Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kurt Zeitzler surprised military observers in the Allied capitals (and perhaps in Germany as well). The choice raised puzzling questions. Why did an Army everywhere in retreat need a tank specialist as its top planner? Was Guderian to be the strong man for the Army, or a figurehead for Hitler himself? Was his main job military (to revise Army strategy) or political (to hold the lid down during a ruthless purge of "unreliable" elements)? Was Guderian himself politically reliable, as far as the Party was concerned? Or just politically indifferent, and more calloused spiritually than even the run of Germany...
Damnation of the Demigods. The 16 could oppose Hitler from the safety of prisoner-of-war camps. Within Germany other Wehrmacht officers had paid with their lives for the bomb plot. Nazi authorities announced only four names of dead ringleaders, but reports sifting through rigid censorship indicated that a ferocious purge of the Army was being carried out, with arrests and executions...
...there was probably not an old-line officer in the German Army who would feel anything but profound relief if the earth were to open up and swallow Hitler and his entire Nazi heirarchy. The demigods of German militarism, Prussian elite officers, hunting, dueling squires of the broad East Prussian estates, were in eclipse. Theirs was the tradition of always stopping a losing war in time to keep fit for the next...
...When Hitler came to the top the officers had gladly, if scornfully, done business with him: he had given them arms, troops, honors, for a time even victories. Now they had the payoff: short of a wholesale uprising, they were completely under the control of the Nazis, who had to fight to the last pistol bullet, because for them there could be no next...
Stopgap. Though Hitler had his officers under control, he still had the problem of keeping them serviceable; he would shoot a general if he must, but he would use the man if he could. He had worked systematically to infiltrate 100% Nazi officers into key military commands. But with the present crisis in bloom he could sense the morale-shattering effect of introducing any young Nazi upstart as Chief of the Army General Staff...