Revolution Versus Reaction • CODOH (2024)

The following article was taken, with generous permission from Castle Hill Publishers, from the recently published second edition of Richard Tedor’s study Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs (Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, December 2021; see the book announcement in Issue No. 1 of the previous volume of Inconvenient History). In this book, it forms the sixth and last chapter. This is the sixth and last sequel of a serialized version of the entire book, which was being published step by step in Inconvenient History. This last installment also includes a bibliography, with more info on sources mentioned in the endnotes. Illustrated print and eBook versions of this book are available from Armreg at armreg.co.uk.

Fatal Diplomacy

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 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 oppress 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.”[1] 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 tenanted sensitive positions in public office and in the military. Major players included Leipzig’s Mayor Carl Goerdeler, Ribbentrop’s subordinates Baron von Weizsäcker, 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 smokescreen, Goerdeler covertly traveled 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.[2]

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, Weizsäcker falsely claimed the opposite, that Ribbentrop was advising the Führer that London was too spineless to seriously oppose the Reich.[3]

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.”[4]

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.[5]

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 Weizsäcker 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.”[6]

Thanks to his lofty position in the Reich’s Foreign Office, Weizsäcker knew that the Führer’s determination to recover the Sudetenland was no bluff. By encouraging London toward a showdown, he hoped to provoke an armed confrontation.

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 Weizsäcker’s mendacious claim that Ribbentrop was advising the Führer 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.”[7]

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.[8] Disappointed, Kordt declared that “the best solution would have been war.”[9] 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.”[10]

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 Weizsäcker and by most well-disposed Germans.”

Assistant Undersecretary Sargent summarized:

“Weizsäcker 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.”

Weizsäcker, the number-two man in German foreign affairs, contributed to the inflexibility of the other side.[11]

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.”[12]

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.[13] 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.”[14]

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.”[15]

General Gamelin told Benoist-Méchin:

“It doesn’t matter whether their armed forces has 20, 100 or 200 divisions, because when we declare war on Hitler, I anticipate not having to deal with the German army. Hitler will be ousted the day we declare war. Riots will break out in Berlin. Instead of defending the Reich’s borders, the German army will rush back to the capital to restore order…Then we’ll cut our way into Germany as easily and quickly as a knife through butter.”[16]

Right after the war’s start, Chamberlain noted in his diary:

“What I hope for is not a military victory – I very much doubt the feasibility of that – but a collapse of the German home front.”[17]

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 in the last days of August and very likely tipped the scales for the English decision to declare war.”[18]

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,[19] the unfaithful few often occupied positions in planning and logistics, enabling them to cause havoc disproportionate to their numbers. The Gestapo eventually maintained a watch list but was not authorized to investigate the army. This fell under jurisdiction of German military intelligence, the Abwehr. As a result, subversion of combat operations continued 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 circ*mstances and through whatever means necessary, even at the cost of a crushing defeat of the German realm, was our most urgent task.”[20]

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, were betrayed to the enemy by a staff member in the OKW before they even landed on my desk.”[21]

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.”[22] Chamberlain duly forwarded the document to Colonel Beck.

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 German army garrisons in Poland. Former SD General Schellenberg concluded:

“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.[23]

Among the loosely affiliated subversive groups, the Abwehr was especially destructive. Its chief, Canaris, was a master of disinformation. In his memoirs, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz stated that the Abwehr “delivered not a single useful report about the enemy throughout the entire war.”[24] 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. While married, he had become romantically involved with another man’s wife. Canaris reinstated Oster as an ersatz lieutenant colonel in 1935. When war broke out anew, Oster began drawing acquaintances hostile to the regime 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.[24]

One month later, Oster gave Sas the target date of the German surprise offensive in the West.[26] The Dutch disbelieved the information. Similarly instructed, Belgian Ambassador Adrien Nieuwenhuys opined skeptically:

“No German would do something like that!”[27]

Believing himself 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 to be “a better German than all those who run after Hitler.”[28] 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 Ilsemarie von Steengracht, wife of German diplomat Adolf von Steengracht. Only Ribbentrop’s intervention prevented Oster, the son of a pastor, from using the Abwehr’s resources to implicate an innocent woman for treason.[29]

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 1930s. Senior Abwehr officers 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.[30] 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 Führer 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.”[31] On the 19th, he announced his willingness to declare war on Britain, adding, “In this case, some support by Germany would be necessary for the attack on Gibraltar.”[32] Hitler could transfer troops to southern Spain to stage the expedition against the strategic English base.

Berlin sent Canaris to negotiate the alliance because of his good relations with prominent Spaniards and fluency in the Spanish language. In collusion with Weizsäcker, 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, wrote Spanish Foreign Minister Serrano Suñer,

“It’s more than possible that such a decision by Spain at this moment would have meant the end of the war.” [33]

With Germany’s position thus strengthened, Hitler would have possessed a more formidable hand when dealing with Molotov that November. He might 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. In addition to reading diplomatic correspondence, they gained knowledge of Russian armaments production, the location and capacity of the factories and shortfalls in industry.[34]

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.[35]

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.[36]

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 documents in Angerburg, East Prussia, never evaluated.[37] Military cartographers prepared maps of the East without referencing Rowehl’s pictures. Some they based on Russian maps that had been printed in 1865. The German army received inaccurate ones depicting dirt roads, which became impassable quagmires after rainfall, as modern, paved highways. This misinformation often confounded the tactical advance of German mechanized forces. They occasionally approached towns that were not even shown on the maps.

Shortly before the Russian campaign began, members of the German military mission in Romania had already 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 Dniester 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, Romanian 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. The evidence has to be on its way by courier today!”[38]

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 1941, it shocked German frontline troops. Its innovative sloping armor was too thick for German tank guns to penetrate, and it rendered German anti-tank ordnance obsolete.

While German intelligence concealed Soviet armaments capabilities 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.[39] An Abwehr liaison in Romania, Dr. Barth, told his associate Pemler:

“The leadership of the armed forces is grossly underestimating the strength of the Red Army. I personally can’t 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. I could tear my hair when the chief of the General Staff scribbles a question mark here, sending the report back for re-evaluation without informing the Führer.”[40]

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.”[41] After the conquest of Poland in 1939, he formed a secret planning staff to overthrow the government and placed General Heinrich von Stülpnagel in charge, who one German historian described with admiration as an “old-school European nobleman.”[42]

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 Führer. He deleted the assessment’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 of advancing German divisions. Based on this evaluation, the OKH did not allot formations to guard the southern periphery of the wetlands to screen the planned thrust of the German 6th Army and 1st Panzer Army toward Kiev.

Soon after hostilities broke out, the Soviet 5th Army, transferred south via Pripyat’s railroad network, assaulted the open left flank of the German 6th Army. This compelled Hitler to halt the advance on July 10. Military historian Ewald Klapdor concluded:

“The capture of Kiev by the beginning of July 1941, barely three weeks into the campaign, would have been entirely possible but was prevented by strong Soviet forces operating from out of the Pripyat marshlands.”[43]

Unable to continue the advance without infantry support from the 6th Army, the 1st Panzer Army became deadlocked in costly battles of attrition against frontally attacking Russian divisions for another seven weeks. Two months into the campaign, Hitler remarked that the entire operation would have been planned differently, had he known the enemy’s actual disposition and strength.

Once the invasion began, the Soviets received timely reports on German military operations from the Supreme Command of the Army, 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 Hans Gisevius, another of Canaris’s Abwehr “specialists.” He relayed the reports to Moscow. Other agents in Switzerland such as Rudolf Rössler participated, identified but tolerated by Swiss intelligence. The sophisticated espionage 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.”[44] When the SD finally shut down the spy ring in 1942, it 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 Aerial Armaments.

On June 22, 1941, the Red Army possessed 25,508 tanks, 18,700 combat aircraft, and 5,774,000 soldiers.[45] There were 79,100 cannons distributed among the 303 divisions deployed in the first and second waves. Hitler took on this force with crucial information withheld, his intelligence agencies consciously understating enemy resources, and spies 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 Führer received two weeks earlier had fixed Russian strength at just 50 rifle divisions and eight tank divisions.[46] On August 10, German soldiers overran the command post of the Soviet 16th 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.[47] 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.”[48]

Advance knowledge of German plans helped the Red Army embroil the invaders in heavy fighting 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. Halder fumed in his diary:

“The senseless operation now decided upon will scatter our forces and stall the decisive advance on Moscow.”[49]

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:

“Strategically, I saw in these flanking thrusts and envelopments the only chance of beating the Russian mass-formations and in this way avoiding costly frontal attacks. We were no match for the enemy either in the number of divisions or with regard to materiel, in tanks and heavy weapons… I had to literally wrest operations from my generals, even forcing them with stern orders. The result was four Russian armies beaten, there were over 650,000 prisoners taken. Not even this success persuaded my generals of the only possible strategy in Russia.”[50]

Weary of wrangling, the Führer 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 switchyards 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. 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!”[51]

The OKH gradually reduced Army Group Center’s striking power during 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.[52] 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.[53]

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 Wagener recalled, “The capture of Kalinin opened a great tactical opportunity for us. We now held the cornerstone of Moscow’s 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.”[54]

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.[55] 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.[56] 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 Milch’s personal supervision.

The OKH was no less remiss about advising Hitler of intelligence reports predicting a planned Soviet counteroffensive. 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. 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.[57]

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.[58] 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.”[59]

At the end of its strength, 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 of the strength of his armaments… and incomprehensible treason” as contributing to the German army’s first major defeat of the war.[60]

Despite the retreat before Moscow, the Germans maintained favorable positions for a 1942 summer campaign. Hitler fixed the main thrust toward the Caucasus Mountain Range, the oil fields and refineries of which supplied 80 percent of the USSR’s petroleum. He ordered Army Group South correspondingly reinforced. With the capture of Voronezh on July 8, 1942, the German panzer divisions were poised to cross the Don River, but the Führer initially forbade the crossing. Not wanting to weaken the offensive by splitting his forces, he commanded instead that the 4th Panzer Army turn south to join the main advance toward the oil fields.[61] Soviet formations in the south were in retreat and seriously demoralized.

German radio specialists arrested two former Polish army officers in a Warsaw suburb, who transmitted detailed information to Moscow about the Caucasus offensive. Abwehr officials, the rank-and-file of whom did not share the treasonous sentiments of Canaris and Oster, reported this to the Führer’s 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 Führer. He buried the news.[62]

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 Anglo-Americans’ 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.”[90] 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.”[91] Canaris sent Moltke to Istanbul the following year to establish contact with the Americans. There he met with two professors affiliated with the U.S. intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

After the interview, the pair submitted a report to OSS Chief William 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, assuming that the military information, means and authority available to the group is used in combination with an operation of the Allies of major scope so that rapid, decisive success on a wide front is secured.”[92]

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.[93]

U.S. 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. 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.”[94]

Among the inaccessible records are those pertaining to U.S. 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.[95] 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.[95a]

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 advance 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 from which 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.[96] On the second day of the exercise, German torpedo 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 narrowest, or further south at Normandy, supposedly tormented German intelligence. In February 1944, an Arado 240 twin-engine observation plane joined the 3rd Test Formation, an air force reconnaissance unit. 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.[97]

Though incapable of the Arado’s 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 Portsmouth on April 25. They discovered no similar concentration in the English harbors of Dover and Folkestone, which were opposite Calais.

German signals personnel monitoring enemy radio traffic between Plymouth and Portsmouth established beyond any doubt that these ports were the staging zones for the invasion army. Nevertheless, the General Staff took no corresponding measures, such as transferring more troops to Normandy or laying nautical mines.[98] 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 15th Army, Lieutenant Colonel Helmut Meyer operated a sophisticated radio monitoring station. 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 frontline units.[99]

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.[100]

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 frontline 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 7th 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 91st. This was a superbly trained and resolutely led formation especially suitable for combating Allied paratroopers.[101] Supporting the 7th Army were three armored divisions comprising 56,150 men, and the Germans had three more Panzer divisions in western 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.[102]

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 under way. They also revealed the locations of where partisans intended to ambush German troops en route to the combat zone.[103]

Reile delivered a comprehensive, written report to General Heinrich Stülpnagel, 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. Stülpnagel, however, was secretly attempting to win the cooperation of this very Communist-oriented terrorist organization for the coup against Hitler.[104] 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.”[105]

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, 26th Squadron Commander Joseph Priller received orders to fly another 124 fighters to Mont de Marsan in southern France, far from Normandy. Ground personnel and ordnance would travel there by truck, hence temporarily paralyzing 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? My ground organization can only reach the new location by tomorrow at the earliest or the day after tomorrow. Are you all nuts?”

Junck brusquely replied that his irate subordinate cannot judge “important developments of state” from the perspective of a squadron commander.[106] 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 of preparing 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 20.[107]

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 Lancaster bombers (towing gliders) hours before the amphibious landings began. Instead, the Luftwaffe operations staff ordered the night fighters to assemble in airspace well east of the coast, far from the drop zones. Post-war historians explain that Allied radio interference and ruses, including aircraft dropping strips of tinfoil to confound German radar, confused the enemy during the crucial phase. This, however, is a dubious explanation for the fighters’ misdirection on the night of June 5/6: Well before D-Day, the experienced German officers who directed nocturnal missions had been successfully guiding their aircraft to intercept RAF bombers despite ongoing, similar British efforts to disrupt them.

In April and May, Luftwaffe bombers flew nighttime 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 concentrated and taking on troops and supplies, the Luftwaffe discontinued the missions.[108]

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 rangefinders were in reinforced emplacements to direct the fire. 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.[109] On June 6, German coastal gunners had to fire on Allied warships by sighting down the barrel. Once the invasion began, the gun crews received deliveries of ammunition from the St. Lo arsenal. Projectiles were often of the wrong caliber. One 88mm battery was issued a load of special rounds for spiking the guns.[110]

One of the worst disadvantages for the defenders was the absence of senior officers the morning of June 6. 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.[111] 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 352nd Infantry Division on alert on his own initiative. Defending “bloody Omaha” beach, his men inflicted serious losses on the first waves 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 2nd SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser, their mission was to help repulse an invasion in the West, and their training emphasized countermeasures against airborne and amphibious landings with enemy air superiority. In March 1944, despite Hitler’s misgivings, the OKW transferred the corps to the southern Ukraine to rescue General Valentin Hube’s surrounded 1st 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.”[112]

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 columns to attacks by enemy fighter-bombers but the inordinate driving distance reduced engine life of the tracked vehicles by half.[113]

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.[114] The U.S. Army later calculated that it averaged a loss of five Sherman tanks to neutralize a single Panther in combat.[115]

Shortly before 10:00 pm on the evening of June 5, 1944, naval personnel manning the German radar station at Paimbeouf near St. Nazaire discovered a large concentration of ships making south from England. Radio operator Gerhard Junger recalled:

“It was clear to every one of us that the long awaited invasion had begun.”

The radar stations at Le Havre and Cherbourg also monitored the Allied armada, reporting its movement to the staff of the Commander-in-Chief West, Gerd von Rundstedt, in Paris. They further intercepted American meteorological predictions transmitted to U.S. bomber squadrons, which normally did not fly nocturnal missions. At 3:09 am on June 6, the navy reported “hundreds of ships course south” to the Supreme Command West.[116] The Luftwaffe signals company on the isle of Guernsey off the Normandy coast identified 180 Lancaster bombers towing gliders toward the mainland at 10:40pm. The commander of a German army regiment on the island was duly notified, and relayed the information to an adjutant at his corps headquarters in St. Lo.

Having hosted guests that evening at Army Group B headquarters in La Roche-Guyon, Speidel received word from General Erich Marcks’ army corps of Allied airborne landings in five different areas, another report from the Navy Group West of paratroopers dropping in sectors defended by the German 716th and 711th Infantry Divisions, confirmation from Major Förster about the situation developing near the 711th and a Luftwaffe report that 50-60 transport aircraft were ferrying in enemy paratroops.[117] Speidel did not alert his divisions. When Rundstedt’s staff telephoned Speidel for clarification, he replied that “the reports are considered exaggerations.” Army Group B Headquarters wrote them off as “possibly confused with flight crews bailing out.”[118] The commander of the 716th Infantry Division, General Wilhelm Richter, wrote that there was no alert until Allied paratroopers were already in action. The chief of staff of OB West, Günther Blumentritt, justified not sounding the alarm “to avoid unnecessarily disturbing the troops, who because of their physical exertions need time to sleep.”[119]

Once the landings were under way, 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… I don’t think now is the time to release the OKW reserves.”[120] In Rommel’s absence, Speidel had persuaded the Führer’s headquarters by telephone that this was not the time to act. He later summarized his arguments as follows:

“The issuing of operational orders in the first hours was out of the question, as long as reports and reconnaissance elements sent forward had not clarified the situation. We had to keep our nerve and wait.”[121]

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 alert the armored troops. You are to halt the panzers at once!” [122]

The OKW posted the weakest of the three reserve armored divisions, the 21st, closest to the coast. Despite the urgings of its commanding officer to authorize an attack against British paratroopers who had landed nearby, Speidel denied permission at 4:30am to commit the division’s panzer regiment. The formation remained concealed in a wooded area for hours. Finally released by the 7th Army to attack the drop zone, Panzer Regiment 22 began rolling at 8:00am. Speidel soon directed it to about-face and advance toward the coast, keeping the unit on the road and out of action for much of the day.[123] The 21st suffered repeated aerial attacks and lost 50 tanks on the march. It ultimately attacked on direct orders from Rommel, who had just returned to Normandy. Speidel had briefed his commander-in-chief on the situation in a telephone conversation at 10:15 am. The marshal’s arrival late that evening put an end to his chief of staff’s dilatory tactics. Speidel had, however, effectively sabotaged the timely deployment of three armored divisions. During mid-day on June 6, he also refused requests by General Max Pemsel to reinforce the hard-pressed 716th Infantry Division, defending the east bank of the Orne River, with elements of a neighboring formation. The division was practically wiped out by nightfall.[124]

The 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend was alerted by its commanding officer at 2:30am and by the OB West at 4:00. On his own initiative, Speidel sent the division in the wrong direction. In position near Lisieux, it received his instructions to transfer 30 miles further from the coast. “The order had a shocking effect” on the troops, wrote its first General Staff officer, Hubert Meyer, after the war.[125] A new directive arrived for the division to about-face and advance toward Caen 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.

“More and more contradictory orders came down from above, and 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.”[126]

Heinz Schmolke, a company commander in the division’s Panzer Grenadier Regiment 26, wrote later:

“The troops and frontline officers of all ranks knew back then that the enemy had to be driven back into the sea in his moment of weakness; that is during the first hours after the landings, otherwise the invasion would succeed. Therefore everything depended on alerting the troops in time…. My regiment only went into action on the third day of the invasion, although we could have engaged the enemy within the first three hours.”[127]

The modus operandi of various army staffers was to keep the troops on the roads as long as possible, often exposing the men to strikes by Allied aircraft. As columns of the Panzer-Lehrdivision approached Caen, 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.”[128]

The division lost ten percent of its strength before reaching the combat zone. Despite the protests of its commanding officer, Fritz Bayerlein, Dollmann had ordered the Panzer-Lehrdivision to advance on Caen at 5:00pm, in broad daylight, after having withheld its marching orders for nine hours.

Simultaneously travelling 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 commanding officer, 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.[129] In a meticulously researched post-war study of the German defense at Normandy, Ewald Klapdor, a former Waffen SS captain who had participated in the fighting, concluded that Army Group B displayed “no particular hurry in shifting divisions to the combat zone.”[130]

On D-Day, Rommel ordered the transfer to Normandy of the fully-motorized 3rd Flak Corps, quartered south of Amiens, but the corps commander, General Wolfgang Pickert, only learned of the invasion 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.[131] Even arriving late, the corps shot down 462 aircraft and destroyed over 100 Allied tanks.

One staff officer who played a primary role in thwarting German countermeasures at Normandy was Colonel Alexis Freiherr von Roenne. As chief of Foreign Armies West and a protégé of Gehlen, he sought to deceive Hitler, Rommel, and Rundstedt through bogus reports that the Normandy operation was a feint intended to divert German formations from Calais, further to the north where the real invasion was supposedly about to take place. General Eisenhower had hoped to mislead the defenders through Operation Fortitude, consisting of false reports about a fictitious “First U.S. Army Group” waiting in reserve in England to launch an invasion at Calais. Roenne came by this information as the Allies had intended. He forwarded it to the OKW, but not before drastically inflating the number of American divisions beyond even that which U.S. intelligence had fabricated on June 2. Receiving Roenne’s analysis, Speidel’s staff actually increased the tally further.[132] The assessments regarding the Allies’ disposition and plans that Roenne supplied to Army Group B were too consistently inaccurate to have been mere error.[133]

Evidence of surveillance refuting Roenne’s mendacious predictions never reached the Führer. At dawn on June 6, Lieutenant Adalbert Bärwolf flew a Messerschmidt Bf 109 Model G8 observation plane over the Allied invasion fleet. The photographs he took of the enormous armada off the Normandy coast should have dispelled any doubt that this was the only landing force. The General Staff of Army Group B took no action, nor did it forward the images up the chain of command.[134]

Speidel used the specter of a landing at Calais to prevent the transfer to Normandy of combat-ready reserves from the German 15th Army, in position on the northern flank of the 7th. This formation was one-and-a-half times the size of the 7th Army and included the 2nd and 116th Panzer Divisions. The latter was among the best-equipped in the German armed forces. More important, the 15th Army had 30 times the transport capacity available to Dollmann’s divisions at Normandy, even though it had shorter supply lines and was not in action. Speidel repeatedly refused to transfer any of these vehicles to support combat operations, explaining to dismayed field commanders on June 22, for example, that “according to all reports at hand, an attack against the channel front on both sides of the Somme (at Calais) is still expected.”[135] Speidel ordered the 116th Panzer Division transferred toward Dieppe, away from the fighting, on June 6.

One “report at hand” that Speidel neglected to mention was the capture on the afternoon of June 7 of Allied operational plans for the U.S. Army’s 5th and 6th Corps and for the British 30th Corps. Supporting a counterattack by the engineer battalion of the German 352nd Infantry Division and Grenadier Regiment 916, Cossacks of the 493rd East Battalion discovered the documents among the bodies of U.S. naval officers in an abandoned landing craft. Over 100 pages long, the cache revealed that the Normandy operation would be the only invasion. Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Ziegelmann of the 352nd delivered the find to his superiors. The headquarters of the 7th Army did not act on this valuable intelligence coup.

Staff officers transferred from the eastern front caused terrible consequences for the German defense at Normandy. In May 1944, General Wagner, remiss in shipping cold weather gear to the troops in 1941, attempted to transfer the entire stockpile of artillery rounds for the 352nd and 716th Infantry Divisions to an army ammunition depot far behind the lines. This was supposedly to increase the amount of munitions in reserve. Only the intervention of General Marcks prevented Wagner from carrying out this suspicious directive, which would have practically crippled the two divisions on D-Day.[136]

Wagner appointed Eberhard Finckh, who had previously mismanaged supply deliveries to Stalingrad, to quartermaster for Rommel’s army in June 1944. The 7th Army’s previous quartermaster, Colonel Hans-Wolfgang Schoch, was an efficient and experienced General Staff officer who had also commanded Infantry Regiment 741 in the Mediterranean combat zone. That Wagner would substitute Finckh right during the critical phase of the Atlantic defense is questionable at very least. Almost immediately, deliveries to the Normandy front of fuel and munitions slowed 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, just one-tenth of the artillery’s allotted ammunition was coming forward, despite sufficient stores in the depots.[137] The troops were receiving only one-fifth of the required quantity of other supplies. On July 2, General Alfred Gause reported from Caen that only three to five rounds per gun were available to German batteries per day.[138] Rommel assigned General Friedrich Dihm to investigate the bottleneck. Dihm advised Rommel of Finckh’s dereliction of duty. The field marshal 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 days’ 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.[139]

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 Führer’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 during the invasion. There was but one explanation; betrayal and sabotage.”[140]

In his memoirs, Corporal Otto Henning of the Panzer-Lehrdivision attributes the fall of Cherbourg to “unknown individuals in the Führer’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.”[141]

Gestapo Chief Müller, perhaps the best-informed man in Germany with respect to sabotage, said after the war:

“A great measure of the German military’s wretched performance in France after the invasion was the result of attempts by the conspirators and their friends to surrender to the Western powers or to let the Americans and the English pass right through our front lines, so that they would reach Germany before the Russians did.”[142]

German headquarters staffers failed to alert frontline 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’s 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.[143]

It is inconceivable that the German army in France, major component of an experienced combat force accustomed to fighting at unfavorable odds, could be commanded in such chaotic fashion after months of preparation and rehearsal for a crucial battle. 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 in some sectors 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.[144] 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 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.[145] In July, battalions stationed in Holland for the purpose of replacing losses to infantry divisions fighting in Normandy were transferred to southern France instead.[146]

Stauffenberg represented Fromm at the Führer’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. In short, the treachery here is that always at the last minute something gets in the way, so that the intended, final deadline for mustering the formations is missed.”[147]

Stauffenberg once told fellow plotters that their “allies” were Germany’s “military crises and defeats.”[148]

Stauffenberg concealed in his briefcase a time bomb, weapon of choice for terrorists worldwide, and smuggled it into the July 20 conference at Rastenburg. 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 others among the 24 participants suffered injuries. Among those to die was Rudolf Schmundt; he had recently used his personal influence with the Führer to promote Stauffenberg’s lackluster career.[149] Another victim was the staff officer Colonel Heinz Brandt, an opponent of National Socialism whom no one had forewarned of the day’s agenda.[150]

At the OKW offices on Bendler Street in Berlin, accomplices awaited news of Hitler’s demise to launch Wälkure, the coup to overthrow the National-Socialist government. There among others were the pensioned General Ludwig Beck, ex-general Erich Hoepner, who had been dishonorably discharged from the army in 1942 for insubordination and cowardice, the retired Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, and General Friedrich Olbricht, who was Fromm’s subordinate (Based on the examination of captured German records, the U.S. State Department later established that Olbricht had leaked military secrets to the Red Orchestra via Gisevius).[151] When Stauffenberg arrived, he told his colleagues that the commander-in-chief did not survive the bombing. The plotters 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. Hitler reached Goebbels in the capital. He also spoke on the line with Major Otto 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 Führer’s telephone conversation. Aware of the circ*mstances, they did not transmit teletype orders formulated by the plotters to military units. Colonel Fritz Jäger, commandant of a training facility for panzer crews and 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.[152]

Stülpnagel 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 offices. Stülpnagel’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 had helped instigate.[153] According to an analysis by a contemporary German historian:

“The plotters did not risk openly confessing that the coup was directed against Hitler, but argued instead to be acting supposedly in the name of the dead Führer against an ‘unscrupulous clique.’ They were themselves not certain in their own cause. They feared that most of the armed forces and the German people stood behind Hitler in their hearts and would therefore not obey them.”[154]

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 Völkischer Beobachter on July 22.[155] Stauffenberg, for example, had never held a combat command. His army driver, Karl Schweizer, testified later that the count had maintained a generous supply of wine, champagne, schnapps, liqueurs and tobacco at both his Berlin residence and his duty office in the War Ministry. Lieutenant Colonel Fritz von der Lancken had regularly procured these luxury items, unavailable to the frontline soldier or to the German public in the fifth year of war, for his fellow conspirator. Schweizer stated:

“I can scarcely remember a day in which he (Stauffenberg) did not consume alcohol.”[156]

The count had also arranged for frequent deliveries to his address of smoked eel, oil sardines and other delicacies through administrative contacts with North Sea fisheries.[157]

Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, senior official in charge of the Gestapo, SD and criminal police, prepared a series of confidential reports for the Reich’s Chancery analyzing the motives of the plotters. After the war, the former resistance member Friedrich Georgi judged the reports to be “absolutely sober and factual, if not of course one-sided.”[158]

Regarding Stauffenberg, Kaltenbrunner concluded in his September 23, 1944 report that the count and his circle of aristocrats

“pursued not only political objectives but social ones, namely to reinstate and maintain the privileged position of a select, socially-connected group of persons.”[159]

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.”[160]

In his post-war autobiography, Günther Adam, a veteran of the SS Hohenstaufen Division which was deployed in France that July, included his own recollection:

“That evening, after a day of combat, some young army officers come to us in our command post and tell us that there was an attempt on the life of the Führer that had failed. They said that senior army commanders had been involved. They ask in complete sincerity if they can join us, since they are too ashamed now to be officers of the army.”[161]

In the opinion of Rolf Hinze, a veteran of the 19th 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 Führer’s central authority remained intact.”[162]

The Führer’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 this alone held the front together.”[163]

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 its watch list, making arrests when suspicion of subversive activity surfaced. Colonel Below told the Führer 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.[164]

Discovery of the sabotage “totally depressed” Hitler, Goebbels told an associate.[165] The Führer’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 had 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.”[166]

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-Leo 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.”[167]

The Führer 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 aide, Wilfred von Oven.[168] Addressing the Rastenburg staff on July 24, Jodl told how whenever suspicions had surfaced about particular officers, Hitler had

“laughed it off good-naturedly and held his protective hand over the discovery, as for example in the case of General Fellgiebel, who had already brought attention to himself through some of his remarks.”[169]

The Führer expressed bitterness over the affair to his staff: “I took over the old officer corps just as it was, preserved its traditions, and respected them,” he said.

“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.”[170]

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 populace 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. For many, the miraculous failure of the assassination attempt was considered an act of providence.”

The Lutheran bishop of Hannover, who was personally unsympathetic to National Socialism, publicly condemned Stauffenberg’s “criminal scheme.”[171]

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.”[172]

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 Stülpnagel’s circle. Buwert met with Allied representatives during a trip to Spain and Portugal.

“As is known, contact with the Allies turned out badly,” he wrote later.[173]

In the summer of 1940, the Churchill cabinet had adopted the policy of “absolute silence” toward the German resistance.[174] 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.”[175]

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.”

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.”[176]

The Allies’ attitude was no secret to members of the resistance movement. Count Ulrich Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, a staff officer and determined advocate of Hitler’s murder, continued his intrigues even though acknowledging that FDR will not mitigate surrender conditions.[177] 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 Führer dead, unconditional surrender is still in force.[178] He ultimately acknowledged that

“Even when planning the invasion of France in the fall and winter of 1943, the internal German resistance against Hitler was no longer a factor of significance for the political and military strategy of the western powers, in contrast to the Résistance in France, which was nurtured by the western powers morally and with all sorts of supplies.” [179]

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.[180] 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.”[181]

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.[182] This enabled the Gestapo to round up the subversives more quickly. A BBC editorial dismissed the coup as a product of Prussia’s 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, a specialist on English affairs in the German Foreign Office, monitored the Allied reaction and ventured:

“Not much further and the English and American radios would have congratulated Hitler on his survival.”

The Führer, shocked at the hostility manifest in some Allied news coverage, remarked to Ribbentrop:

“These people hate Germany even more than they do me.”[183]

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 20 July had succeeded and Hitler had been assassinated… By the failure of the plot we have been spared the embarrassment, both at home and in the United States, which might have resulted from such a move, and, moreover, the present purge is presumably removing from the scene numerous individuals which might have caused us difficulty, not only had the plot succeeded, but also after the defeat of Nazi Germany… 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.”[184]

Churchill, Eden, and the Foreign Office staff accepted Wheeler-Bennett’s viewpoint.[185] 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.[186]

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:

“You shouldn’t have shown me this. What’s going on here is pure treason. This is out of the question for us under any circ*mstances… In wartime this is unthinkable for a soldier. This struggle isn’t about governments anyway, but about diametrical ways of life. So getting rid of Hitler would serve no purpose.”[187]

A Contrast of Motives

In July 1944, the armed forces journal Offiziere des Führers (Officers of the Führer) 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 circ*mstances. With respect to the military, Gross added this:

“On the Führer’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, and a danger 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 repose 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.”[188]

When Hitler first launched Germany’s rearmament, 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. Replacing them were often men from ordinary backgrounds. Hitler himself stated in January 1944:

“In what a rapid way the socialist restructuring of our national entity has progressed is demonstrated most strongly at present, during wartime… 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 lower middle class.”[189]

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.[190] The Russians discharged the task as follows: In October 1944, the German 4th Army repulsed an offensive toward Königsberg in East Prussia by the Soviet 11th Guards Army. Recapturing the village of Nemmersdorf, German soldiers discovered 72 murdered civilians, including the ravaged bodies of young women whom the Russians had nailed to barn doors.[191]

In Schillmeyszen in the Memel territory, the German artillery gunner Erich Czerkus was among the counterattacking troops re-entering the village, which was his hometown. This is what he discovered after the withdrawal of the Soviet 93rd 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.”[192]

The Germans documented countless other atrocities.

The Soviets renewed the invasion of East Prussia in January 1945. They surrounded Königsberg. 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 Göring, 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.”[193]

Another eyewitness participating in local German counterattacks was Sergeant Günther 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 impaled on a bed-post.” [194]

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 whom the German guards had failed to evacuate, killing some. This was the Soviet army, which Stauffenberg, Olbricht 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 8th 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.[195] An officer assisting in the evacuation of refugees described how some passenger cars carried grey-haired children, aged practically overnight from the terrors of the raid.[196]

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. He had conquered time and again until now… What horror, what sorrow, I naturally thought back then. But also, you, the dead, brought this on yourselves. And whom did I worry about during the attack? The pilots! They were valiant and did what I had hoped of them.”[197]

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.”[198] Schwarz van Berk summarized:

“July 20 demonstrated that thoughts about high treason had no roots in the majority of the people. 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.”

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.”[199]

Of the 70 military officers implicated in the plot to overthrow or assassinate Hitler, 55 were aristocrats.[200] 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 cause. Appointment to the Abwehr as a “specialist” allowed him to avoid military service. 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.”[201]

Nowhere near the fighting front, Bonhoeffer occasionally traveled 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.”[202]

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 a British 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. The interrogating officer, believed to have been the British propagandist Sefton Delmer, replied:

“Why no, we’re just getting started! 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!”[203]

The perpetual campaign of negative publicity kept old wounds open for decades. 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 short few 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 non-democratic 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 necessary 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, it needed a strong central authority 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 or 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 ensures life and progress of the personality. Social policy can therefore not be limited to serve only the momentary advantage of particular persons or groups.”[204]

Performing one’s “duty to work” was the prerequisite for belonging to the national community and benefiting from citizenship. This complemented 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 jurisdictions. 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 Führer 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 Führer 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.”[205]

Hitler sometimes displayed a willingness to acquiesce to contradictory viewpoints, demonstrating the latitude he granted party and state functionaries. In 1933, Reinhardt’s “Now Program” offered young women financial incentives to leave their jobs to marry and start families. This enabled out-of-work men to fill the vacated positions, helping relieve unemployment. Once the workforce 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.”[206] 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 Führer explained that Germany’s planned post-war social structure envisioned 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 Führer 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.[207] 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.[208]

At this time, many men were of course in military service, reducing the number pursuing a higher education. The war nevertheless affected young women as well, as thousands found employment in the armaments industry and in the agrarian economy, or in public administration as letter carriers, clerks and so forth. Others enlisted in the Red Cross to become nurses and nurse’s aides, or in the armed forces as auxiliaries such as telephone operators. As the war progressed, more German men were medically discharged from active duty and resumed their studies. The increasing percentage of women attending college demonstrates that neither government nor society restricted them from doing so, and that the National-Socialist dogma that only former soldiers who had served their country should advance to leadership positions was losing influence.

In most governments, politicians promising reform are the least anxious to implement it. Few of them wish to change 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 populace. 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.”[209]

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.

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 must 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.

Epilog

Upon finishing this book, the reader could ask why there is not a word about atrocities commonly associated with National-Socialist Germany such as book burnings, indoctrination, suppression of free speech, persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, hom*osexuals and non-German minorities, banning Freemasonry and most prominent of all, death camps where Jews were corralled and exterminated. One might conclude that focusing instead on Germany’s revitalized economy, social-welfare programs and the enormous domestic popularity of the man in charge, Hitler’s Revolution is biased in favor of the NS era. The author’s purpose in emphasizing its positive elements is not to present an imbalanced perspective, but to correct an imbalance.

There are countless books describing negative aspects of National Socialism. These are perpetually dramatized in Hollywood movies, BBC documentaries and indeed by the entertainment industry of practically every major power including postwar Germany. There is no reason to add another to the estimated 70,000 books published about Hitler that repeats this well-worn theme. For all of the information available, the reader cannot fully comprehend the spirit of the times without examining what caused Germans to back Hitler in the first place, why they ardently supported his administration, and why they stood by him after it became obvious that Germany could no longer win the war. This can only be understood in awareness of the beneficial programs Hitler introduced in his country, and what prompted his actions.

It should be mentioned that the image the Allies project of themselves is anything but impartial. As historian Thomas Mahl points out in Desperate Deception, London invested a fortune bribing U.S. journalists, publishers and academics during 1939-1941 to promote a pro-British, anti-German tenor. He quotes press magnate Ernest Cuneo, for example, as stating that English agents “smuggled propaganda into the country… covertly subsidized newspapers, radios and organizations, perpetrated forgeries… and possibly murdered one or more persons in this country” to turn United-States public opinion against Germany. Even school history books were replaced with revised editions that delete accounts of British atrocities committed against American colonists during the Revolution, and downplay the invaluable contribution of German immigrants to General Washington’s victory.

Western historians do not discuss the expulsion of long-time German residents from Germany’s then-eastern provinces (East and West Prussia, East Pomerania and Silesia, all taken by Poland), the Sudetenland and the Balkans that caused millions to perish following the war. They do not write about the years-long detention of German prisoners in primitive concentration camps after the surrender, again resulting in an extraordinary mortality rate from privation and exposure. They look the other way from the savagery of Soviet soldiers rampaging across East and West Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia in 1945. The victors have created a dumbed-down, good-versus-evil interpretation that endures to this day. Hitler’s Revolution is therefore not intended as a one-sided version of National-Socialist German history, but to offer information unfiltered by today’s prevailing, subjective viewpoint. This will allow the reader to judge the facts dispassionately, according to his or her powers of discernment and conscience.

Notes

[1] Ellenbeck, Hans, Die Verantwortung des deutschen Offiziers, p. 26
[2] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, pp. 25-26
[3] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p.146
[4] Ibid., pp. 168, 386
[5] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, pp. 27, 37
[6] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 171
[7]Ibid., p. 206
[8] Kunert, Dirk, Deutschland im Krieg der Kontinente, p. 218
[9] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 171
[10] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 62
[11] Klüver, Max, Es war nicht Hitlers Krieg, p. 175
[12] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 199
[13] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 234
[14] Ibid., p. 240
[15] Ibid., p. 239
[16] Ribbentrop, Annelies von, Die Kriegsschuld des Widerstandes, p. 385
[17] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 30
[18] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 252
[19] Remer, Otto Ernst, Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, p. 48
[20] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 59
[21] Ibid., p. 19822. Ibid., p. 92
[23] Schellenberg, Walter, Hitlers letzter Geheimdienstchef, p. 117
[24] Dönitz, Karl, Zehn Jahre und Zwanzig Tage, p. 247
[25] Meiser, Hans, Gescheiterte Friedens-Initiativen 1939-1945, p. 191
[26] Sudholt, Gert, So war der Zweite Weltkrieg 1940, p. 146
[27] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 132
[28] Ibid., p. 130
[29] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 425
[30] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, pp. 104-105
[31] Ribbentrop, Rudolf von, Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 288
[32] Schmolke, Heinz, Die Kriegsentscheidung, p. 10
[33] Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop, p. 289
[34] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, pp. 66-67
[35] Ibid., pp. 108-112
[36] Ibid., p. 69
[37] Ibid., p. 223
[38] Pemler, Georg, Der Flug zum Don, p. 79
[39] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p.67
[40] Pemler, Georg, Der Flug zum Don, p. 84
[41] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 79
[42] Schramm, Wilhelm von, Aufstand der Generale, pp. 38, 209
[43] Klapdor, Ewald, Der Ostfeldzug 1941, pp. 83, 116, 117
[44] Schellenberg, Walter, Hitlers letzter Geheimdienstchef, p. 253
[45] Musial, Bognan, Kampfplatz Deutschland, p. 459
[46] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 158
[47] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 162
[48] Ibid., p. 204
[49] Haupt, Werner, Kiew, p. 21
[50] Giesler, Hermann, Ein anderer Hitler, pp. 427, 429
[51] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, pp. 165, 170, 172
[52] Ibid., p. 179
[53] Ibid., pp. 186-187
[54] Ibid., p. 180
[55] Below, Nicolaus von, Als Hitlers Adjutant, p. 295
[56] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, pp. 223, 224
[57] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 186
[58] Haupt, Werner, Die Schlachten der Heeresgruppe Mitte, p. 125
[59] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 186
[60] Giesler, Hermann, Ein anderer Hitler, p. 426
[61] Sudholt, Gerhard, So war der Zweite Weltkrieg 1942, p. 113
[62] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 230
[63] Magenheimer, Heinz, Hitler’s War, p. 140
[64] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 279
[65] Zürner, Bernhard, Hitler Feldherr wider Willen, p. 154
[66] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 288
[67] Meiser, Hans, So wurde Stalingrad verraten, p. 158
[68] Remer, Otto Ernst, Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, p. 180
[69] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, pp. 306-307, 311
[70] Pemler, Georg, Der Flug zum Don, p. 169
[71] Meiser, Hans, So wurde Stalingrad verraten, p.215
[72] Uhle-Wetter, Franz, Höhe und Wendepunkte deutscher Militärgeschichte, p. 362
[73] Meiser, Hans, So wurde Stalingrad verraten, p.207
[74] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 260
[75] Uhle-Wetter, Franz, Höhe und Wendepunkte deutscher Militärgeschichte, p.363-364
[76] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 323
[77] Meiser, Hans, So wurde Stalingrad verraten, pp.219-220
[78] Schmolke, Heinz, Die Kriegsentscheidung, p. 9
[79] Uhle-Wetter, Franz, Höhe und Wendepunkte deutscher Militärgeschichte, p. 382
[80] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 406
[81] Zürner, Bernhard, Hitler Feldherr wider Willen, p.173
[82] Pfötsch, Kurt, Die Hölle von Kursk, p. 97
[83] Brunnegger, Herbert, Saat in den Sturm, pp. 228, 230
[84] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, pp. 233-234
[85] Meiser, Hans, So wurde Stalingrad verraten, p. 246
[86] Buchner, Alex, Ostfront 1944, p. 147
[87] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 233
[88] Haupt, Werner, Die Schlachten der Heeresgruppe Mitte, p. 272
[89] Hinze, Rolf, Ostfront 1944, p. 37
[90] Schramm, Wilhelm von, Aufstand der Generale, p. 29
[91] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p.155
[92] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, pp. 201, 204, 203
[93] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 155
[94] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, pp. 17, 207
[95] Schellenberg, Walter, Hitlers letzter Geheimdienstchef, p. 348
[95a] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, pp. 29-31
[96] Ibid., p. 32
[97] Ibid., p. 126
[98] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 28
[99] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, p. 57
[100] Zimmermann, R. Heinz, Der Atlantikwall, p. 20
[101] Griesser, Volker, Die Löwen von Carentan, p. 86
[102] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, p. 180
[103] Ibid., p. 37
[104] Schramm, Wilhelm von, Aufstand der Generale, p. 25
[105] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, p. 129
[106] Ibid., p. 47
[107] Ibid., p. 145
[108] Ibid., p. 144
[109] Ibid., p. 76
[110] Ibid., p. 78
[111] Carrell, Paul, Invasion—They’re Coming!, p. 122
[112] Widmann, Franz, Mit Totenkopf und Frundsberg an Ost-und Westfront, p. 150
[113] Tieke, Wilhelm, Im Feuersturm letzter Kriegsjahre, p. 114
[114] Ritgen, Helmut, Die Geschichte der Panzer-Lehr-Division im Westen, p. 102
[115] Post, Walter, Hitlers Europa, p. 466
[116] Schmolke, Heinz, Die Kriegsentscheidung, pp. 32, 36, 37
[117] Klapdor, Ewald, Die Entscheidung, p. 165
[118] Schmolke, Heinz, Die Entscheidungsschlacht, pp. 45, 46
[119] Klapdor, Ewald, Die Entscheidung, p. 164
[120] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, p. 86
[121] Speidel, Hans, Invasion 1944, p. 99
[122] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, p. 87
[123] Sauders, Hrowe, Der verratene Sieg, p. 129
[124] Klapdor, Ewald, Die Entscheidung, pp. pp. 136-137
[125] Meyer, Hubert, Kriegsgeschichte der 12. SS Panzerdivision Hitlerjugend, p. 62
[126] Jestadt, Georg, Ohne Siege und Hurra, pp. 138-140
[127] Schmolke, Heinz, Die Kriegsentscheidung, p. 65
[128] Ritgen, Helmut, Die Geschichte der Panzer-Lehr-Division im Westen, p. 105
[129] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie,, p. 97
[130] Klapdor, Ewald,, Die Entscheidung, p. 172
[131] Carell, Paul, Invasion—They’re Coming!, p. 122
[132] Klapdor, Ewald, Die Entscheidung, p. 125
[133] Irving, David, Rommel, p. 494
[134] Henning, Otto, Als Panzer-und Spähtruppführer in der Panzer-Lehr-Division, pp. 15-16
[135] Klapdor, Ewald, Die Entscheidung, p. 127
[136] Ibid., p. 121
[137] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 236
[138] Klapdor, Ewald, Die Entscheidung, p.127
[139] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, pp. 248, 112
[140] Misch, Rochus, Der letzte Zeuge, p. 164
[141] Henning, Otto, Als Panzer-und Spähtruppführer in der Panzer-Lehr-Division, pp.15-16
[142] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, p. 18
[143] Ibid., p. 236
[144] Nardini, Walther, Cassino, p. 311
[145] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat in der Normandie, p. 313
[146] Klapdor, Ewald, Die Entscheidung, p. 150
[147] Oven, Wilfred von, Finale Furioso, p. 401
[148] Landhoff, Werner, Die Opfer des 20. Juli 1944, p. 36
[149] Oven, Wilfred von, Finale Furioso, p. 402
[150] Schaub, Julius, In Hitlers Schatten, p. 266
[151] Georg, Friedrich, Verrat an der Ostfront, p. 87
[152] Remer, Otto Ernst, Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, pp. 36, 51
[153] Schramm, Wilhelm von, Aufstand der Generale, pp. 125, 114
[154] Landhoff, Werner, Die Opfer des 20. Juli 1944, p. 115
[155] “Schufte!”, Völkischer Beobachter, July 22, 1944
[156] Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, p. 416
[157] Landhoff, Werner, Die Opfer des 20. Juli 1944, p. 62
[158] Ibid., p. 61
[159] Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, p. 419
[160] Remer, Otto Ernst, Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, p. 27
[161] Adam, Günther, Ich habe meine Pflicht erfüllt, p. 294
[162] Hinze, Rolf, Ostfront 1944 p. 17
[163] Below, Nicolaus von, Als Hitlers Adjutant, p. 358
[164] Ibid., p. 393
[165] Oven, Wilfred von, Finale Furioso, p. 450
[166] Giesler, Hermann, Ein anderer Hitler, p. 442
[167] Martin, Hans-Leo, Unser Mann bei Goebbels, p. 68
[168] Oven, Wilfred von, Finale Furioso, p. 450
[169] Landhoff, Werner, Die Opfer des 20. Juli 1944, p. 219
[170] Kern, Erich, Adolf Hitler und der Krieg, p. 400
[171] Jordan, Rudolf, Erlebt und erlitten, p. 239
[172] Kern, Erich, Adolf Hitler und der Krieg, p. 403
[173] Schramm, Wilhelm von, Aufstand der Generale, p. 24
[174] Meiser, Hans, Gescheiterte Friedens-Initiativen 1939-1945, p. 268
[175] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 64
[176] Kurowski, Franz, Bedingungslose Kapitulation, pp. 61, 11
[177] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 318
[178] Remer, Otto Ernst, Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, p. 65
[179] Landhoff, Werner, Die Opfer des 20. Juli 1944, p. 220
[180] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 320
[181] Günther, Helmut, Von der Hitler-Jugend zur Waffen-SS, p. 228
[182] Meiser, Hans, Gescheiterte Friedens-Initiativen 1939-1945, p. 273
[183] Ibid.
[184] PRO FO 371/39062
[185] Klüver, Max, Die Kriegstreiber, p. 375
[186] Bieg, Hans-Henning, Amerika, die unheimliche Weltmacht, p. 69
[187] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 124
[188] Offiziere des Führers, 6/1944, pp. 12-13
[189] Post, Walter, Hitlers Europa, p. 374
[190] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 269
[191] Paul, Wolfgang, Der Heimatkrieg, p. 384
[192] Hoffmann, Joachim, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg, p. 292
[193] Kurowski, Franz, Bedingungslose Kapitulation, p. 181
[194] Adam, Günther, Ich habe meine Pflicht erfüllt, pp. 355-356, 358
[195] Kurowski, Franz, Bedingungslose Kapitulation, p. 66
[196] Paul, Wolfgang, Der Heimatkrieg, p. 191
[197] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, p. 265
[198] Czesany, Maximilian, Allierter Bombenterror, p.348
[199] Schwarz, Hanns, Brennpunkt FHQ, pp. 40-41, 192-195
[200] Remer, Otto Ernst, Verschwörung und Verrat um Hitler, p. 324
[201] Meiser, Hans, Verratene Verräter, pp. 104, 143
[202] Hahl, Fritz, Mit “Westland” im Osten, p. 161
[203] Grimm, Friedrich, Mit offenem Visier, pp. 248-249
[204] Neulen, Hans Werner, Europa und das 3. Reich, pp. 150-151
[205] Below, Nicolaus von, Als Hitlers Adjutant, p. 208
[206] Klüver, Max, Vom Klassenkampf zur Volksgemeinschaft, p. 186
[207] Ibid., pp. 192-195
[208] Holmsten, Georg, Kriegsalltag, p. 40
[209] Offiziere des Führers, 5/1944, p. 23

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Periodicals from National-Socialist Germany

Der SA. Führer
Der Schulungsbrief
Deutsche politisch-diplomatische Korrespondenz
Die SA.
Die Seeflieger
Germanisches Leitheft
Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte
NS Briefe
Offiziere des Führers
Soziale Praxis
SS Leitheft
Volk und Reich
Volk und Wissen
Wehr und Wissen
Völkischer Beobachter

Richard Tedor

Richard Tedor is a writer and Historian on the Third Riech. The title of bthese series of book ish*tler's Revolution, which has been said toprovidesconcise, penetrating insight into the National Socialist ideology and how it transformed German society. The government's success at relieving unemployment and its social programs to eliminate class barriers unlock the secret to Hitler's undeniable popularity which, in light of war crimes, seems so incomprehensible today. Documents from German, Soviet and British archives help illuminate the diplomatic atmosphere of the times and the challenge Hitler confronted when weighing foreign policy decisions for these series of books.
In this (Two hours and 6 minutes) video, we look at Europe in the Vice, and the effect that this had on National Socialist (NS) Germany. In the six years after Hitler’s Revolution in 1933, European peoples were, insanely, at war. Richard explains how it was the British Empire that was the prime reason for this fratricidal war. Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax feature prominently in this drive to war.

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Bibliographic information about this document: Inconvenient History, 2023, Vol. 15, No. 3; taken, with generous permission from Castle Hill Publishers, from the second edition of Richard Tedor’s study Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs (Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, December 2021. In this book, it forms the fourth chapter, with illustrations omitted, which are reserved for the eBook and print edition.
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