Document created: 24 August 04
Air University Review,
May-June 1970
Since the late President Eisenhower’s valedictory warning against the military industrial complex, the question has been repeatedly raised whether our country is not being transformed into what one United States Senator has called “a warfare state.” Trapped in an inexorably rising spiral of costs for ever more sophisticated weaponry, we may well find that whatever can be saved by a tapering off or even gradual cessation of expenditures in Vietnam will be claimed in the effort to recover lost ground in a number of defense programs all but starved for funds by the twin struggles in Southeast Asia and in our socioeconomically disintegrating urban centers.
The problems involved in the allocation and control of national resources are staggering. The intrinsically difficult process of decision-making is further complicated by the complexity of our governmental structure. Small wonder that many competent and responsible officers express apprehension regarding the future. Yet as frustrating as the problems are which confront our planners and decision-makers today and tomorrow, and as unprecedented as they are in their technological details and ultimate implications, in historical terms they are not entirely unique. History rarely repeats itself in a predictable way, but at times there is a haunting similarity of pattern between events past and present. Most of us, at one point or another, have felt an uncanny sense of familiarity when viewing a completely strange scene or watching a course of events the outcome of which we somehow already seemed to know. This was my experience when first learning of Georg Thomas, and I would be surprised if it were not shared by a number of readers of this article, for as different as the world of that German general was from ours, his story has elements and implications which give it a certain elusive yet undeniable relevance to our own times.
Born in 1890 in a small Prussian city on the Neisse, the son of a manufacturer, Georg Richard Thomas received his army commission in 1910. He had a distinguished combat record in the First World War, receiving four major decorations including the coveted Knight’s Cross with Swords (Ritterkreuz mil Schwertern). He served in the elite hundred-thousand-man postwar army to which Germany was limited by the Treaty of Versailles. He was a colonel by 1934, brigadier general by 1938, and major general as of 1 January 1940. On 1 August the same year he reached three-star rank as General der Infanterie. He had joined the Economic Staff in the 1920s when it was still under the Army Ordnance Office, becoming its head in 1934 when it was detached from the army and given supra-service status in the Reich Defense (Reichswehr) Ministry. By 1942 he was head of a greatly expanded Defense Economy and Armaments Office (Wehrwirtschafts- und Rüstungsamt) in the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or simply OKW), commanding hundreds of military-economic agencies stretched across Hitler’s Festung Europa. But at the beginning of 1943 he was relieved of command and relegated to the impotent status of economic adviser to the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a competent enough administrator but completely dominated by Hitler. In October 1944, Thomas was arrested for treason. He had played no role in the attempt on Hitler’s life three months earlier but a significant one in the conspiracy against Hitler at the beginning of the war. Long troubled by poor health, Thomas was physically broken by the time he left the concentration camp in 1945. He died in a military hospital the following year at the age of 56.
During the period of almost two years between his relief from command and his arrest, he had devoted himself almost exclusively to compiling a history of the German defense economy and armaments industry since World War I.* Published in 1966 by the West German Federal Archives under the expert editorship of Professor Wolfgang Birkenfeld, a German authority on the economics of the Third Reich, this 500-page volume is an invaluable detailed apologia for the concept of total war and the policy of economic mobilization, to which Thomas’s entire professional career had been devoted but which only began to be realized—far too late to save Germany—under his bitter rival, Armaments and War Production Minister Albert Speer (whose own memoirs, incidentally, have now also been published).
* Georg Thomas, Geschichte der deutschen Wehr- und Rüstungswirtschaft (1918-1943/45), edited by Wolfgang Birkenfeld, Schriften des Bundesarchivs 14 (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1966), xvi and 552 pp.
In Design for Total War, a recent study which complements the Thomas book, Dr. Berenice A. Carroll has given us a clearly written account of Thomas’s ideas in the dual context of the history of warfare and of his attempt to realize them in the Third Reich. ** She had an excellent background for writing this work, which grew out of her dissertation at Brown University. In addition to her formal work at American universities, Mrs. Carroll, who is now at the University of Illinois, spent a Fulbright year in Germany and several years as a member of the staff that catalogued and microfilmed millions of pages of captured German files before their restitution. Her meticulous documentation and detailed knowledge of the labyrinthine military-political-economic bureaucracy of the Third Reich greatly enhance the value of her study of Thomas’s, “design for total war.” This is not to say that her book duplicates or supersedes such works as those of Klein, Meinck, or Milward, to name only three scholars who have approached the problem of German rearmament and economic mobilization in more general terms than she does in her specialized monograph.1 She does, to be sure, complement and even correct them on various not unimportant points. But she agrees with them in their basic confirmation of the findings of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that the economy of the Third Reich was not fully mobilized before 1942, when the Second World War was already half over:
There can be no doubt [according to the October 1945 report on The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy] that Germany started the conversion of her economy to a wartime footing far too late. Had Germany’s leaders decided to make an all-out war effort in 1939 instead of 1942, they would have had time to arm in “depth”; that is, to lay the foundations of a war economy by expanding their basic industries and building up equipment for the mass production of munitions. Starting their armament program as late as 1942, they could only arm in “width”; that is, accept their equipment and material base as given and expand munitions production on the basis of available capacity.2
**Berenice A. Carroll, Design for Total War: Arms and Economics in the Third Reich, Studies in European History XVII (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 311 pp.
Germany, in other words, was not economically prepared for total war in 1939 and did not actually begin to convert her economy “to a wartime footing” until 1942. How and why was this the case? There is no serious question that Hitler unleashed the Second World War. It is equally clear that he had envisioned war at least since the twenties, when he wrote in Mein Kampf that National Socialists “turn their gaze toward the land in the East” and unambiguously affirmed that the only possible way for modem Germany to survive was to resume the eastward march of the medieval Teutonic knights “in order to provide with the German sword land for the German plow and thereby daily bread for the nation.”3 Once he became dictator, moreover, he set about building up the German armed forces. As they became stronger, he conducted a more and more aggressive foreign policy until he finally forced Europe into the Second World War.4 But since Hitler so clearly planned for war, why did he not prepare Germany for it? This is the underlying problem dealt with in Dr. Carroll’s book about General Thomas, who had so insistently urged adequate preparations that, upon his relief from command in 1943, his superior, Field Marshal Keitel, explained to him:
I must concede to you today that your warnings and economic judgments before and during the war were correct. But you have made yourself intolerable to the Fuhrer and the [Nazi] Party by expressing these views loud and often. Hitler has made clear that he has no use for men who seek continually to instruct him. (p. 232 of Carroll’s book, which also is the source of subsequent otherwise unidentified references)
What Thomas had attempted to convey to Hitler—not only in person but through countless memoranda, position papers, and policy recommendations through channels—was his conviction, based on the experience of World War I, that “modem war means total war” and that Germany had to be prepared accordingly. As early as 1928, about a year after the completion of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s future economic general wrote:
Modern war is no longer a clash of armies, but a struggle for the existence of the peoples involved. All resources of the nation must be made to serve the war; above all, besides men, industry and the economy. (p. 40)
It was to provide a central planning organ for the mobilization of “men, industry and the economy” that the Economic Staff of the Army Ordnance Office, which Thomas had joined in 1928, was transferred, with him as chief, to the Reich Defense Ministry in 1934 with general authority over Wehrwirtschaftsuna Waffenwesen ( Defense Economy and Weapons Affairs). But Wehrwirtschaft (a term combining Wehr, defense, and Wirtschaft, economy) was used by Thomas as a blanket concept to cover economic mobilization in the broadest sense, since “the totality of warfare, which according to modem conceptions is its only possible form, has also led to the concept of total mobilization.” (pp. 41-42) Total mobilization, however, could only be achieved and sustained under an authoritarian system, completely subordinating (to use Eisenhower’s terms) individual liberty to the military-industrial complex. As Thomas put it in a speech in 1936:
Wehrwirtschaft is the reconstruction of the communal basis of a national economy. It signifies a disavowal of the international principle of individualism. It is the economic principle of a total state and breaks with the liberalism of parliamentary democracy. . . . Only a strong state with strong leadership, a strong economy, and a strong army can maintain its existence among the nations at length. . . . Therefore the first principle of Wehrwirtschaff [is] authoritarian and strong leadership of the state. (p. 42)
As the rate of the German rearmament program accelerated, Thomas became increasingly concerned that inadequate provisions were being made to sustain during a long war of attrition the precipitously expanding Wehrmacht. In July 1937 he prepared a report for Hitler, warning him, as Dr. Carroll writes, “that the pace of rearmament was outdistancing Germany’s economic capacity, and that certain limits would have to be placed upon current military expansion. In particular, Thomas called for a halt in the motorization. . . essential to Hitler’s Blitzkrieg strategy.” (p. 48) In May 1939 the general stated flatly that he did “not believe that a conflict between the Axis states and the Western powers will be a matter of Blitzkrieg—that is, a matter of days and weeks. For me . . . the essential thing is to see that our armament is set for all eventualities, including a long war.” (p. 48)
Finally, in mid-August, On the very eve of the war, Thomas attempted to avert what he fervently believed would be a catastrophe by insisting to the chief of the OKW, Marshal Keitel, that the impending conflict would inevitably become a long, drawn-out war of attrition which Germany could not possibly survive. As Thomas later recounted, Keitel cut him off with the assertion “that Hitler would never bring about a world war. There was no danger at all, for in Hitler’s opinion, the French were a degenerate pacifist people, the English were much too decadent to provide real aid to, the Poles, and finally, America would never again send a single man to Europe in order to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for England, or even for Poland.” (p.191) When Thomas objected that experts on those countries would never agree with that statement, Keitel snapped back that the general evidently had let himself become infected by “those pacifists. . . who refuse to see Hitler’s greatness.” (p.191) Yet as late as 27 August, Thomas objectively demonstrated to Keitel with a series of charts the long-range economic superiority of the Western powers. Keitel was impressed enough to go over the charts with Hitler, but returned them the next day saying that the Fuhrer was not the least concerned, particularly in view of the pact he had concluded with the Soviet Union during the past week.
When the war began a few days later, Hitler not only refused to give the orders Thomas urged for full wartime mobilization of the economy but even hesitated to establish fixed priority schedules or stable production guidelines within the framework of existing directives. Only on 7 September 1939 did Hitler set up, on Thomas’s urgent recommendation, a priority schedule, giving top classification to munitions and replacement of destroyed weapons and equipment. But then on 4 October he revised this to include, at equally urgent top priority on a competitive basis, a number of additional programs, including submarine construction, which had not even been on the prior schedule—though the submarine force was so weak that during the early part of the war it was hardly possible to keep a dozen U-boats at combat station in the Atlantic. On 10 October, however, Hitler suddenly established super-priority (over the previous top-priority programs) for motorization; and in mid-November, just as German industry was being retooled for that latest shift, he gave super-super-priority to munitions production—a decision forced by the alarming shortages resulting from Germany’s having entered the war, despite Thomas’s repeated warnings, with only a four- to six-weeks’ supply of ammunition.
Thomas spoke out against these conditions with a vehemence which demonstrates a freedom of expression within professional circles which we do not generally associate with the Third Reich. “There reigns today in Germany a war of each against all,” he said in October 1939 at a conference with representatives of the Ministry of Economics and the Army Ordnance Office. “Neither the supreme leadership [i.e., Hitler] nor the commanders of the army understand the present situation. Of course, that would be too much to ask.” Hardly less mordant were his remarks to a large audience of industrialists in November, in which “doubting Thomas,” as he was known, complained that Germany had no war economy for political reasons which were “very likely based on the delusive hope of the German people that the war might be over by Christmas.” The source of such “delusive hopes” he knew, of course—even before receiving Keitel’s assurance several days later that the great winning blow was going to be delivered by Christmas. (pp. 209-11)
The lack of a coherent Wehrwirtschaft program with effective centralized control reinforced Thomas’s conviction that the economic base would remain far too thin to support the burgeoning German war machine. Since he knew that the consequences would be disastrous for Germany, he was led by his patriotism (and by his religious conviction, as Dr. Birkenfeld shows in his Introduction [p. 25]) to lend his full weight, during fall 1939 to spring 1940, to the unsuccessful plot against Hitler. That conspiracy has only recently been given the historical treatment it deserves—by Professor Harold C. Deutsch of the University of Minnesota, who was attached to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war and at its conclusion had the opportunity to interview Thomas.5 Because it was possible for the plot to be abandoned without being compromised, Thomas maintained his position in charge of the Wehrwirtschafts- und Rüstungsamt in the Armed Forces High Command (Wi Rü Amt/OKW) until after Hitler appointed his architect, Albert Speer, as Reich Minister for Weapons and Munitions. Speer, an unusually able, hard-driving man who as a personal friend enjoyed the confidence of the Führer, immediately began to consolidate control over the war economy. At the time of his appointment in February 1942, there were no fewer than five supreme Reich authorities with conflicting and competing jurisdiction over German war production: Göring’s Four-Year-Plan organization, Thomas’s Wi Rü Amt/OKW, the Ministries of Labor and of Economics, and Speer’s own ministry—not to mention the Air Force Ordnance Office which under Goring’s patronage remained independent of the Wi Rü Amt, Himmler’s ss Main Office of Economics and Administration, and several Nazi Party satrapies jealously guarded by Hitler’s sinister Party Chancellery chief, Martin Bormann.
In the course of 1942-43 a significant measure of consolidation and centralized control over the economy, such as Thomas had been advocating since the twenties, was finally imposed—but by Speer, who with Hitler’s support was able at least to hamstring some of his rivals and altogether to eliminate Thomas, whose Wi Rü Amt was first eviscerated and then dissolved. As the military catastrophe he had so clearly prophesied approached inexorably and the cities of Germany fell in ruins, the general withdrew with his staff to the idyllic residence of Count Amim in Lusatia to write his history. It was virtually completed at the time of his arrest, 11 October 1944.
Meanwhile Speer instituted those “changes in the institutional framework of the German war economy which made possible the brilliant success of German war production between spring, 1942, and summer, 1944, and so confounded Germany’s opponents.”6 In the words of the Strategic Bombing Survey:
Production of armament in 1943
was on the average 56 percent higher than in 1942, and more than twice as high
as in 1941. . . . Despite the damage wrought by air attack and territorial
loss, and despite the general drop in production in the second half of 1944,
total industrial output for the year was the highest in the war.7
What was possible under the adverse conditions of July 1944, when the index of munitions output peaked at 322 (the monthly level of January-February 1942 being taken as 100), suggests what might have been achieved had General Georg Thomas’s program of comprehensive economic mobilization for total war been taken seriously during the thirties. But Hitler did not believe in total war and had no intention of becoming involved in it. Thomas’s experience in World War I taught him, the professional soldier, that Germany absolutely had to be better prepared for an extended war of attrition next time. But Hitler, the political fanatic, came to an entirely different conclusion on the basis of the same evidence. He explained his position in a conversation during the early thirties with Dr. Hermann Rauschning, who was then Nazi Senate President of the Free City of Danzig but who later went over to the opposition, emigrated, and published what Hitler had said: “Whoever experienced the war at the front will not want to cause more bloodshed if it can be averted.”8 And Hitler planned to avert it:
Who says that I will begin a war like the fools of 1914? Aren’t we doing everything we possibly can to prevent just that? Most people have no imagination. They can visualize what is coming only in terms of their own limited experience. They do not see the new and surprising. The generals are also sterile. They are trapped in their own professional expertise. The creative genius is always an outsider so far as the professionals are concerned. I have the gift of reducing the problems to their essential core. . . . What is war but cunning, swindle, delusion, assault and surprise? People have resorted to killing only when there was no other way to get ahead. . . . There is such a thing as strategy in an extended sense; there is war with intellectual means. What is the object of war. . . ? That the enemy capitulate. Once he does that, I have the prospect of destroying him entirely. Why should I demoralize him militarily when I can do it more cheaply and effectively in other ways. . . .
When I wage war. . . , one day
in the middle of peacetime I will have troops in Paris. They will be wearing
French uniforms. They will march through the streets. No one will stop them.
Everything is prepared down to the smallest detail. They march to the General
Staff Headquarters. They occupy the ministries, the parliament. Within a few
minutes France, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia are robbed of their leading
men. An army without a general staff. All political leaders taken care of. The
confusion will be unprecedented. But long since I have been in touch with men
who will form a new government—a government which suits me. We find such men.
We find them in every land. We do not have to buy them. They come on their own.
Ambition and delusion, party strife and intrigue drive them. We will have a
peace treaty before we have war. I guarantee you, gentlemen, that the
impossible will always succeed. The most improbable way is the surest.9
It was precisely by such revolutionary techniques of “peaceful” warfare that Hitler was able to seize Austria, then the Sudetenland, and finally Czechoslovakia and the Memelland without resorting to overt hostilities in the traditional sense. It is true that he had to risk war, but the very fact that he was not bluffing and was willing to fight made it unnecessary for him to do so. However, when it came to the next step, Poland, the showdown could no longer be deferred. Yet even here Hitler was true to his revolutionary principles. He had no intention of waging a long war of attrition. His strategy was the very opposite of total war as Thomas understood it; it was Blitzkrieg, literally “lightning war.” He described it in the course of the conversation already cited:
I will never begin a war without
the certainty that a demoralized enemy will collapse as the result of a single
gigantic blow. . . . Aerial bombardment on an unheard-of scale, surprise
attacks, terror, sabotage, assassinations from within, the murder of leading
men, overwhelming assaults on all weak points of the enemy’s defenses,
instantaneously, at the same moment, without regard for reserves or casualties.
That is the future war.10
Here, as before, Hitler had his way. He completely upset the calculations of his enemies by his pact with the Kremlin. The Poles never had a chance. The French, already internally divided, became seriously demoralized and collapsed in six weeks, while their British allies were driven back across the Channel. In less than a year, Hitler was master of the Continent from the Pyrenees to beyond the Vistula. Then, on 22 June 1941, the first anniversary of the French capitulation, he turned on his Soviet treaty partner with Operation Barbarossa, Blitzkrieg on so vast a scale that Hitler was almost right in his prediction that the world would hold its breath. By the end of September, with victory in sight, “the greatest war lord of all times” actually went so far as to order a substantial reduction in armaments production. Only the bitter stalemate before Moscow itself and the formal entry of the United States into the war brought home to Hitler, at the end of 1941, that his astounding series of triumphs by armed diplomacy, coercion, subversion, and Blitzkrieg had finally come to an end and that he was now indeed engaged in a second world war, a long war of attrition, and a war for which he had deliberately and resolutely refused to prepare the Third Reich because he had neither wanted it nor thought it would be necessary. That had been Hitler’s fatal mistake. Deluded by his own extraordinary successes, the half-educated Austrian immigrant, who had emerged from anonymity to rule Germany and tyrannize Europe, was ultimately too much of a dilettante to make responsible provisions for a turn of fate against his fanatical and phenomenally successful will. He regarded himself as the instrument of destiny, and consequently, moving with the self-confidence of a sleepwalker (as he himself put it), he felt himself to be virtually infallible. His decision against Thomas’s design for total war had been irrevocable, for not even the genius of Albert Speer could recapture the lost years of preparation. Consequently the German armed forces, though they did pack a tremendous initial shock against even less adequately prepared opponents, simply lacked the armaments in depth and overall military-economic support which might have been decisive in the long run. I do not say they automatically would have, but it can certainly be argued that this mistake alone was sufficient to cost him whatever chance of victory he might have had.
How many more tanks would have been needed to bring about different outcomes in the battles of Moscow, El Alamein, and Stalingrad? How many more submarines could Britain have withstood during those first two years of the war? How much sooner could Germany’s jet aircraft have been brought into mass production, and what difference would it have made? These are all disturbing reflections, but more disturbing still is the thought of what might have happened had the man who split the atom gone on to develop the atomic bomb. The fear that this might happen had triggered President Roosevelt’s decision in favor of the Manhattan Project. I will never forget Otto Hahn, who received the 1944 Nobel prize in chemistry for his world-shaking discovery of atomic fission in 1939. I met him while a student at Göttingen a few years before he died, and he movingly described the stance which he and his associates took on the issue: Early in the war they had assured the leaders of the Third Reich that it would theoretically be possible to develop the bomb but that to do so would require virtually unlimited support in terms of priority materials and highly skilled personnel in many fields. Moreover, they had added, no definite assurance could be given that a practical weapon would be developed in the relatively near future. Still thinking in terms of Blitzkrieg, Hiter was willing to give serious support only to projects that promised concrete returns within a year. Consequently, the German effort to produce the atomic bomb was carried on in a desultory and uncoordinated fashion by a number of agencies, including even the postal ministry. Nothing came of it, for as Max von Laue, another Nobel laureate, at the time assured a foreign friend who was shocked to learn of the German scientists’ “effort” to develop the bomb: “No one ever invents anything he doesn’t really want to invent.”11 Since the Führer was uninterested, nobody cared.
My point of departure for this review article was the agonizing question in our own time of the allocation and control of national resources in view of the conflicting needs of those responsible for our national security in a military sense and those concerned for remedying the socioeconomic conditions in our cities which are eroding the very fabric of our national life.
Clearly the national goals, problems, and alternatives of the United States on entering the seventies are so different from those of Germany in the thirties that any attempt to draw meaningful parallels must be very carefully defined in order to avoid oversimplification or misrepresentation. But in evaluating the significance and relevance of General Georg Thomas’s design for total war and of his and Dr. Carroll’s fine books, I consider it both valid and important to make three points.
The first is that the story of what Thomas stood for and tried to do, and of Hitler’s negative response, is intrinsically vital to our understanding of the Second World War and its large part in shaping the world in which we live. It has been said that knowledge is power. In some respects this undoubtedly is true, but it is often much harder to argue convincingly than merely to assert. Personally, I consider it unnecessary to rationalize in practical terms my desire to understand the present and the past. I trust the reader will accept as my first reason for writing this story the fact that it is worth retelling for its own sake.
The second point I want to stress is that neither Adolf Hitler nor Georg Thomas was entirely correct or entirely mistaken in his vision of the coming war. The professional soldier, despite his brilliant comprehension of Wehrwirtschaft and the necessity of radical economic mobilization for modern total war, seemed simply unable to grasp the revolutionary significance of Hitler’s innovations that contributed so much to the German successes in the first two years of the war. Hitler, for his part, did not understand that those dramatic victories took place within a larger frame of reference which he could not change either by the force of his will or by the power of his Wehrrruzcht. Thomas was too conservative, but in the last analysis his conservatism rested on sound principles and insights which Hitler ignored. This, as we have seen, was a fatal mistake.
My third point touches not only on the significance of this article and the story it tells but also on the relevance of history to the present and future. It could be dangerous for us to think in terms of learning any positive lessons from the history of General Thomas, his program, and his fate. To put it differently, as interesting as the story may be, it will not help us, in concrete terms, to deal with our own problems today and tomorrow. History may be the teacher of mankind, but its lessons are frequently ambiguous. The great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt rightly scoffed at the idea of studying history “in order to be more clever next time.” The hazard against which he warned is, in fact, demonstrated in this article by the Hitler-Thomas disagreement. We have seen how, for both of them, the experience of the First World War was the point of departure in preparing for the next conflict. Yet their conclusions were contradictory. Thomas was convinced that Germany absolutely had to prepare far better than previously for the war of attrition he regarded as inevitable. Hitler thought it unnecessary and undesirable to do so: unnecessary because such a war could be avoided; undesirable because a larger armament program would involve either a cutback in consumer goods or the risk of inflation, neither of which he considered an acceptable alternative. As things turned out, Hitler was right for the first part of the war, Thomas for the latter part—and it was, of course, the latter which counted in the long run. Hence Thomas may justly be celebrated as a prophet without honor in his own country, a distinguished soldier, a brilliant planner, and perhaps even a man who read the lessons of history correctly. But since the policy he advocated was not followed, we cannot be certain. Consequently, the only incontrovertible conclusion we can reach from these considerations concerning the allocation and control of national resources is the ominous observation that in the long run a mistake can be fatal.
Carbondale, Illinois
Notes
1. Burton H. Klein, Germany’s Economic Preparations for War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1959); Gerhard Meinck, Hitler und die deutsche Aufrilstung (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1959); Alan S. Milward, The German Economy at War (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1965).
2. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 31, 1945), p. 7. Hereafter referred to as USSBS.
3. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (41st ed.; Munich: EherVerlag, 1933), pp. 742 and 154 (my translation).
4. As discussed in my article, “The Origins of the Second World War,” Air University Review, XX, 5 (July-August 1969), 94-102.
5. Harold C. Deutsch, The Conspiracy against Hitler in the Twilight War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), pp. 265-69, 308-15, 392, etc.
6. Milward, p. 72.
7. USSBS, p. 26.
8. Hermann Rausching, Gespräche mit Hitler (Zürich: Europa-Verlag, 1940), p. 15 (my translation).
9. Ibid., pp. 12-13 (my translation).
10. Ibid., p. 16 (my translation).
11. Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: The Story of the Men Who Made The Bomb (New York: Grove Press; copyright, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), p. 94.
Professor Donald S. Detwiler (B.A., George Washington University; Dr. Phil., Göttingen University, Germany) is a member of the History Department, Southern Illinois University. He has taught at West Virginia University and at American University and Catholic University in Washington. Commissioned in the Air Force Reserve from ROTC in 1954, he attended Intelligence School, Sheppard AFB, Texas, and served in Germany as a language intelligence officer until 1957. He is author of Hitler, Franco und Gibraltar (Mainz: Institute of European History, 1962); English translation of two studies on Hitler by Percy E. Schramm (Chicago: Quadrangle Books); and a German history to be released in 1971 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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