A salutary example of a major German general whose reputation has plummeted from hero to zero is Heinz Guderian. He played a crucial part in military history as the creator of the panzer division. Beginning in 1929, he struggled to persuade his superiors to adopt his ideas; only after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 did the new concept become reality.
As a commander of these wholly new armoured formations, Guderian devised the breakthrough in the Ardennes in May 1940 which brought France to her knees. In Russia, he led the assault on Moscow; when it failed he was dismissed.
In 1943 he was reinstated as inspector general of Armoured Troops, with the task of rebuilding the panzer divisions; in July 1944, after the Allied invasion of Europe and the failed plot against Hitler, he was made chief of the General Staff. In March 1945, just over a month before the war ended, he was replaced by Hitler and retired to his estate.
After the war, Guderian avoided prosecution, not least thanks to B.H. Liddell Hart, the military historian and defence correspondent, who debriefed him along with other German generals. Liddell Hart championed Guderian as a pioneering “genius” who had put his own theories into practice. He also contributed a preface to the general’s bestselling memoir, Panzer Leader, which appeared in 1958, fluently translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon. The English version, unlike the German original, makes fulsome mention of his intellectual debt to “Captain Liddell Hart”, presumably inserted by Guderian at his British sponsor’s behest.
A striking passage describes how Hitler, just after assuming power in 1933, watched Guderian’s armoured units on manoeuvres. The new chancellor was much impressed, repeatedly exclaiming: “That’s what I need! That’s what I want to have!” Guderian evidently reciprocated the enthusiasm, struck by the fact that Hitler was the first chancellor since Bismarck to visit their Kummersdorf training ground.
Though the general is at pains throughout his book to distance himself from the Nazis and their Führer, it is clear that their bond was real: it was Hitler who believed in his vision of the irresistible power of the new panzer division: a minimum of 400 tanks, integrated with motorised infantry and artillery.
It was Hitler who gave him the opportunity to prove his worth in a “war of manoeuvre”, designed to overcome the dreaded trench warfare of 1914-18. (The Germans themselves disdained the term Blitzkrieg, used by Western journalists to describe their campaigns of 1939-40). And it was Hitler who trusted Guderian to salvage something from the wreck of his unwinnable war.
For all these reasons, Guderian served Hitler almost to the bitter end, taking refuge in a facade of professionalism and joining forces with the armaments minister, Albert Speer. Both these technocrats contributed to the once-dominant narrative that made Hitler the scapegoat for the collective moral cowardice of the German establishment.
Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.
