W. E. HART Hitler's GENERALS LONDON THE CRESSET PRESS March 1944 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author is indebted to Mr W. Scott for indispensable aid in bringing this book to completion TO JEAN ROTHWELL Contents Colonel General - Baron Werner von Fritsch ..........................3 Field Marshall - Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt..............24 Field Marshal - Erwin Eugen Johannes Rommel...............40 Field Marshal - Erhard Milch .................................................52 Field Marshal - Walther Heinrich A. H. von Brauchitsch.....61 Field Marshal - Wilhelm Keitel ...............................................80 Field Marshal - Fedor von Bock .............................................85 Grand Admiral - Karl Doenitz.................................................101 Grand Admiral - Erich Raeder .................................................107 Colonel General Baron Werner von Fritsch He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon. OLD ENGLISH PROVERB Von Fritsch, typical of his class, was of medium height, heavily built, square-faced and always wore a monocle. Although his intelligence was undoubted and his energy untiring, he was too consciously arrogant to be impressive. He lacked that imagination and foresight which might have enabled him to avoid his violent though not ignoble end. To those under his command he was frigid and remote in his superiority, and before N.C.O.s and men he never relaxed the dignity of his rank and position for a moment. To civilians he adopted two methods of approach. If a man was of no use to him then he was of less significance than the humblest private: the very presence of such a complete nonentity in the scheme of things was an annoyance to him. The private, the N.C.O. and the junior officer, though without interest to him as individuals, were at least units in the great military machine which bound him and them together. The civilian was always beyond the pale. But to the man he wished to make use of, von Fritsch was at once the grandseigneur. To him this was diplomacy, and when it seemed worth while to play the part he could say : 'We are all gentlemen, after all. Now let's talk to each other like that.' Of course, as a Prussian general (or, as one might have thought from his manner, a demigod among mortals), he could hardly be friendly ; but he could stoop so far as to be benevolent, and his tricks when in this mood soon grew familiar to those who had dealings with him. He could expose a human side of himself by pretending to have been 'a naughty boy' not without some foundation and he could be confidential, too, and relate little anecdotes that were not fit for the drawing-room, believing that he was thus creating an atmosphere of trust without himself giving anything away. This done, he would then reveal his original motive, and the man who had been 'taken into his confidence' was expected to tell all he knew or to do whatever was wanted of him. To von Fritsch this kind of thing was 'trying one's charm on somebody'. But if the victim was neither overawed nor dazzled, as could happen occasionally, even in Germany, then all vestige of dignity disappeared and common rudeness took its place. That, however, was very rare, for the German, unlike the Englishman, is brought up to stand in dread of his superiors. Werner von Fritsch was born on the 4th August 1880, at Benrath in the district of Düsseldorf in the Rhineland, a son of the retired Lieut.-General Baron Georg von Fritsch and his wife Adelheid (nee von Bodelschwingh). The father's pension allowed the boy a good education at the grammar schools at Düsseldorf, Posen and Hanau. His mother's family were pillars of the Evangelical Church in Germany; they were philanthropists, and had founded a home for cripples and epileptics that was known all over the country; and their influence was certainly a powerful element in the moulding of the young man's character. Religious education at that time was commonly part of the curriculum of any cadet who intended becoming an officer in the Imperial German Army, but contact with the Church was often not much more than a matter of good form. With Werner von Fritsch this side of his education went deeper, and later on was to dictate his conduct at critical moments of his career. On 21st September 1898, he joined the Grand-Ducal Hessian Field Artillery Regiment No. 25 at Darmstadt. The elder von Fritsch, who was a nobleman of Page 3 standing, had commanded the aristocratic 15th Cavalry Brigade, and the family was substantial financially, so that Werner could have entered any crack Guards regiment of the Imperial German Army. But he preferred an artillery regiment, thus taking almost the only opportunity inside the German Army of that time of acquiring technical knowledge. During the latter years of the nineteenth century there had been rapid development of the artillery arm. By 1900 he was a second lieutenant, nine years later a full lieutenant. But he had caught the attention of his regimental chief in 1907, and in the autumn of that year was transferred to the artillery. He was becoming increasingly conscious of the political influences that governed the general direction of the German armed forces at their headquarters and which impinged on the mind of every ambitious officer. He had gained a deep inside knowledge of many of the larger aims of the German Government, the Supreme Command and the General Staff; and throughout the war while a General Staff officer he had found a most able coach in Colonel Max Bauer, known in General Staff circles as 'the shadow behind Ludendorff'. Bauer, like von Fritsch, was an artillery specialist, professionally concerned with the technical development of the army, but his interests went beyond that. He headed many conferences on war economy, showed von Fritsch -how to handle politicians; and later, during his career in the Reichswehr, von Fritsch was to speak of him as his teacher in matters other than strategy. At the conclusion of the Armistice von Fritsch joined the 4th Reserve Corps, which, under the command of General Count Rudigervon der Goltz, carried on the war in the Baltic provinces. He became Chief of the General Staff of the Corps, which was made up from remnants of the elite of the old Imperial Army. The operations carried out by von der Goltz would have been impossible without the collaboration of the Socialist War Minister of the Republic, Noske an association between an aristocratic general and a former Socialist firebrand which von Fritsch would have thought out of the question until a few months earlier and he was not long in forming the opinion that there was hope for the re- establishment of a limited armed national force. At many conferences between Noske's emissaries and the leaders of the 4th Reserve Corps he saw in practice how even a Left minister put the interests of the army before his professed political principles. The Inter- Allied Commission in the Baltic States, headed by the French General Niessel, put an end to the semi-private, semi-official existence of the Corps. Niessel met von Fritsch, and in his book* he describes a meeting between the Staff of the 4th Reserve Corps, then under the command of General von Eberhardt, who was Commander-in-Chief of the 7th Army during the World War, and the Allied Commission. * LEvacuation des Pays Baltique par les Allemands Contribution a I 'etude de la mentalite' Allemande. (Ed. Charles Lavanzelles, Paris, Limoges, Nancy, 1935). General Niessel writes : 'His Chief of Staff, Major von Fritsch, is young, arrogant and extremely self-confident. It seems he has no qualms about playing a hide-and-seek game with truth or evading uncomfortable questions and misleading the Allied Commission. He has all the professional advantages and all the faults of character of the Prussian General Staff officer, who frequently considers himself superior and rightly too to the ordinary mortal.' Niessel further complains that certain figures of the strength of the Corps were proved false, and had no hesitation in saying so at one of the meetings held. Page 4 Service in the 4th Reserve Corps in the Baltic provinces did not as a rule mean advancement for its officers because it was not a military body which was fully recognised officially in Germany. Nevertheless von Fritsch's services were rewarded by a transfer of short duration to the Reserve Group Command No. 3, and in 1920 he began the two years' task of building up the organisation of the comparatively new Reichswehr Ministry. Here he had his first contact with the Commander-in-Chief of the young Reichswehr, General Hans von Seeckt, who was impressed by his wide knowledge and resourcefulness and with his patience and unswerving concentration. In 1922 he received his first full command and took over the 2nd Battery of the Artillery Regiment No. 5 in Ulm in Bavaria. He was gazetted a lieutenant colonel in February 1923, but his patent dated back from the 15th November 1922, a ruse contrived by his friends in the Reichswehr Ministry to enable him to meet debts incurred by his lavish way of living in Berlin. Transferred for several years to the 1st Division in Koenigsberg in East Prussia as Chief of Staff, von Fritsch studied the military questions of eastern Germany as created by the new frontier line with Poland, not, we may suppose, without some thought for the future. From this staff appointment he returned in 1927 to the Reichswehr Ministry as colonel and 'departmental chief. Actually he joined the camouflaged General Staff of the Reichswehr, which was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. He worked under the direction of another General Staff officer, von Blomberg, but von Blomberg was not a man of energetic mind, his character having perhaps more charm than strength, and von Fritsch in effect replaced him.