Nazism and War (Modern Library Chronicles) by Bessel Richard

Author:Bessel, Richard [Bessel, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

However, it was not world history but the German military elite that had lost its bearings, an elite that had so distanced itself from military professionalism and become so corrupted by the Nazi racial state that instead of developing a rational strategic perspective, it could assert only that “we will win because we must win.” During the First World War, it should be remembered, when Germany's military position had become hopeless in the summer of 1918, the military leadership— and, in the end, even that subsequent propagandist for “total war” Erich Ludendorff—faced the fact that the war could not be won and demanded that Germany seek an armistice.142 During the Second World War, when Germany's military position became hopeless, such rational assessment of the military situation was not an option.

The fact that there was no forum left in which overall strategy could be discussed is a reflection of the character of the Nazi state, in which the coordination of policy had been undermined by institutional Darwinism and extreme personal dictatorship. More specifically, the inability to formulate strategy and the willingness of the generals to commit their troops to suicidal battles during the last years of the war was a consequence of what Bernd Wegner has described as the step-by-step “military seizure of power” by Hitler.143 This gradual takeover—by becoming first supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, then supreme commander of the army as well, then assuming practical command of the operations of individual army groups and effectively reducing the Wehr-macht leadership staff to a personal office—in the end left the military leadership without responsibility for military strategy. More generally, this process signified the domination not of politics by the military (as many generals had hoped for in 1933), but of the military by (Nazi) politics. That the Wehr-macht had surrendered itself to Hitler and Nazi ideology, had willingly engaged in a war of racial extermination, and had abandoned moral responsibility and military rationality would leave it with no choice in the end but to fight for a criminal and vastly destructive lost cause.

Following the surrender at Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht was thrown onto the defensive. On February 8, Soviet forces took Kursk; on February 12, they recaptured Rostov; on February 16, Charkov, Ukraine's second largest city; on March 3, they took Rzhev, one hundred miles to the west of Moscow. Yet German forces were far from beaten. Experienced and desperate, they managed to mount a major counteroffensive, beginning on February 19 (the day after Goebbels had delivered his “total war” speech) and lasting until March 17. In so doing, they managed to stabilize the front in Ukraine and to recoup some of their losses—most important, the retaking of Charkov on March 14, a success that a hopeful German public seized upon as a “turning point of the Second World War.”144 Although, with hindsight, it is apparent that by this time Nazi Germany no longer had a realistic hope of winning the war, nevertheless to a people convinced of their superiority over a “primitive” enemy, there still seemed grounds for believing in the possibility of victory.

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