Rebecca Haynes has recently produced a volume I am keen to read: In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe. As the title suggests, we often forget that Hitler was not the only politician of the Right in the interwar period. Some of the men Haynes considers were Nazi-sympathizers, but others were rivals or even bitter enemies of the National Socialists.
Today is the anniversary of the July 20 Conspiracy (about which I have written before). The conspiracy was an attempt to kill Hitler in 1944 and remove the Nazis from power. Its center of gravity lay in the Germany army, but extended to other segments of German government and society as well. By and large, these were men of the Right, men who believed in tradition and in German greatness. They opposed Communism and had no desire to see anything like a Soviet state established in the Fatherland. Some of them were anti-Semitic; many were not.
Today I'd like to briefly mention two men who opposed the Nazis, and did so from the right wing of the political spectrum. Neither was a among the most important members of the plot against Hitler, nor is either one a well-known figure, even among history buffs. But perhaps that makes them all the more typical (if we can use the term for such extraordinary men) of those who opposed the Nazis. The first is Friedrich Gustav Jaeger. Born in Württemberg in 1895, his father was a doctor. With the outbreak of World War I he quickly completed his secondary studies (with honors) and joined the German army, seeing service in both Flanders and Italy, and being decorated numerous times. After the war he studied agriculture and joined the National Socialist German Workers Party - the Nazis.But then an interesting thing happened. Although Jaeger was a member of the Freikorps Oberland and later re-joined the army in 1934, he refused to participate in the Kapp Putsch and left the Nazi Party, becoming a fierce critic before World War II.
During the war Jaeger fought in Poland, France and Russia, receiving Germany's highest military honor. All the while, however, he was making contact with anti-Nazi elements of the German army. It was only with reluctance, however, that he agreed to the plan to try to assassinate Hitler: Jaeger's Christian faith caused him to prefer a trial before a proper court.
On the day of the attempted assassination, Jaeger had a variety of tasks, commanding reserve troops, arresting key Nazis and seizing a radio station. All this fell apart as the conspiracy was discovered, and Jaeger was eventually executed for his role on 21 August.
Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg was born in Eferding, Austria in 1899. A prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he served in the army during World War I, seeing action in Italy. Like Jaeger, he joined the Freikorps Oberland. Though the Austrian monarchy was abolished at the end of the war, he was keen to enter Austrian politics, joining the local branch of the Heimatschutz (an organization dedicated to protecting Austria's borders, but also its culture). He was intrigued by both Mussolini and Hitler, but gave up on the Nazis after the failed Beer Hall Putsch.Starhemberg briefly served as Austrian Interior Minister in 1930 and became Deputy Leader of the conservative Christian Social Party in 1932. He then became Vice Chancellor in the right-wing government of Engelbert Dollfuß. Say what you will against Dollfuß - and there is probably much that can be said - he was no Nazi, as evidenced by the fact that they assassinated him in a failed bid to seize Austria. Starhemberg briefly served as acting Chancellor until a new government could be formed.
When the Nazis finally succeeded in annexing Austria, members of the Heimatschutz and various political parties with which Starhemberg had been associated were sent to concentration camps. He fled to Switzerland and eventually fought with the British and Free French air forces. Starhemberg was not a member of the July 20 Conspiracy. He abandoned the war effort when the Soviets joined the Allied side - what was the point of defeating Nazism if it were only followed by Soviet domination? - and moved to Argentina, staying until the year of Juan Peron's coup, and then returning to Austria.
Were these men heroes? The case for Jaeger is probably stronger than for Starhemberg. Both men certainly have associations that cause some raised eyebrows. But if they were not unqualified heroes, they were not villains either. They were men trying to make the best of difficult situations, men subject to all the human weaknesses. But in extraordinary circumstances, these men and other conservatives like them not only resisted the allure of Nazism, but opposed it. That is worth remembering.
5 comments:
Good post, Aaron.
One of the big problems that conservatives in Germany face is always being associated with the Nazis. Many writers in Germany will assume that just because a certain figure was not enthusiastic about the Weimar Republic, then he must have been a proto-Nazi.
Another thing that puzzles me is that a lot of popular writers blame the various right-wing Freikorps for destabilizing the Weimar Republic. And the Freikorps do, of course, have to take a lot of the blame for it. But, these writers always gloss over the left-wing Spartacist uprising, the short-lived Communist republic in Munich, etc.
Anyway, do you know of any books that give a good overview of inter-war Germany and Austria?
Steve, I'm afraid I don't know of any good overviews of interwar Germany and Austria. Most volumes that approach the topic are "rise of the Nazis" books, whose teleological focus leaves out the kind of folks we're interested in. I'll keep my eyes out; please do likewise.
The following summary of a panel at this year's meeting of the Society of Military History is interesting, shedding some light on the German army in the 20th century, its relationship to society and perceptions thereof.
From: Kuehn, John Dr CIV USA TRADOC
Subject: The German Way of War: A Roundtable Discussion
Date: June 27, 2011 10:31:04 AM EDT
To: H-NET Military History Discussion List
The German Way of War: A Roundtable Discussion
German navies' ways of war
Randy Papadopoulos, office of the Secretary of the Navy
The other German way of War: criminality in the context of operations
Geoffrey Megargee, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Feeding Mars: Logistics and the German Way of War
Russell A. Hart, Hawai'i Pacific University
Considering logic and grammar in the German Way of War
Antulio J. Echevarria II, U.S. Army War College
The German Way of War
Robert Citino, University of North Texas
This roundtable, as one would expect, was extremely well-attended. An ongoing joke throughout the proceedings was the seemingly universal
journey of discovery that many of the panelists and audience members had taken regarding their attitude toward the German Way of War. It had gone from respect and admiration for the tactical and operational excellence of German military institutions, especially the Wehrmacht, to
a more objective stance that included recognition of the strong tendency toward barbarism which found its apogee in WW II. It almost became pro forma to acknowledge oneself as "a recovering Wehrmacht-a-holic."
It was only in the last generation that the myth of the an honorable and non-culpable Wehrmacht has been more generally, perhaps finally,
dispelled, despite the good work of many, including John J. Mersheimer's key study on B.H. Liddell Hart -_Liddell Hart and the Weight of History_(1988).
The most useful place to start is with Rob Citino's framework for
understanding the German way of war (GWOW) and how it led to a "perfect storm" of barbarism and murder in WW II. He emphasized the now obligatory caveat that "ways of war do not kill people, people kill people." His framework encompasses his central doctrinal/operational
feature of the GWOW, that of essentialism involving their war-making style based on good old fashioned geopolitical
considerations-Bewegungskrieg or maneuver war. Often mislabeled
"blitzkrieg," this German operational style came to represent the apogee of strategy through a rapid and decisive maneuver campaigning style
dictated by the electorate of Brandenburg's almost indefensible borders and bellicose imperial neighbors (and later the same was true of the Kingdom of Prussia, ditto the 2d-3rd Reichs).
The second element is contained in the discussion above, again the
political culture of Prussia that emphasized military duty above all
virtues for the poor aristocratic Junkers who led Brandenburg-Prussia's mostly mercenary forces. This culture did not change with the advent of
mass armies. This of course leads to the officer corps culture in Prussia, one that
came to believe that any expedient to achieve the military missions is allowable in war. Thus the ease with which Prussians and the Germans
could brutalize civilians they thought were fighting as guerillas and franc tireur. As this was discussed I found myself musing on a Guy De Maupassant short story about just this sort of casual brutality from the
Franco-Prussian War ("Ball of Fat").
[continued below]
It was only natural that Greg Megargee would build on this basis to emphasize the German Army's central institutional role in the institutionalization of mass murder that became the Nazi Holocaust. Megargee in particular brought to the fore Wayne Lee's very useful
"frightfulness index" that depends on four factors:
-the ability to field a large field army (obtained in 19th Century with von Roon reforms)
-the control factor, that is how good one was at directing and
controlling this large force
-a leadership dedicated, as discussed by Citino, to maximum violence to achieve the mission
-and a culture-a militarist culture if you will.
This last entails an ideological piece-the missing piece if you will. This way of war was violent, but meant to be short (although the Seven Years and Napoleonic Wars get in the way of the short war mythology, too
bad they didn't heed Delbruck). But for much of its history the actual political component-benevolent dictatorship against the backdrop of the Enlightenment or an enlightened monarchy against the backdrop of
developing 19th century liberalism tended to keep this "impulse" to extremes (absolutes as Clausewitz would call them) in check. However, Megargee argued that once this violent and extremely efficient method
(efficient at killing its enemies, whoever they were-civilian or soldier), once it was united to a political ideology it became, in his
words, the "perfect storm."
In legal terms, the Germany Army's leaders were co-conspirators, many of whom were given a pass after the war due to the exigencies of the
Cold War and anticommunist propagandists like Liddell Hart. Megargee provided support to a component that argues for a German Way of War that
always had a latent "take no prisoners" approach-a violent genie in a bottle if you will. Clausewitz had indeed projected correctly that as constraints were removed war would become absolute-in the GWOW case it
became absolutely barbaric. Are the Germans the only ones to exhibit this trait? Here an argument might be made that they are only the most recent example of a phenomenon that Clausewitz's theory implies is not culturally unique but rather runs deeper in the social human psyche.
However, keeping the memories fresh, which is what Megargee does at USHMM, is another way to try and keep the genie in the bottle.
Randy Papadopoulos from the Navy side offered an interesting thesis
about the German Navy Way of War that started with a theme that is
becoming ever more common in the rash of meta-naval narratives out there about the modern era of sea power (e.g. Padfield, Massie, Rose, NAM Rodger, etc)-that is, the Imperial German Navy created in the 19th century sought nothing less than an overturning of the entire international order at sea that had been put together by the British Royal Navy and its increasingly active offspring, the US Navy. This system included the Japanese (the Japanese-Anglo Naval Alliance of 1901) and the French. Of the major navies (since after 1905 the Russian fleet no longer figured)...only the Germans seemed disinclined to accommodate
themselves to the Pax Britannica at sea. I would add that this seems natural given the similar behavior of the German Army and officer corps vis-a-vis Europe. The attitude of the officer corps went beyond the regimental mess to the wardrooms of the new modern steam warships.
Papadopoulos found that mismanagement by key personalities counted for much in this sorry tale of the rise and fall of German fleets-in part
because German officers with budgetary experience were rare and valued less than those with operational experience in positions of high command. This also aligned with general comments by all the panelists
that identified great weaknesses in logistical appreciation by the
Germans on land, air AND sea.
[continued below]
One significance difference, according to Papadopoulos, was that the German navy tradition, aside from Kaiser Wilhelm's infantile dreams of a
decisive Mahanian Battle, was attritional, not annihilation in a short single battle or campaign-it could not be otherwise given German geography. Also, the Navy did not have the tradition of auftragestactik as did the Reichsheer-Papadopoulos used the example of the Doenitz U-boat campaign to drive this point home. However, it did share with
its Army counterpart a dedication to honest training at the tactical
level-however this in turn created a rather brittle force of highly trained but difficult to replace crews-- A problem that the Japanese navy would also have. Finally, Papadopoulos addressed the very important role of professional officer education, or the lack of it, in
creating a narrow mindset in the German Navy Officer corps. One longs for the ghost of Herbert Rosinski (who taught at the German Navy staff college and fled the Nazis in 1937)to provide some further evidence in
this regard. Rosinski ended up teaching US Navy officers about
Clausewitz in Newport!
Speaking of logistics, Russell Hart provided further discussion of the German Way of War's problems with logistics. His discussion brought to mind Matthew Cooper's book about the inherently short logistical range
of the German Army-an army whose original raison d'etre was not long distance conquest but existential defense of a nearly indefensible geography. One might also add the German Army's innate poor performance and valuation of operational (opintel) and strategic
intelligence -an attitude that included thinking her enemies could not possibly do things like break naval codes and crypto systems because she couldn't break theirs. I longed for Jonathan House to weigh in here
since he and I have long thought that the German Way of war must add to its operational and strategic deficits an institutional mis-appreciation
of the value of military intelligence. Especially useful are House's discussions in his work, both with Glantz and without, about the Soviet
Union's far superior use of opintel and deception in the last three years of WW II, a finding that makes the Germans look like amateurs when it comes to intelligence.
Tony Echevarria batted "cleanup" for this event and offered some
wonderful dry comments about the proceedings. His major point had to do with Clausewitz's famous discussion of the grammar and logic of war. Since this post grows way too long and my notes seem to have little to say, let me summarize-The German Way of War seemed to have problems
linking wars' logic (ends) to its grammar (ways and means).
I asked some questions and they were answered, but I forget what they were! One issue that did come up-see the Wehrmacht-a-holic comment-was the intersection or passing of this German Way of War virus to the US military given the US Army's post-war fascination and admiration for the
Wehrmacht. The urgency came from a desire to understand how to beat the Soviets. There is a great little Department of the Army Pamphlet (DAPAM) in library that reflects one little known aspect of all this--lessons learned on counterinsurgency by the Wehrmacht in Eastern
Europe! Some of these were later folded into the postwar
counterinsurgency doctrine of the US Army. (see also Andrew Birtle's US Army Counterinsurgency book II in this regard). Maybe it's a good thing the Cold War never went hot.
Zum Wohl,
John
John T. Kuehn, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Military History
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
Fort Leavenworth, KS
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