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The German High Command – proud, often Prussian, much of it aristocratic, and just as resentful of the humiliations of 1918–19 as anyone else in the Reich – allowed its traditional role of creating grand strategy to be usurped by a man whom many of them admired as a statesman, but whose talent as a military strategist none of them knew anything about.
in order to avoid a war for which the Western powers were still (unforgivably) unprepared.
This was to be the world’s first wholly politically ideological war, and it is a contention of this book that that was the primary reason why the Nazis eventually lost it.
‘That is how I can deal with any European city.’
For the master race to have their living space, large numbers of Slavic and Jewish Untermenschen had to disappear, and during the war Poland lost a staggering 17.2 per cent of her population.
automatically classed as enemies,
The claim made by many German soldiers to Allied re-education officers, and to each other, that they had been simple soldiers who had known nothing of the genocide against the Slavs and the Jews – or at best had heard only rumours – was a lie.
early evidence that the Nazis would be willing to put their war against the Jews even before their war against the Allies.
Hitler in particular believed he learnt lessons about the performance of the Red Army that were to affect his decision to invade Russia the following year.
Had Hitler given first priority in terms of funding to his U-boat fleet on coming to power in 1933, rather than to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, he might have built a force that would have strangled and starved Britain into surrender.
It was one of the great coups of the Second World War.
a sense of incompetence began to attach itself to the campaign
After being briefed on this operation at the Admiralty, its designated commander, Major-General Frederick Hotblack, had a heart attack on the Duke of York’s Steps on the Mall, on his way back to his club.
twelve German divisions, totalling around 350,000 men. Hitler expected an attack on Norway for several years after 1940, and kept an inordinate number of troops idle there who could have been far better employed on the Eastern Front;
Winston Churchill’s most important, most dangerous but ultimately his most constructive characteristic had always been his impatience.
Whereas Hitler paid little or no heed to his troops’ material comforts, Churchill was constantly interesting himself in such matters.
‘Should not put up with it,’ replied Churchill. ‘Ought to get decent cooked bread and meat.’
not least because the German equivalent of the Daily Mail would not have dared to criticize the Wehrmacht over its rations.
The Maginot Line was as much a state of mind as a line of fortifications,
At the outset of war, neither France nor Britain was politically prepared for such action.
‘By dispersing their armour along the whole front,’
‘the French High Command played into our hands, and have only themselves to blame for the catastrophe that was to follow.’
Auftragstaktik
Captain David Strangeways
over eight months
‘the idea of deep strategic penetration by independent armoured forces – a long-range tank-drive to cut the main arteries of the opposing army far back behind its front’.
‘I was conscious of a profound sense of relief,’
‘At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’
‘to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime’.
A believer in remorselessly taking the offensive, Rommel understood Blitzkrieg and had a superlative sense of military timing.
‘You can never talk to a fool,’
‘Hitler spoilt the chance of victory.’
It was the first example of very many cardinal errors that were to cost Germany the Second World War.
The answer might be that by the morning of 24 May the troops had fought continuously for nearly a fortnight, and from his own time in the trenches in the Great War Hitler knew how exhausting that could be.
This incredible blunder was due to Hitler’s idea of generalship.35
These despicable, cold-blooded massacres give lie to the myth that it was desperation and fear of defeat towards the end of the war that led the SS to kill Allied POWs who had surrendered; in fact such inhumanity was there all along, even when Germany was on the eve of her greatest victory.
The calm sea was the miracle of Dunkirk.’41
‘The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war’, wrote the Irish literary essayist Robert Wilson Lynd, ‘appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.’
It was nonetheless an opportunistic and short-sighted move that was to cost Italy dear.
For this magnificent act of treason, he was condemned to death in absentia by a Vichy court.
‘Nonsense. In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’
Under its terms, all Free French fighters were subject to the death penalty; anti-Nazi refugees were to be handed over to the Germans; captured Luftwaffe pilots were to be returned; the French Army was to remain in captivity and three-fifths of France, roughly the northern and western parts including the whole Atlantic seaboard, were to remain under an occupation whose costs, set at 400 million francs per day, were to be borne by France.
but in fact she was only ever intended to be another satrapy of the thousand-year Reich, and a rich source of foodstuffs and slave labour.
‘The pre-war Third Republic had simply been turned inside-out like an old coat, and the New Order fitted straight into it.’
because the British also failed to put the new military theories regarding tank warfare into effective operation early enough.
Alfred Duff Cooper,
Of Taleyrand fame
‘The whole of the French upper and middle classes … preferred the idea of the Germans to their own Communists, and I think you can call that a powerful fifth column, and it was worked to death by the Germans.’
short-term factor of failing to learn the lessons of modern mechanized warfare,
Of course in all essentials, France was run first by the Nazi Party ideologue and Ambassador to France, Otto Abetz,
Eric Abetz father
The deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 of 4,000 Jewish children aged twelve and younger, after being forcibly separated from their parents at the Vélodrome and starved for a week, was done not by the Gestapo or the SS but by ordinary Parisian gendarmes acting under orders from French officials.
