Disobedience and Conspiracy in the German Army, 1918-1945 (review)

A major puzzle that has attracted attention from students of World War II is the extent to which the overwhelming majority of higher German military leaders remained steadfast in their loyalty to Adolf Hitler into the last days of the war, while only a minute number decided that their loyalty to the future of Germany and any moral standards took precedence. This book is an effort to answer that question by placing central emphasis on the personal oath to Hitler taken by these men from the summer of 1934 on. There is, in addition, a look at the attitudes—mostly negative—of the officers toward the Weimar Republic, their increasing sympathy for the National Socialist Party and its leader, their swelling enthusiasm for Hitler during the early years of Nazi rule, and the slow shift of a small number to opposition beginning in the late 1930s. Furthermore, the author analyzes the backgrounds of a few examples of those who held to Hitler as compared with those who turned against him. He also looks into the reasons why the officers who declined to join any conspiracy against Hitler never denounced those who had tried to solicit their support.

It is certainly of great interest to have these matters examined, but the result fails to convince. Beyond numerous factual errors and the failure to consult much of the relevant literature, as well as problems with command of the German language, there are structural faults with the analysis. The higher officers discussed took lots of oaths other than the one to Hitler. Many had taken an Amtseid, an oath of office, to uphold the laws of the country, and these included the Treaty of Versailles and of Locarno. They broke this oath as often as possible; and while Kane does not note this, by the turn of the 1920s to 1930s, the Ministry of Defense was becoming alarmed about the impact of constant illegalities and oath breaking on the morals of the officer corps. After the war, many of the officers would equally break their oaths to tell the truth in testimony and depositions. Kane refers to the overthrow of the last legal government of Prussia by von Rundstedt (p. 78) but does not refer to his oath then any more than to von Rundstedt's perjured testimony at Nuernberg.

If military leaders break all their oaths but one, the exception needs more scrutiny. There is a brief reference to the systematic bribery of the higher officers (p. 171), but the relevant literature does not appear and there is no sense of the widespread use of this technique of assuring loyalty by Hitler. Those who secretly accepted huge sums, stolen estates, and tax-free monthly bribes for every month that they could keep the war going might have had a reason for loyalty that they were not inclined to explain in their memoirs. And while the author correctly stresses the enormous crimes in which the German military were involved, he never mentions the possibility that complicity might affect a general's concern about being called to account—a point on which Hitler banked as much as on the bribes he passed out so freely.

The author clearly admires those who turned against Hitler, even if they did so very late, but his view of the German army as a whole is far too much influenced by the postwar aura of admiration. Not just Hitler but all top German military were deceived by the Allied deception operation in 1944; there are too many examples of this sort of erroneous perspective. Those who led far more than twice as many German soldiers to their deaths in World War II than in World War I were hardly men of genius. The topic of the loyalty...