 1933. Or perhaps, better said, it was subsumed in the metastasizing of German armed forces under the Nazi New Order. One of Hitler’s first acts as Chancellor was to appoint General Werner von Blomberg as Minister of Defense on January 30, 1933. This reflected a wider bargain—Hitler openly acknowledged the Reichswehr as the leading institution in the state, and promised to initiate a general rearmament program. In return, the Reichswehr relinquished its long-standing responsibility for maintaining domestic order, giving Hitler a de facto free hand in Germany’s “restructuring.”
The next three or four years were the golden age—at least in public—of what Hitler called the “two pillars” rhetoric: the assertion that the armed forces and the Nazi movement were the twin foundations of a reborn Germany. Internationally, after a few months of smoke and mirrors, Hitler withdrew Germany not only from the Disarmament Conference but from the League of Nations in October 1933. In December he decided to triple Germany’s peacetime army to a strength of 300,000. Its 21 divisions would form the eventual basis for a field army of triple that number. The mission of that force was described as conducting a defensive war on several fronts with a good chance of success.
A long-standing critic of Groener’s position, Blomberg supported rearmament in a specifically military context. He was correspondingly willing to accept both the internal strains placed on the newly renamed Wehrmacht by forced-draft expansion and the international challenges posed by its precondition: the reintroduction of conscription. Hitler’s breaking of the SA’s power in June 1934 seemed to offer fundamental proof of the Führer’s good faith. By March 1935, when Hitler declared “military sovereignty,” the Truppenamt was projecting a peacetime force of 30 to 36 divisions, increasing to 73 on mobilization. By July the newly rechristened General Staff planned for a peacetime establishment of 700,000 by—a strange coincidence—October 1939. By 1936 the army’s projected war footing was 3,737,000 men in 103 “divisional units”—a force profile comparing favorably with France’s mobilized strength.
The Wehrmacht’s plans and projections heralded and structured the takeoff of a growth that rapidly became its own justification and eventually outran
both financial resources and production capacity. It also initiated an increasingly fierce competition with a newly created air force and a resurgent navy. In those contexts, theater was everything. And the army was not behindhand in showing off its bag of tricks. Oswald Lutz organized Germany’s first tank unit on November 1, 1933. Kraftfahrlehrkommando Zossen consisted of a single skeleton company with fourteen “tractors.” Another 150 chassis for training drivers were delivered in January 1934. In July, Lutz was appointed head of the new Kom mando der Panzertruppen (Armored Forces Command), with Guderian still his chief of staff. By November the original company had been expanded into a two-battalion regiment, with a second created at the training ground of Ohrdruf.
Adolf Hitler might have run for office in good part on the strength of his wartime service as a muddy-boots infantryman. But the Führer also had a predilection for high-tech displays. Hitler’s use of airplanes in his later election campaigns was as much for show as for convenience. His speeches approached the level of sound and light shows. And his fondness for muscle cars and fast driving was familiar. In early 1934, accompanied by Hermann Göring, he made what probably began as a routine inspection of new equipment. Guderian instead put on what later generations of soldiers would describe as a dog-and-pony show. For a half hour he showed off a motorcycle platoon, a platoon of the 37mm antitank guns just coming on line, a couple of armored car platoons, and the pièce de résistance: a platoon of the new training tanks. Chassis only, with no turrets, no armament, they nevertheless impressed the Führer. Guderian quotes him as repeatedly exclaiming, “That’s what I want! That’s what I want to have!”