Hitler’s response to the military disasters of the early summer was characteristic: he blamed others, and sacked his commanders. Whatever Hitler’s capabilities as a military strategist had been, they had paid dividends only while Germany held the whip-hand and lightning offensives had been possible. Once — irrevocably after the failure of ‘Citadel’ in summer 1943 — a defensive strategy had become the only one available, Hitler’s inadequacies as supreme German warlord were fully exposed. As the records of the military conferences with his advisers indicate, it was not that he was wholly devoid of tactical knowledge, despite his lack of formal training. Nor was it the case, as was sometimes adumbrated in post-war apologetics of German generals, that professionals who knew better were invariably forced into compliance with the lunatic orders of an amateur military bungler. As the verbatim notes of the conferences show, Hitler’s tactics were frequently neither inherently absurd, nor did they usually stand in crass contradiction to the military advice he was receiving.
Even so: at points of crisis, the tensions and conflicts invariably surfaced. And by 1944, the individual military crises were accumulating into one almighty, life-or-death crisis for the regime itself. Hitler’s political adroitness was by this time long gone. He dismissed out of hand all contemplation of a possible attempt to reach a political solution. Bridges had been burnt (as he had indicated on several occasions); there was no way back. And, since he refused any notion of negotiating from a position other than one of strength, from which all his earlier successes had derived, there was in any case no opportunity to seek a peace settlement. The gambling instinct which had stood Hitler in such good stead down to 1941 had long since lost its effectiveness in what had become a backs-to-the-wall struggle. But the worse the situation became, the more disastrously self-destructive became Hitler’s other overriding and irrational instinct — that ‘will’ alone would triumph over all adversity, even grossly disparate levels of manpower and weaponry. As we have seen, he was wont, on occasion, to compare — absurdly — the adversity he had often faced in his rise to power with the current adversity in the throes of a world war. In a sense, his own invariable resort — all the more, the worse the crisis became — to a simple belief in ‘triumph of the will’ as the way out was indeed a replication of his attitude at critical junctures during the ‘time of struggle’ (such as the Party Leadership crisis of July 1921 or the crisis surrounding Gregor Strasser in December 1932). The innate self-destructive tendency which had been implicit in his all-or-nothing stance at such times now conveyed itself, catastrophically, to military leadership.
It was inevitable that seasoned military strategists and battle-hardened generals, schooled in more subtle forms of tactical command, would clash with him — often stridently — when their reading of the options available was so diametrically at variance with those of their supreme commander, and where the orders he emitted seemed to them so plainly militarily suicidal. They were also, however, schooled in obedience to orders of a superior; and Hitler was head of state, head of the armed forces, and since 1941 — disastrously — commander-in-chief (responsible for tactical decisions) of the army. Refusal to obey was not only an act of military insubordination; it was a treasonable act of political resistance.
Few were prepared to go down that route. But loyalty even to the extent of belief in the Führer’s mission was no safeguard against dismissal if near-impossible demands were not met. In accordance with his warped logic, where ‘will’ had not triumphed, however fraught the circumstances, Hitler blamed the weakness or inadequacy of the commander. Another commander with a superior attitude, he presumed, would bring a different result — however objectively unfavourable the actual position. The commander of Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal Busch, a Hitler loyalist, correspondingly paid the price for the ‘failure’ of Army Group Centre during the onset of the Soviet offensive. He was dismissed by Hitler on 28 June, and replaced by one of his favourite commanders, the tough and energetic newly-promoted Field-Marshal Walter Model (who at the same time retained his command of Army Group North Ukraine) — dubbed by some, given the frequency with which he was charged with tackling a crisis, ‘Hitler’s fireman’.188
