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Authors: Dennis Showalter
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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
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
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