Air University Review, March-April 1983

The Federal Republic of Germany
and the Second World War

history remastered

Readers of Air University Review might well be taken aback when initially confronted with a review of two massive volumes totaling 1200 densely written, heavily footnoted pages—in German. Yet the value of these works to the Air Force officer is substantial for two reasons. First and foremost is the relative lack of scholarly studies of the Luftwaffe in the context of Nazi Germany’s war effort. The wartime records of the German air force have been severely depleted: lost in bombing raids or destroyed to prevent their capture. What remains has been moved several times and is at best erratically catalogued, which in turn has left the door wide open for mythmaking. The numerous studies completed under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force Historical Division have essentially been technical documents, whose authors took particular pains to present their roles and the role of the Luftwaffe in the Third Reich as narrowly as possible. On a more popular level, journalists and memoirists have described knights of the air fighting for their homeland against increasingly heavy odds, men too young and naïve to be aware of the true nature of the regime they defended but whose hearts were by and large in the right place.

The process was expedited by the general willingness of the postwar U.S. Air Force to forgive and forget. Its prisoners had on the whole been properly treated, at least while in Luftwaffe hands. Its dead had fallen in fair combat against enemies whose skill at arms commanded admiration. Its homeland had remained unscathed, and its erstwhile opponents were willing, indeed eager, to establish friendly relations. Men like Adolf Galland and Johannes Steinhoff, far from sulking in their tents, proved boon companions, equally interested in discussing current defense problems during the working day and sharing reminiscences over drinks during the evening. In this context, it is hardly remarkable that the least history-conscious of America’s forces should form images of Hitler’s Luftwaffe little more sophisticated than "There we both were over Schweinfurt at twenty-five thousand feet. . ."

A second reason for paying attention to these books is their status as the first two volumes of the nearest thing to an official history of World War II that West Germany is likely to produce. The Allies, especially the Western Allies, were early off the mark in this area. Germany, politically divided, initially lacked the stability, the underlying consensus, required to produce official histories. Not until the l960s did the race between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for control of the public images of World War II really get under way. The East Germans were first on the scene with a four-volume history published between 1974 and 1977. In the Federal Republic, the task fell to the Militiärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Military Historical Research Center), located at Freiburg in Breisgau.

This agency plans a ten-volume work with an unusual format. Instead of producing a collective work on the GDR model or assigning each volume to a single author and a corps of assistants, the Forschungsamt chose a form of intellectual pluralism. Each section of the first two volumes was written by an individual scholar; then they coordinated their work as far as possible without altering substance for the sake of artificial harmony. This cross-fertilization produced stimulating, controversial volumes. Their value is heightened by the absence of that unspoken requirement to pay obeisance to military or political figures still active and influential that influences even the bluntest volumes of British or American official history.

This review has been structured for the Review in two ways. Few of the journal’s readers, even those with some facility in German, are reasonably likely to tackle two volumes of German academic prose in addition to their other professional duties. Therefore, I have decided to concentrate more on summarizing than on critiquing the arguments presented, in the hope of encouraging further reading in specific issues. I have also highlighted air power questions wherever possible, focusing on the development and employment of the Luftwaffe in the Nazi system.

Volume I deals with Germany’s road to World War II.* The National Socialists were determined to implement as soon as possible their program of comprehensive rearmament and comprehensive integration of the German nation behind an aggressive foreign policy. Hitler, however was not working in a vacuum. Wolfram Wette brilliantly demonstrates that Nazi determination to create a militarized folk community depended heavily on attitudes formed during the Weimar Republic. The Versailles Treaty confronted Germany with a blunt alternative: either a policy of peaceful reconciliation with the victors or a drive to reestablish political power through military might. The pacifistic elements of German society—the Social Democrats, the trade unions, the peace movements—proved unable to sustain themselves against a rising tide of militarism. The churches continued to pay homage to Mars. The liberal parties moved ever farther right. A wave of books and films highlighted the "front experience" of 1914-18. After 1933 the Nazis were able to mobilize Germany’s media behind their particular brand of glorifying the martial virtues. Wette is particularly effective in his analysis of the relationships among peace offensives, fear propaganda, and displacement of guilt feelings in the Nazi propaganda campaign. He recognizes, too, that neither the abstract militarism of the Weimar years nor the more concrete Nazi version was enough to generate war fever in the population as a whole. Instead the National Socialists depended heavily on a mixture of co-option and terror to secure compliance as the Third Reich moved toward its war of conquest.

*Wilhelm Deist et al. Das Deutche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrief, Vol. I, Ursachen und Vorausselzung der deutschen Kriegspolitik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlage-Anstalt, 1979), 764 pages.

Economic preparations for that war are presented by Hans Erich Volkmann. He describes Germany before Hitler as caught up in a world economic crisis that was essentially the crisis of a liberal economic system based on the principle of free international trade. As an alternative, the Nazis offered the concept of a self-sufficient economy oriented in every respect toward preparation for an eventual war. It was an economy of crisis, geared from the beginning to absorbing Germany’s unemployed in a mushrooming armaments industry financed on the slenderest of bases. Germany was to become as independent of raw material imports as possible while absorbing the industrial a capacities of such weaker neighbors as Czechoslovakia and Austria. Spain and the Balkan states were also targets for German economic penetration. Volkmann takes pains to demonstrate Wehrmacht involvement in these aggressive economic policies. Concern for maintaining steady supplies of food and raw materials had permeated German military planning since 1918, and the generals heartily welcomed the initiatives of Hitler and Hjalmar Schacht.

The Third Reich was hardly ready for war in 1939. National Socialism’s chronic inability to organize and administrate had wrought havoc in an economy whose reserve capacity was severely limited. Party and state agencies competed for nonexistent raw materials and workers. Army, navy, and Luftwaffe spent as much time in blocking each other’s contracts as in expediting rearmament. The gulf between demands and capacities grew almost by the week. Signs of stagnation and exhaustion were becoming plain at every level. After six years of effort, the Wehrmacht in 1939 still pessimistically described Germany’s economic capacity for war as significantly below 1914 levels. Foreign observers described the Third Reich as able to wage modern war for a limited time at best. In this context, blitzkrieg was Germany’s only hope for a military solution to an economic problem. Conquest would rejuvenate the economy by giving it a broader base of control and exploitation.

The instrument of that conquest was the Wehrmacht, and the preparation of Germany’s armed forces for World War II is the theme of Wilhelm Deist’s contribution. He describes German rearmament as one of the decisive factors in the drastic alteration of Europe’s power relationships between 1933 and 1939. However, the nature of that rearmament reflected significant changes in internal attitudes as well as external circumstances. Both the experience of World War I and the fact of Germany’s disarmament had convinced the Reichswehr’s leaders of the need for matching military means and political ends. In Wilhelm Groener’s words, definite prospects of success must become a prerequisite of any military action. From its creation, the Reichswehr prepared for the day when the Versailles Treaty would be modified or abolished. But simple professional solutions to the problem of German security were impossible with armed forces only 100,000 strong. Recognizing this, the Reichswehr developed both its political sophistication and its consideration of economic issues. Its revisionism was broad-gauged, recognizing the existence of a European collective security system and working within its structure.

This approach began to change with Werner von Blomberg’s appointment as Defense Minister in January 1933. By no means a mere lackey of Hitler, Blomberg regarded national defense as a problem whose solution should be military. Unsympathetic to international treaties and disarmament negotiations, he gave German rearmament its own dynamic, independent of but parallel to Hitler’s political visions. It was a dynamic based on fear. Blomberg’s abandonment of the collective security concept generated corresponding anxieties about the behavior of Germany’s neighbors: Poland, France, Czechoslovakia. Not grandiose plans for aggression but concern for Germany’s existence dominated the new Wehrmacht’s professional councils. The Reichswehr was neither equipped nor prepared to function as a cadre for expansion on the scale Blomberg proposed and Hitler applauded. Like the proverbial chameleon on a plaid shirt, Germany’s military risked bursting itself trying to make good.

Fear contributed significantly to the second characteristic feature of Nazi Germany’s rearmament—competition. Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck and Commander in Chief Werner von Fritsch were convinced that Germany would be unable to deal with her potential enemies one by one, that any conflict would promptly explode into a general war. Their solution was to make Germany Europe’s premier military power; they advocated enlarging and improving the army at all costs. The navy was less concerned with strategic concepts than with eradicating the shame of the 1918 mutinies and fulfilling Alfred von Tirpitz’s visions of Germany as a world-class sea power. The air force, youngest of the services, with no significant institutional foundations, stood under corresponding pressures to achieve. The results were a desperate internecine struggle for scarce resources and a pattern of rearmament, incorporating no significant elements of central planning. The structure of the Wehrmacht in 1939 owed more to limited vision and interservice rivalries than to any Hitlerian visions of armament in breadth and a strategy of blitzkrieg.

The essentially haphazard nature of German rearmament is illustrated by Deist’s treatment of the Luftwaffe, which from its official emergence in 1935 inspired fear and amazement. Its jump from biplanes to jets in less than a decade and its growth from three squadrons in 1933 to almost 5000 front-line aircraft in 1939 are without parallel in the history of military aviation. Deist draws an overt parallel with the Kaiser’s navy in his description of a "risk air force" initially focused on increasing the stakes of war with Germany to an unacceptable level. From 1933 to 1936, air force planners were careful and comprehensive, incorporating political, strategic, and technical-industrial factors in their considerations. But the death in a plane crash of General Walther Wever cleared the way for Hermann Göring to increase his direct authority over the Luftwaffe. In one sense the service continued to progress. By 1939 it was well able to carry out tactical campaigns on several fronts. But Göring and his new subordinates, notably Erhard Milch, concentrated on technical modernization at the expense of both strategic thinking and the development of a rational supporting infrastructure. Production crises could not be met indefinitely simply by increasing demands, and Germany’s new "risk air force" had contributed substantially to creating a new set of foreign policy risks that neither the Luftwaffe’s leadership nor its technical capacities could match.

Manfred Messerschmidt concludes Volume I of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg with a survey of Nazi Germany’s foreign policy and its relationship to military planning. He offers a perceptive analysis of the "continuity problem" of German history—the extent to which Nazi Germany represented the continuation of long-standing tendencies and ideas. Messerschmidt draws a sharp distinction between the foreign policy goals of Hitler on one hand and those of the traditional German elite on the other. These conservatives sought a gradual restoration of Germany’s position as a great power. While they did not exclude war as a means to that end, they had been sufficiently impressed by the events of 1914-18 to want a solid military establishment backed by extensive human and material reserves.

Hitler’s visions were of quick victories, prepared by setting potential enemies against each other. War was an essential part of his program: war for living space, war for the hegemony of Europe. Messerschmidt squarely aligns himself with scholars like Gerhard Weinberg, who stress the importance of ideology in Hitler’s planning. The Nazi dictator was an opportunist only in the sense of his willingness to take advantage of his enemies’ confusion. In this context he benefited from a general conviction that Nazi Germany’s policies merely represented an intensification of Weimar revisionism. The ideological elements of Hitler’s expansionism were deemphasized or disregarded. The states of Europe were unable to decide among cooperating to isolate the Nazi state, taking consequent action to integrate her into the international order, or accepting Hitler’s approach of bilateral negotiations.

This confusion offered Hitler his opportunities. Messerschmidt presents Great Britain as the key to Hitler’s policies in the West. Initially he hoped to secure British assent to German hegemony on the continent in return for guarantees of Britain’s empire. Hitler’s primary concern was gaining freedom of action in the West in order to turn against the Soviet Union. For this reason, he was ultimately uninterested in Franco-British appeasement policies, even when they fulfilled the wildest dreams of pre-1933 revisionists relative to Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland. He sought more comprehensive solutions, achieved through force. By the time of the Hossbach conference in November 1937, Hitler was caught up in the dynamic of his own policies. Only with the greatest effort by the European powers, including Italy, was Hitler checked from going to war during the Czech crisis.

On one level, Munich proved a Pyrrhic victory for the peace party. Yet the systematic Nazi violations of the agreement strengthened French, and above all British, determination to resist further Nazi aggrandizement. The Polish guarantee and the accompanying Anglo-Russian conferences generated a fundamental strategic contradiction for Germany. Hitler’s policies were bringing together his intended associate, Britain, and the ultimate object of his expansionism, the Soviet Union. The Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact was a temporary solution. Its failure was demonstrated when the Western powers declared war in response to the Nazi invasion of Poland. Henceforth force, not diplomacy, would be the means of realizing Hitler’s goals. But Germany’s armed forces were in no position to do more than achieve short-term successes that nurtured an equally short-lived optimism.

These successes form the material of Volume II,*- which covers Germany’s triumphs in Poland, Scandinavia, and France, and her failures against England. Air power played a decisive role in all four campaigns, and Klaus Maier offers a perceptive general introduction to the Luftwaffe’s fundamental problem. Engaged in a total war, it was not prepared to operate independently. Its aircraft and doctrine alike were tailored to support ground forces. Efficient and flexible within its limits, the Luftwaffe was the only one of the three services that made the immediate risks of a two-front war calculable. It promised quick victory in Poland and the simultaneous ability to hold off the air forces of the Western powers. Ultimately, however, it failed to deter France and Britain from declaring war in September 1939.

*Klaus A. Maier et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. II, Die Errichtung der Hegemonie auf dem europäischen Kontinent (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 439 pages.

Horst Rohde’s analysis of the Polish campaign ascribes the quick German victory to the close cooperation of air and armor and their skillful employment by a high command able to compensate for shortcomings in training and equipment. Rohde stresses the tactical significance of German air superiority The Luftwaffe prevented Polish troop movements by cutting railway lines and crippled the Polish command structure by systematically attacking higher headquarters. It shattered the morale of Polish ground troops, unprepared physically or psychically for the never-ending onslaught from the sky. However, the Wehrmacht’s military victory did not end Germany’s diplomatic isolation. That was to be achieved by turning to the West. Poland was left prey to unlimited racially based exploitation by its Nazi masters while the Wehrmacht stood passively by.

Bernd Stegermann’s discussion of Germany’s relatively inconsequential naval war in the fall and winter of 1939 introduces his collaboration with Klaus Maier on the Norwegian campaign. Stegemann describes a Kriegsmarine torn between realistic assessments of its position and wildly optimistic dreams of success to be achieved by magnetic mines or pocket battleships. This uncertainty in turn contributed to the genesis of Operation Weser. Initial German hopes of preserving Scandinavia’s neutrality were overshadowed by Admiral Erich Raeder’s dreams of Norwegian bases for his U-boats. He convinced Hitler, and the Wehrmacht once again proved its operational virtuosity. Stegemann correctly declares the impossibility of determining at this date whether planned allied actions against north Norway and the Swedish iron mines would have led to a direct confrontation with the U.S.S.R. More important was the Wehrmacht’s pride in its decisive triumph. Instead of developing the combined arms coordination that proved so important in Norway, the army, navy, and Luftwaffe reverted to operating in separate compartments. Easy victories seldom inspire comprehensive self-analysis.

Hans Umbreit offers a 100-page summary of the preparation and execution of the Battle of France. He stresses both Hitler’s initial ambivalence about seeking a military decision in the West and the military’s opposition to expanding the war after the fall of Poland. Umbreit credits Manstein with influencing Hitler’s decision to take the risk of driving through the Ardennes and emphasizes the Luftwaffe’s continued lack of interest in waging an independent strategic campaign. Indeed, the air generals regarded such an operation as a diversion of strength from their primary mission of ground support.

Germany’s comprehensive and consequent preparations for the campaign in the West were in sharp contrast to the Allies’ policies of inaction and wishful thinking. Numerical and technical superiority—at least on the ground— proved of little consequence against what Urnbreit calls the "almost classic" cooperation of the Luftwaffe and the Panzer divisions. Despite heavy losses, the German, air force proved able to maintain air superiority while simultaneously opening holes for the ground troops. Its inability to prevent the evacuation at Dunkirk in large part reflected weather conditions, previous losses, and the diversion of strength against Paris and southern France.

By July 1940, Hitler was master of Western Europe. He had forced his generals to take desperate risks, and the resulting victories raised his prestige and his confidence to new heights. Yet, once again, military victory bore no political results. Germany had won only another battle.

To win the war, Britain must be brought to heel, or at least to preserve its existence and its empire by recognizing German hegemony on the continent. Umbreit, Maier, and Dirk Stegemann collaborate to present the Third Reich’s attempt to project its power across the English Channel. Umbreit demonstrates that the army’s initial doubts about the prospects of a landing were encouraged as Hitler’s attention turned more and more to the east and south. Too much depended on technical details that could not be improvised, and even more depended on the air force and navy. The Kriegsmarine collected barges and hoped for favorable weather, while attacking British shipping with a mixture of submarine and surface units. But the U-boat campaign was still in its infancy; the commerce raiders lacked a network of bases. Interservice rivalry, moreover, limited cooperation with a Luftwaffe increasingly focused on the Battle of Britain.

Klaus Maier analyzes the evolution of German operations—and their degeneration from a concentration on British fighters and the factories building them to a series of terror attacks aimed at exhausting Britain’s resources and breaking her morale. Maier describes a Luftwaffe neither equipped nor prepared for the kind of offensive it was ordered to undertake.

Pitted against a defensive system four years in the developing, its prospects for success were limited at best. They were not fostered by Hitler’s growing skepticism at the prospect of winning a quick aerial victory. Like gamblers attempting to recoup early losses by doubling their bets, Göring and his subordinates "extended the scope of their air attacks and told each other that every ton of bombs dropped at random was directly contributing to winning the war. British production statistics told a different story, but, as Maier indicates, the British and American air forces were not the only ones that attempted to sustain a campaign of attrition by what Napoleon called "making pictures."

By the autumn of 1940 Germany was checked. Britain was still unwilling to abandon the continent to Hitler; Hitler, in turn, had been unable either to conciliate or destroy his British opponent. Economically, the Third Reich was relatively no better prepared for a long war than in 1939. The burgeoning Anglo-American cooperation posed still another threat to a Nazi dictator already obsessed with time. A strategy of indirect approaches, concentrating on the Mediterranean, promised only temporary success. Instead, a frustrated Hitler chose to turn against Russia, to destroy his last potential opponent on the continent, and with it England’s hopes. It was a move that would decide the outcome of the war and determine Germany’s fate.

Dennis E. Showalter (B.A., St. John’s University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of History, Colorado College. He is editorial consultant to Archon Books and has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Military Affairs. Dr. Showalter is author of Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification or Gremany (1975) and Little Man, What Now? (1982). He is a previous contributor to the Review.

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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