Word: zeitzler
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What Manner of Man? Guderian's appointment to replace bumbling, Nazified Colonel General 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...
...Berlin dispatch announced the German Government in &#quot;permanent session&#quot; at Adolf Hitler's field headquarters. Present: Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Munitions Minister Speer, Chief of Staff Keitel, Grand Admiral Doenitz, Air Marshal Milch, Generals Zeitzler and Jodl of the General Staff. (Notable absentee: General Walther von Brauchitsch, former CINC of the Wehrmacht, who disappeared from the Russian front last January. Might he become Germany's Badoglio...
Last week the official Berlin radio confirmed the report that Haider had been replaced and identified his successor: non-Junker, 47-year-old General Kurt Zeitzler, long a friend and protege of the Gestapo's Heinrich Himmler, for whom the Army Prussians have no love. Gustav Siegfried Eins, still broadcasting reports which would normally bring quick extermination to any station in Germany, growled that General Haider was "confined" at his home...
Hitler took a liking to black-eyed, paunchy Kurt Zeitzler during the Polish campaign when the Führer reviewed one of Himmler's 55 regiments. Zeitzler quickly rose from colonel to general, served in Poland, the Balkans and the Caucasus as a Panzer staff officer and, despite his Gestapo connections, won the grudging respect of the Wehrmacht's Junkers...
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