Hitler's Charisma by Laurence Rees

Author:Laurence Rees
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307908131
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-15T23:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

RISK AND REWARD

12

THE GREAT GAMBLE

Despite decades of historical research, a number of myths about Hitler and Nazism still persist in the popular consciousness. One of the most pervasive is that the German victory over the French in 1940 was made possible because of the superiority of German equipment—crucially, that the Wehrmacht had more tanks to enable them to pioneer Blitzkrieg tactics. But this is not the case. In fact, the Germans had fewer tanks than the Allies on the Western Front, and a study of the decisive period from the start of the war through to the defeat of the French—from September 1939 to the summer of 1940—reveals a much more complex matrix of reasons for Hitler’s success, one in which his charisma played a vital role. Hitler’s vision, his certainty, his oratory, his ability to release the limitless ambitions of his followers and create an atmosphere of intense excitement at the possibility of making history—all of this played a part in ensuring German victory.

Above all, this is the period of the great gamble. And here, too, we confront another popular myth—that the greatest risk Hitler ever took was thought at the time to be his decision to invade the Soviet Union. But, in reality, his decision to attack the French was considered much more risky—so much so that the German offensive on the Western Front in the spring of 1940 was looked on as one of the greatest military gambles in history. According to conventional wisdom at the time, the German attack ought not to have succeeded.1 Moreover, during this period Hitler not only had to persuade his generals to do his bidding and attack west, but also decide on the nature of the war against Poland and the form that the Nazi occupation would take.

However, there is nothing mysterious about the military destruction of Poland, which the Germans accomplished within weeks. Warsaw may have fallen only on 28 September, but the fate of Poland had been clear eleven days before when the Red Army, acting in consultation with the Germans, marched into eastern Poland to seize their share of Polish territory. Trapped between Hitler and Stalin—who were acting as Allies in the dismemberment of Poland under the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact—the Poles never had a chance.

But if the military action was straightforward, Nazi policy within occupied Poland was anything but. A senior German military officer like General Johannes Blaskowitz could still maintain during interrogation in 1947 that he had felt at the time that, “A war to wipe out the political and economic loss resulting from the creation of the Polish Corridor and to lessen the threat to separated East Prussia surrounded by Poland and Lithuania was regarded as a sacred duty though a sad necessity.”2 In effect, he claimed that he was fighting a war to “right the wrongs of Versailles.”

A war for these ends also had the wholehearted support of ethnic Germans who had been left trapped at the end of the First World War when territory that had been German for generations had been handed over to Poland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.