Hello team.
Did the generals ever question or outright defy Hitler based on his old rank or military experience from WW1? Did anyone ever bring up his old rank up as a counter when Hither issued insane orders like holding the line till the last man?
Love your work, greetings to every team member and good luck going forward!
Hiya, Rok!
No. Hitler was a āFrontKampferā - a front-line soldier in WW1, and a message runner to boot. His courage was unquestioned, and that was enough to give him a pass. That he was an enlisted man didnāt matter. Also, Hitler was the political leader of the country, and every member of the military had sworn an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler.
Nope, not to his face, anyhow. HItler had a hatred for generals that was born of his experience in WWI, when enlisted menās resentment of high officers was entirely justified. This resentment was (in is) common to enlisted men in pretty much every army.
Orders are āinsaneā only if they donāt work. 
I think the joke of Hitler as the little corporal came from the Chaplin film not real life.
Napoleon was the āoriginalā little corporal, he noted during the campaign in Italy in the late 1790s that heād been referred to that way by some of his own men. Napoleon, of course, was never an enlisted soldier in the French royal army or the army of the French Republic ā¦ heād entered as an officer cadet.
Hitler, on the other hand, had actually been a Gefreiter in the Bavarian army. Bruce Gudmundssonās The Tactical Notebook had a discussion about the oddity of German Gefreiters recently:
In the army of Frederick the Great, a Gefreiter was a private soldier who had been freed (gefreit ) from some (but far from all) of the many petty restrictions then imposed on men in the ranks. For example, a Gefreiter could be sent on errands, such as going to a well or stream to fill of water bottles, that other soldiers might exploit as an opportunity to avoid drill, get drunk, or desert. In other words, a Gefreiter was the military equivalent of a trustee in a penitentiary.
In the course of the nineteenth century, as the ācadaver disciplineā of the Enlightenment gave way to more participatory forms of control, the Gefreiter evolved into an apprentice non-commissioned officer. He might, for example, serve as the senior man in a squad bay or the leader of a small patrol.
[ā¦]
Early in the interwar period, when all enlisted men of the army of the German Republic were obliged to enlist for twelve years, farsighted officers anticipated the problem of what to do with an āold soldierā who lacked the skills, knowledge, and attitudes required of an efficient non-commissioned officer, especially one who was serving in an āarmy of leaders.ā In particular, they worried that long-serving soldiers with little to lose might provide young recruits with the wrong sort of guidance, influence, and example. To solve this problem, they generalized the rank of Obergefreiter , which had previously been limited to men of the Foot Artillery, and invented the rank of Stabsgefreiter .
The rank of Obergefreiter was normally awarded to a man who, having served for a combined total of four years in the ranks of Gefreiter and OberschĆ¼tze (private first class), had failed promotion to the lowest non-commissioned officer rank (that of Unteroffizier .) The rank of Stabsgefreiter was reserved for men who managed to serve for twelve years without convincing their superiors that they were capable of leading a squad.