The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich (review)

On 21 March 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg and the new Chancellor Adolf Hitler staged a remarkable ceremony at the Garrison Church of Potsdam. There, in the most prominent shrine to the Prusso-German military tradition, the old Field Marshal and the ambitious former Gefreiter ceremonially linked the legacy of the Hohenzollern dynasty with the nascent National Socialist state. Robert Citino does not mention the "Day of Potsdam" in this ambitious new study, but he might well have done so. Citino argues here for the existence of a consistent pattern in German warfare from the seventeenth-century emergence of Prussia until the defeat before Moscow in 1941.

Citino is one of the most insightful historians of operational warfare working today, and his gifts for narrative and puckish myth-busting do not fail him here. He is unabashedly interested in operations and fairly dismissive of doctrine, politics, or culture. In one memorable passage, he provides a laundry list of terms associated with the imperial German army (Kesselschlacht, Auftragstaktik) before reminding readers that "they do not necessarily tell us all that much about what actually happened" (p. 143).

At the core of Citino's argument is the concept of Bewegungskrieg ("war of movement"). The German Way of War, he argues, was largely born from necessity. The need for speedy, fluid conflicts stemmed from Germany's geographic position, penned in by potentially dangerous neighbors along exposed borders. His descriptions of representative engagements from the "Great Sleigh Drive" of 1678–79 to the invasions of 1939–41 are both engagingly written and deft in their analyses.

While there is much that is useful about this volume, there are also some notable blind spots that make the book particularly frustrating as it moves toward the twentieth century. By focusing on operations, Citino conveys the image of a German army that was somehow above politics and concerned only with winning wars on the battlefield. In late-nineteenth-century Germany, this is untenable. The army's autonomy arguably exerted a disproportionate and ultimately destructive influence on grand strategy. This ambiguity, captured in the famous lament "Who rules in Berlin, Bethmann or Moltke?," was as much an operational problem as a political one.

Furthermore, anyone seeking to find a pattern that connects the past several centuries of German history has to deal with the evolution of a mentality that began to treat civilians as legitimate military targets. A range of scholarship, including work by Hannes Heer and Wolfram Wette, has exploded the myth of the apolitical Wehrmacht in the interwar years and World War II. Isabel Hull's recent study has situated this "institutional extremism" in Germany's European and colonial wars of the late nineteenth century. While no serious historian would claim that only Germany experienced such an escalation of violence toward civilians, we need a fuller explanation and a longer perspective than the one that Citino provides (pp. 273, 292).

Despite what this reviewer sees as critical shortcomings, this is a fascinating and important book that challenges many conventional ideas and suggests others that are worthy of debate and future study.