Guderian: Panzer Pioneer or Myth Maker? (Brassey's Military Profiles) by Russell Hart

Author:Russell Hart [Hart, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2006-10-30T22:00:00+00:00

7

Inspector General of Armored Troops, 1943–1944

IN HIS memoirs Guderian glossed over his activities of 1942, when he remained on the unassigned officer reserve list. He had good reasons to omit details of his actions, since they did not reflect well on the self-image he wished to depict. Part of the time he spent receiving treatment and recuperating from heart troubles that the strain of the Eastern Front had exacerbated. When not receiving treatment, however, he was not idly kicking his heels—quite the opposite. Initially, Guderian spent some time looking for a house in southern Germany where he could live after retiring. Then his horizons widened, and he extended his search and began looking for a much more extravagant new home. This change occurred during the spring of 1942 after Guderian accepted a massive payment of 1.25 million marks from Hitler. To put the scale of this bribe in perspective, it was the equivalent of more than fifty years’ regular salary for an officer of Guderian’s rank and seniority!1 During the summer of 1942 Guderian traveled extensively around the Wartheland of West Prussia (annexed after the German conquest of Poland) with the staff of the local Nazi Gauleiter, or district leader, looking for a suitable Polish aristocratic home to appropriate. He found a spacious estate to his liking, but Hitler’s Chancellery Office (which dispensed these secret funds) rejected his application to take possession because it was too excessive and would establish a bad precedent.2 He therefore had to look for a more modest estate and in October 1942 finally settled on possession of a large twenty-five-hundred-acre rural estate of excellent farmland at Deipenhof. The final obstacle to Guderian’s moving in was the forcible eviction of the Polish owners.3 In fact this “bribe” (which is precisely how Hitler conceived of it, distrusting the senior generals and thinking it necessary to bribe them to keep them in line) represented the largest single bribe that he ever gave to any of his field commanders.4

In fact, Guderian had already been receiving special, regular, tax-free monthly payments of 2000 Reichsmarks—effectively doubling his gross salary5—since August 1940, after he was promoted to colonel-general in the aftermath of the successful western campaign. Such “honorific reimbursements” were specifically designed to bind senior military officers to Hitler and the Nazi state. Guderian’s payments alone represented three times the annual salary of an army major, and no less than eight times the salary of a sergeant.6 Moreover, given that these bonuses were tax-exempt and that wartime Germany’s income tax rates reached as high as 65 percent, these secret bonuses massively increased Guderian’s net salary. These illegal bribes were paid out a secret Chancellery “discretionary account” and were intended, according to Hitler, to overcome officers’ “inner convictions” so that they became compliant servants of the Nazi regime.7 They worked.8

Guderian was well aware of the unorthodox and precarious nature of these payments: that they came directly from Hitler, through secret Chancellery channels, and could be withdrawn at any moment by Hitler himself.9 These

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