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Stephen Fritz, "The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader" (Yale UP, 2018)
01:16:34
A necessary volume for understanding the influence of World War I on Hitler’s thinking, this work is also an eye-opening reappraisal of major events like the invasion of Russia and the battle for Normandy...
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Marshall Poe
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Craig
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to New Books in German Studies, part of the New Books Network. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Steven Fritz about his excellent new book, the First Hitler as a Military Leader, published by Yale University Press. Stephen, hello and welcome to the show.
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Thank you for having me, Craig.
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Craig
It's a pleasure to have you, Stephen. We always like to traditionally begin these interviews by having the author telling us a little bit about themselves, their background, how they got interested in history, where they. Where they currently teach.
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Dr. Steven Fritz
I guess I'm like a lot of people who are interested in history. I don't really have a seminal moment when I got interested in history. I always seem to have been interested in history and have always been fascinated With I guess, the stories of history as much as anything and why things happened and, and what happened, because things happen. So it's always been an interest of mine in terms of where I studied. I earned my PhD at the University of Illinois and studied under two really very different individuals there. I was one of those interesting people who kind of fell through the cracks because I was originally interested in Weimar era, 1920s era German history. And my, my official advisor was J. Alden Nichols, who was a specialist in, in late 19th century, actually the late Wilhelminian period. And my other, the other professor I worked with was Paul Schrader, who was quite a prominent and still is quite a prominent diplomatic historian, primarily of the 19th century Europe. So I've often pondered about the fact that I kind of fell through the cracks there. But it was, in a sense, for me it was interesting because I learned, I think, from both of them things that have stuck with me the rest of my life. And maybe that's, I guess, kind of a lesson for listeners. You don't have to be pigeonholed, I suppose, into, especially from Professor Nichols. I really learned, I think, I hope I learned how to, how to, how to kind of the artist style, how to present a story, how to, how to kind of frame a narrative so that, so that it's interesting and how to, how to get at the human dimension. And from Professor, Professor Schrader, I learned really kind of the art, I think, of constantly questioning and of constantly asking what were the unintended consequences of actions or decisions or events, of really looking to try to see what else might have happened, trying to look at events through a different perspective and try to see things differently, if not full fledged revision, certainly to try to see things from all sorts of different angles so you can get a better sense of what and why things were happening.
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Craig
Yeah, I think more people would benefit from having multiple advisors with different perspectives to learn sort of different ways of doing things, going about things. Where is it that you teach now?
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Dr. Steven Fritz
I teach at East Tennessee State University and I've been here now for 35 years. So it's obviously a place that's been very comfortable to work at and teach and live in. So it's one of those things, I guess when you start out your career, you don't exactly know what's going to happen. And my wife and I certainly never expected to be here for this length of time. But as I said, it's a very comfortable, beautiful area to live in in Upper East Tennessee, in the mountains of Upper East Tennessee. And I'VE had very congenial colleagues and very, very helpful administration in terms of pursuing research efforts. So it's been a nice, comfortable place to be.
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Craig
Fantastic. So now let's turn to your new book. I know you've written several books, this being the newest. How did you come up with the idea to write this book? What sort of motivated you to write to look. To re examine Hitler as a military strategist and leader?
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, actually that's one of those, as I said, talking about interesting stories. That's one of those interesting stories. And point of fact, it really wasn't my idea originally. I was. After the publication of my third book, Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, I guess maybe six months or so after it had appeared, I was contacted by Heather McCallum, who at that time was an editor at Yale University Press and now actually is the managing director of Yale University Press. And she suggested very nicely that she thought a book on reassessment of Hitler as a military leader would be a good project to pursue. She had read Oskrieg and thought that it was interesting and I might be a person who could reassess Hitler as the military leader. At that time I was onto another project, or I had just started another project and I wasn't all that interested in looking reassessing Hitler as a military leader initially. And so I suggested other possible topics to her. And over a period of time, she very effectively but very professionally dissuaded me from these other projects. It kept coming back to the notion of Hitler as a military leader. And the more she suggested it, the more I really got interested in and I began to perceive possibilities in reassessing Hitler. I guess in Austria I had seen some of this, that the caricature of Hitler as kind of an irrational madman just didn't fit what I was seeing in the sources. And so the more I thought about it and the more I discussed it with Heather, the more I began to realize that this was an interesting project and this could be something that could be very fruitful. So in a sense, I guess I came in to it in a roundabout way and had to be persuaded. But once persuaded, then I could begin to perceive the different possibilities in re examining Hitler.
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Craig
Could you just give the listeners just a. A little bit of what the prevailing view of Hitler as a military leader has been in the past? Sort of let them know what you're responding to?
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, in a sense. It's kind of interesting as a professional historian, because I wasn't really responding to other Historians interpretation, certainly not recent historians interpretations since. There's been a lot of really good work in the last 10 or 15 years on Hitler and World War II in general. But I was really responding to kind of the popular image of Hitler that had been created. And again, it's one of those interesting stories. At the end of the war, the U.S. army found itself in possession as prisoners of war of a goodly number of very senior German generals. And having very little idea of what to do with them, they decided to put them at work. I suppose it seemed sensible at the time, writing histories of the various military operations and campaigns in which these generals had participated. Interestingly, they put the former chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, in charge overall charge of coordinating and overseeing and directing this project. And Holder, of course, who had been at variance with Hitler off and on during his entire career as Chief of Staff, effectively managed the program so that the subtle or oftentimes not so subtle viewpoint taken in virtually all the operational histories that were written was that Hitler was an idiot and that but for Hitler's intervention, the clear sighted, rational assessments of the generals would always have prevailed. And in kind of an interesting phenomenon, then, early military historians picked up on these essentially primary documents, since they were written by the generals involved in the actual operations. And they kind of went unquestioningly with this interpretation. And so it stuck. And I mean, it's still in the popular mind, it is still very much prevalent. So in a sense I was writing to that audience that is generally educated, but not necessarily a specialist in the field and trying perhaps to persuade them to see Hitler in a different light.
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Craig
And in doing this project, you mentioned the memoirs or the histories from his former generals. Can you just talk a little bit about some of the other things that you looked at to help you write this book?
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Dr. Steven Fritz
A lot of the, A lot of the. Since this was centered on Hitler as the military leader, much of it of course was centered on records of his military conferences, records of obviously diaries of top military leaders with whom he interacted, the various transcripts of his so called table talks, his nightly, I can't really say conversations, his nightly monologues with members of his inner circle, obviously diplomatic correspondence. There are a lot of trial records that were gathered for the Nuremberg trials, actual documents in which, you know, memoranda and official documents of that nature. So trying to, trying to use those to get, to get kind of comprehensive picture of how Hitler was seeing things that at any given time.
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Craig
Yeah, fascinating. So let's start with the beginning of the book. And talk about Hitler's World War I experience. And this is definitely, and you make this case in your book, this is definitely a really important time in Hitler's life. You could explain to us not only what his experience was, but how you feel like it set him up for future thinking in terms of, you know, in terms of military thinking.
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Right. Yeah. In many respects, I think Hitler never really did leave World War I. I mean, the rest of his life was, I think in, in some respects you could argue, was. Was an effort to undo the, the, the loss of World War I. Hitler, as I'm sure most of your listeners would know, was at the front in World War I. But interestingly, given the nature of his job, he was at the front, but not necessarily at the front, if the listener gets what I mean. His job, of course, was very dangerous. He was a dispatch runner. So he would obviously take messages from battalion and regimental headquarters to the front lines and, and oftentimes under very dangerous circumstances. But as opposed to being in the frontline trenches, he would spend considerable amounts of time, obviously, at battalion and regimental headquarters, which gave him not only an opportunity to kind of get a glimpse of the bigger picture, but also afforded him more time to reflect. And that was. That was one of the things that most of his comrades after, after he became prominent obviously in the late 20s, early 30s, and began to write some sort of reminiscences of the type. I knew Adolf Hitler when they tended to remember him as kind of a loner, but somebody who was unusual and that he always seemed to be thinking about what was going on. He always seemed to be trying to make sense of what was happening. He always seemed to be pondering the deeper implications of the war and what had happened and what was going on. So that kind of marked him out as unusual, essentially, in terms of what he learned from the war. I think the big thing was, obviously, clearly he adopted the stab in the back notion that Germany had lost the work, not because of any failing of the military, but because of the collapse of the home front. And interestingly, as he put the pieces together, he formulated an explanation. And in many respects, you can see this very clearly in a lot of Hitler's early speeches in the early 1920s, where he's emerging as a significant regional political force in Bavaria. Many of Hitler's early speeches are really attempts to try to explain what happened. I mean, they're not, again, they're not the stereotypical Hitler waving and wildly denouncing enemies. He really is struggling to try to explain to his AUDIENCE and probably to himself exactly why this misfortune had befallen Germany. And what he came up with was kind of an interesting sort of, sort of scenario here which really I think was quite convincing to many Germans in the sense that the German home front had collapsed because of the pressure of the British blockade, which to Hitler pointed up the necessity of. Of resources. Germany had failed because Germany didn't have the necessary raw materials and foodstuffs and so forth with which to fight a major war. Which led then to the next reflection of how Germany could obtain these resources. And if you look at Mein Kampf, I mean, it's kind of interesting, he goes through a fairly logical sort of. Of assessment that Germany could, Post World War I, Germany could return to the pre World War I era of free trade and globalization and exporting. But that wasn't probably going to work because Germany's former enemies were not likely to engage in free or fair trade with Germany anymore. And then the second scenario, of course, was that Germany could, like Great Britain or France, become a colonial power and grab a colonial empire. But he rejected that, both for racial reasons and for the obvious fact that all the territory was gone overseas. And the third scenario, interestingly, he tended to use the United States as a model that Germany could become a continent state by simply expanding into territory contiguous with Germany. And so that meant expansion into East Central Europe and European Russia. And then in that area then had the raw materials and foodstuffs Germany needed theoretically to make itself blockade proof and to successfully prosecute a major war and become a world power. Some he kind of went through this logical sort of step by step process. And again, I'm sure, which seemed very convincing to many of his listeners in these speeches. And the other thing that he learned from, I think from World War I was that he tended to see this as a total war, as a struggle for existence of a nation, a nation struggle for existence. And in that scenario, from Hitler's perspective, and he always was in a sense an all or nothing sort of personality in that respect. If war was for the very existence of the nation, that to him indicated then that in the conduct of a war all means were acceptable in this struggle for existence. And that tended to typify his attitude from the very beginning, that war, from Hitler's point of view, was always going to be essentially an extreme struggle for existence. Which meant the bottom line, I suppose you say a war of annihilation was always lurking in his. In his basic ideas.
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Craig
From, from what you could tell, did he have any sort of intellectual underpinnings for his ideas. Did he, he read military, military philosophers, political philosophers. Did he seek out professors in Germany? Did he have any intellectual sort of foundation?
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, he was. Again, Hitler was one of those interesting sort of self educated people who clearly had a photographic memory and that he really never forgot anything he read. He had read extensively. He was a great admirer obviously of Frederick the Great and his military activities. He had read extensively in the famous theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz. He was an associate in his early political days, in the early 20s, of course, he was closely associated with Erich Ludendorff, who had been one of the last military leaders in Germany. I think he tended to absorb key points from all of those. He was of course, impressed with Friedrich the Great. Sense of will, sense of determination, his understanding more as a state function. He also, I think in some respects had a clearer understanding of Frederick the Great than did his generals. He understood that more often than not, Frederick won his victories not through any sort of lightning military campaigns, we might say, but simply through wearing down his opponents. So he had a fairly clear understanding of the political nature of war, the political goals of war. Which of course that was reinforced by Clausewitz who always insisted that the political goals of war were superior and that had to inform all other aspects of war. And certainly that appealed to Hitler, especially after he became a political leader. And then Ludendorff, I think he was impressed with Ludendorff because of Ludendorff's understanding that the new war, World War I, in essence, had become a total war. What the Germans often referred to as a people's war. And in the people's war, again, you get that sense of the total dimension in a people's war. All things which would help lead to victory are acceptable in terms of how you conduct a war. And then one final person in terms of geopolitical strategy, of course, was the very famous Munich professor Karl Haushofer, who was one of the key exponents of geopolitics in the 1920s and actually 1920s and 1930s, had a great influence on Rudolf Hess, who was one of Hitler's chief associates, closest associates in the 1920s and, and 1930s. And from Haushofer I think Hitler learned the importance of space and resources and the fluidity of borders. That space is an amorphous concept and there are in fact very few what we might call natural borders. And how you use the space or who controls the space is not determined by geographic factors. It's determined by military force, political will, the determination to use this territory as you would intend it. And households were also emphasized that of course in the 1920s you have the reality that people at that time would have witnessed the collapse of four great empires. So East Central Europe would have been a space in a vacuum. So the old borders would have collapsed. The new borders would have been perceived as very artificial and temporary. And it seemed not only to Hitler, but many other would be expansionist leaders at the time. It seemed that there was a whole area out here which was simply, which is simply ripe for the taking. And Hitler, Hitler fancied himself what he called a round politico, which meant he was a politician of space, he was a theorist of space. And so his ultimate goal was to reshape all of this space out in East Central Europe.
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Craig
Yeah, I think that's fascinating. I don't think a lot of people really know about the things that Hitler read or Hitler thought about. They know the end result, but I don't know if they know a lot of the things that you just mentioned. Let's move up a little bit to 1933. Now Hitler is in power. He's done all this thinking that you just eloquently described. But now he actually has to sort of begin the process of working with people in the military, people in government and things. Can you describe what his relationship was like with the military very early on and we'll, I'm, sure we'll, we'll touch on how it evolves over the course of, of his reign. But initially what is that relationship like?
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, in a sense it was, I suppose both were. Both Hitler and the top military leaders were I think initially rather apprehensive of each other. It was kind of a feeding out process. The top military leaders were frankly skeptical of this guy. He didn't come from the right social class. He obviously didn't have the right credentials. He wasn't educated, he didn't go to university. He'd been a mere private or corporal. However you want to translate Gefreiter in World War I, he clearly didn't have the bona fides that the top military leaders would wish for. But on the other hand, he said a lot of things they liked. He talked about restoring the German military and German power and he talked obviously about reclaiming lost German territory, revising the Treaty of Versailles and getting back, especially in the east, from Poland, from the new state of Poland, lost German territory at a time in the early 1930s when the only alternative to Hitler in the dismal crisis of the Great Depression in Weimar Germany, when the only alternative to Hitler and the Nazis seemed to be the Communists. Hitler certainly impressed the generals with his willingness to take on what they perceived, like him, as the communist danger. He talked about rebuilding Germany economically and promoting industrial development, economic development. Again, so those were all things that resonated with the generals. So they are skeptical of him, although he says a lot of, from their perspective, he says a lot of the right things. From Hitler's perspective, again, he's skeptical of the generals. Hitler, from a lot of his early experiences, I think, had a burning resentment at social privilege, at class privilege. And Hitler saw himself as one of those bright people who is oftentimes not given opportunities or respect or the proper status simply because he doesn't have the proper class background or the proper credentials. He saw himself as one of those young individuals with great talent whose way was blocked because of class privilege and so forth. So he, in fact, throughout his life, he burned with resentment against the aristocracy. And of course, many of the military officers had come from the aristocracy. But Hitler, again, I mean, Hitler understood the bottom line was if you're going to restore German power and if you're going to not only destroy the Versailles system, but ultimately you. Excuse me, if you're not only going to revise their Versailles system, but ultimately, as was Hitler's intention, destroy the Versailles system, you have to have a powerful military force. And the reality was that modern military are technological, and you had to have experts in technology and weapons procurement and weapons design and organization and training and all the rest. I mean, it's, it's nice to talk about having a revolutionary army, but you have to be able to transfer, transform this revolutionary spirit into an effective, disciplined, highly technological fighting force. And the, the people who had that expertise were the military officers, top generals. And so it's kind of, in the beginning, it's kind of, it's kind of a mutual dependency. They don't particularly trust each other and they don't particularly like each other, but they both understand that in order to get where they want to go, they have to rely on each other. And I think that characterizes the early relationship.
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Craig
What are some of the key steps early on that Hitler takes to start rebuilding the German military? Either policy or things, you know, different ideas that he brings to, to achieve that goal?
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, and that's a good question. And I think it goes along with what I was saying, that in a sense, what happens. And you don't want to get too deterministic about this, but it's almost like things fall on the Line almost perfectly. In order for Hitler to kind of demonstrate his political skill and his diplomatic intuition and kind of begin imposing his dominance on the military. Again, we tend to think of Hitler as always being dominant. But in the early months of his administration of his regime really maybe the first year, it was the military leaders who thought they had the upper hand. But Hitler in the 10th I guess again understood the steps along the way better than they did. Rather than ramble on here, I guess the best example would be that the beginning with the disarmament conference, the new head of the army Blomberg understood that in order to rearm that Germany would have to violate the restrictions of the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty. And there was in fact a disarmament general disarmament conference which had, which had been dragging on for a year or so, which was currently taking place in Geneva. And in order to rearm, Blomberg and the German generals realized that Germany would have to withdraw from the disarmament conference which would signal obviously German intention to begin rearming. But they didn't really understand how to go about doing that. And it was Hitler who supplied kind of the diplomatic finesse and the diplomatic cover for withdrawing from the armament conference. But in a sense making it seem that Germany was not withdrawing in order to begin the process of rearmament. That Germany was disarming in terms of I guess what you might say a moral protest against the failure of the disarmament conference to result in general disarmament of all the major powers. Hitler's early diplomacy was really quite skillful in keeping his would be opponents, the British, the French, others kind of off balance in a sense disguising his real intention. One of them, one of the key, one of the key developments was the Anglo German naval agreement of June 1935, which is one of the lesser known steps I suppose, along the way in which Hitler rather skillfully disengaged Great Britain from a would be anti Hitler coalition, the so called Straza front of Great Britain, France and Italy. And in June 1935 Hitler essentially, essentially broke the strait front and lured Britain away from France and Great Britain by agreeing to a naval disarmament agreement with Great Britain in which the Germans agreed to limit the size of the German Navy to about 35% the size of the British navy which was from Germany, from Hitler's point of view, which was acceptable not only because that was the larger percentage basically than Hitler had envisioned, but more importantly because it validated German rearmament. The agreement essentially violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and essentially gave British approval, kind of the British stamp of approval on, on German rearmament. So Hitler proved very skillful in terms of, in terms of his early measures. And I could go on and on that obviously the reoccupation of The Rhineland in March 1936 was a crucial step. And I suppose the bottom line of all these was that in sort of a step by step process, Hitler not only demonstrated his political skill, which greatly impressed German military leaders, but at each stage along the way, Hitler seemed to have more determination, he seemed to have more courage, he seemed to have a stronger will, a stronger nerves than that in the German military, which tended to impress both him and them. And certainly by 1937, other about Hitler had become convinced that he certainly had a stronger force of will and could see things more clearly than his military advisors.
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Craig
And he seemed to get some help, right, from forces beyond his control. The Italians decide to invade Ethiopia, making an arrangement between the British, the French and the Italians basically impossible.
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Dr. Steven Fritz
Right?
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Craig
And then, you know, the Spanish Civil War. So there was these other things going on even beyond his control that, that seemed to help him achieve these, achieve these goals. You, you brought us up to 1937. So this is a, maybe this is a good place to sort of shift gears a little bit and talk about the Munich Conference and sort of the annexation of the Sudan land. And you, you in the book, you do a very good job of, of demonstrating Hitler's sort of, oh, that's okay. Hitler's sort of almost desire. You, you make it sound in the book like he, he really wants Armed military conflict over. Over Czechoslovakia. And he's almost. You make him come out as almost seeming disappointed that there was a diplomatic solution. And you do a very good job of depicting the anxiety of his generals during this. This period. If you could talk about this. This episode and sort of why he did or why he thought the way he thought about it.
- [37:54]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, I think it's one of the interesting things, and one of the things you see that it's not typically known about Hitler was that he had, I suppose, one of his reevaluations, or as he saw events from the late twenties on into the 1930s, one of the things that was always lurking in the forefront of his mind was the potential power of the United States. And he was very much impressed with the potential. Not only, well, with the actual economic power, industrial power, and the potential military power of the United States. And. And he was growing. By the mid-30s, despite his diplomatic triumphs, Hitler was growing increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of German rearmament. And his generals, of course, were accustomed to taking in terms of kind of military strength, relationships where you. If you. They're not. They're not so much opposed to launching a war, but they want. They want to have a situation in which it appears to them that Germany has clear military superiority. But Hitler, as the 30s went on, began to divine that. That from. From rates of rearmament and. And. And military buildups and how long it was taking Germany to recover from the. Or to build up from the very low level from which they had started, it might actually never be possible for Germany to achieve clear military superiority, even over the British and French, let alone always that possibility of the United States, of course, joining with the British and the French. So what you see really markedly from 1937 and 1938 on is. Is Hitler is extraordinarily impatient. He has this very strong sense of the time pressure. And I think that's what factors into his disappointment in September and October 1938. And I think you've correctly summarized my view, I think Hitler really is disappointed that there's not war in the fall of 1930. I think in Hitler's mind, he believed that if there had not been the municipal, then if the Sudeten crisis had gone to war and it had resulted in a European war, of course it would have been a more limited European war. It would have been Germany against the Western democratic nations. That was a war I think Hitler thought he could win. But in any case, I suppose the key question is that. Or the key point is that Hitler didn't think a war would break out, he was pretty certain that the French would not take any action and he was skeptical that the British would actually go to war. So I think in Hitler's mind, he envisioned a scenario in which when push came to shove over his demands for the Sudetenland, the British and the French would back down. And having suffered yet another diplomatic humiliation, that would end any active French opposition to German expansion in the east, and that would likely end any really, any active British diplomatic resistance to Germany's aims in the east, which would effectively then forestall any sort of American intervention, diplomatic or otherwise. So I think he, I think he, he perceived that the Sudeten crisis was his grand opportunity to so humiliate the Western powers diplomatically that they would remain passive when he began his expansive drive in the East. And so, as I've argued in various books, from Hitler's perspective, the wrong war was always the war in the west against France and Great Britain. And I think the more he thought about it, and this is something that obsessed him till the day he died, literally, I think the more he thought about it, the more he kept coming back to that. What if, what if I had launched the war in the fall of 1938 and what if the British and French had backed down? Then I would have gained a year and a half, two years of time, and I wouldn't have had to have fought a war in the west and I could have turned all my attention immediately against the Soviet Union. So I think that's the scenario that was obsessing him.
- [42:49]
Craig
So you've just led us up to his, the coming invasion of Poland. Just, I know, a year later, after, after this, what were, what was the mindset amongst his military leaders just before the invasion of Poland? Because, you know, we know the end result of the invasion, you know, it was very quick. They did defeat the Polish army, you know, in just several weeks. But you, you demonstrate in the book that, you know, there wasn't, I mean, there was, there was confidence that the war could be won, but not, not quite. They didn't necessarily think it was going to play out the way it play out. Can you explain this sort of the planning process and the, and, you know, so the, the early, early moments of that conflict?
- [43:37]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, the, there's, I guess there's kind of a, kind of a. On a dual level there. The generals were fairly confident that obviously they could defeat Poland militarily. That it would come so swiftly, I think was a great surprise to the generals. And again, we tend to be taken in by that whole notion of, I guess what we could call today the myth of blitzkrieg, that the Germans had devised this stunningly brilliant new method of waging war and then they simply unleashed this in Poland. They hadn't, they weren't quite certain. They had experimented a little bit with the use of tanks, but they didn't really have a very extensive tank corps at the time and certainly they didn't have the powerful tanks of later. They weren't entirely certain how to use their tanks in coordination with infantry. In a sense, the blitzkrieg campaign in Poland unfolded primarily because of the geographical considerations. The fact that Germany encircled Poland on three sides, which made kind of a blitzkrieg type war possible, where the Germans would naturally launch, excuse me, would naturally launch attacks into the Polish rear and flanks. But this notion that they had devised this new form of war, that was. The Germans weren't. They weren't terribly confident that this would all work because this was not something that had been demonstrated in any sort of in depth in terms of war gaming or things like that. The other big consideration was, I guess at the macro level, at the strategic level. The other consideration was the fear that as they did, that the Western powers, the Western democracies, Britain and France would come into the war and kind of the general military assumption, the general's assumption that the British and French would immediately launch an attack in the west against, against German defenses to aid the Poles and against. Again, in kind of contrast to our general perception of the German military. The German military leaders in the fall of 1939 were really mostly obsessed with their, with the perception of German weakness, I think, rather than German strength. They were aware that although they were probably superior to Poland, they certainly were not superior in military strength to the British and French. So there was that unease in their mind that this could be repetition, obviously in different circumstances, but this could be a repetition of the two front war of World War I, which brought back all sorts of unhelpful, sort of worrisome memories there. So Polish campaign. Yeah, it was something that in retrospect seems to confirm Blitzkrieg. But at the time the German generals were. And quite frankly they remain skeptical of blitzkrieg even after the triumph from Poland.
- [47:27]
Craig
Yeah, you mentioned this in your book and this is something I wanted to ask you about because, you know, you watch the documentaries in the History Channel, you get this, this picture of this very mechanized, very modern German army. Just from the very beginning, they just sort of spring out of nowhere. And one of the things in Your book that I found fascinating was this rivalry between the generals themselves over the. You, how to use new technology, how to use tanks. And, and I'm specifically want to ask about using tanks in the invasion of France. You know, as you mentioned, in some older military strategy, the tanks are used to protect infantry, not to be their own, you know, their own units advancing at their own speed and so on. And so I, I want to talk about the, I want you to explain the, to our listeners. The, the sort of, the, the different types of thinking going on amongst the generals, like sort of between the older generals and the younger generals, right?
- [48:24]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah. Probably 98% of the senior general officer corps, the top generals, the general ship in the German army were skeptical, very skeptical of the tank. It was potentially a nice support weapon, but they couldn't envision how it might be used. And of course, from their perspective, Polish campaign was irrelevant when it came to possibly defeating France because Poland was so much different. The geographical considerations that the Germans couldn't outflank Poland. The French army was certainly considered far superior to the Polish army. The British would help the French. Most of the, you might call them traditional generals couldn't conceive how blitzkrieg could work because they could envision, if you talk about a thin spearheaded Panthers coming through, as eventually happened, coming through the Ardennes. They couldn't envision a scenario in which the French army would remain daddy and would not do the most obvious thing it seemed to them, that is, marshal their forces and launch a counterattack at the vulnerable base of the German spearhead. So it seemed unthinkable to the German generals that this audacious plan might work because it seems so obvious to them what the logical countermeasure would be. So they were very, you know, it took a long time for the, for the, frankly, for the successful blitzkrieg campaign in France to evolve the initial plan planning. In fact, the initial plans were really very pedestrian because the planners at army headquarters simply could not envision how tanks could be used in rapid movement to knock a great power like France out in one blow. And, and so the original plans of attack, the first two or three plans of attack, never actually envisioned knocking France out at one blow. It just, it simply, it was something they couldn't conceive in it. The whole process, of course, was, in a sense, again, kind of demonstrated Hitler's ability to read a map, his ability to think in innovative terms, we might say, to think out of the box. Hitler early on envisioned was dissatisfied with the rather unimaginative plans of the operational staff. And so he suggested moving the focal point of attack away from the Low Countries as such and moving it to the south to the Ardennes, where a panzer thrust could come through the Ardennes and potentially break through French lines and get to the Channel coast, which then raised the possibility of the destruction of an entire friendship. Franco, Francis Franco British army there. And of course the idea was initially ridiculed by Halder and others at okh. And it was not until of course, Manstein independently proposed pretty much the same idea that Halder and others began to take it seriously and began to envision perhaps how this plan could work in a way that again kind of reveals the influence of World War I on all of the thinkers at the time. The experience of World War I, I think had convinced the German generals, as others and in other countries, that great powers could not be knocked out at one blow. So it was futile to try to knock out a great power at one blow. But I think as many of the top generals, certainly the key generals like Halder, began to perceive that maybe this strategy might be able to knock the French out at one below, then they began to throw their support behind it.
- [53:10]
Craig
So let's jump ahead a little bit. So French France is obviously defeated quickly and now Hitler is free to return his attention east. And so if you could explain the initial planning of Barbarossa and sort of how all of the things that you have been talking about through the course of this interview sort of added up to this moment for him.
- [53:35]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah. As I've indicated before, from Hitler's point of view, the real war was always in the east because as he understood it, Germany had lost World War I because of lack of resources. So all of the available attainable resources lay in the East. And so things fit together in a sense. You can see the different dimensions of the war in Russia. Obviously, if you want to call it this, the colonial dimension, Lebensraum or living space, the conquest and exploitation of raw materials and foodstuffs. There's also in a sense the racial war, Hitler's racial views, the alleged inferiority of the Slavic peoples from Hitler's point of view, the racial threat posed by the Jewish population and the so called Jewish conspiracy. And of course then there's the ideological, the ideological consideration since Hitler saw communism as simply part of this alleged Jewish conspiracy of destruction. So in Hitler's mind, all of his major considerations came together in the war in Russia. His ideological obsessions, his racial obsessions and than his determination to conquer the so called living Space for the German people. The war in the east, as I said, was always. That was always. That was a given for Hitler. That was always where Germany's future to him lay. So the question was basically simply operational. How was the best way to defeat the Soviet Union? And again, you get this kind of interesting conceptual difference. Hitler sketched out a plan, kind of an indirect plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union, where a thrust in the center would be kind of secondary. It would be used only essentially to tie down Soviet forces, Red army troops, so they couldn't retreat. So the key was to defeat the. The Red army as close to the border as possible. So the idea was to launch an attack. Hitler's idea was to launch an attack in the middle, but simply as the whole Red army forces in place in the middle. And then the major advances would take place on a grand scale on either flank to the north through Leningrad, and then to the south through Kiev. And then Hitler essentially envisioned a fast encircling movement that would kind of circle back then on Moscow. But the key was to. The key was this indirect approach to hold Red army forces in the center and then strike at the flanks. Whereas Holder's conception was kind of the classic military conception of attack in the center and head for Moscow on the assumption that Moscow would be so important in terms of political importance, economic importance, ideological importance, communication, so forth, that the Red army, that the Stalin would be forced to throw in the bulk of his military forces to defend Moscow. And so in kind of classic military operational terms, then you could defeat the bulk of the Red army by moving towards Moscow. That was, I mean, that was kind of the classic. That was kind of the classic thinking from Hitler's perspective. The problem with that was, I suppose, the kind of the, the, the, the fear of them, the kind of the specter of Napoleon. The problem with that is that if you can't pin the Red army and if you attack in the center and are unsuccessful in initial encirclement operations, in, in destroying the bulk of the Red army or pinning them in place, then the vast expanse of Russia allows your opponents simply to begin retreating and luring you into the interior of Russia, which is one thing the Clausewitz, for example, warned against, about being lured into the interior of Russia. So Hitler had a strong conception that the danger in the center was precisely that the Germans might win battles, but not effectively prevent the Red army from retreating and carrying on the war.
- [58:33]
Craig
So the initial phases of the operation goes all right. They conquer tremendous swaths of territory very quickly and then they reach Stalingrad and things begin to bogged down. If you can talk just a little bit about Stalingrad, you know, this is seen by, by many as the big turning point for the Germans. Talk about Stalingrad and then sort of lead us to the end of the.
- [59:00]
Dr. Steven Fritz
War.
- [59:03]
Craig
And, and then give your overall assessments of Hitler sort of as a military leader.
- [59:09]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, Stalingrad's one of those interesting things that in fact one of the things I tried to get across in the book is that. And certainly, and I think this would be the consensus of many German military historians today that Stalingrad was important but perhaps was not the turning point of the war that people envision it. German historians and I tend to agree with him, locate, if you want to talk about the turning point, locate the turning point of the war much earlier. In fact it could be as early as mid August 1941 or certainly by November 1941, even before the German reverse, excuse me, even before the German reverse in front of Moscow. Because it's fairly, I mean if you look at Hitler's statements by in mid August and in mid November 1941 both Hitler makes in retrospect, I'm sure at the time must have seemed rather curious statements to his listeners but in retrospect seemed quite insightful which would indicate that he has a sense that Germany cannot win the war the way he originally envisioned and that he was not likely, the Soviet Union was not likely to be knocked out of the war. And so it's kind of interesting if you look at Stalingrad from that perspective. It gives kind of a different interpretation I suppose where the key events are really taking place in the winter of 1941 and into early 1942. So Stalingrad then becomes a turning point, but it's a different kind of turning point. What Hitler envisions in the summer of 1942 as a campaign. I think he envisions a campaign not to knock the Soviet Union out of the war anymore but simply to kind of immobilize the Soviet Union to destroy the Soviet ability to wage active war, large scale war by denying the Soviets resources, key resources and especially oil. And so interestingly, Stalingrad was important and the whole plan of the whole military campaign in 1942 was essentially an admission. And of course Hitler had been deeply involved in planning the operation in 1942. It was an admission that Germany had insufficient force, insufficient strength for an all out assault on the, on the Red army in the south. And so the whole operation was to be sequential, one stage leading to the next stage which would ultimately Lead, if everything went right to the, captured the oil fields of the Caucasus. In that scenario, interestingly, Stalingrad was not in and of itself terribly important. The important thing was to, was to get to Stalingrad and to block the Volga River. If you could get to Stalingrad, invest Stalingrad, then you could begin to impede industrial production. Stalingrad was a major tank production center for the Soviet Union. But more importantly, and again, kind of shows Hitler's understanding of the broader war. More importantly, Stalingrad was a major inland port on the Volga river through which increasingly American Lend Lease supplies were being brought up from the Caspian Sea along the Volga. And of course, the Volga reaches all the way up to the east and north of Moscow. So using the Volga river as a transport system, you could supply virtually every, every one of the fronts. So American, American Lend Lease supplies could flow very efficiently by using the Volga River. So one of Hitler's main goals at Stalingrad, ironically, was to, was to, was to cut the Volga River. The Stalingrad, in a sense, shows Hitler's insight. I mean, he understands this. It also, I think it also shows Hitler's one of his major deficiencies as a military leader. He was very, very impatient. He had a difficult time prioritizing and sticking to his priorities. He made the fateful decision in late July 1942 to split German forces, which were already insufficient, and send one army heading to the south to the Caucasus oil fields, and then another army heading separately across to Stalingrad to try to seize Stalingrad, which was in some respects, as I argue in the book, the most profound military mistake Hitler made during the course of the war was to split his forces and abandon the sequential nature of them of that 1942 summer campaign. Because by doing that, it really meant that he couldn't achieve any of his goals in 1942. And so what Stalingrad I think ultimately represents, and this kind of flows into the remainder of your question here, what Stalingrad ultimately represents is Hitler's understanding that the defeat at Stalingrad. And Hitler, I think, understands this even before German forces are finally defeated at Stalingrad again as early as September October 1942, even as the bad battle to take Stalingrad is waging or is raging, Hitler has a sense that any hope of winning the war, and of course, there are different ways to interpret winning the war, you don't have to win, absolutely, but any hope perhaps of even obtaining the resources to be able to kind of stalemate a global war have been lost with the defeat of Stalingrad. So what you see in 1943, 44 increasingly. And, and this is where a lot of the criticism of Hitler as a military leader comes in. From 43, 44 on, certainly from the late summer of 1943 on, Hitler increasingly seems to be obsessed with holding on and not allowing the withdrawals. He's famously criticized over and over for not allowing them, Manstein, for example, to engage in nimble movement and withdrawals. I think a good part of that, again my reply to that is that in a sense Hitler again was looking at that war from a different perspective. In order to wage a mobile war, you have to have the resources by which to wage a mobile war. And if Germany began to withdraw too much, Germany would give up too much territory and therefore too many of the valuable resources they needed by which to wage this, to continue to wage the war. And in any case, to wage a mobile war you have to have mobile forces, you have to have mobility. And from the autumn of 1943 on, certainly the German army was becoming increasingly demotorized, increasingly demobile, if you want to put it that way. They had lost aerial superiority. They certainly were losing their mobility edge over the Red Army. And so Hitler's understanding, I think, of the problems of waging mobile war are not as irrational perhaps as people, as people have traditionally, some historians have traditionally made them out to be. I think he has a fairly sophisticated understanding of the problems raised by trying to wage a mobile war when you're increasingly being overwhelmed by resources. And so I guess finally to answer in terms of what Hitler is I think ultimately trying to do, and he makes this fairly clear in terms of terms of holding on, I think Hitler is increasingly operating under his assumption that the anti Hitler coalition, the British Americans and the Soviet Union, is an inherently unnatural coalition. So it's fundamentally unstable. You have the two great western capitalist democracies in alliance with Soviet communism. So Hitler is increasingly of the opinion that if he can just hold on long enough, this unnatural coalition is going, sooner or later it's going to collapse. And certainly he more and more quotes Frederick Degrade, who of course survived the Seven Years War simply by outlasting his opponents until the unnatural coalition arranged against Frederick collapsed. And in many respects I think Hitler saw himself trying to pull off another miracle just, just hang on long enough so that this unnatural coalition would, would eventually collapse. And, and he could wriggle out with some sort of, some sort of, if not gain, certainly maybe the survival of his regime. He could wriggle out from under that, although that was increasingly, obviously increasingly improbable.
- [69:42]
Craig
As a way to sort of wrap up discussion of your book, just give us a couple of sentences. What is your overall assessment of him as a military leader? I mean, I'm sure listeners can sort of gauge where you're going to go with this, given your talk, but I put a nice bow on it for us.
- [70:05]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Yeah, I think, in a sense, what I was trying to get across in the book was that Hitler was not simply the irrational madman of caricature. That's too simplistic. That, in a sense, that lets him off the hook too easily. In many respects, my sense that Hitler was dangerous precisely because he was far more capable and competent than people like to believe. Certainly he had strengths as a military leader in kind of understanding the larger strategic goals he wanted to achieve. He had. He certainly could read a map. He certainly understood opportunities. He. He had a sense for the weak point of his enemies. He had a sense for the surprise. He was attracted, at least early on. Certainly he was attracted by innovative ideas, unconventional sort of ideas that offered great promise. He certainly was willing to take great risks in order to attain great rewards. On the other hand, Hitler. Hitler's greatest efficiency, probably, and this is, I'm sure, not unusual for somebody who was not trained as a military leader. He often did not understand what seems to be the mundane aspects of military operations, but are, in fact, quite trained, crucial. He oftentimes overlooked supply aspects, logistical aspects. How do you move armies from one place to another, how you supply those armies. Just. Just kind of. Just kind of mundane things like that. But. But he. He did have. He did have a quick mind and. And he was. He was probably, I think, in general. And of course, you always have to be careful because at a certain point, and certainly from mid 44 on, this is certainly true, but up until, say, mid 44, I think he's willing to entertain ideas and he's a little bit more flexible than many of his critics give him credit for. One of the things that impressed me with Hitler, especially early on was that, again, despite this image, or in contrast to this image of Hitler as this decisive, intimidating sort of leader who imposes his will constantly on his cowed and fearful generals, Hitler oftentimes, certainly through 1942, Hitler oftentimes seems to be unsure of himself and is engages in endless discussions with his generals, trying to persuade his generals through the force of his argument as much as the force of his will. Certainly it's hard to envision Stalin. In fact, it's hard to envision any of Stalin's generals arguing with him furiously for days on and over key decisions. And, and in 1941 and even into 1942, you see Hitler engaging in extended discussions with his generals and debating them over what decision to make. Again, it gives kind of a different perspective, I suppose, to our understanding of how Hitler operated.
- [74:01]
Craig
Yeah, I, I definitely want to encourage all our listeners to pick up your book. It's a fascinating book. It's again called Hit the First Soldier. Hitler Is Military Leader. But Stephen, before I let you go, I want to ask one final question. What are you working on now that this project has done in Overworld?
- [74:21]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Well, one of the things that interested me, I mentioned way back at the beginning of the, of the conversation here that in his early iteration, I suppose, as a would be political leader in the early 20s, what struck me in many of Hitler's speeches, as I said, was that he was trying to explain what had happened to Germany. And so Hitler, of course, was very well read in history and he tried to think historically. He tried to explain to his various audiences, oftentimes by going back hundreds of years in German history, exactly what things had happened to Germany and the German lands before there was a unified Germany and trying to make sense of history. And so I got fascinated with Hitler's conception of history. So at the moment, I'm beginning some preliminary research into Hitler's concept of history and how he used history and how his understanding of historical events shaped his ideas and shaped not only his military strategy, eventually, certainly, but shaped many of his political ideas. How he used history and his historical explanations to connect with the German people and to. And to offer what to them might have seemed like a reasonable explanation for why Germany was where it was in the 1920s and 30s. So kind of, kind of within the general framework of Hitler as a historian, I suppose, would be what I'm working on at the moment.
- [76:05]
Craig
Well, no pressure, but when you're done and it's a book, I'd love to have you back to talk about it.
- [76:13]
Dr. Steven Fritz
Sa.