Read Online Hitler's Panzers by Dennis Showalter - Free Book Online
Authors: Dennis Showalter
Ads: Link
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
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
Similar Books
