one last swipe at Liddell Hart

[truepenny]

I'm about fifty pages into Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (1942, 1944), and I just want to note that he's already, more or less in passing, demolished the "we are simple soldiers!" defense. In talking about the Weimar Republic, he says:

The Reichswehr, reduced to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty, continued to be the stronghold of conservatism and nationalism. With army careers now closed to many and promotion slow, there is little wonder that the officers' corps became militantly anti-democratic, despising parliamentarianism because it pried too closely into the secrets of army expenditure, and detesting the Socialists because they had accepted the Versailles Treaty and the destruction of the supremacy of German militarism. Whenever a political crisis arose, the army invariably sided with the anti-democratic elements.
(28)

And let's not forget the role of the Reichswehr in the end of World War I and the "stab in the back" myth. The Reichswehr was intensely involved in politics, and that was hardly a secret.

There was certainly less scope for officers to wield political power in the Wehrmacht, with the shift from a pluralist, struggling government which always stood in a suppliant relationship to the army, to a single-party dictatorship in which the army stood suppliant to the Führer, and the generals may have wanted to be ignorant of Nazi politics, but they got there by trying to make a political deal with Hitler. The fact that the deal went so very badly for them--like any deal Hitler made with anyone, it was "heads I win, tails you lose"--is not a sign of political naivete on their part, but a sign of just how disruptive a force Hitler was in the political arena.

Liddell Hart seems to have accepted the German generals' pose as political naifs in good faith, but a pose is all it was.


---
WORKS CITED
Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. 1942. Expanded ed. 1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009.

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, I'm not all that sure Liddell Hart was all that unsympathetic to the German generals WRT this issue. An awful of the the British establishment was prepared to turn a blind eye to a lot of the nastiness in the 1930s. You see a lot about "regrettable necessities" with regard to legislation restricting people's rights, and there's a great deal of tut-tutting over Those Awful Socialists and the even more awful Communists, and what choice to they have in Germany if they are to avoid Total Chaos, really. Then there's the British Union of Fascists...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Padgett in Gaudy Night in 1935 saying "What this country needs is a Hitler." Yes.

I don't know enough about Liddell Hart to say--nor is my curiosity burning enough to make me research it--but from his presence as narrator in The German Generals Talk, I'd guess he personally was pretty committed to the idea of the gentleman professional soldier as an apolitical creature.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I'd guess he personally was pretty committed to the idea of the gentleman professional soldier as an apolitical creature.

I should think LH sees preserving the status quo as he understands it - that is, maintaining the class structure, with "gentlemen" at the top - as an apolitical stance. In that (very blinkered) sense, his German generals are apolitical, inasmuch as they weren't rabid Naional Socialists, but nationalist conservatives with a duty to their country.

And I would dispute the idea that the generals were putting on an act for LH, insofar as I'm sure they believed what they were saying themselves. It was their way of preserving their self-image as decent human beings in the face of the massive cognitive dissidence created by serving the Nazi cause. I'm not saying they managed to stay decent human beings, but I'm certain they needed to believe they had.