History Of The German General Staff 1657-1945

Walter Goerlitz

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429717925
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

This book is about the social and economic setting of the Hitler era. It unveils an amazing story about the bitter end of the German Great General Staff, the once most precise and powerful director of military policy known to the Western world, and its command in a democratic-capitalistic society.

Chapter I
The Beginnings

I

The Prussian General Staff is a product of a specific phase of European development. It grew out of that combination of absolute monarchy with standing armies which became so typical a phenomenon after the Thirty Years’ War. In more than one instance, where that combination occurred, the military element was integral to the whole structure of the State. In the Spanish Empire it was the paid professional Army that held that scattered and heterogeneous thing together. In the Habsburg dominions with their diversified mixture of peoples the Army played a similar part.

Nowhere did this hold more true than in that composite state formed by the union of the Electorate of Brandenburg with the secularized inheritance of an East Prussian religious order. Writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, the military historian von Behrenhorst declared that the Prussian monarchy was not a country that had an army, but an Army that had a country which it used as a billeting area, and Mirabeau once made a somewhat similar remark. There is more than a little truth in these observations; the history of Prussia is essentially the history of the Prussian Army.

During the Thirty Years’ War the speculative traffic in mercenaries had developed into something like a major industry. It was by bringing its bigger practitioners under his control, and also by forcing the recalcitrant nobility to do service to their sovereign, that the Great Elector laid the foundations of a standing Prussian force—and, with it, of Prussia. The chequered hotchpotch of the Hohenzollern possessions had come together through purchase, through conquest and through inheritance. It was the Army that formed the iron ring that held them together; one may even go so far as to say that in the strict sense there has never been a Prussian nation at all, though there has most certainly been a Prussian Army and a Prussian State.

Aside from the Army, the absolute monarchy of the Hohenzollerns had two other props, a Protestant orthodoxy with a peculiar Prussian colouring of its own, and a patriarchal system of land ownership. All matters of Church government were, of course, dependent upon the King, the Church’s activating doctrinal principle being the subject’s duty of obedience—which last was often inculcated to the neglect of more cardinal Christian virtues. As to the landlords, they were compensated for the sovereign’s encroachment on certain privileges of their order by the retention of private jurisdiction and the continued dominion over their serfs.

Without the Junkers of East Elbia, without this Prussian aristocracy of sword and service which for two centuries supplied it with most of its officers, the Prussian Army is inconceivable, and this applies with even greater force to the Prussian General Staff. Indeed, the history of the General Staff is indissolubly linked with that of a comparatively small number of noble families. This Junker nobility differed markedly both in spirit and circumstance from what was often the much wealthier nobility of other parts of Germany. Its manorial estates were often far from profitable. As against this, they were free from taxes, save only for the Lehnpferdegeld, or Horse-money, an ancient feudal due, quite negligible in terms of actual cash. Military or administrative service was the normal career for the sons of such families—to this rule there was hardly ever an exception—though prior to 1806 few of the young men concerned enjoyed a university education.

Genetically, these people were a mixture. Families of Wendish, Cassubian or “Pruzzian” origin, like the Zietens, Quitzows, Mansteins and Yorcks, may be said to have constituted a sort of basic norm, but there were accretions to this. Huguenot settlement had brought in a sizeable French element, while the incorporation of Silesian and Polish territories introduced a strong Polish influx which was swollen by the tendency of the impoverished Polish noblesse to take service under the Prussian crown. Prior to 1806, about one-fifth of the higher and one-quarter of the lower ranks of the nobility were of Polish origin. Though these families became thoroughly Germanized in habit and outlook, the censorious might claim to see the marks of a distinctive origin in a haughtiness that was crude beyond the average and in their occasional tendency to wild extravagance.

II

The period round 1640, in which the Prusso-Brandenburgian Army was born, saw the beginnings of what was later to be referred to by the comprehensive term Generalstabsdienst, or “General Staff Service”. The Swedish Army stood at this time in high repute in Northern Europe, and it was on that model that the Great Elector may be presumed to have based himself in creating a so-called Quartermaster-General’s Staff. The latter’s function comprised all engineering services, the supervision of routes of march and the choice of camping sites and fortified positions. The first mention in the records of a Brandenburgian Quartermaster-General (a certain Lieutenant-Colonel and Engineer Gerhard von Bellicum, or Belkum) appears in 1657. He seems to have been assisted by one Lieutenant-Colonel and Engineer Jacob Holsten, who bore the title of Second Quartermaster-General.

The pay sheets show that the following belonged at this time to this so-called General Staff. There was, first, a Commissary-General, responsible for all matters of replacement, uniform, armament, food and shelter. This officer was assisted by a Generalwachtmeister; Sergeant-Major-General is the literal rendering: the rank was known to Cromwell’s New Model Army. Further there were two Adjutants-General, one Provendermaster-General, a General-auditeur, who dealt with matters of military law, a Wagonmaster-General and an “Enforcer-General” (Generalgewaltiger) who with his constables was responsible for police matters. Actually, neither the Quartermaster-General nor the Commissary-General ranked as senior officer of the General Staff. That honour fell to the Master of Ordnance (Feldzeugmeister), in this instance Freiherr von Sparr, one of the Great Elector’s truly great generals.

Among Bellicum’s successors we find in the years 1670-73 a certain Philippe de Chiese, or Chiesa, less well known as a soldier than as the architect of the main building of Potsdam Castle and of the Berlin Mint, and also famous as the constructor of a post-chaise hung in slings, known as the “Berline”. Chiesa was succeeded in the years up to 1699 by a number of officers of French origin, de Maistre, du Puy, Margace and de Brion. As regards the staff of the Quartermaster-General proper, this consisted of the following in order of seniority: the Oberquartiermeister or Senior Quartermaster (the rank is unknown in English), the General Staff Quartermaster and the Staff Quartermaster. These various functionaries constituted a technical and administrative body which, however, was never really organized on a permanent basis. What happened was that when war broke out, the General War Commissariat, as the General Staff began to be called, would on each occasion be assembled afresh.

In Austria, whose rulers tended to lack military experience and were not in the habit of taking the field themselves, a somewhat different institution had developed. This was the Court War Council, which surrounded the ruler with a body of persons with active service experience. In so far as this body drew up operation plans, it came closer to what we understand today by a General Staff.

In Prussia, however, the Great Elector was his own Generalissimo and his own Chief of Staff. His grandson, King Frederick William I, founded the tradition that the King was ipso facto the Supreme War Lord, leading his own army in the field. Under him, the uniform became the ruler’s official livery, and so the most distinguished attire of social life. Service as an officer became the privilege of the nobility. The officer began to look upon himself as the servant of the monarch in whom the State was held to be personified, and the military oath in which the Junker swore loyalty to his sovereign gained a new and profound significance. Indeed, this conception of personal loyalty was the real moral foundation of the Army and was the thing that shaped the highly distinctive mental attitudes of the Prussian and later of the German officer corps as a whole.

Like that of Austria and Russia, the character of the new State was essentially military. Even the civil administration tended to borrow military forms, and the title of Kriegsrat, or War Councillor, for ordinary senior government officials is eloquent in this respect. With the exception of the Academy of Sciences, all educational institutions served purely military purposes, as, for instance, did the Ritteraka-demie, the Cadet Schools designed for the education of the nobility, and the Militärakademie. The Ingenieurakademie duly delivered military engineers, while the Medical School known as the Pépinière ensured the supply of regimental doctors.

It was under Frederick William I that the conception of so-called “Prussian Obedience” became a fundamental principle of this Prussian military nobility, and yet in those days, at any rate, it was not an obedience that was merely blind. A story is told of von Seydlitz, the cavalry leader, that when at the battle of Zorndorf, in 1758, Frederick the Great ordered him to attack the still unbroken Russian infantry, he replied, “Tell His Majesty that my head will be at his disposal after the battle, but that as long as the battle lasts I intend to use it in his service.”

III

The Great Elector bequeathed an army of 30,000 men to his successor. Frederick I raised the number to 40,000, and Frederick William I increased it further to 80,000. When Frederick the Great died in 1786, the number had risen to 200,000. These rising figures mirror Prussia’s ascent during the eighteenth century to the level of a great power. The three victorious Silesian wars and the proceeds of the partition of Poland in 1772 added West Prussia and Silesia to Frederick’s possessions, while his victories at Rossbach and Leuthen in the Seven Years’ War established the Prussian Army’s reputation all over Europe, though it was Russia’s change of sides, and not Frederick’s military performance, that saved him from annihilation by his more powerful neighbours.

Like his predecessors, Frederick the Great was his own Chief of Staff, and the Quartermaster-General’s staff remained much the kind of thing that has already been described, the number of officers serving on it totalling about twenty-five. We find, however, that this staff has now a corps of orderlies at its disposal to serve as messengers and despatch carriers, and also that the institution of the Brigade Major has come into being. Brigade Majors were officers who moved about from one place to another and assisted generals by means of reports and the compilation of useful data. It was in the nature of things that this Quartermaster-General’s corps should work in close personal contact with the King. Indeed, in later times the latter made the training of these officers his own personal concern, the twelve best pupils of the Academie des Nobles in every year being taken for these posts. Even so, there is as yet no question of a genuine General Staff in our sense of the term. The King has as yet no responsible body of military advisers.

We must, however, note the growth of another institution with which the Quartermaster-General’s department has a tendency to overlap, and with which in the course of time it develops a very sharp rivalry. This is the office of the Adjutant-General, the germinal cell of that most characteristic Prussian thing, the Military Cabinet of the Prussian kings. Under the first Prussian kings, this office was chiefly concerned with officers’ records. Frederick the Great, however, somewhat extended its province in connection with the new system of “directives” which the exigencies of this particular time called into being.

The fact that during the Seven Years’ War theatres of operation were scattered and often remote frequently necessitated the employment of large bodies of troops under what were really independent commanders. Within the framework of instructions of a general kind, such officers had to be given a certain freedom of decision. In such cases, apart from Brigade Majors and other more subordinate personnel from the staff, the King liked to attach to the field commander an Adjutant-General or an aide-de-camp, whose rôle was in the nature of that of a royal Commissar. There were during the Seven Years’ War five such Adjutants-General attached to the infantry and two to the cavalry, and the best known among them, Hans von Winterfeld, one of the King’s closest friends, actually had a number of units under his independent command.

From the year 1758 onwards, there was a single Adjutant-General who had a secretary attached to him. The most important of these was Heinrich Wilhelm von Anhalt. He was an illegitimate son of Prince Wilhelm von Anhalt-Dessau, his mother, a noted beauty, being a clergyman’s daughter. This man joined the Prussian Army under the name of “Gustavsohn”, served on the Quartermaster-General’s staff and was raised by Frederick to the nobility in 1761, and from 1765 to 1781 held, with the rank of colonel, the posts of First Adjutant-General and Quartermaster-General. The interest of this figure lies in the fact that, during the partition of Poland and in the war of the Bavarian succession of 1778, he played so large a part in deciding on the commitments of various bodies of troops that one might almost speak of him as Frederick’s Chief of Staff. He seems hardly to have been a very agreeable person, for he enjoyed the reputation of a surly and obstinate martinet, but he shared one characteristic with later chiefs of the General Staff: his work was largely done in secret and he remained almost wholly unknown to the public.

IV

War in the eighteenth century had its own governing principles. The economic and even the political power of the absolutist states was limited, and this, of course, in its turn set a limit to their military means. Moreover, the professional armies of the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs and the Bourbons were expensive instruments which were hard to replace, for they were instruments of high mechanical perfection. Infantry marched right into the battle line in firm, mathematically circumscribed formations. It fought in thin lines three deep, several sets of triple alignments being drawn up one behind the other. All evolutions were carried out according to rule, with the soldiers during all their ingenious wheeling and manoeuvring keeping strictly in step. The aim was the welding together of the men so that they moved and fired with the synchrony of a single machine. The individual as such was at a discount. Frederick the Great is said to have remarked that the soldier needed to fear the sergeant’s stick more than he feared the bullets of the enemy; even of his own officers, the great Potsdam sceptic was in the habit of saying that if they ever started to think, not one of them would remain with the colours. There were really only two considerations—speed of march and speed of fire, of which the latter was greatly enhanced by the use of the iron ramrod (introduced into the Prussian Army by Duke Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau) since wooden ramrods were liable to break under rapid manipulation.

The short range of firearms restricted the size of the battlefield, so that it was easy in those days for commanders to supervise their dispositions with their own eyes from any rising piece of ground. The provisioning of the well-nigh irreplaceable troops was done by means of a cumbersome system of storehouses, and this also narrowed down the field of operations. If military operations were on a modest scale, the aims of wars were equally restricted. Wars were waged for the possession of a fortress or a province. The merciless life and death struggle between whole peoples, let alone the war of ideologies, had not yet been born.

The strategy of the time was that of the chess board which concentrated on felicitous manoeuvring and avoided, wherever possible, the more painful decisions of a direct encounter. Count Wilhelm von Schaumberg Lippe, one of the most important military historians of the time, says in his Mémoires sur la Guerre Defensive that the art of war should be directed to the avoidance of war, or at any rate towards the mitigation of its evils. One of the most typical wars of the century was that of the Bavarian Succession, which was fought by Frederick the Great in 1778 to prevent the union of Austria and Bavaria. In this instance the King and his brother, Prince Heinrich, each with an army of 80,000 men, marched from Silesia and the Lausitz into Bohemia, while the Austrians took up an entrenched position on the Upper Elbe; yet a battle was risked by neither belligerent, and the issue was settled by diplomacy. Till then the notion of a war of extermination had only made its appearance in the Turkish wars which were waged against the House of Habsburg in the Balkans, and in this case the Osmanli Empire really does seem to have maintained the traditions of Timur the Tartar and Genghis Khan; but these wars took place in an area that lay somewhat outside the consciousness of eighteenth-century Europe.

Change, however, was already at work. In the middle of the century two events had erupted into that polished world of Rococo—the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. The former had been most in evidence in England, but in France, too, it was a sign of the times that land speculators were buying up old ancestral homes. Middle-class business efficiency and the middle-class ability to make money began palpably to breach the charmed feudal circle, and the change finds expression in the military sphere. Technical proficiency begins to threaten the traditional precedence of a titled soldier caste—particularly in the artillery, which now becomes essentially the weapon of the third estate. Scharnhorst, the son of a tenant farmer, begins his career as an artillery officer in the Hanoverian forces. Even Prussia is not wholly immune against this hidden class war, which brings with it a steady dribble of middle-class officers into the artillery and the engineers.

Meanwhile, eighteenth-century military thought was effecting its own reductio ad absurdum. Moving, as it did, in a world of artifice and geometrical forms, it induced in a number of minds the conviction that the art of war was a matter of mathematical calculation. Von Templehof, a Prussian artillery colonel, from whose family came Ludendorff’s mother, inclined to this persuasion, as did also a certain Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow, a Prussian officer who was dismissed the Army because of the irregularities of his life, but aspired to a post on the Quartermaster-General’s staff on the merits of his theories. One of von Bülow’s main concerns was the angle formed between the base of operations and the operational objective. An angle of ninety degrees was considered the most desirable. In the Prussian Quartermaster-General’s staff itself, Colonel Christian von Massenbach was the best-known exponent of this general school of thought, and it was no doubt this kind of speculation, in which all feeling for effective forms of combat had disappeared, that led von Saldern, one of Frederick the Great’s latter-day generals, to declare that the essence of all military training lay in the formal evolutions of the parade ground.

V

The petrifaction of Frederick’s military system led to the bureaucratization of the Army command. Under Frederick’s successor, Frederick William II, it became plain that the monarchy had grown much too large for a single individual to deal with the whole business of government, especially when that individual was as devoted to the pleasures of life as the potentate concerned. That was why in 1787 there was form...