Why Did the German Army Fight to the End?

good afternoon everyone my name is samuel byers and i'm the program coordinator and research assistant here at the project for military and diplomatic history at csis i see a few familiar faces in the audience from people who've come to our events in the past for those of you who aren't familiar the project on military diplomatic history seeks to promote the use of history as a means of enhancing our understanding of modern challenges in foreign policy international security and related fields as well as to create connections between policy researchers and policy makers in washington and historians around the country whose work has bearing on the contemporary policy debate if you're interested in learning more about our project feel free to sign up for our email updates at csis.org we host regular events like these that are open to the public and we welcome all comers for those who are interested next thursday march 15th we're partnering with the u.s army center of military history to host a panel discussion on the 50th anniversary of the milai massacre the panel will consist of vietnam war historians military legal expert and military legal experts who will share their thoughts on the history and legacy of the milai tragedy and the lessons we can draw from this dark episode in american military history today we're fortunate to be joined by dr robert citino to discuss his latest book the verimox last stand the german campaigns of 1944 and 1945. dr cetino is the samuel zamori stone senior historian at the national world war ii museum in new orleans he's the author of ten books on world war ii german military history and the evolution of military operations more broadly vermont stand is his third book covering the campaigns of the german army during world war ii followed by two other critically following two other critically acclaimed works which covered the vermont's operations in 1942 and 1943. prior to joining the world war ii museum dr cetino has held academic posts at a number of educational institutions across the country including the u.s military academy at west point and the u.s army war college please welcome dr robert citino [Applause] thank you thanks everyone that good you might want to leave a copy of my book here in case i need a quick quick quote uh greetings from new orleans and it's wonderful to be here in washington dc i'd forgotten what it's like to be cold at all and um today was a kind of stalingrad moment for me uh i i was i was asked to talk about my most recent book which is the the as you've heard the vermont's last stand uh the german campaigns in 1944 1945. i think the way we'll play it today is i'll give what i think is a pre-see of the book uh highlighting it's high uh it's it's good points and maybe even talking about some places where i think it it might have been better and then we'll have some back and forth conversation today it should be fun i'm looking forward to it i think if there's um well always ask have an elevator speech about your book or in some cases something shorter than that just a a quick sentence and if there's a sentence i think that would sum up the material sum up the the argument of the vermont's last stand is that he didn't do it all by himself and and he of course uh by he i mean the furor the the leader of nazi germany adolf hitler and by it i mean fighting planning and losing uh world war ii standing alongside hitler was a core of highly trained professionals army officers especially and it's it's the army that i've concentrated on because as the army there was 90 percent of the german war effort at least after the mid-point the the navy had almost ceased to exist as a surface fleet and the air force was whittled down almost nothing by the time 1944 rolls around so army officers especially uh army officers who supported hitler's launch of the war in 1939 who worked tirelessly to put his plans into action and who remained fiercely loyal to him to the very end and then when the war was over turned around and wrote memoirs denying that they had done any of these things and and that is in essence what i've talked about in the course in the course of this book you know um when you're writing a book your publisher will often say what's the ark and this was a tough one if you think about it because the germans are getting beaten very badly in 1944 and that's the beginning of the book and then they're getting beaten very very badly for the next 600 pages and then they're blown into smithereens on the last page and um so so there you know there's not that that kind of arc like there's not a turning point of the war this being discussed here but but what is happening is is that the situation is becoming more dire literally by the week and yet the officer corps and virtually all of the manpower of the army remains loyal to the cause to the very very end and and that's what i sought to explain in the course of this book and that to me was an interesting historical problematic that does require some explanation because it's getting it's bad in 1944 but it's worse in the middle of 1944 and it's worse still by the end of the year and and what is keeping those those uh soldiers but especially those officers loyal to the cause so that is if you're wondering what the vermont's last stand is about how this could possibly be different from the other million books written on world war ii um that that's it uh particularly written on the german army it's written almost exclusively from german language sources as well and that would give it a certain arjuna sequoia to mix my languages that perhaps other other books on the topic do not have so it's it's a sad fact to me um but when when the generals wrote those memoirs after the war when they said those things we tended to believe them they were men of breeding and wealth and taste and from fine families many of them were highly skilled military operators no one denies that today i'm that the name's rommel and gaddarian and monster these are highly skilled military operators they may even have deserved the the often over used title of genius you know which we throw around for any general who can walk and shoot gum at the same time becomes known as a genius into military historians we're a very credulous and supportive bunch but i think in this case we might actually make the case so you know they they wrote things um that that denied that their ignorance of the horrific crimes that the germany had committed they the vermont they said it fought a good war a clean war they had clean hands in 1945 and they blame the mass murders and the other atrocities on the thugs in the nazi party uh especially the sort of parallel military force of the waffen ss now it doesn't you don't have to scratch the surface of the material very deeply to realize that when they said these things there's only one problem with them and that's they're all false the documentary record is so clear on this point that it hardly bears any any debate today that the officer court backed hitler's rearmament program schemes in the 1930s it meant rapid promotion in an army that had been almost devoid of promotion for 15 straight years they supported the invasion of poland in 39 the invasion of france in 1940 after some initial misgivings and they didn't make a people and hitler decided to invade the ussr in uh 1941 in operation barbarossa they were as certain as he was that they'd be victorious in a few months even as the war turned and then turned hopeless they followed hitler's orders to hold on no matter what the cost a halton um jaden price is hitler's phrase he said it so often that they could probably predict when he was going to say it to fight until five minutes past midnight if that's what it took you know despite their claims they put their men and equipment and energy and time at the the disposal of the killing squads the holocaust could not have happened without their administrative support that is the administrative support of of army officers on the eastern front even as defeat became certain they could see the writing on the wall they said so often enough they were professionals after all can read a map they kept going they groused in private but obeyed their orders and launched their outclass lonzers their their equivalent of gi joe into one hopeless battle after the other getting millions of their own men killed for no reason in the last year of the war no strategic reason that could possibly be induced now there was a plot to kill hitler and you're a savvy group in the audience and i'm sure you know that uh on july 20th 1944 set a bomb in his headquarters in east prussia and killed a few people in the room and and did a great deal of damage unfortunately none of the people killed was named adolf hitler so the plot failed uh the conspirators there were colonels caused by stauffenberg i'm thinking it was a revolt in other words of the middle managers uh not the senior staff not the not the c-suite or the executive wing so the question and again it is the heart of the book why did they stay so loyal even after defeat was certain um they often claim it was because of their oath but but i think it's more complicated than that because german officers took all kinds of votes in their career they took an oath to serve the weimar republic they served in oath to defend this constitution of the weimar republic which included um obedience and uh to the restrictions of the versailles treaty as so they broke the one to the constitution and they violated the versailles treaty any moment they got so you know that we all know this there's oaths and there's oaths and apparently the germans uh german officers felt that as well but let me give four quick reasons why i think we might say i think we make the argument what caused the german army the german officer corps especially to remain in the field certainly uh one factor that kept them fighting so tenaciously was their fear of soviet revenge should the red army break into germany they'll said that in their memoirs and i think it's actually true they knew exactly what they had done in the soviet union they had good reason to be worried and soviet troops did indeed behave atrociously on on german soil killing and looting and raping as a but still today it's a horrible story i think the soviet union lost the cold war in the first the last moments of world war ii by its behavior in berlin so they had good reason to to fear soviet the soviet revenge and maybe that was what kept them in the field a second factor that they often uh called to mind is the allied declaration at the casablanca conference in 1943 that the allies were fighting for unconditional surrender so there seemed to be no real alternative the generals claim but to fight on till the till the bitter end now it is it's a rare thing if you study military history to demand unconditional surrender from your adversary typically when the adversary's been beaten emissary and knows he's been beaten emissaries are sent out to some neutral corner and some kind of armistice is hammered out and then that leads to a peace treaty so the germans claim that and we can at least we could argue it but at least we'll leave it hanging out there and say it's it's plausible prima facie case you can make for unconditional surrender but here's something they didn't say in their memoirs that we know all too well today hitler was bribing them all to the hilt providing them with what we're called in german a dotazione and we the translation into english it's a word we don't use it's an archaicism dotations an old prussian word for uh an award from the king that is uh you have done you've done service to the monarch and then the monarch and his gratitude to to pays you a uh pays you a some kind of reward now in the german context of 1944-45 these were immense cash payments deposited directly into general's bank accounts every month the war went on the remote bonuses for special events uh for example 250 000 reichsmarks for your 50th or 60th birthday i'm very it's very tough exactly what does that mean in today's money in today's purchasing power but let's estimate two to three million dollars so a bonus for your 50th or 60th birthday they also received huge landed estates in the occupied territories carved out of land cease and their rightful owners and you all know where the rightful owners probably were by this point either dead or in in camp somewhere awaiting uh awaiting their deaths late in the war october of 1944 eric von monstein one of the great german field marshals and one of the most skilled military operators of the 20th century um sent out his scouts in into pomerania to to look for a suitable landed estate you know the soviet armies were probably 22 miles 25 miles away you might hear the artillery fire in the background and the notion that monstein was ever gonna i don't know curl up in front of the fireplace with a pipe and then reel and have a relaxing evening on his new estate is is laughable that calls into question i suppose his strategic acumen uh uh perhaps he was merely trying to do that to lay a claim for any kind of post-war settlement that's that's why i've always thought at any rate so i have the deed to this property if they're ever if that ever did matter in the kind of in some kind of post-war settlement maybe memory made them do it i've thought about this one a lot and in fact a lot of my book is about this this fourth point maybe memory made them do it we have to remember that these were the same officers who had fought and lost the previous timeout they fought and lost world war one to a man they believed they had lost because germany threw in the towel too soon and germany had thrown in the towel too soon due to a kind of rot on the home front the the infamous phrase that still percolates around german historiographical circles is they believed that the army had been stabbed in the back by the home front by socialists and pacifists vegetarians and all sorts of people who lack the stomach for the fight to the end and of course this being the german officer corps group that that leaned to the right in any circumstances and now they've been kind of they've been radicalized in in the in the current formulation that also included germany's jews there's a massive uptick in anti-semitism amongst the german officer corps after world war one as well so rot on the home front that's one thing that didn't seem to be happening in 1944 and 1945. hitler seemed to have solved that problem the german people were standing firm behind hitler and in fact they would till the until the very end so there was no one amongst them really amongst the officer corps who wished to be the first to stand up and say what many of them were privately thinking we've lost and so they fought on again through one bloody campaign after the other by far the bloodiest year of world war ii is the last year of the war that surprises us sometimes wars sometimes trail off at the end and come to everyone loses momentum but that's not how world war ii went world war ii just ended in a bloodbath and that was the final year of the war you know interestingly enough there's there's one component from this list one item from this list that's missing none of them ever said they were afraid we didn't do it because we were afraid of hitler afraid for our lives afraid that hitler would kill them if they disobeyed he had relatively few generals executed in the course of the war a handful and matter of fact probably about 10 arrested and a handful of that actually uh actually uh executed unlike stalin who executed so generals by the by the bucket load all through the war especially in the early years of the war if we could say one thing about a typical german general this is probably absolutely unafraid of death they tend to do command from the front which is why so many of them died and were killed i should say in the course of military action in the second world war the number that is usually pointed to by historians you have argued a little bit both ways 676 german generals killed in the fighting in world war ii compared to i don't know the exact number for the americans it's it's in double digits less than 50 certainly and probably a lot less than that just not how american generals played the game they weren't in the front line carrying out a reconnaissance through field glasses they tended to be administrators i'm thinking of a courtney hodges or a or a william simpson behind the lines and making sure that the logistics were right and the administration and organization was tight so fear politics money memory they were all at play in keeping the generals going or maybe and as i researched this book i was forced to confront an unpleasant reality maybe some of them just felt like it and i asked you to consider the case of field marshal ferdinand scherner here was a a truly you know for lack of a better term here was a truly bad guy a fanatic national socialist fanatic a true believer in hitler his operational signature was shooting thousands of his own men for cowardice in order to terrify the others into obedience he liked to fly to the front the german commanders have this little feasler stork aircraft it's quite light it takes about 50 foot runway to take off it's incredible so you can land literally in the in the middle of the street he like to come down in his little command plane up up the front do a brief inspection then meet out death sentences on the flimsiest of evidence after the attempt on hitler's life july of 1944 uh scherner would open staff meetings by asking his officers around the table how many men did you hang today he seemed to seem to think it was an important aspect of of command how many men did you hang today on several occasions he had dogs shot who were barking too loudly outside his outside his command post you know you're reading this so i already read that account and they said no this is apparently a different doc so it happened on more than one account more than one um uh occurrence he once visited a tank repair shop where crew was waiting to get a vehicle fixed and scherner had the commander shot for malingering he once had 22 men shot for the crime of standing around without orders he was driving around late late in the war this is this is very late in the war and and the trooper was at rest for a moment and he ordered them executed apparently for no reason at all all this took place again in the very end of the war with germany collapsing in runes all around him and hitler uh you know getting ready and then actually killing himself the retreat path of schurner's armies was marked by thousands of german soldiers hung from lampposts on charges of cowardice uh a malingering desertion and the like he appalled many of his own colleagues which always says something people tolerate almost anything but if you ask what yes their colleagues what what they're like um many of his own colleagues one fellow general detail it was one said ferdie ferdinand ferdi who do you think you are a cop you know in other words the art of command is not catching your men in various uh uh forms of of disobedience to regulations the art of command is commanding and commanding towards victory hopefully ferdinand was acting more like a cop in the uh term of a probium to his fellow officers just days before the end of the war ferdinand scherner was commanding army group center in bohemia with today czech republic he issued his last order of the day to his troops a quote in these hard days we must not lose our nerves or become cowards any man abandoning his post will suffer the most dire consequences he threatened to hang in other words any man abandoning his post now a few days later scherner got into his private aircraft and abandoned his post he was facing the russians and as you might expect he had no desire to fall into the hands of the russians who do you want who do you want to be taken prisoner by the western forces the british are americans so he abandoned his men to their fate as soviet pows reached the safety of u.s lines and this makes me proud to be an american we handed him back over to the soviets um who who held him as a prisoner for the for the next 10 years doing time next to the very men he had left in the lurch and he often had to be protected by soviet guards from his own men while in prison he was freed in late 1954 he returned to west germany what was west germany now to angry outbursts from many of his former soldiers and their families he went on trial there too and he spent four more years in prison um when he got out in 1959 i want to say is i think the trial was 55. i have a letter it was he was in munich time he'd been he's a bavarian by birth so he's in munich at the time i have a letter that he wrote to the bavarian transport asking why he had not been granted the free train pass that was his due as a returning veteran and i never saw the answer but there are a couple there's a couple ways we could answer that question so the point is scherner almost unheard of today next to the monsteins and the godarians and the and the rommels the people i've spent my career uh writing about but the scherners are kind of unknown today but but he is a prime example of a late war german general he was loyal all right but loyal up loyal to hitler there's there's many different kinds of loyalty expected of a military commander and one of them of course is loyalty to the men under your command some concern for the lives of the men who are serving under your command you know i'll end with the the words of wisdom from the dean of world war ii historians the kind of pope of our field gerhard weinberg who once described the end of the war with this phrase the german war huge bribes for some at the top and bullets for thousands at the bottom it was commanders like scherner in the end who allowed it to happen in fact who who made it happen and that would be the my reminder for today's lesson is that hitler did not fight world war ii all by himself thank you very much very beautiful thank you so i i wanted to start out and you talk about these these generals who are getting up to the end of the war and and can kind of see the writing on the wall that this is it's not going to end well for them uh but you know they're still fighting for this variety of reasons and in some cases like you mentioned possibly you know planning for after the war sticking out claim to property and whatnot how how did did they see their situation you know after the war inevitably ended given the the propensity of the soviets to exact revenge on them uh their experience in world war one and the the settlement that i'm sure they thought would get repeated um you know in whatever uh form how did they see themselves after you know the nazi government inevitably falls good question so there's a german historian by the name of zunken neitzel who's written a really good book that has been translated into english as tapping hitler's generals now um they're in so these are german generals who've been captured by the british and americans and who are in various uh british prisoner war camps in in britain on the on the island of britain and unbeknownst to them uh their conversations were being taped and so this is like the greatest source of all time um no one is really willing to stand and say well that wasn't a very ethical thing to do remember gentlemen don't read each other's mail as as was thought in world war ii well evidently after the bloodletting of world war ii you did read each other's mail and we have very frank discussions amongst the german generals and some then are still defending hitler a large number of them are still defending hitler and some are saying you know this this war was a mess from the start and very often there's a great deal of tension within this once solid cohort of german officers and arguing about minor details of the war about with the logistics of the kasserine pass and whether or not the panzers should have you know gone for de nepio piotrofsk in 1941 i mean so the just it's grist for the middle of an operational military historian such as myself but one of the generals um who's discussed they're sitting around discussing their post-war prospects and one famous uh a quote that comes out of this one of the one of the infantry commanders on the eastern front said before this war we were colonels and generals and after this war we're going to be shoe shine boys and bellhops so i mean we are talking about an elite we're talking about a social elite and not just the social elite of the third reich it's not a 12-year 33-45 social elite so social elite and start going back to the prussians dating back three in 400 years at least to the time of the the great elector the the the ruler who made brandenburg prussia of power in central europe so there's no doubt i mean at least when we read this um sam we can say that yeah well i understand that you've been at the pinnacle and now you're going to be scuffling for your for your daily bread we can understand that um i i think the vast majority of them in wartime knew that it would be a very good idea to surrender to the west now that unfortunately 80 percent of them were in the east 80 percent of the army was in the east and so the soviets the soviets captured hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of prisoners and of of of the officer called higher ranking officers and generals and that's been published now too interrogations of charner was held by the reason we know about schurner it was held by the soviets for for ten straight years and so we have chapter and verse of scherner's interrogation his testimony before various soviet tribunals uh you know what they've been thinking during the war why they followed hitler shauna was if you admire this sort of thing shawna remained hardcore under soviet interrogation he didn't didn't appear to have been tortured in the classic barrier nkvd 1938 style but of course neither was he well particularly well treated in captivity but he said repeatedly that the war was a the war was a preventive one to forestall a soviet attack and no matter how many times his interrogators you know that's not true you must you must you can't possibly believe that you had no evidence he he stuck to the story so there's um i mean i think that we're looking at their diminution in in importance in prussian society and and they were going to be down on the social scale they were also going to be in a country they knew that would be divided and that would be uh that at least the eastern half would be under communist domination so you know for all those reasons i i think the one another sensible reason you said why did the german officers keep fighting is that you know they're fighting the soviet union they were not looking forward to its soviet occupation of the homeland now of course they had started that mess in the first place by invading the soviet union and you know they might be wanting to think about that but you act in haste and of course you have leisure time to repent sure they all thought that was going to be a six week campaign just that you know the french campaign had been so simple there was no army that could possibly stand up to the vermont in 1941 the first campaign bore that out for a few months didn't it four million casualties three million soviet prisoners in those opening battles so i i think there's a once again there's an amalgam of emotions and motives going through their minds i'm trying to unpack and untangle them a bit all right well then so kind of the the flip side of that you talk a lot in the book about you know the high officer court the general officers and and you know a few uh you know colonels in there um i'm curious what you can tell us about your motivation yeah junior officers the average soldier you know in this same time period who i'm sure is thinking much you know similar things about where this war is going in the face of you know continuous crushing defeats especially you know there's a great chapter where you just line up one after the other you know this army group surrounded and destroyed and this next and men you know fighting their way for weeks back to the german lines yeah the the feeling the sentiment amongst the rank and following hours the germans have this marvelous term lonzer it means um ground pounder in the same way we would talk about a foot soldier so the the opinion amongst the the lonzers is interesting there's been a few books that have looked into motivations of of the german soldier i think of stephen fritz's great book brunswilden the frontline soldier it's called um he largely there's not you wouldn't really say prime archival sources but he largely based what he had to say on his reading of correspondence between german soldiers at the front and their families and back and forth and and he paints a picture of a german uh german force that was pretty thoroughly ideologized and pretty thoroughly nazified in so far as as being nazified means absolutely loyal to hitler a belief that somehow the fuhrer will concoct a a stratagem to get us out of this mess so often he led us to the brink in the 1930s and always seemed to concoct some kind of stratagem to get us out of those messes opinion morale within the stalingrad kessel so the the encirclement of stalingrad soviet armies encircled the german sixth army in november and they're so it's all of no the rest of november all of december and all of january it's it's a it's 70 days in in an encirclement as food runs out and as water runs out and as medicine runs out as everything you can imagine until these men are kind of walking skeletons morale held firm in the stalingrad park until about the last week until i i think the food ran out and then it was it was increasingly clear that hitler wasn't riding to their rescue and now that's prob that's i'm looking at it as a general statement of course it's different for each individual so julie morales essence has to be boiled down into the personal level but let's go to july 20th 1944 the attempt on unsuccessful attempt on hitler's life the bomb plot in the east prussian headquarters most most frontline soldiers were absolutely appalled not that hitler had survived they were appalled that that some there was a plot within the officer court to kill the supreme commander it's just the kind of rot they'd heard about read about at the end of the war in world war one when there was there was all kinds of opinion within the new draftees and the new officer corps uh war weariness was multiplying across the countryside and and didn't fail to uh didn't fail to infect the armed forces and they felt they'd been pretty immune to that and so i'm thinking of i'm thinking of walter model who was a field marshal on the eastern front and he hears about the plot and he gets in his car and his chauffeurs and enlisted man says thank god it wasn't a lancer it was one in other words it's one of yours it's an officer so uh it would be it would be comforting to think that that that ordinary folk ordinary german soldiers at the front remained immune from what we consider to be these repugnant outbursts of the ideological anti-semitism and the notion that germany really was spearheading a were a global anti-bolshevik crusade be comforting to think that the german soldiers had too much too too hard-headed and too much folk wisdom to fall for that sort of thing but i think the record there is pretty clear let's remember who these young men were if if let's do some quick math if you're 20 in 1944 you're born in 1924 and so you've been in the hitler youth since you were nine and so from nine to 19 you were in the hitler youth and you were hearing one kind of story one kind of narrative i you know we all say we're immune to advertising i've i've what do they call it when you don't have network or cable i've cut the cable and i just watch netflix and and hulu nowadays so i don't have ads and so it's you know i realize i've been liberated in a sense we i say we don't really are not moved by advertising or propaganda but of course we are that's why people spend so much money on propagandizing and advertising so i think i'd like to like to draw that dichotomy between the soldier and the officers the higher you were the closer you were to hitler the more likely to be loyal further down the less likely but i'm just i'm just not sure that's true on a different note uh so this book you know starts in 1944 in january and at this point in the war it you know the vermont already looks like it's you know not it's not in good shape you know it's not in good shape understand under supplied you know constantly exposed to to air attack it's it's almost you know it looks like at this point it's just a matter of time um but you've also in your last two books talked in 1942 and 1943 and i i wanted to know if you know not the the classic question of how could germany have won the war but maybe when was there a point of no return between 1942 and 1943 where there wasn't really anything that on the operational level that commanders could change to change the outcome of the war or change the trajectory of the war where it was just they they kind of just had to react to the choices i think this brings us to the question of whether the germans were really pursuing a strategy in world war ii and it's one i've i'm asked a lot matter of fact i talked to the us marine corps war college yesterday addressed the student body there on this very question what was german strategy in the war so it's a question i have to deal with a lot the standard take on on the germans is that they relied too heavily on military operations that is they they fought campaign in battle well so operations and tactics very astute but exactly how are they linking those operations and and individual battles into some cohesive hole that would lead to victory in a war that's that is the consensus you know i traced the the growth of that outlook of an operations heavy war all the way back to the prussians and prussia was a fairly small kingdom cr hemmed in by enemies and potential enemies and those frank mighty france in the west and mighty russia in the east and mighty austria in the south and and at least in the period of the 17th century mighty sweden in the north no one worries about the swedes very much anymore people worried about a great deal at the time and so they they evolved this kind of war that that said we can't really win a long war of attrition we we can never out produce or outman our enemies what we can do is is out think them on the battlefield and uh and out fight them in terms of aggression in in tactical encounters and so they evolved this method of war called the war of movement the wagons creek um not blitzkrieg which is an invention of western journalists in the 1930s and 40s but beveglian's creek the war of movement which is large units uh from division on up division core armies maneuvering in such a way as to attack the adversary from multiple directions at once they call that a kessel schlocked a cauldron battle or a battle of encirclement and that really was their art of war um about things like you know long-term industrial production well we'll we'll work that out as we go if if things go out if things go well we won't really need long-term industrial production we'll have won the war in the opening weeks uh things like intelligence and counter-intelligence and the logistics and production the kinds of things that the western powers are so good at in world war ii just never really been on the front burner if you were a very skilled german officer you went into the maneuver arms certainly didn't go into the signal core or logistics as often happened in the in the united states army for example so that's an inadequate way of war and that's why you could say well that's why the germans went over two you know the only two at bats that counted in the 20th century the germans went over two but you know if you look at the opening years of world war ii uh any sensible person would say well maybe that was a pretty good gamble the german star opened the war of course with a strike into poland and over around the polish army matter of 18 days of fighting there'd be another weak plus to overrun the capital uh hitler then wanted to immediately turn on the french you may know this within days of the polish campaign he ordered his officers to draw plans for the invasion of the west they dragged their feet a bit but they got on board they did what they were told um a little passive aggressiveness they didn't they didn't come up with the most exciting plan but hitler accepted it as the operational plan it had to be canceled because of weather in october had to be cancelled again had to be canceled again in december in january a german luffaffa staff officer was flying around and got forced down over belgium by bad weather and he's holding the whole operational plan so they had to come up with a new plan it was a very daring one for armored drive through the ardennes forest uh zickle schnitt the germans called it the cut of the cut of the site um you know that that was that was the that was the golden moment for military operations in the 20th century which smashed the french army and drove the british army off the continent in a in a humiliating retreat that could only be carried out by abandoning all of your equipment and it made a great movie and i enjoyed i enjoyed the film recently but we always have to remember that churchill even said you know you don't win wars by successful evacuations and and let us let us remember that he should know what he's talking about the the british entered norway to face the germans there got beaten badly had to evacuate from the continent had to evacuate at dunkirk they went to greece to fight the germans and oppose the germans in greece got beaten badly had to evacuate they evacuated to crete where they hit by an all airborne operation by the german paratroopers and had to evacuate again so you know it got to the point where bef didn't stand for british expeditionary force but back every friday you know that was like the comedians in london were saying that at the time so you know and then the opening campaign into the soviet union which is successful again as any military campaign has ever been the first two or three months to still boggle the mind in terms of distance speed numbers of prisoners and absolute operational superiority the did the encirclement in front of kiev 750 000 soviet prisoners of war still today mind-boggling figure so it's an inadequate strategy but it pointed it come pretty close and by the end of it german patrols were 15 miles away from the kremlin in december of 1941 they they'd run out of gas and steam and they clearly hit their culmination point as clausewitz would call at the moment when you just you can no you cannot go any further but it's hard for me to see what the germans might have done any better in those first two years of the war now soviets managed to hit them with a counter-attack in december 1941 of 17 fresh armies that they had been assembling in secret or shipping in from siberia via the single trans-siberian railroad and and and i was and the germans were not just held in front of moscow or or driven back they were blown away with extremely heavy casualties and it looked for a time like the army was about to dissolve all together i would say i don't really go for a turning point in world war ii but that was to me the most important battle of world war ii in which the germans who had suffered almost no casualties up until this point in the war i'm exaggerating for a fact that they had taken two million prisoners in the west and suffered a little over a hundred thousand casualties so i'm exaggerating but they suffered very light casualties now suddenly suffered a million and the if you started the germans out the beginning of the war so there's gonna be a battle which will lose a million men they would say well we better not even fight this war because if that means something has gone badly wrong in our traditional way of war of winning victories early in the campaign and so your question i'm sorry for circling back by that long detour but was there anything operational the germans could have done in 42 they tried and that was to launch one big operation in the eastern front the united states was not yet in the war well it was had declared war that germans had declared where it wasn't the war but it was not yet in europe and wouldn't be for some time so they tried an offensive in the east now they no longer could do a defense of the entire eastern front they chose the southern portion of it heading toward the caucasus possession of caucus's oil the oil fields of baku for example even today are important and the possession of the oil fields of the caucasus would allow germany to wage more indefinitely so theoretically but notice the germans could no longer run a full-size campaign from from baltic sea to black sea they lacked the troops and and thanks for that but you know they lack the troops and the tanks even for what they tried to do first panzer army went into the 1942 offense offensive towards stalingrad on the caucasus at about 30 percent of it's a lot of strength in tanks in one of the okay w planners the high command of the vermont wrote a memorandum saying that we have to face it some degree of demoterization's going to be necessary in this campaign the troops in the field the germans had four field armies and there was an italian field army two romanian field armies and uh an italian field army the italians hungarians and two romanians i mean they were the ones really kept very increasingly bearing the burden they moved all of them moved a bit too slowly to seal the deal either taking stalingrad or blasting their way through the caucasus they got to my cop one of the oil cities the soviets had demolished it pretty badly they moved a bit too slowly for all the reasons i just i just mentioned and and were unable to seal that campaign off and again that one ended in disaster true disaster not just blowing an army away and having it reform and actually encircling one 220 000 men at the outset of that campaign i'm talking about the sixth army at stalingrad so the answer to your question is no i don't think that and in 1943 the germans will launch one last offensive and now they can only muster two armies and that was against kursk so so you see in 41 big theater-wide offensive 42 half size offensive 43 pint-sized offensive and that offensive went nowhere didn't even break through the front-line soviet uh tactical defenses so i i don't think then that's the whole point of the book that's why i laughed earlier you know kind of a tough character arc it's not like when the soviets attack in bella rush in 1944 you're going to say to yourself i bet the germans are going to hold them off you know if you've been reading the previous 20 pages you know that's not going to happen yeah i know reading this you you often you lay out the order of battle for the germans and then come in and say well just have to remember all of these units are half strength yeah below or you know ten percent if i if i may you know just go up to the d-day the normandy campaign i work at the national world war ii museum please come see us i give you all a personal invitation to come see us um we used to be the d-day museum and and now we are the national world war ii museum so we do the whole war but d-day is near and dear to our hearts at the museum it's our origin story you know the german defense is a deed so the trope is you know the americans british land you know broke the the defenses of hitler's fortress europe and beat the best that the germans had to offer us i love that kind of talk i don't necessarily think it's true so there was 65 german divisions defending in the west which if you you know by if you how how exactly you measure the coastline it's far too few divisions even come close to defending that coastline it'd been enough if france was about half as big so you don't have enough divisions um of those 65 divisions um 55 of them are infantry or some sort and of those 55 30 of those 55 are static they have no transport they don't have a horse and they don't have horse horse-drawn wagons they have no transport they've been plunked down in a bunker on the coastline and their job is to fire and you know at omaha beach they did so quite well we all know that the omaha beach landing was almost a tactical disaster they fought they they fired quite well there they have come close to stopping the the british and canadians at the other beaches nor did they come close to stopping the americans at utah beach even even within a mile of doing so within all those divisions there was virtually every one of them had one or more battalions so-called of eastern troops australban as they were called eastern troops captured soviet prisoners of war from various nationalities who were put into a german unit and taught a few rudimentary words of german foyer is one you need to know um yavol is another one you probably need to know and and they fought you know about as well as you could expect them to fight what that is to say not all that well why would anyone expect them to fight so so that's that's the german defenses in normandy in other so if you're if you're keeping track of my numbers there's 10 still unaccounted for and those are panzer divisions modern mechanized a brand new brand new mark iv mark mark 5 or mark 6 tanks usually mark 5 tanks the so-called panther and they're fine divisions but so what do you do with them rommel said well they have to be at the water's edge to hit the allies just when they land roonstead said no they just they'll be under ally naval gunfire if we do that we have to keep them back and they'll counter attack at an appropriate moment and rommel said you don't know what it's like to fight the americans and the british they have control of the air movement by day will be impossible movement by night will be a nightmare you know he's right and roonsted was right so when when that when there is no good operate when there's no good solution to an operational problem you have to trace it back to some of the problems we're talking about so one more question for me and then i think we'll open we have one from a few a few questions from the audience so this is you know the project on military and diplomatic history where you're always looking for you know some of the the larger lessons we can draw from history and apply to some of our present uh sure problems and i'm curious you know what you would say you know beyond just world war ii what can we learn about you know leadership duty and responsibility down as you know as well as up and you know political or civilian control of the military what can we learn about these things from the story of yes and yes like both of what you just said obviously well you know civilian control of the military is um is a tough one in this context it all depends who your civilian is hitler was a civilian so hitler hitler did stand for a kind of modern war making of civilian and political let's say political people better i think hitler did stand for a kind of modern model of political control of the military in that sense he is more modern than a roon state the field marshal came up out of the old school who thinks that you know war is on it's time to let the generals plan the operations and so the generals would say we're we're going to retreat from nickel opal and hitler said you can't do that it's the last manganese mine we have in our possession and they would say so what and hitler said because we have 17 days of manganese left and if we lose these we're going to lose the war so i mean he was constantly trying to remind them of politics and economics and in admittedly a non-systematic way hitler was very was capable of memorizing all sorts of statistics and then ramming them down your throat in in a 15-minute conversation so you wanted to scream everyone who came into contact with them said that so civilian control is a tough one loyalty below i think is i just think that the definition of loyalty is not simply obeying your superior whether it's in private life or public life or in military life you have responsibility as well as as authority as a commander and you so you you do you're a man under authority uh if it is you know the centurion once said but beneath you there are men who also look to you for protection of their lives and and i think both of those have to be taken into account i think the united states armed services have a pretty good record on that point i brag about it all the time scherner executed thousands of his own men patton almost lost his career for slapping one two the second time was unfree you know patton had two slapping incidents of exhausted soldiers in a hospital in sicily a lot of people you know at the war college excuse me at the national world war ii museum we got a fairly conservative crowd and we tell them the patent story and they say well he's putting some backbone into this guy you know slapping some sense into them and it's just u.s officers don't lay hands on their personnel it's just not the way we roll in the united states and it makes me proud to be an american so i think that's something that we constantly need to keep in in mind i think there's a broader lesson of this book for the present though when i think of the officer corps we talk about them fighting world war ii but really in their heart of hearts they were fighting world war one i think it was the most important psychological touchstone to them that they didn't they were on the state they were on the uh on their guard for any signs of a repeated stab in the back or a new sign of a stab in the back as they believed had led to defeat in world war one so um i i think of the chinese office of court today and i think i've educated the educated chinese i i know and i i move in circles that enable me to know a number and um the amount of time we spend talking about the opium wars is sometimes really shocking to me you know because opium wars mean very little to most americans that's why it's shocking to me i'm a historian i know why they're important but you know humiliation at the hands of the west and if there's one thing for example china today is determined to avoid it it's another form of humiliation at the hands of the west at least it strikes me i'm i'm not an expert on chinese affairs but there is a chinese officer out there and i bet they have certain core beliefs that would be interesting to penetrate and get to know something about and for that reason a broader a broader point i would make is you know the knowledge of foreign languages absolutely essential sure i i'm able i think to get a little better handle on this office of course for one reason as i've taken some time to learn german i can read german real well and i've spent a lot long time you know soaking in those archives i think i have a sense for the rhythm of of of military german speak in particular in a way that maybe other authors haven't but i think of the outbreak of the vietnam war and there's a old wives tale perhaps or maybe it's true there were four vietnamese speakers in the state department at the time i don't know what the number is but let's admit it was obviously going to be pretty small so i think the the the importance of military culture if i want to study a foreign military i'd like to know more about their culture about the way they speak to one another i like to read their professional literature which we often think is kind of kind of dry but i've been reading german professional military literature for a lifetime i have three daughters who are now grown and gone so they're all grown up and doing wonderful things but around the dinner table i would say you see kids and they would know they're about to get a 20-minute discussion of german civil military relations in the 1920s i became fascinated with it and i really do think that the i don't the solution but the path to greater knowledge of either friends or or or potential adversaries or anyone in between is probably to know something about their culture and i think the best way to to know something about that is to learn the foreign language excellent sure thank you so we have a couple microphones all right in the back this is the fun part let's start i'm going to take my jacket right there in the back and if you could please state your name elizabeth um could you go back to the western front oh june 44 july when the normandy army german army in normandy is shattered we had the great good fortune to go on your fabulous trip to normandy and as moving as the beaches are the part i will never forget is driving down that what was then a dirt road the only road out east they were being strafed day and night and at the very end we walked over a tiny bridge that was a creek that the last german soldiers had to cross could you describe that breakout sure so you're talking about the the battle of the so-called pocket and and immediately afterwards so the yes it's um what individual german soldiers but german soldiers on the micro level went through in some of these battles it simply beggars the imagination because they had lost a firepower battle and so if we like to name book give books titles i think of sla marshals men against fire this is a great title for a book but it's nothing i ever want to experience but the german army experienced the phenomenon of men against fire late late in the war and that they had they just lost the firepower battle especially in the air there was no fire no air cover overhead so the allies had broken out of normandy and that in operation cobra and they had made a a loop into the britney peninsula to the west and then a loop towards the german border this is patton's great drive across central france through le mans and coming so he's on the southern wing of the of the german armies he comes up and uh and he's almost meeting a northern arm coming down from montgomery and they've just about made contact near the town of phales and so the germans call this the the castle the the the valley's encirclement and uh you're talking about maybe three miles by five miles wide and 150 000 german troops trapped there and there every inch of it is being raked by allied fire whether aerial bombing or a short range mortars long range artillery heavy machine guns tanks being used as just simply uh simply indirect fire i mean they're not maneuvering they're simply being used as extra artillery and there's really nowhere to go and the germans try desperately to find what cover they can find during the day and then which is often you know their own equipment or sometimes the bodies of their own comrades and then try to make their way east that is towards the last little bridge still open and it's the scene of carnage on you know there's maybe five times in the 20th century that anything like this has happened it's a scene of absolute carnage the the wreckage of five or ten german uh divisions of four of whom were armored or mechanized so that means vehicles all kind of piling towards this one little road and then tanks or trucks breaking down and being thrown off the road or thrown off the bridge so that the soldiers can get by every inch of it again is still this is as the allies realize what is happening they lay on the firepower against this crossing site and you know the the the fellais pocket is usually described in in allied histories as a failure because a lot of germans escaped from it was the allies were kind of slow in closing the final gate to that pocket either patent didn't move rapidly enough or montgomery didn't move rapidly enough all the pensioner you're talking to patna montgomery they each have their own ideas um but a lot of german commanders escape so you know most of the divisional staffs and the court staffs escape from the fella's pocket and that's important because they're because they're going to be allowed to reform they'll reform the armies along the german border we'll have to fight another campaign to get into germany but if you were there um the last pi if you were 90 of the people 80 95 percent of the people who were at the fella's pocket those who were there know that they lived through an absolute armageddon and you know the paul carrell is the sort of popular german historian of world war ii up he went he wrote by paul carl but his real name is carl paul schmidt and he was official of ribbon trop's foreign office and a thoroughly disreputable character but you know he entitled his chapter on fellas fellas the hell the hell of fellas the armageddon of fellais and um you know i've walked that ground many times and it's uh it's haunted it's there's too many people died in that little spot there's a few places like that if you travel around you know world war ii battle sites but that is definitely one of them one of the others for me would be stalingrad if you ever travel to stalingrad it's quite something to see say you're in the back sir uh you mentioned briefly the issue of uh unconditional surrender yeah and i'd hope you could expand a little bit on that because it if if you think about it it's hard to imagine that if the allies had not taken that position that there would not have been tens of millions of lives that would not have been lost but then you might well say 15 years later there'd be a nuclear war who knows but could you could you expand a little bit on that and maybe a way to do it is to say what would have happened had the allies not demanded unconditional surrender and i know it's not the subject of today's discussion you might have often off also make a side comment about the war in the pacific where the same conditions applied sure yes i i i said in the in the talk well just leave that one hanging because you could argue it both ways many all german officers and their memoirs did say it was something that kept them in the field no self-respecting military or self-respecting state could ever submit to unconditional surrender sounds like the end of your national existence in the course of the war um we have a number of diaries from germans of high stations and low stations and everyone in between that are increasingly coming to light and and being published and at least there we see on more than a few occasions unconditional surrender was welcomed it was it was an announcement that there would be no post-war hitler that that there would not that hitler had no role to play in any kind of post-war settlement so for example if you were a resistance type engaged in some kind of resistance whether inside germany or in one of the occupied territories unconditional surrender was music to your ears you're risking your life for that possibility for that just for that future that's exactly why you're risking your life at the moment so so there there is that um it's entirely possible so to take your counter factual so no unconditional surrender it's entirely possible for me to imagine german generals doing exactly what they had done in the course of the battles described in this book even in the absence of unconditional surrender because for all the other reasons i talked about the bribes and the memories of world war one and the fear of soviet retribution when they came when if and when the soviet union soviet armies broke into germany you know there was a very well how to describe it there was a large number of german officers mainly those captured at stalingrad by the soviets but later in other battles as well who took part in you know formed a committee called free germany and then the league of german officers who actively propagandized their comrades to surrender made broadcasts leaflet drops by and large they had no real impact stalin thought they might have some impact and he he gave them put some real resources behind them and the real test case was this encirclement at corson in early 1944 the so-called corson pocket when zydelis one of the commanders captured stalingrad leaflets bearing his name or dropped into the pocket saying you're all going to be killed the germans were surrounded there it's going to be stalingrad all over again you'll be treated well blah blah blah it had no impact at all apparently and then stalin as the soviet army got closer and closer to germany i think he said i don't need this and and they be they sort of became common prisoners but there have been a surprising number of them many went out to careers in the east german military after the communist half of germany communist sector of germany after the war and so um you know unconditional surrender was there was there was apparent solidarity on the german home front but but that's not to say there was real solidarity many people were biting their timing safely keeping their opinions to themselves and unconditional surrender was not was not a horrifying thought to all of them it meant that there would be no hitler in the post-war and germany could perhaps could re-enter the family of nations as it had once you know been a been a proud member so it's a it's a difficult question and it can be argued a lot of different ways uh the japanese example is fascinating because the casablanca declaration applied to the japanese as well unconditional surrender and uh the japanese knew that we were you know truman sent the japanese a notification we have this extremely powerful made declaration of pots and we have an extremely powerful bomb and we're going to drop it on you and yes you accept unconditional surrender and bomb was dropped on hiroshima and the japanese fought on the they barely acknowledged the bomb being dropped on hiroshima and dropped the second bomb on nagasaki and the japanese commanders hi the service chiefs if you will the big six they met in session and and on whether to continue the war and they split three to three that's that meant there were three japanese you know service chiefs said yeah bring it on more atom bombs but it might be a better way of looking at that to say that they they arranged the split deliberately beforehand so that the emperor would be forced to show his the emperor would be forced to intervene as you know the emperor did intervene and said it's time to stop the war and the war was stopped um remember the japanese had the one objection unconditional surrender was they want to keep the emperor which is you know this is this is fascinating um we said no it's unconditional we dropped two atomic bombs and they finally agreed to surrender and we let them keep the emperor so in a sense they they if that was the last condition that they held as an un incontrovertible demand they it was it was met of course it was granted so that you can you know them it's if face is saved on both sides the emperor remains the americans say well we granted it it wasn't really a condition you put yourself into our hands but the the end of the war in the pacific was a much messier end of the war than the end of the war in europe and just troops fighting their way into the enemy capital let's see right there man we have a microphone right behind you yeah my question is on nazi gold and switzerland and um i was reading a pack of thieves and basically it had to do with um the requisition of goods and everything um and that was that that was then created the nazi gold um as the germans went everywhere sending people to the camps all the their goods and properties and businesses art work artwork and in the in the in the book it said that uh the nazi gold extended the war by two years um so there was a lot of tens of tens of billions of dollars of nazi gold um and of course bletchley park says their efforts ended the war they prevented the war from extending two more years so um could you please explain if there was that much nazi gold that means that these soldiers who were fighting and um eventually were going to surrender they they were able to have access to this gold at some point in their lives once they got out of their imprisonment that's it's a good question that nazi the nazi occupation economy was a looting economy that is a smash and grab economics it wasn't conquering territories to further develop them and turn them into blooming landscapes of economic prosperity it was to to loot them any any estimates about what anything did to shorten the war is nothing more than an estimate and it's usually because the author has a pet project like nazi gold or or bletchley park or air power which is said to have shortened the war by six months in the in the eyes of some current you know recent authoritative studies i've seen on it so yeah you have to understand when we come for that whenever you say how long it extended the war but certainly um yeah german looting of foreign economies and foreign individuals under you know incarcerated unfairly or hauled off to concentration or death camps german looting definitely extended the war it added gold and added resources to the german treasury that wouldn't otherwise have been there much of it remains unfound though to this day which means it had been squirreled away by individuals which means it had been kind of embed so first you loot then you embezzle you know it had been looted from its owners but now clearly some dishonest forces within the german state government military were embezzling it that is squirreling it away for their own private use um i i don't know what the final disposition of the polish gold train was the most recent gold train that was alleged to have been found apparently excavations are being carried on there's been some seismic data that indicates there's some heavy metals buried under the earth but we'll we we won't know the size of that until it's um until it's brought forth so i um there's it's incontrovertible that the holocaust in some way just writ large um added to german prosperity in the late 1930s it was a lot of confiscated wealth in the same sort of way that the early soviet union the bolsheviks extorted all sorts of wealth and seized all sorts of wealth from the former ruling classes as they were styled um they were liquidated and then they were liquidated and their wealth was in the hands of the state and there's no doubt that the soviets the bolsheviks were able to finance portions of the civil war against the whites for example from from uh looting it's not a long-term path to sick my my caveat is it's not a long-term path to success once you've looted and the wealth is gone then then you're kind of back where you're started and you're perhaps looking for new people from whom to loot or new territories to conquer you right here in the front sir you finally you finally got your call make it good man hopefully uh eric gomez from the cato institute um i am wondering about north korea in the current context um and one of the major questions that sort of come up in discussions of should the u.s attack or not is the fighting willpower of the north korean military yes and would it if kim jong-un were to be killed or if he were to be disarmed of his nuclear weapons and a you know overly optimistic first strike uh would then the conventional forces just say okay we give up because you know they're underfed or what have you so in your experience studying the german military losing in this i know it's not a perfect case but are there any sort of general things we should be looking for in peace time to get clues as to how the kpa might function were a new korean war to start you know i read my my historical colleagues when i've never met but i read a lot bruce cummings who talks a lot about the north korean state and north korean military and it's a state that was built really on the grounds of anti-japanese resistance and it's a state that was built of guerrilla fighters what we often style in the korean war is the collapse of the north korean military after inchon when when the united nations forces were hurtling over the parallel and toward the yalu really now seems to have been a voluntary dissolution of the north korean army into smaller sized guerrilla units so that's the way it's being written now i i'm a little bit outside my uh i'm upside my lane perhaps but that's the way it's being written now by scholars whom i whom i respect so um you know a good question to start with is what would have happened to the vermont had hitler been killed so it's one of the possibilities you just said about what would happen to the north korean military uh certainly there was a plot to do so and uh there have been some officers who agreed to step forth and lead some kind of new new regime and um i i if i were a north korean intelligent that is a intelligence specialist dealing with north korea and american i'd be looking very very carefully for uh for for signs of some sort of dissatisfaction or for signs of certain kinds of office office early ambition that might be coming to the fore i'm sure a trained psycho a psycho not psychoanalyst but sort of a psycho-intelligence agency or psycho-intelligence agent would be able to look for some of those signs so it's a little bit difficult to say but i um i i'd be very wary of a simplistic notion that i will say this killing kim will lead to a collapse of the north korean military i i would i'd be pretty skeptical of that notion based on what i know about the german army i probably should say no more before i humiliate myself that's all right i'm willing to answer anything to my best of my ability sir get the mic we have you mentioned the germans who collaborated with the soviets i've always been fascinated how juan paulus ends up with easter oh yeah right right so the question is about german officers who who collaborated with the soviets and you you especially bring the for the example of of friedrich von paulista friedrich paulus those german sixth army commander so he's taken prisoner at stalingrad you may know the the unusual circumstances the german troops were in the pocket in stalingrad for over for over two months and refused to allow to surrender or to break out or do anything really but sit there by by hitler and paulus never argued with those orders as he certainly could have he was a thousand miles away from hitler and there was nothing hitler could do to him at the moment but paulus remained loyal um when it when all was lost and the food was out and the ammunition was out there were paulus uh sent a message to fewer headquarters saying you know the the struggle is over hitler promoted him to feel marshall on the historical notion that no german field marshal had ever surrendered before by the way i'm not even sure it's true we'd have to look at it there are some cases that are kind of ambiguous in the past um so policy you know paulus was granted the field marshal's baton by radio and then surrendered um he had had enough clearly uh the the the kessel experience had broken him in a certain sense those who were with him at that time it was had kind of a lazy eye now he's gotten a facial tic that was becoming increasingly obvious a person under immense stress right so he's under immense stress and that the surrender seemed to have loosened him completely his soviet captors well their interrogators talked about how relaxed he seemed you know being taken prisoner by the soviet army you think the last thing you'd have is a sense of relaxation but compared to what he'd been through he was being fed a couple of hot meals a day and was in relative comfort as opposed to living in the unheated ruins of the main department store in downtown stalingrad which is where his headquarters have been so he is one of those who joins this bdo bunder deutsche bundt deutsche officers the league of german officers bdo along with most of the other generals captured a stalingrad including one of the real tough guys of the of the german officer of friedrich zeidlitz the descendant of the great cavalry commander from from the from the frederick the greats time he had been commander virtually all the infantry forces at stalingrad and the two of them and numerous other generals i think there's 20 generals taken prisoner at stalingrad and then they've been added to some other battles already and there's a lot more to come after 1944. and so again they do their best that in the cold war they were condemned as as stalinist lackeys condemned by us in the west in west germany as well as stalinist lackeys and maybe in some sense i totally understand that but but silas said whatever happens in germany can't possibly be worse than what's going to happen in germany if we continue the war paulus said the same thing what what what is happening what will happen in the next 12 months will beggar our imaginations we can't even paint the picture germany will be in flames from one corner the other so a communist germany may not last forever but destruction does last forever this is the kind of arguments they were making at the time and there's no doubt they were rewarded according to soviet and communist lights by high positions in the east german military paulus was the commander of this uh exact title was but essentially the commander-in-chief of the east german folks army uh in its in its early early years of its founding and he'd lived for the rest of his life in east germany his former west german colleagues his west german former colleagues um you know went on a 15-year campaign of character assassination against him saying he'd always been disloyal he never really cared about his men and he'd always probably secretly been a communist that was often that was often he was often accused of secretly being communist which is ridiculous paulus was perhaps the least inspiring military leader of the 20th century he fought in a nept campaign in stalingrad attempting to fight his way through the city stalingrad's along like a rectangle sits along the volga long but not very deep so he's gonna fought his way from the bottom of stalingrad to the top of stalingrad the long way it's a it's almost as silly as fighting your way up the italian peninsula from the south to the north oh sorry i didn't say that you got me on camera saying that um it's not really a wise operational decision so i have nothing good to say about paulus as a military commander but i've at least i've always i've always tried to take phenomenal like the bdo and analyze them on their own terms rather than through a cold war lens of pro or anti-communism let's see uh let's see you sir right here herb rose um i'm going to take you a little bit out of your area of comfort well we already went to north korea so nothing you do could possibly be right to um and ask you to speculate quite a bit but uh if you compare the german soldier and you're concentrating more on the officer but with the japanese soldier who was found in various islands a decade or more hiding out in trees and living off the land or in caves and living off the land if the situations had been reversed would you have found many of the german troops doing the same sort of thing so if the germans were fighting in the pacific yeah wow exactly i love my love me some counterfactual that's the best one i've ever heard one of the things i i at the museum we try to be fair and even-handed and for every word we print on the war in europe we try to print something on the war in the pacific and vice versa so we almost never talk about the germans without the japanese or and i was never the japanese of the german son of the italians i am italian of italian ethnicity they get short shrift and i guess like we're just going to have to accept that but i i've really spent a you know career talking about world war ii trying to demythologize the japanese soldier somewhat in terms of loyalty to the concept of bushido and and other things this said to be a 800 year old samurai tradition which is it's it's more equivalent to me to being in the hitler youth a japanese soldier in world war ii had been thoroughly propagandized his whole life about the not the brilliant above the brilliance the majesty and divinity of the emperor but the brilliance of the japanese military and the weakness and decadence of the soldiers and sailors every fighting so i think that's that's how i see it anyway so i think what when you have japanese soldiers still in guadalcanal or wherever they are in the interior this dense triple canopy jungle still wandering around and occasionally you know still presenting themselves to the to the outside world yeah i i personally think that if german soldiers had been fighting the war in the pacific completely out of of communications and out of any sort of social or human intercourse you're i don't know somehow you've lost your unit you've wandered off and have not and you just can't you never found them again and they've they've disappeared and somehow you fell into a hole or whatever it might be some of the japanese stories are quite unusual as to how they came to be lost i i think if german soldiers have been put in those kind of unusual situations i i see no reason why some of them might not still be wandering around papua new guinea i i mean it's to me it's it's an it's a question without a firm answer of course and you're free to differ on that point i think every i think every nation does evolve a kind of way of war i've written a book called the german way of war and uh russell widely famously wrote a book called the american way of war about how different cultures military cultures evolve different ways of looking at the battlefield and understanding what they're doing so certainly there are differences between the german and japanese way of war i think the japanese knew they could not compete on the level of technology and so they were for they felt themselves or saw themselves as forced to to rely more on the human factor to inculcate a sense of human superiority which is extremely deadly under modern conditions and they prove the japanese prove that repeatedly in the course of the war i'm thinking of all out we call them bonsai charges but but essentially all out shock charges by infantry against well-defended american positions by and large germans didn't do that germans were always looking for a weak spot and a flank so so i mean there's certainly differences that we could find between the germans and japanese but the specific case you mentioned of being trapped on a desert island like gilligan outside of any contact with the outside world i i think it is possible that german soldiers could be wandering around some some abandon or some obscure island in the south pacific up to the present day yeah that's a good question though good question i think we have time for one or two more i am staying across the street so as you know i can always come back any time you sir in the back uh thank you this was really interesting um my name is will stayton and uh curious uh you just made a point about hitler's you know stay order in stalingrad uh you talked about how a lot of the officer corps and even many of the enlisted soldiers had kind of bought into the ideologies and so i'm wondering to what extent you think the idea of laban's realm and hitler's kind of refusal especially on the eastern front to let his troops retreat even a little bit may have played into the psychology and the reason that the vermont kept fighting even after it was obvious the war was over yeah that's so one of hitler's you know he defeats was this notion of laban's realm which means living space that germany was a crowded nation as nazi propagandists always said about twice the population of france living on the same amount of territory which is roughly give or take because it's pretty close to being true and the germans had certainly conquered their their their fill of laban's realm by by december of 1941 and then you know if you look at an operational map of the july of the summer 1942 campaign and you know it's going to end in disaster stalingrad so it's kind of tough but if you can forget that for a moment you have german army sitting in the caucasus mountain range it's a long long way from from berlin i don't know how much laban's realm that idea that geopolitical idea played a part in german steadfastness late in the war i think i think i turned laban's rom around a little bit part and parcel of the idea of laban's rom was that there were these wide open spaces that were not being used adequately because the people who inhabited them were sub-human or savage so i think that les miserables has to be linked to that question of racism of inferior races who are who are occupying these vast territories which they're not doing anything with so to say in the way that we germans we aryan races the the smarter more organically thinking clear thinking races could what could we do with this territory and i think that's really the essence of laban's room and and once again i i have to say that those racist or racialist ideas are definitely part and parcel of the german army's worldview especially the armies fighting in the east there's a certain amount of oh decadent westerner types of that sort of thought again fighting against the americans but it was hard to think they were too decadent given the level of technology they had they had brought to the fight german german soldiers mentioned constantly the disgusting nature of these little hovels that soviet that russian families live in you know in the forests around moscow there's a hole in the ground for a toilet and the place stinks like cabbage and and on and on and on and on and on so i mean i think that notion that that late in the war you say well they're getting beaten badly by the so by the russians how soviets how could they possibly think they were fighting an inferior race well the notion of a small band being overwhelmed by hordes of inferior barbarians is hardly foreign to the western worldview probably hardly for anybody's worldview any any civilized people always fear the barbarians living on the living on the frontier it's a it's one of our bedrock western civilization myths of the 300 spartans against xerxes so i mean i think that probably does play laban's wrong but but as i phrased that racialized laban's realm probably does have something to do with the the german german steadfastness in the field both at the officer level and at the level of the lonzer yeah let's take maybe one more for me right here in the front sir we have uh jude sander i just had a question about um german logistics at the end like how how was their supply trains i just don't understand how they maintained the supplies they had such a diversity of equipment too they had like like panthers and all types of different right they just had so many types of equipment their religious trail which has been very difficult i think and the other thing is like good question yeah and the second question is just the payments to the generals did they keep that after the war i'm just curious how the reconstruction of the banks after that good two two good questions logistics of course proved to be the german achilles heel german logistics uh we're essentially rail bound so the germans had the finest rail network anywhere in the world the densest rail network anywhere in the world it proved remarkably difficult to to bomb it into uh you know to destroy it uh because there was always you bombed a line there was always an alternate line german uh engineers very skilled at rerouting and and and repairing very very quickly eventually the key for allied bombers and they tried everything they said well we'll hit german rub you know synthetic rubber plants we'll hit german ball bearings we'll hit oil in romania at ploesch which was germany's principle source of oil the germans always managed workarounds uh finally it wasn't until early 1945 that the solution was found you know the trial and error they tried them all which was to bomb the marshaling yards these huge immense acres and acres and acres of side switches and turntables that that formed the marshalling yards outside of all of germany's major cities i'm thinking especially of the marshalling yards outside frankfurt so the martian hit destroying the marshalling yards outside frankfurt made it very difficult for the germans to fight the uh to uh recover after the battle of the bulge and to reform their their lines in the west end to ship troops in the east as well so once off the once off the rail line you know at the railhead it was a horse-drawn transport wagons and uh you're right the you mentioned the multiplicity of equipment the different kind of models of german tanks how about the captured tanks how about all the captured french tanks and the czech tanks and the polish and russian artillery it's a it's a mess and while the germans did all that was humanly possible i don't think we can ever say they solve the problem and that's why they're fighting for a position of one of the reasons they're fighting from a position of material uh inferiority for for the last two years of the war that i'm talking about uh your last oh were they allowed to keep the payments mo so many of them were arrested so many of them were taken prisoner and by the soviets in the east and after the war in the west was over there's a sort of a wholesale roundup virtually all of them are taken prisoners in the west uh they are put to work writing essays on their way of war on what it's like to fight the soviet union difficulties of fighting the russians in the winter how to survive a battle of encirclement these foreign military studies i've i've i've spent my whole life swimming in them you know my whole professional career thankfully we put those guys to work and made them right but as prisoners they had forfeited all the all the gains they were they had made under the third reich uh higher salaries from being generals but especially the dotations so to say german currencies were so little by the end of the war in the immediate aftermath the occupation the allies now ran the currency system that it was easy to to see who had gotten ill-gotten gains and take them away now i don't know if any of them ever smuggled any of that stuff outside of the country and let's assume some of them did and so maybe some of them were able to benefit from some of those payments they're the classic example of ill-gotten gains i mean they really are a norm goethe a real fine historian has written a good article on this subject called black marks you know they're they're it's ill-gotten gains there's nothing good about the money that that german generals were getting if you think about it is that why gadarian was willing to still you know be launching offensives and pomerania in february and march of 1945 and it clearly lost by now no one could even doubt it but keep it going one more month when's my 50th birthday i mean i don't know if any of them were asking themselves that question it's entirely possible they were because that was a big fat bonus time 50th and 60th birthdays all right well thank you very much for coming dr satina thanks sam oh thank you very much and thank you all good session you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 630,496

Rating: 4.4922009 out of 5

Keywords: csis, international, politics, diplomacy, washington

Id: UI72BLrwqR0

Length: 85min 22sec (5122 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 06 2018

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Submission statement:

Citino gives a wonderful lecture here, along the lines of his previous lectures covering the contents of the previous books on the German army in the 2nd World War. This one is on the topic of the final book in the series (I guess his daughters are all out of college), the german campaigns of 1944-45. Overall a high quality lecture, and a reasonable abbreviation of an excellent book.

Amazon link to book