Hitler's Bandit Hunters (5 page)

Schlieffen became obsessive in solving Germany’s self-imposed strategic dilemma of war on two fronts and against overwhelming forces. He believed the solution lay in the precedents of Hannibal’s victory over the Romans at the Battle of Cannae (216 BC). After a series of spectacular military achievements, Hannibal set his numerically inferior forces to encircle a Roman army. The audacity of Hannibal’s victory exploited the terrain and his opponents’ way of warfare so completely that the Romans were completely destroyed. Schlieffen studied the battle and found strategic solutions that suited him. He likened himself to Hannibal laboring at the head of a federated army of military establishments (the Prussians, the Bavarians, and the other Germanic states). He also assumed that Germany’s principal opponents (France and Russia) were nations that had overcome military tribalism, fielding homogeneous forces under unified command. Schlieffen concluded that Cannae proved Clausewitz and Napoleon wrong: smaller forces could encircle larger opponents. However, in establishing Cannae’s credentials, Schlieffen smoothed over uncomfortable but salient points. Hannibal was, by the prevailing standards of the German officer corps, a maverick. Schlieffen demanded that his officer corps follow his orders to the letter. The battle, although an overwhelming victory, was not exploited by Hannibal and proved his undoing, because it reinforced the Roman determination to destroy him. Irrespective of this, Schlieffen ensured Cannae became the dogma behind all aggressive German army operations.

In theory, Schlieffen sought to make the army flexible in responding to all situations.
³³
In practice, the enlargement of the army from 400,000 in 1870 to 864,000 by 1913 forced him to simplify tactics and standardize operations. The principles of Cannae were reduced to enveloping attack (
umfassender Angriff
), encirclement (
Einkesselung
), encircling maneuvers (
Einkreisungsmanöver
),
and encircling pursuit (
überholende Verfolgung
). These were exhaustively trained for and rehearsed by the army. Schlieffen’s solution was a cyclical process of standardized basic training, war planning, mobilization rehearsals, and large-scale military exercises, implemented with every new intake of conscripts. This tortuous cycle of inducting recruits and transforming them into the cogs of a military machine was seen as instilling discipline and building military efficiency. This turned the army into either the manipulative agent of socialization described by Volker Berghan
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or the seal of the national spirit professed by veterans.
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The twelve-week basic training program culminated in massive exercises held on expansive troop training grounds. On these mock battlefields, troops were honed to perform the maneuvers of encirclement and envelopment, the reinforcement ad nauseam of Cannae, which was expected to help establish a doctrine of aggressive warfare and the coup de grace in security actions.
³⁶

In the eighty years after the demise of Napoleon, most armies of Europe responded to the socioeconomic challenges of the nineteenth century through technocratic professionalism. In Prussia, professionalism came from a process of regimented schooling, conscription, and training in the military academies. In time, the professionalization of the officer corps, the regimented bureaucratization of the state, and the influx of military officials defined the German military establishment over society; Christopher Dandeker has called this the militarization of government.
³⁷
The armies of Germany had been active in financing and planning the development of the states. The Prussian army endorsed the construction of state railways during the 1840s and established strong links with banks and business. When Schlieffen became chief of the Great General Staff in 1891, the full potential for a unified Imperial German Army had still to be realized. He recognized that troops could neither march to the beat of different drums nor perform the precious Cannae, unless welded into a clockwork-like army. Historians have focused on the social consequences of latent civilian militarism. The paradox of deep-seated anxieties and fears about the military came from within a society deeply dependant on the protection of the army and its regulation of law and order. The consequences of Schlieffen’s efforts were seen in 1914. The Imperial German Army entered the war on a sounder operational footing than any other army, but its rapid collapse in November 1918 indicated the underlying frailties of a militarized society.

One Prussian tradition, after 1813, was to assign older reservists to security duties. The Landwehr, a territorial militia, was the backbone of homeland defense. Although formed from reservists, the Landwehr was responsible for securing Germany’s conquests and military occupation. In the early days of the Prussian annexation of the Rhineland, Landwehr regiments were
garrisoned in every town and city. In 1822, the 25th Duke of Wellington Landwehr Regiment had three battalions of infantry. The regiment was raised from men over twenty-four years old and was mustered from within the area of Aachen, Jülich, and Düren.
³⁸
The total manpower was 8,113, with the main fighting complement listed as 56 officers, 333 noncommissioned officers, and 5,859 troopers; the rest was made up of 1,848 elderly war reservists, 73 bandsmen, and 3 surgeons. Michael Howard regarded the Landwehr as critical to Prussian security operations during the Franco–Prussian War with a total deployment in excess of 110,000 men.
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Its duties ranged from guarding railway lines and strong points to taking hostages and committing reprisals to when called on, detering franc-tireur activity. During the war, the Landwehr received frontline troops, especially the cavalry, bolstering their aggressive operational mobility.

The German military rear-area system was called the Etappen. The term originated from the French
étape
, meaning stages, and referred to the army’s lines of communication. The Etappen were the responsibility of the quartermaster-general (
Generalquartiermeister
) within the Great General Staff (
grosser Generalstab
). In time, the Etappen grew into a larger and more complex organization than the fighting (teeth) arms. Its mission was to support and supply offensive operations from the rear area and into the combat zone. In practice, this usually meant plundering the land as offensive operations ground forward. Its secondary mission, growing in greater importance over time, involved countering incursions by partisans or guerrillas and preventing disruption of the rear area. Operationally, the Etappen expanded and contracted, rather like an accordian, to given circumstances. At its greatest extension, the system controlled the corridors between the army’s bases in Germany and the front lines. The Etappen were erected on a cadre of professional soldiers, reservists, and civilian experts and tradesmen. They carried out a broad range of tasks including taking prisoners of war, policing, controlling civilians, and administering the occupation. When the war ended, the Etappen were reduced as an unnecessary financial burden on the state. In response to supply problems during the wars of 1866 and 1867 and the insecurity caused by francs-tireurs in 1870–71, the system was reformed and regulated under the 1872 Etappen regulations.
⁴⁰

After 1872, this system became a fixture of the permanent military establishment. The publication of its ordinances immediately attracted British attention.
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The British noticed that responsibility for the Etappen remained within the decision-making circle of the quartermaster-general of the army. The senior field officer was the general inspector rear area of the army (
Generaletappeninspektionen der Armee
), who administered the operational functions and later joined with the inspector general of communications (
Generalinspekteur des Etappen- und Eisenbahnwesens
). To sustain the mission demanded by the new instructions, the Etappen received specialists
from all branches and services of the army. The new guidelines also reflected advancing railway engineering and the growing dependency of the army on railways. Reflecting this new requirement, the army introduced the post of chief of the field railway (
Chef des Feldeisenbahnwesens
). Military traffic managers joined the Etappen to prevent bottlenecks in transportation and to maintain the flow of traffic along roads and railways. A railway protection regiment was raised with railway reservists; this led eventually to the military railway corps (
Feldeisenbahnkorps
). In theory, local military commands (
Etappenkommandantur
) were placed in railway junctions and towns. During occupation, they ruled local civilians by distributing work and food and imposing social control. In the surrounding hamlets and villages, a district commander (
Ortskommandantur
) extended this system of control. The priority task was protection, and to this end the flow of replacements could be interrupted in an emergency, forming troop-cadres (
Stammtruppe
) for security duties. Local rear-area departments (
Etappenhauptorte
) and roving special military courts (
Sondergerichte
) supervised military justice.
⁴²

Political considerations dictated whether the occupation system took the form of a general government or a military government. The former was staffed by civilians and administered by the army; the latter was a military state. According to Michael Rowe, the Prussian army in the Rhineland (1814) formed a working relationship between local collaboration and military administration.
⁴³
In 1870–71, this same army, with Prussian state assistance, knitted together a highly profitable and financially rewarding occupation of France. The Prussian government, through the secondment of senior public servants, tax and finance specialists, and sociopolitical experts from universities, assisted the army. Public servants or civilian commissioners, working with French mayors and local councilors, handled the civil functions of occupied France.
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German army civil-military relations policy for occupation in 1873 had crafted a subtle form of control. The complete Etappen function reflected Germany’s central position in Europe and thus threatened Russia and France. The British army review of the regulations concluded that no organization comparable to the Etappen existed within the armies of Europe. They were particularly struck with authority handed to the Etappen commanders, “great powers of organisation” arranged around “three perceptions”: first, providing necessities for the army in the field; second, “calming the temper of the local population”; and last, preventing enemy infiltration. The British were also interested in what they termed the duties of the communications officer during an occupation. This involved installing civil government, establishing collaboration with the indigenous population, and turning “the resources of the country to the best account for the benefit of the army.”

The final pieces in the organizational development of the German military security establishment were the field police and military intelligence. In August 1866, Bismarck promoted Baron Wilhelm Stieber as director of the
Prussian State Ministry and charged him to erect a central intelligence bureau (
zentrale Nachrichtenbüro
) for political security and intelligence.
⁴⁵
The first secret field police (
Geheime Feldpolizei
), known as the GFP, began with fifty conscripted police officers.
⁴⁶
Its mission was to safeguard the senior commanders and staff officers of the high command. In 1870–71, Stieber became the chief of Field Police under the Great General Staff and commanded thirty-one administrators (
Polizeibeamten
) and 157 field officers.
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The military police (
Feldgendarmerie
) usually came from the cavalry and served with each army corps. The normal command was a cavalry captain (
Rittmeister
), two noncommissioned officers (
Wachtmeister
), and sixty military police (
Feldgendarmen
). For civil-military relations purposes during an occupation, they joined local commands and worked alongside the beat police (
Landespolizei
). Policing the occupation of France (1871–73) involved cadres of constables, collaborators, prefects, mayors, and the men from the Etappenkommandanten. In Lorraine, the chief of the local rural police (
Landgendarmeriekommando
) came from the Berlin police. In Rheims, the Germans employed collaborators to raise a local protection militia (
Schutzmänner
), used to counter the roving bands of francs-tireurs and bandits. In the 1880s, the introduction of passports and controls, primarily to administer the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, led to the founding of the Border Police (
Grenzschutzpolizei
), attached to the GFP. By 1914, the GFP was the central secret police agency for the army, commanded by Major und Polizei-Rat Bauer, under Oberst Nicolai. During the Great War, members of the GFP were granted the right to wear either uniforms or civilian clothing, depending on their duties.

In 1884, Major von Lettow-Vorbeck became director of military intelligence and counterintelligence for the Imperial German Army.
⁴⁸
Between 1900 and 1917, the intelligence services underwent a series of changes. Initially, their functions were to monitor foreign press and propaganda, censor mail, operate the border police, recruit spies, and conduct counter-espionage. After the Russo–Japanese War, reforms were introduced, and in 1906, the intelligence and security police agencies were reorganized. Developments continued to separate military intelligence from counterintelligence. In 1910, Department IIIb, the German army Abwehr was formed to handle foreign military intelligence, and in the spirit of the times, the navy established its own Abwehr branch. In 1913, IIIb came under Oberst Walter Nicolai, aged thirty-nine, chief of military intelligence of the German Supreme Command (
Chef des Nachrichtendienstes der obersten Heeresleitung
). Nicolai scored several successes revealing spies and traitors. He believed an iron curtain (
eiserner Vorhang
) had descended around Germany and her allies prior to the war, leaving only Switzerland as a small window to the outside world and thus restricting intelligence operations. The occupation and annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was soon regarded as a springboard for French espionage by the
German army. Rightly or wrongly, German perceptions fixated on French revanchism, and these perceptions became connected with a deeply held suspicion of Britain.
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In 1917, the army finally decided to separate counterintelligence from foreign military intelligence. The intelligence section within IIIb became the Foreign Armies Section (
Fremde Heeresabteilung
). Therefore, by 1917, military policing, counterintelligence, and military intelligence were three distinct branches of the army.