As in France, Germans too associated traditional military glory with generals; but the circumstances of war and politics were meanwhile radically transformed. During the last two years of the war, Germany was largely controlled by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, whose “silent dictatorship” combined tradition and modernity. Seen by the conservatives after the fall of the monarchy as an ersatz Kaiser, Hindenburg had the same predilection as Petain to “make a gift of his person” by offering himself as Germany’s savior in time of war and crisis, even if it meant returning from retirement on the brink of senility. But unlike Petain, his paternalism was geared to conquest and expansion, not to preventing yet another slaughter. Nor was he a soldiers’ general; to the contrary, he helped launch the career of the man he derisively called the “Bohemian corporal,” who personified the frontline soldier yet eventually became supreme commander of the army. Moreover, Petain had no Ludendorff at his side—for Ludendorff was a man who formulated and strove to implement the concept of total war on the military, political, psychological, and economic fronts during World War I (ultimately articulated in his 1935 book, Total War), along with such officers as General Wilhelm Groener and Colonel Max Bauer. Both a relentless technician and a political extremist, Ludendorff made up for the qualities lacking in Hindenburg, behind whose stature as Prussian warlord he devised modern warfare. It is no coincidence that Ludendorff appears again on the scene during Hitler’s Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 (in which he showed more courage than his Nazi colleagues). For him war was destiny, all encompassing and unavoidable, but rather than a mythical, chivalrous encounter, it had to be waged by mobilizing all the energy and organizational sophistication of the modern industrial state. Behind him was a younger generation of gifted staff officers who emerged in the 1930s as Hitler’s generals. Professional, modern in outlook, and ruthless, these men were dedicated to making a new kind of war that would reverse the outcome of 1914—18 and reconceptualize the relationship between war and the state. And behind them was an even younger group of men, many of whom had missed service in the war, who became the chief organizers of the Nazi police state and the genocide of the Jews, both of which they deemed an essential component of winning the next war.
To be sure, World War I had produced a whole crop of young officers devoted to designing a new type of modern, violent, and decisive warfare: De Gaulle in France, Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller in Britain, M. N. Tukhachevskii in the Soviet Union, and Guilio Douhet in Italy. To some extent, this seemed a reasonable reaction to the terrible stalemate on the Western Front. Indeed, along with the expanded use of aircraft and armor, new strategies and tactics were already being developed and partly employed in the latter phases of the war. These included Ludendorff s infiltration tactics, using storm battalions (of which Junger was a member) that prefigured future elite units, Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s similar offensive tactics, and Fuller’s brilliant though unrealized “Plan 1919,” which in many ways heralded the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg strategy twenty years later. But in Germany the notion of combining new strategies with a total reorganization of state and society went much further, thanks to the traditionally greater role of the army in politics and the continuing influence of military elites in the Weimar Republic, the intellectual glorification and aestheticization of battle, the powerful urge to reverse the humiliating outcome of the war, and the rampant extremism and violence of the republic’s early and final years. The progression from Alfred von Schlieffen’s concept of a Vernichtungsschlacht (battle of annihilation) in the early 1900s to the realities ofVernichtungskrieg (war of extermination) in the 1940s was neither inevitable nor, in retrospect, entirely fortuitous. The German concept of war as an exercise in total destruction emanated from a complex of ideas about the relationship between the individual and the collective; it postulated the militarization of society and the organization of the state as a tool for waging war. Such ideas were not foreign to other countries. But in the initial phases of World War II, the Nazi state and the Wehrmacht employed them better than anyone else. By the end of the war, however, all major combatant nations had learned the rules of total destruction. The Third Reich was crushed by enemies who had acquired its own methods of waging war, and if they did not match the Nazi dedication to extermination, they could muster far greater resources of men and materiel. The devastation of Europe and the murder of millions of citizens was testimony to the triumph of the new concept of war.
The Nazis gave the veterans a new sense of pride in the war they had lost and promised those who had missed the fighting their share of glory in a future struggle that would make Germany great again. Much as racist and eugenicist ideas were crucial to its ideology, Nazism must be viewed within the context of the war’s traumatizing effects as well as with the notion of the “new man” that sprouted out of the trenches. All other attempts to endow the carnage of 1914-18 with a higher meaning were ultimately appropriated and put to political use by the Nazis, and no one was more adept at this than Hitler. For millions of Germans, Hitler came to symbolize the unknown soldier of World War I. It is no coincidence that during World War II he donned a simple uniform rather than fabricating an elaborate generalissimo’s costume, thereby underlining his affinity with the Frontschweine (“grunts”) on the line. Hitler was the soldier who had come back from the dead, from anonymity and oblivion, from neglect and abandonment. What Hindenburg failed to understand was that this contemptible corporal represented for innumerable forgotten soldiers the kind of leader who knew what they had been through, spoke their language (admittedly with an Austrian accent), shared their phobias and prejudices, and yet proved that it was possible to survive, rise to prominence, and ultimately wreak vengeance on all those foreign and domestic enemies at the root of the inexplicable catastrophe that had deprived their sacrifice and devotion of all sense and meaning. It was the Fuhrer who resurrected Germany’s fields of glory by personifying the forgotten soldier and acting out his rage and frustration.