From Total War To Total Defeat: The Case of Germany

Whether his fate was suicide or exile, the final days of Hitler revealed he was a coward. A real leader would have stood trial or allow himself to be captured and killed like his soldiers. 

Petty dictators like Saddam and Assad run. That’s ultimately who Hitler was. He practiced total war only when it suited him. Fear of judgment gripped him as it does the common thief. 

But history is the final judge, not your contemporaries, and even in defeat there can be victory if you don’t run and hide in the end. 

The Verdict of Battle – James Whitman.

Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz.

II.

An excerpt from, “The Axis Grand Strategy: Blueprints for the Total War” Edited By Ladislas Farago, Stackpole Books, March 2018, Pg. 57 – 63 (Via Google Books):

There once was a time when war might well have been called an art. Knightly tournaments were an art. With a fair lady’s scarf tied about the lance, it was almost a romantic art. In those days war was the privilege of kings, together with that other “royal art,” philosophy. But when the colorful knights were superseded by skillfully conducted bands of mercenaries, the so-called “art of war” passed into the hands of clever and able leaders.

On the other hand, the term “art of war” was always meant to emphasize that, in this field of human activity, the borderline between knowledge and craftsmanship is a sharp one indeed. The elder Moltke once pointed out that there is a wide gap between knowledge and ability in “military science.” But, in calling attention to the ever-increasing scientific training required by a strategist, he sarcastically added: “There is a still wider gap between ignorance and ability.”

The aestheticists of the nineteenth century and certain German scientists ridden with a mania to idealize war endowed the term “art of war” with an ambiguous and misleading meaning. The previous century had wrought a revolutionary change in military matters. The knowledge a general was supposed to command in technique, organization, and other fields grew ever greater. As mass armies supplanted the picked mercenaries and nobles, the strategist’s place on General Head-quarters Staff became further and further removed from the actual field of battle.

As a result, the general public came to look upon generals like Scharnhorst, Moltke, and Schlieffen as theorists rather than fighters. This erroneous interpretation, however, was made only by the snobs among the Prussian Junkers, who would not forgive Scharnhorst his uneven thighs or Moltke his stooped shoulders.

Clausewitz looked upon warfare as the most difficult and the most direct form of politics. In politics, he said, the statesman must see his way through by negotiation, persuasion, and other peaceful devices. Many human wills must be co-ordinated to serve the constructive purpose of the politician; many incalculable factors and direct countermoves need to be overcome. In war, however, which is the last resort of the politician, the adversary must be forced to bow to the will of the warring party.

The form of political activity exercised by the general is the most difficult kind of human endeavor. Moltke said it was more than a science. He might have added: it is more than an art.

Clausewitz defines the art of war in terms of military science, as uniting strategy, the science of operations and tactics. He was the first to devise a skeleton of scientific terminology plastic enough to fit the changing historical developments. He was careful in his research and writings and warned his pupils to hold close to facts, constantly to analyze new facts and to abstain from purely speculative analysis.

The teachings of Clausewitz were misconstrued in the Prussian army and finally completely falsified, owing chiefly to Germany’s thwarted national development. Another factor was that, because of his incom-plete manuscript, it was easy for critics to say he had been unduly in-fluenced by Napoleonic strategy. That this is not so is evident from the fact that he gave considerable thought to the part played by politico-historical factors in the phenomenon of war. He studied, also, the wars of Frederick the Great (1740-1786) and the German Wars of Liberation. (This so-called Age of National Wars, started in the eighteenth century and culminated in the First World War of the twentieth.)

Clausewitz was not a mere master strategist of destruction. He realized that weak nations, like Prussia under Frederick, could wage only a war of position constantly dependent upon political considerations. The Napoleonic strategy sought decisive battles that destroyed the enemy. While more fascinated by the possibilities of encirclement operations, as later designed by Schlieffen, than by Napoleon’s break-through, Clausewitz did not foresee that later strategic progress would favor the decisive battle, and remained loyal to Frederick’s warfare of position.

The French Revolution not only set the pattern for modern European democratic nations, but also put an end to the small armies of mercenaries and noblemen. Popular mass armies sprang into being, and with them came an entirely new concept of war. The same industrial revolution that manifested its social and economic implications in the French uprising evidenced its political and military significance in an equally violent change. Industrial developments made it possible to put larger armies into the field and to keep them there for a longer time. This, in turn, made possible the “strategy of decision,” featuring decisive battles, occupation of enemy territory, and capture of the hostile capital. As larger national interests were thrown into the balance, the scope and aims of these wars broadened. But never (until the Hitlerian explosion) were they so ruthless as to envisage the complete eradication of the enemy as a nation.

From the economic standpoint, the cost of such wars, as well as the price of defeat, could be borne by the national states with relative ease. Victories were invariably gained by those countries which fought for a national aim and were able to indoctrinate their entire population with the will to victory. This development ended with 1914, by which time the goals of national ambition had been mainly reached by all the powers. When, however, economic progress advanced further and com-petition for world markets became increasingly severe, the states began to arm more and more and to call up an ever-larger part of the population for military service. The First World War, which pitted the national states of Europe and their entire resources against each other, proved that the teachings of Clausewitz had been correct. The whole theory of strategy, operations, and tactics developed during the age of National Wars (1800-1870) collapsed.

The First World War finally was decided by nonmilitary means.

As has been seen, the art of war was transformed from the “Cabinet Wars” of the eighteenth century through the National Wars of the nineteenth into the Mass Wars of the twentieth century. During this time the General Staffs of all the European armies but particularly of Germany and France had developed a theory on strategy, operations, and tactics based largely on Clausewitz’s teachings.

Continental military literature produced a widely divergent bibliog-raphy of conceptions of this new theory. In the lively process of history, the definitions were frequently adjusted to practical experience and, therefore, became extremely flexible. Theory was supplemented by a network of expedients. Finally, the disciples forgot all about the theo-retical system and knew nothing but the expedients.

However, the definitions of Clausewitz still remain basic. “War,” he said, “is the continuation of politics with the means of force.” The armies of Prussia and Germany had not considered the nature of war as a means of politics. But the First World War caused the Germans to regret their neglect, and ever since they have been abusing this principle.

Strategy was defined by Clausewitz as “utilization of battles for the purpose of war,” During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), for instance, the Prussian generals were ably seconded by Bismarck, a strong statesman who was also a master of the art and thus able to inject strategy into his political aims. The generals were free to confine themselves to the purely military aspect of war, providing, of course, they had sufficient political understanding to integrate strategy with the purpose of politics.

Clausewitz said that tactics is “the use of the armed forces for the purpose of battle.”

A deserter from the Prussian army, the officer Dietrich Heinrich von Buelow, was the first to propose a flexible connection between the various fields of the art of war. Even before Clausewitz, he understood that armed conflict was merely a climax. He defined tactics as strategy em-ployed in a limited field, and military strategy as the limited application of political strategy. The conception of operations has since become wedged between tactics and strategy, and may be defined in one way as “higher tactics” and in another as “lower strategy.” Thus, the broad field of military art, according to these three concepts, may be grouped as follows:

1. Tactics is the utilization of armed forces for the purpose of battle.

2. Operations, in its higher tactical form, is the co-ordination of individual clashes for the purpose of a decisive battle; in its minor strategic sense, as timing, locating, and co-ordinating a succession of battles.

3. Strategy, as a higher form of operations, is the co-ordination of battles for the conduct of a campaign and, as a lower form of the con-duct of war, is the co-ordination of battles and campaigns for the vic-torious conclusion of the war.

4. Conduct of war, as higher strategy, is the utilization and co-ordina-tion of military results to force one’s own political will upon the adversary. 

5. The “art of war” is the combined use of all military and political means of a nation for the purpose of war. At all times, however, political considerations have dominated the art of war. Whenever they have been neglected, military defeat has been the inevitable result.

The former chief of the German General Staff, von Schlieffen, before his retirement in 1906, had foreseen a great world war. Consequently, he prepared a plan to assure German victory at the fateful hour. This plan bearing his name was never adopted, and ever since 1918 the debate has raged over the effect his strategy, if fully employed, might have had on the eventual outcome.

What is the Schlieffen plan?

It proposed, in the event of a coalition war against Germany, throw-ing the main part of the German army against France in a gigantic, co-ordinated sweep of attack. The right wing was to march through Belgium. It was to be strong enough to crush the left wing of the French army by sheer weight of numbers. It was also to be deep enough to swing around and reach the Atlantic coast after having marched through Belgium and France.

The German left wing was supposed to be weaker and, as such, was to fight retarding battles in order to lure the main power of the French army to make a “push into a vacuum.” In the meantime, the right wing was to take Paris and, in the final stage, to crush the beaten French army against the Swiss frontier.

The main risk involved in this plan was that the German front might be pierced at a weak spot. It was this fear of a break-through by the French that actually caused the retreat from the Marne in the First World War, but if the German right wing had been strong enough, and deep enough to swing around Paris, the risk would not have been great.

The interesting feature in Schlieffen’s plan is that it took into account all the known elements of that time. Smarter than the generals who actually fought the war, Schlieffen had anticipated the tremendously increased firing power of modern armies that would transform a war of movement into one of position unless a powerful, quick sweep would gain a decision.

Schlieffen also saw that the narrow battlefield of France militated against individual operations by separate armies, restricting the chances of success to a single gigantic operation. Strategically, the plan sought to conquer France before Great Britain had an opportunity to bring her tremendous resources into play. Although he did not actually figure upon Russia as an adversary, Schlieffen did prepare for such an eventu-ality. His plan comprehended a general defensive strateg strategy on the east, but, in view of the larger battlefield, included highly offensive operations by individual armies.

The Germans had attempted to win the First World War through a diluted application of the Schlieffen plan. The “younger” Moltke and Ludendorff were in agreement that, contrary to Schlieffen, it was the left wing of the German army that should be the stronger. This was an opportunist strategy that made possible early impressive victories but made real the peril of a French break-through on the weakened right.

Subsequent events caused the complicated art of war to degenerate into simple tactics of attack and defense. The war of position turned into a war of attrition. Instead of victory, a negotiated peace became the desired conclusion. Murderous machine-gun fire had destroyed every means of transition from tactics to operation and strategy. The tactic of combined arms (later elaborated by the Reichswehr) obscured the higher art of war. When the entire strength of the German army was exhausted, the front collapsed, and the strategy of the pan-Germans broke down in defeat. Tactics had decided the war. The French, in their exultation, overestimated their own defensive conception of the art of war and relied upon their Maginot Line to protect them. Instead it contributed to their defeat in 1940, thus providing a belated confirma-tion for Macchiavelli who said that fortresses are “unnecessary and decidedly injurious.”

The following material about the art of war in Germany’s post-Versailles Reichswehr and the Nazis’ national army may not always be lucid or consistent. There is a great deal of intentional obscurity, designed to screen from the outer world the hopes the Nazis placed in a return to the war of movement through the use of tanks, planes, and other modern speedy weapons. But Colonel von Schaefer’s brilliant essay on strategy and tactics is the most intelligent presentation of German theories to be found among the mass of biased, slanted and opportunistic writings on the subject.

An excerpt from, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” By Hannah Arendt, The Montreal Review:

The point I wish to raise here goes beyond the well-known fallacy of the concept of collective guilt as first applied to the German people and its collective past—all of Germany stands accused and the whole of German history from Luther to Hitler—which in practice turned into a highly effective whitewash of all those who had actually done something, for where all are guilty, no one is. You have only to put Christianity or the whole human race into the place originally reserved for Germany to see, or so it would seem, the absurdity of the concept, for now not even the Germans are guilty any longer: no one at all is for whom we have so much as a name instead of the concept of collective guilt. What I wish to point out, in addition to these considerations, is how deep-seated the fear of passing judgment, of naming names, and of fixing blame—especially, alas, upon people in power and high position, dead or alive—must be if such desperate intellectual maneuvers are being called upon for help. For is it not obvious that Christianity has survived rather handsomely many popes who were worse than Pius XII, precisely because it was never all of Christianity that stood accused? And what shall one say of those who would rather throw all mankind out of the window, as it were, in order to save one man in high position, and to save him from the accusation not even of having committed a crime, but merely of an admittedly grave sin of omission?

It is fortunate and wise that no law exists for sins of omission and no human court is called upon to sit in judgment over them. But it is equally fortunate that there exists still one institution in society in which it is wellnigh impossible to evade issues of personal responsibility, where all justifications of a nonspecific, abstract nature—from the Zeitgeist down to the Oedipus complex—break down, where not systems or trends or original sin are judged, but men of flesh and blood like you and me, whose deeds are of course still human deeds but who appear before a tribunal because they have broken some law whose maintenance we regard as essential for the integrity of our common humanity. Legal and moral issues are by no means the same, but they have a certain affinity with each other because they both presuppose the power of judgment. No courtroom reporter, if he knows what he is doing, can avoid becoming involved in these questions. How can we tell right from wrong, independent of knowledge of the law? And how can we judge without having been in the same situation?

It is at this point that I think it would be proper to make my second personal remark. If the heat caused by my “sitting in judgment” has proved, as I think it has, how uncomfortable most of us are when confronted with moral issues, I better admit that not the least uncomfortable one is myself. My early intellectual formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: Das ф Moralische versteht sick von selbst, moral conduct is a matter of course. I still remember quite well my own youthful opinion of the moral rectitude we usually call character; all insistence on such virtue would have appeared to me as Philistine, because this, too, we thought was a matter of course and hence of no great importance—not a decisive quality, for instance, in the evaluation of a given person. To be sure, every once in a while we were confronted with moral weakness, with lack of steadfastness or loyalty, with this curious, almost automatic yielding under pressure, especially of public opinion, which is so symptomatic of the educated strata of certain societies, but we had no idea how serious such things were and least of all where they could lead. We did not know much about the nature of these phenomena, and I am afraid we cared even less. Well, it turned out that we would be given ample opportunity to learn. For my generation and people of my origin, the lesson began in 1933 and it ended not when just German Jews but the whole world had been given notice of monstrosities no one believed possible at the beginning. What we have learned since, and it is by no means unimportant, can be counted as additions and ramifications of the knowledge acquired during those first twelve years, from 1933 to 1945. Many of us have needed the last twenty years in order to come to terms with what happened, not in 1933, but in 1941 and 1942 and 1943, up to the bitter end. And by this, I do not mean personal grief and sorrow, but the horror itself to which, as we can see now, none of the concerned parties has as yet been able to reconcile itself. The Germans have coined for this whole complex the highly questionable term of their “unmastered past.” Well, it looks as though today, after so many years, this German past has turned out to remain somehow unmanageable for a good part of the civilized world. At the time the horror itself, in its naked monstrosity, seemed not only to me but to many others to transcend all moral categories and to explode all standards of jurisdiction; it was something men could neither punish adequately nor forgive. And in this speechless horror, I fear, we all tended to forget the strictly moral and manageable lessons we had been taught before, and would be taught again, in innumerable discussions, both inside and outside of courtrooms.

In order to clarify the distinction between the speechless horror, in which one learns nothing, and the not at all horrible but frequently disgusting experiences where people’s conduct is open to normal judgments, let me first mention a fact which is obvious and yet rarely mentioned. What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the storm troopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi bigwigs in power, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. The new regime posed to us then nothing more than a very complex political problem, one aspect of which was the intrusion of criminality into the public realm. I think we were also prepared for the consequences of ruthless terror and we would gladly have admitted that this kind of fear is likely to make cowards of most men. All this was terrible and dangerous, but it posed no moral problems. The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of “coordination,” that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which lifelong friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened. It is true that many of these people were quickly disenchanted, and it is well known that most of the men of July 20, 1944, who paid with their lives for their conspiracy against Hitler, had been connected with the regime at some time or other. Still, I think this early moral disintegration in German society, hardly perceptible to the outsider, was like a kind of dress rehearsal for its total breakdown, which was to occur during the war years.

. . .To set the time aright means to renew the world, and this we can do because we all arrived at one time or another as newcomers in a world which was there before us and will still be there when we are gone, when we shall have left its burden to our successors. But this is not the kind of responsibility I am talking about here; it is not personal, strictly speaking, and it is only in a metaphorical sense that we can say we feel guilty for the sins of our fathers or our people or of mankind, in short for deeds we have not done. Morally speaking, it is as wrong to feel guilty without having done anything specific as it is to feel free of all guilt if one actually is guilty of something. I have always regarded it as the quintessence of moral confusion that during the postwar period in Germany those who personally were completely innocent assured each other and the world at large how guilty they felt, while very few of the criminals were prepared to admit even the slightest remorse. The result of this spontaneous admission of collective guilt was of course a very effective, though unintended, whitewash of those who had done something: as we have already seen, where all are guilty, no one is. And when we heard, in the recent discussion in Germany about an extension of the statute of limitations for the Nazi murderers, how the minister of justice countered any such extension with the argument that further zeal in looking for what the Germans call “the murderers among us” would only result in moral complacency among the Germans who are not murderers (Der Spiegel, no. 5,1963, p. 23), that is, in those who are innocent, we see at once how dangerous this moral confusion can become. The argument is not new. A few years back, the execution of the death sentence for Eichmann aroused widespread opposition, on the grounds that it might ease the conscience of ordinary Germans and “serve to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany,” as Martin Buber put it. Well, if young people in Germany, too young to have done anything at all, feel guilty, they are either wrong, confused, or they are playing intellectual games. There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals.

Recently, during the discussion of the Eichmann trial, these comparatively simple matters have been complicated through what I’ll call the cog-theory. When we describe a political system— how it works, the relations between the various branches of government, how the huge bureaucratic machineries function of which the channels of command are part, and how the civilian and the military and the police forces are interconnected, to mention only outstanding characteristics—it is inevitable that we speak of all persons used by the system in terms of cogs and wheels that keep the administration running. Each cog, that is, each person, must be expendable without changing the system, an assumption underlying all bureaucracies, all civil services, and all functions properly speaking. This viewpoint is the viewpoint of political science, and if we accuse or rather evaluate in its frame of reference, we speak of good and bad systems and our criteria are the freedom or the happiness or the degree of participation of the citizens, but the question of the personal responsibility of those who run the whole affair is a marginal issue. Here it is indeed true what all the defendants in the postwar trials said to excuse themselves: if I had not done it, somebody else could and would have.

For in any dictatorship, let alone a totalitarian dictatorship, even the comparatively small number of decision makers who can still be named in normal government has shrunk to the figure of One, while all institutions and bodies that initiate control over or ratify executive decision have been abolished. In the Third Reich, at any rate, there was only one man who did and could make decisions and hence was politically fully responsible. That was Hitler himself who, therefore, not in a fit of megalomania but quite correctly once described himself as the only man in all Germany who was irreplaceable. Everybody else from high to low who had anything to do with public affairs was in fact a cog, whether he knew it or not. Does this mean that nobody else could be held personally responsible?

When I went to Jerusalem to attend the Eichmann trial, I felt that it was the great advantage of courtroom procedure that this whole cog-business makes no sense in its setting, and therefore forces us to look at all these questions from a different point of view. To be sure, that the defense would try to plead that Eichmann was but a small cog was predictable; that the defendant himself would think in these terms was probable, and he did so up to a point; whereas the attempt of the prosecution to make of him the biggest cog ever—worse and more important than Hitler— was an unexpected curiosity. The judges did what was right and proper, they discarded the whole notion, and so, incidentally, did I, all blame and praise to the contrary notwithstanding. For, as the judges took great pains to point out explicitly, in a courtroom there is no system on trial, no History or historical trend, no ism, anti-Semitism for instance, but a person, and if the defendant happens to be a functionary, he stands accused precisely because even a functionary is still a human being, and it is in this capacity that he stands trial. Obviously, in most criminal organizations the small cogs are actually committing the big crimes, and one could even argue that one of the characteristics of the organized criminality of the Third Reich was that it demanded tangible proof of criminal implication of all its servants, and not only of the lower echelons. Hence, the question addressed by the court to the defendant is, Did you, such and such, an individual with a name, a date, and place of birth, identifiable and by that token not expendable, commit the crime you stand accused of, and Why did you do it? If the defendant answers: “It was not I as a person who did it, I had neither the will nor the power to do anything out of my own initiative; I was a mere cog, expendable, everybody in my place would have done it; that I stand before this tribunal is an accident”—this answer will be ruled out as immaterial. If the defendant were permitted to plead either guilty or not guilty as representing a system, he would indeed become a scapegoat. (Eichmann himself wished to become a scapegoat—he proposed to hang himself publicly and to take all “sins” upon himself. The court denied him this last occasion for elating sentiments.) In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government—the rule of offices, as contrasted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many—bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership. But in the courtroom, these definitions are of no avail. For to the answer: “Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,” the court immediately raises the next question: “And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?” If the accused wishes to shift responsibilities, he must again implicate other persons, he must name names, and these persons appear then as possible codefendants, they do not appear as the embodiment of bureaucratic or any other necessity. The Eichmann trial, like all such trials, would have been devoid of all interest if it had not transformed the cog or “referent” of Section IV B4 in the Reich Security Head Office into a man. Only because this operation was achieved even before the trial started could the question of personal responsibility, and hence of legal guilt, arise at all. And even this transformation of a cog into a man does not imply that something like cogness, the fact that systems transform men into cogs, and totalitarian systems more totally than others, was on trial.