"Fighting a Lost War: The German Army in 1943" by Dr. Robert Citino

i have a difficult topic to uh to discuss this evening 1943 is probably the most difficult year of of world war ii to to write about for an author or indeed to to try to get a handle on and let me explain a little bit about why that is so a kind of preliminary remarks the attempt by the axis powers to win the war quickly which they all knew they had to do if they were going to win it at all before their enemies could muster superior resources had failed by 1943. those allied resources were now beginning to tell and yet that sounds clear-cut and yet axis forces had driven far forward enough in their initial offensives that they were sitting everywhere in strong defensive positions well forward from where the allies stood as 1943 dawned it was a long long way to rome berlin or tokyo the allies i think by 1943 could see eventual victory they did know they were going to win the war but they also knew by now that it was going to be a long and hard and very bloody road and in that sense 1943 is the hardest year of the war for all concerned since everyone's short war illusions had been shattered you know i thought about this a long long time and i i can't imagine ever in the history of of warfare that any military establishment has ever gone to a civilian masters and said you know what it's gonna be a long long war it's always the opposite it's always promised to be the opposite yeah we can do this how long it's gonna take well it's not gonna be it won't take that long it'll be over soon uh the classic trope of course is the war will be over by uh what what's the holiday the war's going to be over by christmas and then it's the war is over by next christmas bill clinton once famously told us that the troops would be out of bosnia by christmas christmas of 2057. now for the germans and i'm going to be concentrating my remarks on the germans tonight because it's what i know best the war had opened with an amazing run of uh victory from 1939 to 1941. every student of the war i suppose knows something about this chronology but there's poland in september of 1939. norway and denmark the scandinavian campaign france in 1940 and the low countries belgium and the netherlands the campaign in the balkans in 1941 over almost before it got started the germans overran yugoslavia and took about 800 000 prisoners and suffered 362 casualties then there was an air drop on crete perhaps the most exciting moment of this early phase of world war ii in which the germans carried out the occupation of an island solely by uh by airborne means alone which could not have made the british sleep all that well then there's the opening of operation barbarossa the first six months at least from june to december 1941 in which the germans inflicted no fewer than four million casualties on the forces of the red army in that period three million of them were prisoners in the largest battles of encirclement the germans have the term kessel schlocked the largest battles of encirclement that have ever been uh ever been affected uh the battle in front of kiev probably in september of 1941 probably took around 700 or 750 000 prisoners of war from the red army so the red army had essentially been at least red army version 1.0 had essentially been destroyed somewhere between june and december of 1941 and we'll talk about what might have happened in december in a moment now the formula for each one of these dramatic victories was essentially a long-standing german operational tradition now it's the b word in my business and it's not blitzkrieg uh which is a term with high sex appeal amongst the reading public in world war ii the german term actually is bevagong's creek which is a lot less well-known but it translates as the war of movement bavaigung in german as movement so the war of movement and the germans use that on the operational level that is to say the the movement the maneuver of large units uh of maybe division but core on up core armies and army groups so was bavaigung's krieg the war of movement on the operational level aggressive even reckless attacks on every target of opportunity concentric attacks seeking again what the germans called the castle schlock a castle is a cattle or a cauldron so it's a cauldron battle but really a battle of encirclement now by and so essentially i believe i have a britney spears mic so i can walk around you can hear me this is astonishing um essentially it's how how this map was created that is how the entire map of europe uh turned blue according to the map that you have here so the german star with the invasion of poland turned to the north in scandinavia to the west france and the low countries into the balkans and then of course the great campaign into the into the soviet union at this uh in june starting in june of 1941 it's how this map uh turned blue i believe there i have by the way for you tonight an amazing powerpoint of precisely two slides and this is the this is the second slide and it's called how all the blue got erased and this is essentially the process that starts in 1943. you know you can go to a publisher and say i have a book about dramatic military victories and the publisher is going to be all over that if you go to a publisher with a book say i want to write about disillusionment what are you going to call this book disillusionment that's a loser in the in the publishing world and so it was a little bit difficult getting this idea sold but it's it's how again uh map one turns into map two and 1943 is the crucial year for for that uh that development by 1943 in other words that run of victories was over and it was a dramatic run and it's so dramatic that i think there's still lessons to be learned both from for historians operators analysts of all sort can still study the opening years of world war ii with i think some some profit i don't pretend to know when the turning point of world war ii actually took place and i would ask you all to be as humble as i am in this particular instance and admit that you might not know either it's a big war it was a global conflict from the arctic circle to the south atlantic and pacific and claiming that one discreet event had turned it from german victory to german defeat is is probably a bit much was it 1942 november with the el alamein stalingrad nexus that is a big defeat for the germans deep inside the soviet union and a big defeat for the germans in in the western desert in north africa these events happened within a week of one another and and that's often been a really good uh candidate for turning point i wrote a book on 1942 and i went out of my way not to use the word turning point uh and and i remember it got picked up i was so lucky it got picked up by the the military book club and i remember saying i can put another daughter through college these are always big moments and a little brochure comes from the military book club many of you been members of it you know the brochure that describes the books and there's my book a featured selection death of the vermont robert citino big headlines turning point of world war ii i've gone out of my way but it's a it's a term that that people are sort of having instinctive yearning for what was the moment so it could have been 1942 and many people would say that it was it could have been december 1941 when the germans got smashed in front of moscow i i've i came of age in reading about world war ii in high school and i always remember the german army was stopped outside of moscow that's sort of what i learned then i studied it a little more and oh yes it was stopped in front of moscow and then it was nearly destroyed by a gigantic soviet counter-offensive stop doesn't even do it justice up till that moment the germans had taken very minimal casualties in the first two years of the war after the airdrop on crete when the germans an airborne division it dropped on korea they've taken some casualties four or five thousand men out of a twelve thousand man division so nobody should underplay that they were heavy casualties but but hitler said well we can never do that again that was too bloody that was too expensive the next month he invaded the soviet union and and every day brought casualties that probably were five times the number of casualties sustained on crete every day for the rest of the war and really that process comes to a culmination in front of moscow in december of 1941. a a relatively blah blah blah i'm exaggerating a war that had featured minimal casualties for the germans now suddenly generated 1 million german casualties and so if you're looking for a turning point in world war ii perhaps december of 1941 uh can be your choice but we can go further back perhaps hitler's decision to launch operation barbarossa in the first place that is to invade the soviet union up till now he'd had things his own way couldn't figure out a way to beat britain without a navy i might have wanted to think about that before he launched the war but nevertheless britain was no existential threat to the germans at this point either they didn't have an army to to get back to the continent and then hitler decided to attack his ally the soviet union and that's in june of 1941. july of 1940 and the german failure to act decisively against a wobbly great britain immediately after the fall of france heck maybe it was 1939 and the decision to launch the war in the first place which was to take on naval powers without a navy it's one way of describing the german strategic problem in 1939 i don't know i don't know what the turning point of world war ii was but i do know this by 1943 whatever slim chance the germans had five ten percent to win this war in the first place had slipped away germany first failed to subjugate britain and then saw its armies trapped in russia and then declared war on the united states in short it was now trapped in a war of attrition against superior enemies and it's hard to imagine a way out of that problem you see this is depressing i i admit here's the thing about 1943 though the war may have changed but it was the same old vermont the same old german army still trying to do the same thing it had done in the wars first three years perhaps the only thing it knew how to do and that was to fight maneuver warfare to fight bavegan's krieg on the operational level it was an army that stressed fighting power comfort is the german term over less glamorous aspects of war making like administration or logistics or intelligence or counter intelligence all of which were among the worst in the field in in world war ii polish military intelligence completely penetrated german counterintelligence before the war began sort of spirited out the german code making machine the the famous enigma machine while the germans have historically produced great philosophers of war like klausovitz supposed to applaud my seminar is here i know and they're supposed to be i accept those applause carl couldn't be here this evening to accept those applause there are great philosophers of war in the german tradition of course klaus of its uh hans von mulke uh general von zaked after world war one but the germans have also had an abiding respect for the man of action the money boots general the hard charger you can choose your metaphor world war ii field marshals like eric von monstein or eberhardt von mackinson or walter model were not so much brilliant theoreticians of war as they were highly aggressive practitioners of it and the same is true as you dive deeper down the chain of command the division and core commanders of the german army in world war ii deserve a lot more attention i think than they've gotten up till now there's a book waiting to be uh written there let me give you an example general paul konrad who is not a household name even to readers of books about world war ii but he commanded the hermann gehring parachute panzer division in the camp the sicilian campaign the allied landing on sicily when i was a young boy a parachute panzer division was something i wanted to see in action i've since found out they did not drop the tanks out of the back of a transport and i've lost a bit of my uh a bit of my romance it was a lo it was a ground division with luftwaffe personnel so designation parachute now this was the division that gave the us army all that it could handle during the invasion of sicily konrath once summed up his art of war in what i would consider to be some fairly non-artistic terms he was talking to his superior a field marshall kessel ring who was the commander-in-chief of the mediterranean theater and kessel ring said conrad that you're ready the allies are going to land in sicily are you ready and conroth answered pretty much words that should be immortal you want an immediate reckless rush at the enemy i'm your man now that phrase sums up the army's operational proceed for 1943. this was a rotten year across the board at sea the allies finally managed to bring the u-boat threat under control and the big month there black month of the german u-boats may of 1943 new tech new sonar technologies new convoy techniques and the u-boats uh several dozen u-boats were sunk in that single month of only maybe 120 in the in the water at the time likewise in the air despite a slow start to the combined bomber offensive the allies torched their first great german city in the summer in 1943 it was hamburg the first but of course not the last to suffer that fate now despite what was looking more and more like strategic collapse the army spent the year on the attack almost everywhere in 1943. in early uh 1943 march the end of the 4243 winter sequence field marshall monstein launched a contra stroke of karkov that smashed a pair of soviet armies in july there was the great offensive at kursk operation citadel there was a series of german offensives in tunisia with the blow against the us army at the kasserine pass in february being the best known it was the first time the americans had met the germans in battle and the results were not exactly encouraging for the allies there were some hard words from our our british ally after the after the relatively inept opening to the kasserine pass operational sequence began referring to the us the u.s soldier the us infantryman as alice calling the american army our italians i'm italian so i can get away with that but it was those are fighting words of course between allies in july the allies invaded sicily uh operation husky so what we're doing here is coming up from victory and eventual allied victory in tunisia up to sicily and from there to uh from there to italy operation husky was a success eventually within weeks the first day and a half or very very sketchy indeed the the la the american force that landed in south central sicily near the town of jayla uh wound up with a german panzer division sort of in its face within hours of the landing you know the nightmare for up for amphibious troops is that there's some formed unit within the day's march of the beach that can hit the landed troops before they've really uh coalesced into a solid beachhead that's precisely what happened to the americans at sicily and and that is courtesy of general konrad of the hermann gary parachute panzer division reckless a mad reckless rush at the enemy he said i'm your man and that's what the americans had to put up with at on sicily in september they they the allies not just the americans followed up the sicilian invasion by invading mainland italy and this is operation avalanche this time the u.s landing force at salerno got six german panzer or mechanized divisions in their face within the opening days of that campaign and came very close to being driven into the sea probably as close as any uh amphibious force in the european theater in world war ii came to actually being driven into the sea that is to say their commander was cons was seriously considering evacuating his headquarters and that'd be general who that would be general mark clark i i i teach in texas now my family lives in denton texas i'm a faculty member at the university of north texas and i once gave a talk down there and i i said some things about mark clark that were relatively favorable in texas i will never make that mistake again i'll be happy to go into the gory details if you'd like to know i survived the encounter but just barely again it came the americans at solerno came very close to being driven back into the sea uh i said clark was considering evacuating the german commanders on the site sent dispatchers that said the americans are leaving it certainly looked like an evacuation was in process in other words in 1943 in every way it was the same old vermont always aggressive whether the aggression was necessarily wise or not and with a tight focus on the immediate enemy leaving broader strategic questions more or less untouched now that's what the germans did in 1943 but i think there's a bigger question and the question is what might they have been thinking and this my most recent book is a piece called the the vermont retreats and it's about this 1943 year and you know tunisia is a fairly well-known operation katharine pass has been an american obsession sicily big amphibious op people love reading about that nice self-contained campaign several weeks in duration then there's the drama in italy mark clark salerno rick atkinson did this up in style in his book the day of battle if you've never had a chance to read atkinson's the day of battle i urge you to do it before you go to bed tonight sometimes it's an assignment because it's a nice big big book people know those campaigns and operations pretty well but i don't think what has gotten perhaps sufficient attention is just what the german officer corps who was leading these campaigns might have been thinking exactly what they thought they were doing were they thinking you know by 1943 rationality told the officer corps that the war was lost and in fact they admitted it often enough in their writings and commentary and interviews and post-war memoirs that's rationality but tradition reinforced in a thousand different ways urged them all to keep the faith and to keep going it might have been in 1943 and on it might have been easier simply to fight the war than to stop and think about the way the war was going it's a daily task that could that could satisfy an officer's interest in the operational art and that could that could fill up the hours of a day but standing back and saying well we're going to launch a we're going to launch a counter-offensive at salerno standing back and saying what will that eventually gain us i think never really got a lot of attention one old prussian tradition and the german army had come out of the prussian tradition largely what's the toten writ the death ride it was an order that you carried out costa s vasavola what whatever it takes whatever it costs something you didn't question uh in a sense yours is not to to reason why yours is about to do or die we have the tradition in in the charge of the light brigade perhaps that's what the germans were doing in 1943 no one can deny they paid a price for this kind of thinking you can picture this officer core at war ss general paul hauser with his one eye general hans hubba fighting at salerno with his one arm general walter naring assembling a rickety defense in front of tunis while constantly having to change the bandage on a festering arm wound general hare commanding at the salerno beach divisional commander while shaking off the effects of a recent head wound that was really only a couple of months old general fisher commander of the 10th panzer division in tunisia paying the ultimate price for driving into an unmarked minefield they fought they suffered and they died in droves well over 100 german officers 100 german generals were killed in the course of world war ii the numbers 150 i don't have the exact number in my mind it's the order of magnitude they died in droves and of course so did the men under their command together they fought so hard that germany literally had to be destroyed to bring the war to an end which is a relatively unprecedented event when i was growing up the destruction of germany and world war ii seemed like the most ordinary and common event in in the world but as i've gotten older and studied more military history and gone back and looked at other wars it's a very rare event indeed someone comes to their senses at some point and asks for terms that's usually how wars come to an end that's not how this one did of course now this to me fighting until destruction is the real problem of the war year 1943. the germans have a great word you know they have a word for everything the problematic it's the problematic it's a series of interrelated problems and here's the first the war was lost and a lot of smart minds in the officer corps recognized it and yet hitler had no trouble finding commanders who would continue to serve loyally even enthusiastically for the rest of the war for every officer who finally said i don't think this is going well and some did come to their senses there was always a line there was a line outside the door waiting to replace them hitler had spent the war hiring and firing much like stalin or churchill or or any ceo the american army got its firing out of the way before it entered the war after the louisiana maneuvers when a big chunk of the officer corps a big chunk of the general ranks were weeded out and younger officers put in their place but but by and large he didn't kill people oh he killed all kinds of people he kills on officers stalin killed his own officers in great numbers but by and large hitler fired people so he'd spent the year about the war years up till now hiring and firing but in the course of 1943 he finally assembled the team he wanted by now he believed and he was on record of saying this many many times that the time for large-scale mobile warfare the way the germans had played ball from the beginning operations in the classic style as he as he uh phrased it that era was over by the end of 1943 the generals who wanted to operate the germans have the verb opioid it means operate to fight mobile warfare we're by and large gone monstein got fired uh general kluga and kleist on the army group level general hermann hoath of the fourth panzer army one of the most aggressive of the army commanders in the german officer corps now in their place these clever guys were gone and their place were tough guys with firm jaws field marshall ferdinand scharner or lothar rendalic or walter model a little less well known to the west the issue was not that they were bunglers this is how it's often written up they got rid of the smart generals and put his bunglers into into their places those who would obey him unquestioningly they were by and large competent professionals they'd been to the right schools and knew how to draw up an order battle what really meant recommended them to hitler however was that each was a stander the german term the stare or stander someone who would stay put and stand fast where he was told to they weren't operators clever guys like monster they weren't general staff officers who sat around staring at maps all day perhaps hitler's least favorite colleagues in the high command they were men of will who considered retreat a personal insult and who are willing to fight to the last german soldier in a hopeless war i i i don't want for a moment anyone to think that i'm recommending this as a course of action scherner had hundreds even thousands of his own soldiers shot in order to keep the others in line and to prevent the collapse of discipline on his front you may know this statistic the germans handed down roughly 25 000 death sentences against their own troops in world war ii uh how many of those death sentences are actually carried out as questionable the records are completely partial toward the end of the war but let's assume that the traditional efficiency of nazi germany was on display here and that most of those 22 000 death sentences in fact were carried out the vast majority of them by the way in world war one the germans had handed down 16 death sentences for cowardice desertion and hear 22 000. in italy of course hitler had to his delight found the purest stander of them all and that's field marshall albert von kessel rang beneath the standers were the conrads and the hubbas and the bulks and the hares others i've already mentioned you know may have been a beaten army but it was still a highly lethal instrument and in standing those last two years the casualties that it inflicted on the allies were enormous casualties inflicted on the soviet army in the last four months of the war that is the last january february march and april of 1945 before hitler's suicide approach one million now the handwriting was on the wall what the germans called the mene tekkel nebuchadnezzar in daniel 5 sees handwriting on the wall and of course it means that you've been weighed in the balance and found wanting in a perfectly rational world they would have risen up overthrown hitler and sued for peace and in fact a few of them tried to do just that as i hope we all know in july of 1944 there was an attempt to kill hitler not by the generals but by uh by the colonels i've gotten to know my share of colonels and they're independent-minded people and that was likewise in hitler's germany but you know none of us is a fully rational being and the this officer core was well past caring it was marching to the sound of the guns as it had done for centuries its blood was up and all it had left was a one-sided call to action i pondered this and i think i finally made sense out of it in 1943 the journal that had served as a forum for ideas within the officer corps since the napoleonic period it's called the military vulcan blot the military weekly been published uninterruptedly since 1816 and it went out of business in 1943 the germans stopped publishing it no longer had a raise on debt what was there left to talk about i might be a gloomy magazine by 1944. to commit fully to the death ride you had to substitute faith i suppose for rationality perhaps you had to stop thinking altogether but i'd like to finish with the discussion yet of why i think it's punting to say well they probably weren't thinking very hard if they thought harder they probably would have stopped the war i think they were thinking about some things and historians have kind of meticulously gone through these um we often argue that what kept the german officers in the field was their fear of the red army's revenge if the red army broke into germany there was going to be hell to pay and and that's true enough and they had good reason to be worried others argue that it was hitler either their fear of hitler or their loyalty to hitler flip sides of the same coin i suppose if i had a dime for every time i've read in a memoir i went in intending to argue with hitler but there was something hypnotic about that blue eyed piercing stare and i just went to pieces i walked out shaking and i personally don't buy that for a minute but it does get written a lot that hitler had some hypnotic or perhaps even demonic power i'm no theologian so i will leave that to the theologians but people do write it a lot and others say of course i feared hitler i feared for my family and you would too and we have to be kind of you know if you're a family person you have to be sensitive to that i will say once again that by and large hitler let people resign who were no longer who no longer felt they could carry out their duties then some of those officers tried to kill hitler and then he killed a boatload of them and we have you know that's about after mid-1944 but by and large again the officer corps that should have been the most worried about being killed was the red army officer corps in the first couple years of the of the soviet war against the germans but nevertheless the arguments do center on hitler either your fear or your admiration or your the fact that you were hypnotized by and again i suppose that's true enough no one wants to read hitler out of the story of world war ii but i do think we need to nuance this a bit if there was one experience one shared experience one searing experience that linked members of the german officer corps in world war ii it was the end of world war one when they believed they'd been on the verge of winning the war until they had been stabbed in the back by a by a wavering home front and the groups on the home front who did the stabbing could vary from from depending on the officer you're talking about but but the usual suspects socialists pacifists national socialist conception jews communists an unholy coalition that had somehow come together to stab the german army in the back now that may not have been true in fact as a historian in world war one i don't believe it is true i do world war ii but to do world war ii you have to look at the german army in world war one germans were beaten pretty soundly by the end of world war one in the field just like the allies always maintained we have good dr nyberg in the back and he can come up here and share my honorarium for this talk but that's not just it's not true it's not to say that many german officers didn't believe it i i think many of them did believe it i think they'd heard it said enough times they'd repeated the tropes and the myths enough times that they eventually began to internalize them and if there was one thing that i'm not surprised about in world war ii it's that this officer court promised to fight on until midnight until 10 past midnight if that's what it took this time there wasn't going to be a stab in the back the germans were going to fight this war out to what proved to be an extremely an extremely bitter end you know they did just that and they might have done just that even if somebody else was in charge maybe in hitler maybe hitler didn't hypnotize them maybe in hitler they had finally found the do-or-die leader they'd been yearning for since 1918 and 1919. every one of these officers had fought in the previous war of course especially when we talk about general level officers they had long careers and we're only going back a couple of decades and perhaps in hitler they had finally found the man they were looking for know finally i don't think it's unfair to point out that they were worried about themselves we all are near the end of the war many of them sat in british prisons unaware that their captors were taping their conversations uh gentlemen don't open each other's mail a us diplomat said before world war ii when talking about should we put some spies in into the axis camp but the the experience of world war ii that was the least of the horrible things that happened is that people began to to uh wiretap each other to read each other's mail in a certain sense but many of them sat in british prisons and they were unaware they were being in in one bleak moment one of them suddenly realized the gravity of it all the wrong turn they'd all taken we used to be colonels and generals general robert zattler blurted out one night but after this war we're gonna be shoe shine boys and bellhops the most respected social category in german society was the officer corps and they knew that was over his complaint might be the best epitaph of all for 1943. the war was lost but the officer corps remained loyal to the regime into the fight in so doing they signed a death warrant not only for millions of soldiers and civilians of course but for their own caste as well the campaigns of 1943 were not just the beginning of the end for world war ii but for one of the longest running acts on the european uh historical stage the prussian german officer corps so that's my prepared remarks tonight and i'm prepared to also answer any questions or comments that you might like to throw at me yes oh thank you students who've been in my class know that what i should have done right now is drop mike so uh my lads here will you'll you'll you get the people need a question uh please wait till the mic comes to you though before we get to the questions i'd have to say i see a lot of my students from seminars 24 and 25 in the room and i it's so good to see seminar 25. it really is no i can't believe that you knew i think they come and get you so i have a question uh where am i looking please corner front corner there you go thanks guys what role did the oath uh that german officers took to hitler personally not to a constitutional hitler personally personally have to do with their loyalty to the bitter end especially considering the concept of honor and the uh in the office well this is a obviously it's a very good question and virtually every officer who wrote his memoirs after the war said well we were trapped we had taken an oath to hitler and i you know you parsed it in such a way he said it was a personal oath as opposed to uh oh to an institution or a constitution and perhaps that was uh that makes some kind of qualitative difference but let's look at those other oaths the german officer took oaths of allegiance to the weimar constitution in the 1920s and 30s that is a constitution of the german republic and that didn't seem to stop them from violating that oath in the 1940s and 50s they perjured themselves repeatedly during their war crimes trials contradicted by the written evidence and so apparently that oath didn't mean too much so there's oaths and there's oaths and there are some we take i i to happen to hold for a lifetime i intend to keep that one uh perhaps others by my constitution uh swear to tell the truth in in court somewhere around the bible the officer corps concept of the oath could be quite elastic i'll just i'll just say that so i believe what linked them to hitler was not the oath so much as the things hitler gave them and what they supported he promised to overthrow the democratic constitution something they wanted he promised to rearm the country something they wanted promised to restore germany self-respect something they wanted promised to start a war at the very least to destroy poland perhaps not this gigantic war maybe they didn't want that but but of course the invasion of poland led to this and that was extremely popular within the officer corps the day the chief of the general staff hal franz halder hitler said we're invading poland in two weeks whatever the date was halder said a stone has fallen from my heart the happiest day of his life apparently poland had been carved out of german and russian territory and it was a sort at least the very first step for german expansionism was to destroy poland and the office of course supported that after the plot to kill hitler the officer corps many of the officers heinz gadarian sat on hastily rigged up courts marshall which sentenced many of his fellow officers to death for violation of the oath against hitler so there's their oaths that they kept and there are oaths that they didn't keep uh i don't mean to be a moral arbiter again i'm not a theologian and at some point you answer i think to a higher power for what you've done in your lifetime i do believe that but i don't mean to be the one who condemns them because god knows we're all human beings and we all make this we all do things we're embarrassed by ashamed of which we hadn't done secrets we keep every we're all human beings as a corporation as a corporate body the german obstacle certainly had a great deal to answer for in terms of of the plasticity of its oath i'll just say that so am i miked right now oh okay right you speak uh you speak quite correctly i believe about the ultimate irrationality of the germans german army's decision to keep on fighting uh after uh from the beginning in 1943 even when any kind of rational calculation must have told them that they were defeated but yet you did not mention anything about the demand for unconditional surrender which sort of places them in a bind i mean uh a general slash politician with any foresight could have seen that one way or another germany is going to be divided amongst the occupying powers with or without two more years of war that's a good point not uh and it needs it needs to be responded to and i think it is a good point we could debate the rightness or wrongness of the unconditional surrender policy from from now until doomsday and we'll have different opinions in the hall certainly again i'm an expert in the the memoirs and the interviews done with the german generals after the war virtually to a man they mentioned this what did you expect us to do after an uh declaration that the allies were fighting for unconditional surrender germany would stop it nothing less now it is interesting that at the time that it was declared opinions within the german resistance such as the german resistance was at the time disparate groups a fairly inco at resistance to hitler uh we're not unanimously against it and so at least this is putting this is telling the officer what's up what they're going to get they what they were worried what the resistance was worried about is there they would show their hand and then there'd be some negotiated peace which would leave some form of national socialism and power and of course then that's you've just i suppose signed your own your own death warrant but off the top of my head when i hear unconditional surrender while i can understand it as a political move to weld the alliance together it seems to me to be an overly rigid strategic posture that at the end of the day the war has to be a political act war and politics have to be linked and that there's always room for negotiation at wiggle room in politics what what i think solidifies unconditional surrender as a viable policy and has the right thing to do at the time was hitler this just appeared to be a regime with which there could be no sound basis for negotiation too much water gone under the bridge too many uh too many treaties had been signed and violated too many promises had been made and then uh reneged upon and so i think at least in this one case unconditional surrender probably makes a certain amount of sense i believe if there even if there hadn't been an unconditional surrender policy i think the war might have turned out very similar to the way it did go ahead in the in the last few weeks of the war over here thank you in the last few weeks of the war did any of the general officers try to escape to switzerland sweden south america any place the most agreed yes the answer short answer is yes by and large no virtually all of them went into captivity one sword or the other most of them tried to surrender to whom the the western allies and not to the soviets probably sen a sensible policy but the most egregious example i suppose of an officer who tried to escape was general scherner who commanded army i guess army group south until the very end of the war and he was the the disciplinarian general who had shot thousands of his own men to keep them to keep them in line on usually on trumped-up charges of cowardice toward the end of the war he tried he got him went to the pay master of army group south and got all the funds he could get commandeer to feasible historic aircraft that little command aircraft that the germans had and abandoned army group south and tried to surrender through the americans flew flew the american lines he was captured by the americans and promptly handed back over to the soviets the vast majority of his army group went into soviet captivity rather than american captivity soviets finally freed him in 1955 i think sent him back to east germany it was part of the debate at the time over german rearmament and the soviets was trying to say we got some unpleasant characters you want to rearm west germany here's an unpleasant character you might be dealing with in the future and that became a big issue at the time the fact that he had tried apparently to save his own skin while abandoning his troops in the last few days of the war so but the vast the vast majority i wouldn't say you know they didn't harbor fantasies of escape and sailing off to the into argentina or wherever the vast majority of them wound up as prisoners virtually all of them then gave interviews to the allies western allies those turned into the foreign military study series which line the shelves of of the of the a hack here and now thank god for world war ii or i have nothing to write about that's what i've been i've been wading into those documents for my entire scholarly career and continue to do so yes sir in russia in particular do you feel that the confusion caused by okw and okh plus the firing of protests had and he said plus the firing of phil marshall from broadish those three conditions do you feel they had much of a negative impact without a doubt i i think one of them the myths perhaps about the german uh high command in world war ii is that that it was particularly efficient but but they're certainly having more efficient high commands in the annals of 20th century military history so there's essentially a tripartite division there's the high command of the army okh and it runs the war in the east that is the war against the soviet union there's the high because that's basically an army show that's where 80 of the army is then there's the okw the high command of the armed forces army navy and air force and that's north africa the the western uh sectors then there's the general staff kind of responsible for army planning but also some some joint planning as well so it's very complex hitler created the high command of the armed forces not as you might expect because it makes sense to coordinate land air and sea operations could all support that he did it to cut the high command of the army out of decision making because it had been the dominant body in german military planning along with the general staff up till this point now to hitler the army officers were a particularly obnoxious bunch in hitler's worldview they were from the high prussian aristocracy the junkers from eastern germany ancient names and ancient families hitler had a guy named monstein who sometimes gave him trouble frederick that great had someone named einstein who usually gave him trouble hitler had zeidlitz who was the officer the the commander inside stalingrad saying there had to be an immediate breakout frederick the great had an obstreperous commander named sidlis these families were ancient hitler as you may know came from no social what we might consider social background at all he had father was a maybe lower middle class father was a customs official for the hapsburg empire odof was orphaned at a relatively early age not really we don't really diagnose this clinically uh his parents were both dead by the time he was in his late teens hardly unusual for europe in the late 19th century um uh at a relatively young age went to vienna to become an artist that failed he spent christmas of 1912 in a homeless shelter outside of vienna i mean that's that's who hitler was he had risen up from the gutter as he said he said that repeatedly himself so having to deal with cultured and cultivated and educated and privileged officers of the army office of cour in particular was very difficult for hitler the the navy and especially the air force were much more nazified the the air force had younger guys technicians people who like to fly your family your pedigree was not so important to the air force or even even the navy it's a relatively young service so hitler had done that again created this okw high command of the armed forces so that the three services would look like they were equal and he could adjudicate between them but it was often the navy and the air force ganging up two to one on the army you could have an infantry division in the soviet union was under the command of the okh under the administration of the okh and then it would have to be shipped to france and that and it would it would leave okh i command the army and go to the high command of the armed forces then it would be transferred back to the soviet union and it would happen all over again the other way generating massive amounts of bureaucratic administrative friction and of course massive amounts of paperwork so the short answer that was a long answer the short answer i even blew out the microphone and answering it the short answer is yes that those are all problems you said one other factor as well a brockage's dismissal yeah uh the high command of the the high commander the army general of altar von braukich uh a pretty fanatical nazi married to an even more fanatical nazi mrs brockich was interesting character as well frau brockage was dismissed from his post as the soviet campaign went bad in december 1941 now there seemed to be a health issue the official the paperwork said it was a heart problem that's been called into question about how bad the heart problem was but the campaign had gone badly and and hitler was not satisfied now that's fine you pittsburgh penguins got eliminated they're going to fire the coach we all know how that works but but but the problem is when you don't hire a new coach hitler took over the high command of the army personally after brockage's dismissal he told the chief of the general staff franz fano franz halder i love this i'm going to say this to the next class of students at the us army war college this little matter of operational uh planning anyone can do it and you know hitler spent the rest of the war proving the falsehood of that statement not everyone can do it it's very complicated and requires specialized training and certainly this kind of specialized training that hitler did not have what he did have of course was a faith in his own star based on some early successes maybe some counter-intuitive guesses in the french campaign we might say but but there's there's no doubt that the the germans could have fought the war more efficiently if hitler had stopped meddling in it so much i i don't believe that in the end the the result would have been any different hitler all the big decisions were hitler's especially to invade the soviet union and then later to declare war on the united states it's kind of a two-part thing um you said a couple of times that he didn't really kill a lot of his officers or anything but towards the beginning of his career there before he became the fir fuhrer and like cheshire didn't he kill a lot of the old world war one generals and uh officers that were part of his sa brown shirts in that one night of the knives and that then turning into nazi germany i think took a turn with a younger enlisted people that were more in tune to the nazi ideal and um so that was that part one yeah let me answer it and then hold let me answer that so i remember the remember the question then we'll get you part two in a second um there had been a pretty big purge in in june of 1930 hitler came to power in january of 1933 about a year and a half in of some what hitler perceived as dangerous trends within the party particularly among his street fighting stormtrooper organization and there was a sort of a decapitation coup against them ernst rome the head of the stormtroopers killed along with some of the other cronies a handful of regular a handful a couple of officers in the regular army were also killed in that that uh we call it a coup a putch sometimes called the rome push the knight of the long knives is what you called and that's good enough but i'm not i'm not defending the night of the long knives at all but some some perspective if you look at what stalin had done to his own officer corps in the 1930s in terms of the numbers hitler was quite the amateur by comparison now in 1938 uh there was another move to sort of coordinate the army the the defense minister blomberg and the chief of the army command of general fritsch were both dismissed from their posts on trumped-up morals charges of all things um general von blamberg had married a woman with a past what was said at the time this is why wikipedia exists so please go look that up if you wish other morals charges were brought against general fritsch based on trumped-up testimony from from a street person that the ss had the gestapo had rounded up and asked for ask for information so they were removed from their posts and neither k i mean you know this is horrible but this is a gangster regime which did horrible things regularly but neither one was killed at the time so i'd have to stick but by and large this was not a regime that killed its own generals until some officers tried to kill hitler in july of 1944 and then again a number of them were killed horribly and if you want to go look up the details again these with why we have an internet today um but you know killed in in particularly gruesome fashion and often condemned by you know kind of hastily sort of kangaroo courts of their fellow officers it's a it's a pretty rough situation all along so no one should ever seen it hitler helen really killed people he killed all kinds of people he's my greatest mass murderer of the 20th century by and large the officer corps was not a target of his most murderous impulses and you had a second part yeah um with the end of world war one the german army was really based off of its own lands and was more in the land of its conquered countries whenever it surrendered oh yes yeah right so if i remember something i read correctly at one point people had said that they felt it was more of a draw and a draw down and not so much of a loss on their part and then signing that treaty and then not being allowed into the the conversations afterwards for the league of nations and the treaty of versailles they were alienated and then their country was cut up into many pieces and taken away from them so does that play i mean i feel like that plays a huge role in the 1943 with what you're talking about and how could you surrender not not even a generation later in a war that you're fighting whenever the last time you surrendered the allies took everything you had anyways yeah so i did you know i referenced a sort of stab in the this notion that the german army had been stabbed in the back in world war one but see this that is the danger of falling prey to to a myth at the end of world war one the german armies had sustained massive defeats on all fronts but particularly western front the austrians were collapsing their bulgarian ally was collapsing the chief of the german general staff at the time not his exact title but it's close enough general eric ludendorff went to the civilian government said you must sign an armistice immediately were beaten now ten years later he's the one he's one of the people writing books and saying our brave fighting forces were stabbed in the back by socialists on the home front i mean we can understand why he wrote it people always try to excalpate themselves very few people write memoirs and say it and the book the memoir is called my fault by robert m citino and that would be a that would be a best seller people write books that say you know your fault that's what that's what memoirs people sometimes say this memoir is particularly self-serving all memoirs are self-serving that's why people write them to make the best possible case the only contrary example saint augustine he called his memoirs confessions he said every horrible thing he'd ever done in his entire life it's very unusual piece of literature so you're right in a sense that this myth that had taken hold that somehow we the germans we let's say let's say where the germans here we weren't really beaten and i know what you i like the way you started it at the end of that war we were everywhere on foreign soil right we're still an occupation of most of belgium and parts of france and a huge chunk of what had been czarist russia the german army had to come home to to end the war so they they were everywhere on on foreign soil but the [ __ ] the country's economy had fallen apart the blockade had just practically wrecked the economy the flu epidemic was hitting germany as hard as it was hitting any place because of the the you know lower calories in the diet and the more and more meager diet as 1917 turned into 1918. 16 and 17 you know the germans started eating turnips three times a day you can grind them and boil them and fry them and bake them and that's great man i love turnips but before world war one they were feed for livestock in germany they were hitting the dog food aisle so so to so to you understand the point i'm making so you're right i mean if that was the myth we all believe you know we didn't really lose that war we're going to prove it this time by getting destroyed oh did i'm sorry what it did i'm not sure what isn't that say that you mean oh there's no doubt national pride and and pride in nation was a big part of the nazi appeal the many germans felt that the treaty of versailles treated them unfairly i believe it is a high exaggeration to say it tore germany apart it removed some border territories about 12 percent of the total population about out of the total uh area and about 12 percent of the total population did hit you know steel and coal or uh iron ore and coal reserves and there's took away all of germany's colonies disarmed germany it was a you know it it was certainly a treaty with some harsh uh clauses by no means was it a carthaginian treaty where germany was destroyed and all the men were killed and the women and children sold into slavery and the land was sowed with salt in the kind of exaggerated rhetoric of the day is how the treaty of versailles was often uh described i'll give you a treaty in world war one that was carthaginian and it's the treaty the germans imposed on defeated russia which locked off 50 million people and i a 10 million i don't have i have no idea how many square miles but you know um if uh if in the treaty of versailles the germans lost a little bit here and a little bit there in the treaty of breslau tops the the tsarist russia lost most of what's on this map so that to me you know i again i i understand the the appeal hitler was able to make political hay out of a very unpopular treaty there's no doubt about that and he could also speak with some authority he could say it's all well and good for for you finely educated politicians to debate our problems today i mean i didn't go to your schools i didn't get to go to university i had a university called the western front he fought on the front lines uh fought supposedly pretty bravely some people call into question whether his medals were earned and that's a whole other can of worms but but he could he played that very very skillfully i do believe some of it was mythological and that's the point i'm making no mike's work tonight carl here speaking to my ear if i can a quick introduce great if you'll stand right out here i reluctantly came tonight because i knew it was rob thanks matt and and now i know i wasted most of the night so thanks for that in all seriousness uh what a great presentation i've heard a lot of talks about world war ii read quite a bit on my own and that's probably the finest discussion uh that i've heard and i hope you all would agree with me and give him a round of applause thanks so much oh man i appreciate that

Channel: The USAHEC

Views: 931,892

Rating: 4.6864362 out of 5

Keywords: USAHEC, Perspectives in Military History Lecture Series, U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, Robert Michael Citino, Germany, World War II, WWII, The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943

Id: 1SdO-btKuds

Length: 63min 25sec (3805 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 25 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/hurf_mcdurf]

The duration of this one is probably best noted as (1:03:24), for some reason I was slightly disappointed when I saw the link because the topic sounded interesting but I thought it was a one minute long video.