Napoleon & Hitler: A Comparative Biography by Seward Desmond

Author:Seward, Desmond [Seward, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0094765804
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-06-23T23:00:00+00:00

All methods formerly usual were upset by Bonaparte’s luck and boldness, and first rate powers almost wiped out at a blow.

Clausewitz, Vom Kriege

Before the war, and still more during the conquest of the West, Hitler came to appear a gigantic figure, combining the strategy of a Napoleon with the cunning of a Machiavelli and the fanatical fervour of a Mahomet.

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill

6

The Conquest of Europe

Napoleon conquered what was later Germany in 1805, Hitler overran France in 1940. Both smashed coalitions whose armies had appeared to have overwhelming superiority. These unexpected, complete victories made the Emperor and the Führer masters of Europe. Each was intoxicated by his success, yielding to unbridled ambition.

Marshal Alexandre Berthier, the son of an engineer who had been ennobled by Louis XV and himself a sapper, is recognized as one of the greatest staff officers in history. He was both a genius and a dogsbody. While Napoleon was his own chief military planner – crouched over or even lying on his maps with a pair of dividers (spaced to cover 22 to 25 miles, the distance infantry could march in a day), marking his divisions by coloured pins which he moved so as to know where they would be at any given moment, only issuing orders after the most meticulous calculations – the provider of maps and everything else was Berthier, who knew the strength and position of every unit. During one campaign he is said to have gone without sleep for nearly a fortnight. He was so much under his master’s spell, that guilty at having deserted in 1814 and not daring to rejoin him, he eventually threw himself out of a window.

General Alfred Jodl and the future Marshal Wilhelm Keitel together constituted a species of joint Berthier. Jodl, originally an artilleryman, was a Bavarian of bourgeois background with intellectual tastes. Too intelligent not to question Hitler’s wilder fantasies, he was totally dominated by him, often cynically agreeing for the sake of peace and quiet. Nevertheless, he could plan anything. (He was to plan the brilliantly successful invasion and conquest of Yugoslavia.) Keitel, a Hanoverian country gentleman whose family had fought against the Prussians in 1866, was also a gunner but not so clever as Jodl. ‘From an honourable, soldierly respectable general he had developed in the course of years into a servile flatterer,’ comments Speer. ‘Basically Keitel hated his own weaknesses; but the hopelessness of any dispute with Hitler had ultimately brought him to the point of not even trying to form his own opinion.’ So enslaved was he that when his master staggered to his feet after the bomb attempt of 1944 he embraced him, crying, ‘My Führer, my Führer, you’re alive!’ (It was Keitel who gave Hitler the title Grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten – ‘Greatest War Lord of All Time’; abbreviated to ‘Gröfaz’, it became a sarcastic nickname at Wehrmacht headquarters during the war’s later stages.) Together Jodl and Keitel enabled the Führer to function as a commander.

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