(NOTE: Originally posted on /r/WarCollege)
This is a very interesting book, for a number of reasons.
Context is everything here. This book was written by a young German historian in the five years after WW2 ended. The Nuremberg trials were recent news, Germany had been partitioned, and the German generals were doing everything they could to blame Hitler and the SS for everything bad that had happened since 1933. The end result is a book with an underlying question of how the General Staff could have let this all happen.
This in turn leads to a book that is mostly about the years 1933-1945, which occupy just over half the book. The years prior to Napoleon are covered in a mere 15 pages, and amount to little more than a military history of Prussia and examination of how the Prussian military system worked prior to 19th century. That said, while short, this chapter does provide some useful context to what reformers like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were reacting to – a system in which the Prussian army was a personal tool of the king.
In a lot of ways, the second chapter presents the overall thesis of the book. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were both reformers and idealists, wanting to create an army that both served and represented the Prussian people. They wanted officers who had an education and were capable of being technicians on the battlefield. And all of this was in the face of an absolute monarch with little interest or intention of relinquishing power. As the book explores, from the heights of Moltke the Elder the General Staff was left in a decades-long fall from grace, letting go of the very things that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had fought for.
If there's one thing that Goerlitz excels at throughout the book, it's in capturing the personalities of the people involved. He does a better job handling Schlieffen and Moltke the Younger than most other historians would right up to Terence Zuber's publication of the surviving German war planning documents (to be clear, the war planning side still isn't great, and Goerlitz was working without the benefits of having the actual documents on hand, but at least it isn't a caricature, which is more than can be said for Geoffrey P. Megargee's handling of them in Inside Hitler's High Command). His handling of the General Staff during the Great War is quite good, I would say, and brings together how it came about that a near-military dictatorship came to rise out of Hindenberg and Ludendorff in the last two years of the war.
But, after this point, the Great War ends, and the book gets a massive asterisk applied to it.
It is one of the those cases where the book is almost as good as it could have been under the circumstances. While the German generals were blowing smoke to present a narrative that they opposed Hitler at every turn, and it was Hitler's megalomania and incompetence that got the war started in the first place, Goerlitz does have something resembling a working bullshit detector. There are a number of incongruities with the story that he notes, such as the General Staff actively undermining the Treaty of Versailles to rearm while supposedly working towards maintaining the peace, the General Staff turning a blind eye when Hitler murdered two of their own on the Night of the Long Knives, and the fact that while the generals claimed to have been shocked by the Criminal Orders, almost all of them still carried them out.
The problem is that while the incongruities are there, for the most part Goerlitz doesn't go beyond documenting them. He points out that for all of the General Staff's supposed opposition to Hitler, it almost never seemed to turn into action. He doesn't question further, however, and dig into why this action never materialized. For the most part, he buys the excuses, concluding that it was a matter of a fallen organizational culture that led to the General Staff's actions (and lack thereof) during Hitler's regime. The wars of unification had led to a false sense of their own abilities in the field, made only worse by the early victories during WW2. His ultimate conclusion was that it was not possible to sustain the claim that the General Staff was in any part responsible for dragging the world into a second global war.
That said, it would be a mistake to write this book off as just part of the German generals' narrative, because it is far more critical than that. The "clean Wehrmacht" is partly present, but only partly. As Goerlitz points out, for all the claims that the Criminal Orders came as a nasty shock, they were followed. Goerlitz also doesn't support the general's "if Hitler had only listened to us, we would have won" narrative – he repeatedly draws attention to the degree to which the Wehrmacht was biting off far more than it could chew, and taking on opponents it had no way of defeating. The "Wehraboo" will find little support in this book – it presents the Wehrmacht as being consistently outclassed, but getting lucky for the first three years of the war.
As far as the generals themselves go, they really do come across as useful idiots. Again, this is in large part based on their own narrative, and this makes the book particularly interesting for documenting the development of this narrative. There is a naivety that can be absolutely astounding. Goerlitz recounts one general (I believe it was Hammerstein-Equord) who figured he could deal with Hitler by inviting him to inspect his unit, and then arresting Hitler when he showed up – Hitler became suspicious at the repeated invitations, and just kept saying "no." For all their efforts to make it look like it was Hitler who was disconnected from reality, it's pretty clear that Georlitz holds a similar opinion of them. He documents how the broad education championed by men like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had been reduced to a purely military education, and the impact this had on later events. If anything, I would characterize Goerlitz's ultimate conclusion as being that the General Staff couldn't be blamed for leading Germany into WW2 because they were too lost in their own world to do anything effective to stop it.
Of course, this conclusion holds no water – we now know that the General Staff was quite on board with Hitler and his agenda, and didn't really have much in the way of objections with carrying out the genocide of Jews and Slavs (and, in fact, they sometimes did so with enthusiasm). And this leads to another interesting facet of this book, and that is its sources. To be clear, there are no citations in this book. However, sources are mentioned in the text itself – there are repeated references to the evidence of the Nuremberg trials, as well as to Halder's diary and the discussions the generals had with Basil Liddell Hart. And, this is where the German generals created their narrative.
So, in the end, I think this book has to be read as an interesting historical relic. It is an exploration by a German historian of why the very officers sworn to protect Germany destroyed it instead. It is a skeptical view of a narrative that holds no water, but without the hindsight and access to materials from behind the Iron Curtain that would have enabled the author to figure out the truth.
(As a postscript, I think there is an interesting question of just how much of this narrative was a deliberate effort by the generals to avoid the consequences of some truly horrific and criminal actions, and how much of it was rationalization and self-delusion. I don't think either are absent, and the degree to which self-delusion was involved can be seen in the title of Manstein's memoir: Lost Victories.)
by Robert_B_Marks