Terror in the Balkans (78 page)

of effective support against Hitler from Britain, France, and now Italy

left him no alternative.32 At the same time, an unsuccessful attempt by

Schuschnigg to crack down further on the Austrian Nazis gave Hitler the

leverage to compel Schuschnigg to lift the ban on the party and appoint

several of its number to key government positions. Hitler also compelled

Schuschnigg to remove the head of the Bundesheer, General Jansa,

who had intended military resistance to any future German invasion.33

Schuschnigg regarded all these developments with mounting anxiety.

So too did many Catholic, old-school conservative, senior Bundesheer

offi cers.34 But many of their younger colleagues increasingly did not.

There are many indications that the Bundesheer would have resisted

German invasion had it been ordered to do so.35 Nevertheless, con-

tact between the Bundesheer and the German army grew increasingly

close and cooperative during the years following 1935.36 Among other

things, this caused Bundesheer offi cers to grow increasingly disgrun-

tled at the two armies’ contrasting standards of equipment. From 1936,

moreover, National Socialist sympathy was fi rmly on the rise among the

Bundesheer’s lower ranks after the Bundesheer aped its northern coun-

terpart by introducing conscription.37 The debilitating effect of bur-

geoning National Socialist support upon relations among Bundesheer

offi cers was commented on by a German observer:

Bridging Two Hells
65

One group, up to lieutenant-colonel or thereabouts, thinks National

Socialist and pro-Anschluß. Second group thoroughly pro-government.

Because of the differences between these political opinions and atti-

tudes, any sense of unity and comradeship within the offi cer corps is

entirely absent. What has taken its place is mutual distrust, spying, and

denunciation.38

Hitler fi nally annexed Austria directly, and bloodlessly, in March

1938. He was spurred among other things by Schuschnigg’s pledge to

hold a national plebiscite in an attempt to settle the question of Austria’s

independence for good. Across many parts of Austria pro-Nazi offi -

cers, under the aegis of the pro-Nazi soldiers’ organization, the Circle of

National Socialist Soldiers, moved swiftly to neutralize their anti-Nazi

colleagues and ensure that the Bundesheer would not intervene against

advancing German forces.39 Schuschnigg was forced to resign and make

way for the Austrian Nazi Artur Seyss-Inquart.

Over the months that followed, the Bundesheer was absorbed into the

German army as smoothly as Austria, or the Eastern March as it was now

renamed, was absorbed into the Reich. Most divisional commanders and

many regimental ones—non-Nazi, old-school, and often monarchical in

outlook—were removed. The submerging into the German army of the

rest of the Bundesheer offi cer corps, and their troops, then proceeded

swiftly. Apart from anything else, this was a comment on the Republic

of Austria’s failure to cultivate a proper sense of national identity during

its nineteen-year existence.40 From March 1938, then, the German army

contained offi cers from both Germany and Austria, and the story of two

offi cer corps becomes the story of one.

The Anschluß was only the fi rst of Hitler’s foreign policy triumphs in

1938. The second came that autumn. After months of international ten-

sion, a negotiated settlement at Munich granted the Reich the German-

speaking Sudetenland region of neighboring Czechoslovakia. Offi cers

throughout the Wehrmacht, like the population as a whole, were dazzled

by Hitler’s purported diplomatic brilliance. But though the resolution of

66
terror in the balk ans

the crisis had been peaceful, the consequences for Hitler’s relations with

the army leadership were anything but.

At the outset of the crisis, Hitler had sought to use the “violation” of

the rights of Sudeten Germans by the Czech government as an excuse to

smash Czechoslovakia through military action. But then, faced with the

prospect of war with Britain and France over the issue, he had been per-

suaded by his more cautious generals that Germany was not yet ready for

such a war, and that it would therefore be prudent to negotiate a way out

of the crisis. Now, having acquired the Sudetenland by negotiation, Hit-

ler rued his ever having been swayed by such “timid” counsel. Instead,

he concluded that his generals’ advice had been wrong, that Britain and

France would not have gone to war after all, and that his future foreign

policy must always employ the radical brinkmanship that had enabled

him to bring the Rhineland and Austria into the German fold. Thus, in

a process inaugurated earlier in 1938, those senior offi cers who were con-

cerned at the destabilizing pace of Hitler’s foreign and rearmament poli-

cies were replaced or sidelined. That or they simply resigned themselves

to the impossibility of challenging a leader whose popularity among the

German people was now greater than ever.

Hitler’s new measure of control over the armed forces was refl ected in

a restructuring of the high command system. Out went the old War Minis-

try; in came two new bodies, the Army High Command (
Oberkommando

des Heeres
or OKH), which from June 1941 would be concerned primarily

with coordinating the war against the Soviet Union, and the Armed Forces

High Command (
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
or OKW). The OKW

was effectively Hitler’s personal military offi ce, and would from 1941 be

responsible for coordinating the war across the rest of Europe. Hitler’s

inner military circle now consisted largely of careerists, sycophants, or at

best offi cers who, able though they were, refrained from criticizing Hit-

ler’s decisions openly. He now pursued his foreign policy program ever

more recklessly. In March 1939, he seized the remaining Czech lands of

Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler’s next move, against Poland, led directly to

war, the dictator wrongly calculating that Britain and France would be

deterred from intervening by the cynically utilitarian Nazi-Soviet Pact of

August 1939. But while the Germans took one month to vanquish Poland,

Britain and France were powerless to intervene.

Bridging Two Hells
67

Many army offi cers, particularly those originating from eastern Prus-

sia, were eager to settle accounts with Poland.41 Yet triumphant in the

fi eld though the army was, the invasion also exposed the moral degen-

eration that by now affl icted its leadership and, increasingly, its offi cer

corps more widely. Hitler’s speech to his highest commanders on August

22 had set the tone for the way the Polish campaign was to be waged:

“Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally. Eighty million people must

have what is theirs by right. Their existence must be secured. The stron-

ger has the right. (Exercise the) greatest harshness.”42

Now, after years of growing accommodation with the Nazi regime and

burgeoning enthusiasm for its military and ideological policies, the army

largely stood by as Nazi murder squads—the
Einsatzgruppen
of the SS-

run Security Service (SD)—fanned out behind the advancing troops to

“cleanse” Polish territory of “dangerous elements.” The Einsatzgrup-

pen were charged with rounding up and liquidating all Poles who might

conceivably threaten the German occupation’s stability. They netted

political fi gures, the intelligentsia, former army offi cers, and many Jews.

Several thousand individuals, in a portent of far greater slaughter later in

the war, were shot en masse.43

In failing to protest effectively at these killings, the offi cer corps of the

German army crossed a further moral line. In turn, they emboldened

the SS to cross lines even more bestial in the future. A number of army

offi cers did object, but few used moral arguments.44 Most other protest-

ing offi cers, whether because they were not morally affronted in the fi rst

place or because they perceived that appeals to morality would simply

be ignored, objected more mildly on “pragmatic” grounds instead: their

fear for the discipline of army troops in the vicinity of the killings or their

concern at the damage that might be wrought on the army’s “good name”

were it to be tainted by association with them. And no protesting offi cer

received any backing whatsoever from the supine head of the army, Gen-

eral von Brauchitsch.

Many offi cers, meanwhile, did not protest at all. Moreover, whether

because their own anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic beliefs were infl uencing

them, because their scruples were diluted by careerism, or because they

68
terror in the balk ans

obsessed over needing to preemptively crush any potential opposition

to German occupation, they were liberally bloodying their own hands

in the name of “security”—sometimes, indeed, in co-operation with the

SS. Any civilian resistance posed to the German invasion of Poland—

and of civilian resistance in Poland, in contrast to Belgium and France

in 1914, there was plenty—was answered with massively disproportion-

ate reprisals.

German interwar military doctrine, besotted as it was with mobile,

technical, and tactical superiority at the front line, had in fact paid

relatively little attention to counterinsurgency. But in Poland in 1939,

the German army’s leadership chose to resurrect that singularly harsh

counterinsurgency doctrine that had led German soldiers to commit

brutal acts of suppression such as those in German Southwest Africa

in 1904–1905 and Belgium and northern France in 1914. That the army

leadership acted thus was not simply because German generals were pre-

programmed to counter irregular warfare with terror. After all, the Ger-

mans’ relatively balanced counterinsurgency campaign in the Ukraine in

1918 had demonstrated that they were not thus preprogrammed.

But the senior German offi cer corps of 1939 was harder and more

radical than its predecessor of 1918. It was also enmeshed, for the greater

part willingly, in a criminally brutal regime, and extensively shared that

regime’s ideological contempt for “Slavic races.” And brutal counterin-

surgency conduct of the Belgium 1914 variety dovetailed perfectly with

the Nazis’ steadfast belief that terror and suppression were the only sure

means of keeping an occupied population in line—particularly if both

parties regarded that population as racially inferior.45 Such sentiments

would go on to underpin the German army’s counterinsurgency cam-

paigns in both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The campaign in the West of spring 1940 radicalized virtually all ele-

ments of the National Socialist regime. The Wehrmacht achieved in six

weeks what the Kaiserheer had failed to achieve in four years—the con-

clusive defeat of France herself, and the apparent prospect of imminent

peace with Britain. The stunning victory, and the euphoric accolade that

followed it, combined to infuse Hitler and the Nazi regime with immense

hubris. Consequently, when Britain refused to make peace, they believed

it well within their capabilities to compel Britain to the negotiating table

Bridging Two Hells
69

by defeating her last potential ally on mainland Europe. This potential

ally, the small matter of the Nazi-Soviet Pact notwithstanding, was the

Soviet Union. Invading the Soviet Union sooner or later had always been

a long-standing aim of Hitler’s; he believed that the German people’s

long-term future could only be secured by annihilating the mortal dan-

ger the Soviet Union’s “Jew-Bolshevik” leadership posed and seizing the

country’s economic wealth and vast rural spaces. But the aim of sapping

Britain’s will to resist by defeating the Soviet Union sooner rather than

later certainly infl uenced the timing of his decision to invade.46

The army leadership’s complicity in the invasion of the Soviet Union,

code-named Operation Barbarossa, is the most resonant statement of

how far it had by now debased itself, and the army, in the name of National

Socialism. Hitler and the leading power blocs of the Third Reich did not

regard the attack on the Soviet Union as an ordinary invasion. They con-

ceived it instead as a “war of extermination,” one aimed at destroying an

entire nation, plundering its resources, annihilating its “Jew-Bolshevik”

leadership class, and decimating and enslaving its population. It was a

war the army’s leadership and senior offi cer corps broadly supported.

By now, they were even more heavily under the infl uence of Hitler and

National Socialism, enthused at the opportunity to provide the ultimate

demonstration of their army’s fi ghting prowess, and animated by anti-

Semitism, by anti-Slavism and, perhaps above all, by anti-Bolshevism.

While this fi nal motive may have been muted by short-term exigencies

such as the Reichswehr’s erstwhile clandestine collaboration with the Red

Army, it was now established as a major driving force.47 Typical of many