What Did German Generals Think of Hitler? JJ

In September 1938, a raiding party in Berlin  stood ready to storm the Reich Chancellery   and seize Adolf Hitler — a plan drawn up inside  the army’s high command. The man who could set   it in motion was the chief of the general  staff, Franz Halder. Then the news came:   the British prime minister was flying to Munich,  and there would be no war.

Halder called it off,   and days later the plotters burned their papers  in a fireplace. It was the closest the German   generals ever came to stopping Hitler. What they  thought of him ran from open loathing to worship.   Yet for most of them, it made remarkably  little difference to how they served him.    Franz Halder was not the kind of man you   would expect to plan a coup.

He was a Bavarian  artillery officer, devout and precise, a gifted   staff technician who had climbed to the top of the  general staff on ability alone. To a professional   like him, Hitler was not a leader to admire but  a dangerous amateur — a man with no training   playing at strategy with an army other people  had built. That was one view of Hitler inside   the officer corps. It was far from the only one. At one end stood the men who loathed him.

Kurt von   Hammerstein-Equord, the commander-in-chief of the  army when Hitler took power, was so hostile to the   Nazis that he had urged President Hindenburg not  to make Hitler chancellor at all. Within a year   he was eased out of his command. Others sneered  from a safer distance.

Hindenburg himself is said   to have called Hitler “the Bohemian corporal,”  a jab at his low rank and foreign birth that the   aristocrats in the officer clubs happily repeated. At the other end stood the believers. Field   Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the war minister,  was so taken with Hitler that his own colleagues   mocked him as the “Rubber Lion,” stern on the  outside and soft in the leader’s presence.

Wilhelm Keitel, who would come to run the armed  forces high command, turned into such a yes-man   that officers rebuilt his name into “Lakeitel,”  a pun on the German word for lackey. Göring said   he had the mind of a sergeant in the body  of a field marshal. Between the loathing   and the worship sat almost everyone else.

Most officers were somewhere in that middle,   and their view of Hitler was shaped as  much by what he was doing for the army   as by what they thought of the man himself.  They disliked his manners and his origins,   but they wanted what he was delivering. He tore  up the Treaty of Versailles, which had capped   the army at one hundred thousand men and stripped  it of tanks, aircraft, and a general staff.

Money   flooded into rearmament. The political left they  feared was crushed. For a professional soldier,   that transformation was intoxicating. The differences between these men were real.   Some despised Hitler, others admired him, and  many simply accepted him because of what he was   doing for the army. But private opinion  was one thing; obedience was another.

In   the summer of 1934, Hitler found a way to  bind the officer corps to him personally.    It started with a purge. Hitler owed part   of his rise to the Sturmabteilung, or SA — the  brown-shirted storm troopers whose street violence   had helped bring him to power.

By 1934 the SA  had swollen past two million men, and its chief,   Ernst Röhm, wanted it to swallow the regular  army and become a revolutionary force in its   own right. To the professional officer corps,  barely a hundred thousand strong, that was a   mortal threat. At the end of June, Hitler struck  first. Over a few days Röhm and the SA’s leaders   were swept away in what the regime called the  Night of the Long Knives.

The generals welcomed   it. The rival that had threatened them was gone. But the same purge reached into their own ranks.   Two retired generals, Kurt von Schleicher, a  former chancellor, and Ferdinand von Bredow,   died in those days as well. It was a  plain warning that the new government   would settle scores with soldiers too.

The army command said almost nothing,   and its silence would cost it more than it knew. Weeks later came the moment that bound the officer   corps to Hitler in person. On 2 August 1934,  President Hindenburg died. That same day,   before the old marshal was even buried, every  soldier in Germany was made to swear a new oath.   The old pledge had bound them to the constitution.

The new one bound them to Adolf Hitler by name,   promising unconditional obedience to him  as supreme commander. It was Blomberg,   the Rubber Lion, who pushed the oath forward,  hoping to tie Hitler closer to the army. He   had created a promise the generals themselves  would later use to justify their obedience.  Then, in early 1938, Hitler turned on the two men  at the very top of that army.

Blomberg was forced   out over his marriage in January. Within days,  the army’s commander-in-chief, Werner von Fritsch,   was accused on fabricated evidence of a crime  that ended his career. Both of Germany’s most   senior soldiers were gone inside a month, and  no one lifted a hand to save them — not the   men who despised Hitler, and not the men who  adored him.

Hitler abolished the War Ministry,   built a new high command under the  compliant Keitel, and named himself   supreme commander in fact as well as in name. Now it mattered less what an officer thought of   Hitler. He had bound the army by oath, shown  that he could remove its senior commanders,   and taken direct control of the armed forces.

Whatever many officers felt in private, in   public they obeyed. But in 1938, a small group of  senior officers came closer than ever to turning   that private opposition into action. Ludwig Beck, the chief of the general staff,  resigned that summer rather than help plan a   war he believed would ruin Germany.

His successor  was Franz Halder, who shared that fear and went   further, backing a plan to arrest Hitler if he  ordered an attack on Czechoslovakia. For a brief   moment that autumn, many senior officers believed  Hitler was leading Germany toward disaster.  Then the victories began, and they changed a great  many minds. Poland fell in weeks in 1939. In the   spring of 1940, the German army did what it had  failed to do in four years of the First World War:   it beat France, and it did so in six weeks.

Officers who had called the plan reckless   were stunned. The amateur they had sneered at  had overruled his own general staff and been   proven right, and for a season even the doubters  wondered whether he was some kind of genius.  Halder himself, who had schemed to  remove Hitler two years earlier,   spent 1940 filling his diary with one triumphant  plan after another.

Success did what threats   never could: it quieted the sceptics. In the summer of 1941, Hitler turned east,   and Halder helped plan the invasion of the Soviet  Union. His staff drafted the orders that stripped   Soviet officials and prisoners of any protection  under the laws of war. The same officer who had   once considered removing Hitler was now helping  organise his war.

Whatever contempt he still   carried, it had made no difference to what he did. Long after the war, Halder told an American   interrogator that in those years he had always  carried a loaded pistol when he went in to see   Hitler. Whether or not that was ever true, the  record is plain about what his hand actually did:   it signed the orders.

Then the invasion stalled,   and the old professional contempt  returned, sharper than before.   Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, one of Germany’s  most respected commanders, judged that Hitler had   talent and nerve but no real military training and  no sense of what an army could and could not do.   He was not alone.

Up and down the senior ranks,  men who had cheered in 1940 now grumbled that a   former corporal was overruling field marshals. Again and again, Hitler overruled commanders who   were closer to the fighting and knew the situation  on the ground. When the Normandy front broke in   1944, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the German  commander in the west, was asked what should be   done, and was later remembered as snapping back:  “Make peace, you fools.

” By then, many generals   privately believed Hitler was destroying them.  But believing it did not change what they did.    A small number finally turned thought into   action. On 20 July 1944, Colonel Claus von  Stauffenberg carried a bomb into Hitler’s   headquarters and left it beside the map table.

Ludwig Beck, the general who had resigned in 1938,   was to lead the new government. Hitler survived,  the plot collapsed within hours, and Beck took   his own life that night. The interrogations  that followed dragged up the old conspiracies,   and on 23 July the Gestapo arrested Halder himself  and sent him to Flossenbürg and then Dachau.  Most of the generals, though, had never  joined.

Keitel stayed a lackey to the end,   signing whatever was put in front of  him. Manstein, approached more than once,   refused every time. “Prussian field marshals  do not mutiny,” he is remembered as saying.   Even Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Germany’s  most famous soldier, was only loosely tied   to the plot.

In October 1944, two generals came  to his home and offered him a choice: a public   trial that would ruin his family, or poison and  a hero’s funeral. He took the poison. The oath   of 1934 had become a ready answer whenever  officers were asked why they had not acted.  Then the war ended, and the surviving generals  began to write — and Franz Halder ended up   holding the pen.

His hidden diary was found in an  attic and carried to Nuremberg, where he testified   against the Nazi leaders he had once served. After  the trials, the United States Army hired him for   a different job. Hungry for intelligence on its  new Cold War enemy, it put the former generals to   work writing the history of the eastern front.  From offices in Germany, Halder directed some   seven hundred of them through roughly two and a  half thousand studies, and told the writers to   cut whatever damaged the army’s good name.

The legend they built was of a clean,   professional Wehrmacht, betrayed by an amateur  dictator and innocent of the worst crimes. In   memoirs with titles like Lost Victories, generals  who had obeyed Hitler to the last now presented   themselves as clear-eyed professionals who had  seen through him all along. In 1961 the Americans   gave Halder a medal for his help, making him the  only man ever decorated by both Adolf Hitler and   an American president.

He had despised Hitler  enough to plot his arrest, served him well enough   to help organise his war, and outlived him long  enough to help shape the story that followed.  That, in the end, was the contradiction  at the heart of the German officer corps.   There was never one view of Hitler: men like  Hammerstein despised him, men like Keitel   devoted themselves to him, and most stood  somewhere in between.

But for most of them,   personal opinion was never enough to overcome  the oath, ambition, the thrill of victory,   or their own part in Hitler’s wars. After 1945,  the survivors made their private contempt the   centre of the story they told about themselves.  By then, they were the ones writing the history.  We’ve seen what Hitler’s generals thought of  him.

But what did they think of Eisenhower,   Montgomery, Patton, Zhukov, and the other  commanders they faced across the battlefield?   That is the story in our next video. Watch  it next. Thanks for watching. If you found   this video insightful, like, subscribe,  and hit the bell for more History Inside.