Winds of War (17 page)

Byron, eating and drinking with the rest, and feeling very good indeed, was not sure for hours whether the marriage ceremony had or had not taken place. But near midnight a sudden gravity fell on the guests. In a courtyard, with the bright moon and a blaze of stars overhead, in a series of stern and impressive acts – including solemn incantations over silver goblets of wine and the lighting of long tapers – the bride and groom were brought together for a ring ceremony and a kiss, much as in a Christian union, under a hand-held canopy of purple velvet. Then the groom ground a wineglass to bits under his heel, and jubilation broke out that made everything before it seem staid and pale.

Byron almost became the hero of the evening by putting on a black skullcap and dancing with the yeshiva boys, since there was no dancing with the girls. All the guests gathered to clap and cheer, Natalie in the forefront, her face ablaze with fun. Her knee healed or forgotten, she joined in the girls’ dances; and so she danced, and Byron danced, inside the house and outside, far into the morning hours. Byron scarcely remembered leaving the bride’s home and falling asleep on the feather mattress on the floor of the rabbi’s house.

But there he was when a hand shook him and he opened his eyes. Berel Jastrow was bending over him, and it took Byron a moment or two to recall where he was and who this man was, with the clever, anxious blue eyes and the long gray-streaked brown beard. All around him the yeshiva boys were sitting up and rubbing their eyes, or dressing. The girls were hurrying here and there in their nightclothes. It was hot, and the sun was shining into the room from a clear blue sky.

“Yes? What is it?” he said.

“
Der Deutsch
,” the Jew said. “
Les Allemandes
.”

“Huh? What?”

“De Chormans.”

“Byron sat up, his voice faltering. “Oh, the Germans? What about them?”

“Dey comink.”

* * *

Chapter
9
-
World Empire Lost

by General Armin von Roon

(adapted from his
Land, Sea, and Air Operations of World War II
)

English Translation by

Victor Henry

Translator’s Foreword

I never expected to translate a German military work. For years, like many flag officers, I planned to write up my own experiences in World War II; and in the end, like most of them, I decided against it. It was said of the late Fleet Admiral Ernest King that, if it had been up to him, he would have issued a single communiqué about the Pacific war: “We won.” My war memoirs boil down more or less to this: “l served.”

Upon retiring from the Navy, I become a consultant to a marine engineering firm. On my last business trip to Germany, in 1965, I noticed in the windows of bookstores, wherever I went, stocks of a small book called
World Empire Lost
, by General Armin von Roon. I distinctly recalled General von Roon, from my days of service in Berlin as naval attaché to the American embassy. I had met him, and chatted with him; and he came to one of my wife’s frequent dinner parties. He was then on the Armed Forces Operation Staff. He had a distant, forbidding manner, a pudgy figure, and a large beaked nose, almost Semitic, that must have given him some grief. But of course, as his name indicates, he was of simon-pure Prussian descent. He was obviously brilliant, and I always wanted to know him better, but did not get the opportunity. I little thought then how well I would come to know him one day through his book!

Out of curiosity I bought a copy of
World Empire Lost
, and found it so absorbing that I visited the publisher’s office in Munich, to learn who had printed it in America. I then discovered that the work had not yet been translated into English. On my return to the States, I induced the publishers of this volume to acquire the English-language rights. I was planning to retire from business, and I thought that translating the book might ease the pain of putting myself out to pasture.

World Empire Lost
is an abstract from a huge two-volume operational analysis of the war, written by General von Roon in prison. He called it
Land, Sea, and Air Operations of World War II
, and he had plenty of time to write it; for at Nuremberg he got twenty years, for complicity in war crimes on the eastern front. This exhaustive technical work is not available in an English translation, and I doubt that it will be.

Roon prefaced his account of each major campaign with a summary of the strategic and political background. These brief sketches, pulled out and compiled by the publisher after his death, constitute
World Empire Lost
. (I doubt that the general would have approved of that melodramatic title.)
World Empire Lost
is, therefore, not solid military history, but rather a sort of publisher’s stunt. It runs together Roon’s sweeping assertions about world politics in one short volume, and omits the meticulous military analysis that backed them. However, I believe the result is readable, interesting, and valuable.

The remarkable thing about the book is its relative honesty. Nearly all the German military literature glosses over the killing of the Jews, the responsibility for the war, and Hitler’s hold on the army and the people. About all these sticky questions, Roon writes with calm frankness. He planned to withhold his work from publication (and did) until he was safely dead and buried; so, unlike most German military writers, he was not trying either to save his neck or placate the victors. The result is a revelation of how the Germans really felt, and may well still feel, about Hitler’s war.

Here then is a German general leveling, insofar as he can do so. Roon was an able writer, much influenced by the best French and British military authors, especially de Gaulle and Churchill. His German is more readable than that of most of his countrymen who write on military matters. I hope I have at least partly conveyed this in translation. My own style, formed in a lifetime of writing U.S. Navy reports, has inevitably crept in here and there, but I trust no substantial distortion has resulted.

This author, to my mind, portrays the Germans under Hitler as they were: a remarkably tough and effective fighting nation, not a horde of stupid sadists or comic bunglers, as popular entertainment now tends to caricature them. For six years these people battled almost the whole world to a standstill, and they also committed unprecedented crimes. The stake they were gambling for was, in Shakespeare’s expressive phrase, nothing less than “the great globe itself.” What was going on in their minds seems to me of importance. That is why I have translated Roon.

His version of events, while professional and well informed, can scarcely be taken at face value. He was a German through and through. On the whole I have let General von Roon describe the war his own way. I could not, however, translate certain passages without challenging them; hence my occasional comments.

Roon starts on his first page, for instance, exactly as Adolf Hitler started all his speeches: by denouncing the Versailles Treaty as an injustice imposed on an honorable and trusting Germany by the cruel Allies. He does not mention the historical catch to that. German writers seldom do. In 1917 Lenin overthrew the Kerensky government and sued for a separate peace on the eastern front. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, dictated by the Germans over a year before the Treaty of Versailles, deprived Russia of a territory much larger than France and England combined, of almost sixty million inhabitants, and of almost all her heavy industry. It was far harsher than the Versailles Treaty.

I used to bring up this little fact during my Berlin service, whenever Versailles was mentioned. My German friends were invariably puzzled by the comparison. They thought it made no sense at all. The Treaty of Versailles had happened to them; Brest-Litovsk had happened to the other fellow. In this reaction they were sincere. I cannot explain this national quirk of the Germans, but it should never be forgotten in reading
World Empire Lost
.

Victor Henry

Oakton, Virginia

27 May, 1966

Case White

The Responsibility for Hitler

In writing this book, I have only one aim: to defend the honor of the German soldier.

To trace the rise of Adolf Hitler, our leader in World War II, is not necessary here. No story of the twentieth-century is better known. When the victorious Allies in 1919 created the crazy Treaty of Versailles, they also created Hitler. Germany in 1918, relying on the Fourteen Points of the American President Wilson, honorably laid down arms. The Allies treated the Fourteen Points as a scrap of paper, and wrote a treaty that partitioned Germany and made an economic and political madhouse of Europe.

In thus outwitting the naïve American President and butchering up the map, the British and French politicians probably imagined they would paralyze the German nation forever. The cynical policy boomeranged. Winston Churchill himself has called the Versailles settlement a “sad and complicated idiocy.” The oppression of Versailles built up in the vigorous German people a volcanic resentment; it burst forth, and Adolf Hitler rode to power on the crest of the eruption. The Nazi Party, a strange alliance of radicals and conservatives, of wealthy men and down-and-outers, was united only on the ideal of a resurgent Germany, and unfortunately on the old middle-European political slogan of discontent – anti-Semitism. A riffraff of vulgar agitators, philosophic idealists, fanatics, opportunists, bullies, and adventurers, some of them extremely able and energetic, swept into power with Hitler. We of the General Staff for the most part watched these turbid political events with distaste and foreboding. Our loyalty was to the state, however it was governed, but we feared a wave of weakening social change.

It is fair to say that Hitler surprised us. Swiftly, without bloodshed, this brilliant and inspiring politician repaired one injustice of Versailles after another. His methods were direct and strong. The Weimar regime had tried other methods, and had met only with contempt from Britain and France. Hitler’s methods worked. Inside Germany, he was equally strict and harsh when needed. Here too the methods worked, and if historians now call his regime a terror, one must concede that it was then a popular terror. Hitler brought prosperity and he rearmed us. He was a man with a mission. His burning belief in himself and in his mission swayed the German masses. Though he usurped much power, the masses would probably have granted it all to him freely anyway.

Case Red

Naturally, the swift renascence of Germany under Hitler created anger and dismay among the Allies. France, war-weary, luxury-loving, and rotted by socialism, was reluctant to take effective action. England was another matter. England still ruled the world with her global navy, her international money system, her alliances, and her empire on five continents. In ascending to master of Europe, and upsetting the balance of power, Germany was once more challenging her for world rule. This was the confrontation of the Great War again. Nothing could avert this showdown, for Germany early in the twentieth century had passed England in both population and industrial plant. In this sense Churchill correctly calls the Second World War a continuation of the first one, and both conflicts together “another Thirty Years’ War.”

We of the German General Staff knew that at some point in Hitler’s spectacular normalizing of Europe, England would intervene. The only questions were, when, and under what circumstances? Already in 1937 we had prepared a plan for a two-front war against England and Poland:
Fall Rot
(“Case Red”). We kept updating it as Adolf Hitler scored one bloodless victory after another, and our strategic situation and armed strength improved by leaps while Britain and France contented themselves with feeble scolding protests. We began to hope that the forceful Führer might actually bring his new order to Europe without bloodshed, by default of the perpetrators of Versailles. Had this occurred, he could have launched his grand crusade against the Soviet Union for living space in the east – the aim of his life – as a one-front war. History would have followed a different course.

But on March 31, 1939, a day that the world should not forget, all this changed. The British Prime Minister Chamberlain suddenly gave Poland an unconditional guarantee of military assistance! His pretext was anger at Hitler for breaking his promise not to occupy the weak fragment of Czechoslovakia, left after the Munich partition – the deal which Chamberlain himself had engineered. Hitler’s promises, like those of all politicians, were merely contingent and tactical, of course. It was asinine of Chamberlain to think otherwise, if he did.

Whatever the motive for the Polish guarantee, it was a piece of suicidal stupidity. It stiffened the corrupt Polish army oligarchy to stand fast on the just German grievances involving Danzig and the Polish Corridor. It placed in the hands of these backward militarists the lever to start another world war. Otherwise it had no meaning, because in the event England was unable to give Poland actual military help. With Russian participation the guarantee might have made sense, in fact it might have stopped Hitler in his tracks, because he feared above all things, as the General Staff also did, a two-front war. But the British gentlemen-politicians disdained the Bolsheviks, and Poland in any case utterly refused to consider admitting Russian protective troops. So foolishness and weakness joined hands to trigger the catastrophe.