Hitler's Panzers (7 page)

A Truppenamt war game in the winter of 1928-29 was set in the context of a two-front war with France and Poland—hardly an illogical scenario. Even with allowances for Poland keeping strong forces to watch its Soviet frontier, even by incorporating projected possible augmenting of the Reichswehr’s force structure, the most favorable outcomes involved delaying actions fought in a militarily hopeless cause.

The Reichswehr was not “militaristic” in the sense made famous by Alfred Vagts. Its generals were not content to supervise drills, organize parades, and conduct elaborate exercises with simulated armies. The conclusion that increasingly permeated senior Reichswehr leadership was nevertheless simple and startling. Because Germany could not wage war, war must be avoided. As a corollary, revising Versailles by abrogating its disarmament clauses was likely to make Germany’s last condition worse than its first. A program of military expansion designed to raise the republic’s armed forces to the levels of even Poland or Czechoslovakia was likely to have a general ripple effect: an arms race forcing Germany into a competition it had no chance of winning, a stern chase to nowhere. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, there was no practical chance that Germany’s voters would underwrite such a policy in the absence of a tangible, immediate threat.

Substantive concessions on the issue of arms limitation would not have guaranteed European stability. They did offer a window of opportunity for continued, positive German participation in a modified treaty framework. But any serious steps to restoring Germany’s military strength in any parameters ran directly counter to France’s continued commitment to maintaining its security directly, through its own armed forces and a system of alliances. With economic and diplomatic independence increasingly becoming the new European order, with an increasingly factionalized polity influenced by increasingly strong anti-war sentiments, France was essentially unable to move toward a compromise with Germany on arms control even if the will to do so had existed.

By 1930 even internationally conscious Reichswehr personalities like Groener were growing frustrated by a policy seeming to offer nothing but indefinite postponements. The long-projected plans for expanding the Reichswehr to a 21-division force were made increasingly comprehensive. An initial Aufstellungsplan of April 1931 and a Second Armaments Program in early 1932 provided for assembling essential material: uniforms, personal gear, rifles, and machine guns. By 1933 about two-thirds of the hardware was in place. It was, however, easier to produce equipment than to find men. The Great War veterans as a class were getting long in the tooth for service in the combat arms. The Restructuring Plan of November 1932 offered placebos: integrating police units and volunteer home guard formations, enlisting a few thousand men for three-year terms, encouraging men to volunteer for a few weeks’ elementary training. An alternate prospect—and a corresponding challenge—was, however, emerging. And it was here that the army began finding common ground with the emerging National Socialists.

The Nazi Party has been compared by scholars to almost every possible human organization, even medieval feudalism. The one adjective that cannot be applied is “patriarchal.” Hitler’s public persona was that of leader, elder brother, perhaps even erotic symbol, but never a father. Change—progress—was the movement’s flywheel. Nazi nostalgia found its essential expression in domestic kitsch. It had no place in military matters. The Reichswehr and the “Movement”—die Bewegung, as the Nazis preferred to be known—thus had the common ground of emphasizing a commitment to the future rather than a vision of the past. Hitler’s initially enthusiastic wooing of the soldiers was based on his intention of using them first to consolidate his hold over both the Nazi party and the German people, then as the standard-bearers of territorial and ideological expansion until they could safely be replaced by the SS. The Reichswehr for its part also saw the Nazis as means to an end, albeit the more pedestrian one of increasing the armed forces’ resources.

National Socialist views of war differed in important, arguably essential respects from those of the Reichswehr. But on such subjects as anti-Marxism, anti-pacifism, and hostility to the Versailles Treaty, the military’s values were not incongruent with those avowed by Nazi theorists and propagandists. Those positions were also respectable across a broad spectrum of Weimar politics. Germany wanted normalcy in the years after 1918, but was unable to achieve it at the price of abandoning the illusions and delusions of the Great War. The gradual turn to Nazism that began in the late 1920s, represented a “flight forward,” an effort to escape that cognitive dissonance, as much as it reflected a belief in the Nazis’ promises to make things better.

The Reichswehr was not a fascist coup or a right-wing conspiracy waiting to happen. From its inception, the Reichswehr had regarded itself not as an independent player but a participant in a common national enterprise based on rearmament and revision. Refusal to identify the armed forces directly with the Republic facilitated the transfer of loyalties from the Empire. It enabled avoidance on one hand of the problems of a Soviet model of military professionals reduced to technicians while commissars wielded real power and, on the other, of the risks of saddling Germany with an officer corps of mercenary technocrats. Yet as the gulf between soldiers and politicians widened, as the Republic’s crisis deepened with the depression, few officers saw their responsibilities to the state in any but the narrowest terms. The results of the war game of December 1932, with its predictions of domestic collapse should Nazis and Communists combine against an overextended, outnumbered, and probably outgunned Reichswehr, were presented with a kind of malicious pleasure that reflected more than simple anti-republican sentiment. It suggested instead a fundamental detachment from a “system” that remained fundamentally alien to an army with its own independent, comprehensive ties to state and society.

In the early 1930s, Germany was being swept by a wave of popular militarism and quasi-militarism, extending across the political and cultural spectrum. The Communists’ Red Front Fighters’ League, the Social Democratic Reichsbanner, the right-wing Stahlhelm, and above all the National Socialist SA attracted increasing numbers of young men who thought they were tough and were willing to prove it. Beer mugs, lead pipes, and an occasional knife were not likely to intimidate external enemies. But however much Reichswehr planners and Reichswehr officers might dislike the revolutionary premises underpinning these organizations, the possibilities inherent in bringing storm troopers into uniform and under army discipline were too enticing to be ignored—to say nothing of the corresponding risks of leaving them to their own devices and those of their leaders, including Adolf Hitler.

The Reichswehr understood better than any army in Europe or the world that total war and industrial war had generated new styles of combat and new methods of leadership. The officer no longer stood above his unit but functioned as an integral part of it. The patriarchal/ hegemonial approach of the “old army,” with professional officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) parenting youthful conscripts and initiating them into adult society, was giving way to a collegial/affective pattern, emphasizing cooperation and consensus in mission performance. “Mass man” was a positive danger in the front lines. What was necessary was “extraordinary man”: the combination of fighter and technician who understood combat both as a skilled craft and an inner experience. The street brawlers of 1931-32 were promising raw material for a new military order. In passing, those would be exactly the qualities eventually cultivated in the panzertruppen.

Mechanization temporarily receded into the background with the Nazi seizure of power in March 1933. Or perhaps, better said, it was subsumed in the metastasizing of German armed forces under the Nazi New Order. One of Hitler’s first acts as Chancellor was to appoint General Werner von Blomberg as Minister of Defense on January 30, 1933. This reflected a wider bargain—Hitler openly acknowledged the Reichswehr as the leading institution in the state, and promised to initiate a general rearmament program. In return, the Reichswehr relinquished its long-standing responsibility for maintaining domestic order, giving Hitler a de facto free hand in Germany’s “restructuring.”

The next three or four years were the golden age—at least in public—of what Hitler called the “two pillars” rhetoric: the assertion that the armed forces and the Nazi movement were the twin foundations of a reborn Germany. Internationally, after a few months of smoke and mirrors, Hitler withdrew Germany not only from the Disarmament Conference but from the League of Nations in October 1933. In December he decided to triple Germany’s peacetime army to a strength of 300,000. Its 21 divisions would form the eventual basis for a field army of triple that number. The mission of that force was described as conducting a defensive war on several fronts with a good chance of success.

A long-standing critic of Groener’s position, Blomberg supported rearmament in a specifically military context. He was correspondingly willing to accept both the internal strains placed on the newly renamed Wehrmacht by forced-draft expansion and the international challenges posed by its precondition: the reintroduction of conscription. Hitler’s breaking of the SA’s power in June 1934 seemed to offer fundamental proof of the Führer’s good faith. By March 1935, when Hitler declared “military sovereignty,” the Truppenamt was projecting a peacetime force of 30 to 36 divisions, increasing to 73 on mobilization. By July the newly rechristened General Staff planned for a peacetime establishment of 700,000 by—a strange coincidence—October 1939. By 1936 the army’s projected war footing was 3,737,000 men in 103 “divisional units”—a force profile comparing favorably with France’s mobilized strength.

The Wehrmacht’s plans and projections heralded and structured the takeoff of a growth that rapidly became its own justification and eventually outran both financial resources and production capacity. It also initiated an increasingly fierce competition with a newly created air force and a resurgent navy. In those contexts, theater was everything. And the army was not behindhand in showing off its bag of tricks. Oswald Lutz organized Germany’s first tank unit on November 1, 1933.
Kraftfahrlehrkommando Zossen
consisted of a single skeleton company with fourteen “tractors.” Another 150 chassis for training drivers were delivered in January 1934. In July, Lutz was appointed head of the new Kom mando der Panzertruppen (Armored Forces Command), with Guderian still his chief of staff. By November the original company had been expanded into a two-battalion regiment, with a second created at the training ground of Ohrdruf.

Adolf Hitler might have run for office in good part on the strength of his wartime service as a muddy-boots infantryman. But the Führer also had a predilection for high-tech displays. Hitler’s use of airplanes in his later election campaigns was as much for show as for convenience. His speeches approached the level of sound and light shows. And his fondness for muscle cars and fast driving was familiar. In early 1934, accompanied by Hermann Göring, he made what probably began as a routine inspection of new equipment. Guderian instead put on what later generations of soldiers would describe as a dog-and-pony show. For a half hour he showed off a motorcycle platoon, a platoon of the 37mm antitank guns just coming on line, a couple of armored car platoons, and the pièce de résistance: a platoon of the new training tanks. Chassis only, with no turrets, no armament, they nevertheless impressed the Führer. Guderian quotes him as repeatedly exclaiming, “That’s what I want! That’s what I want to have!”

Did Hitler actually see the military possibilities of these few dozen small vehicles? More likely he was taken by their potential for reinforcing his comprehensive propaganda campaigns, domestic and foreign, in the same context as his admonition to Göring that numbers of planes took precedence over their types and combat value. Certainly he did nothing specific to expand the armored force as such. The High Command and the General Staff took care of that on their own. In 1934, as the original seven Reichswehr divisions began to triple themselves, their motor battalions produced fourteen antitank battalions and seven motorized reconnaissance battalions. The 1st and 2nd Cavalry Divisions took delivery of several hundred motor vehicles. The 3rd not only traded in its horses altogether, but came under command of the Inspectorate of Motorized Combat Troops.

That last was the result of a suggestion made by one of the army’s rising stars. Then-Brigadier General Walther von Reichenau is best known as one of Hitler’s early open sympathizers among the Reichswehr’s senior officers. He was also interested in motorization, and as an artillery specialist was concerned with keeping even an embryonic armored force from becoming too much a thing in itself. As chief of the Wehrmachtamt, he was in a position to influence policy. It was the kind of gesture Lutz welcomed as one of the preliminary steps intended to produce an armored force of three divisions, plus two or three independent tank brigades, by the end of 1938.

On July 1, 1934, the Inspectorate of Motor Combat troops was reorganized. The Inspectorate for Army Motorization was made responsible for overall supervision of the process. The Motor Combat Troops Command would control the projected panzer divisions, in effect becoming a corps-level field command. Lutz assumed command of both agencies; his ambitious amanuensis Heinz Guderian became Motor Combat Troops Chief of Staff—a fast-track posting, if the holder could develop it. Lutz had no doubts.

THE PROJECTED GERMAN force structures were hardly unique. France’s horsed cavalry divisions were not very different from the German models. Contemporary Polish mobilization plans projected mobile or “mixed divisions.” In the course of the decade, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria would collect their respective tank and motorized elements into ad hoc “fast divisions,” though these reflect available forces rather than any real doctrine. But the German stress on mobility, deep penetration, envelopment, and initiative was original. It reflected growing institutionalization of the concept that future campaigns would be decided at neither tactical nor strategic levels, but in the previously vaguely defined intermediate sphere of operations.