HITLER AND THE GENERALS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 918, 15 March 1957, Page 13

HITLER AND THE GENERALS

THE FATAL DECISIONS, edited by William Richardson and Seymour Freidin; Michael Joseph, English price 25/-. IX accounts by six German generals of phases of World War II, in which they played a leading part form the subject matter of this book. It has an introduction by Cyril Falls; and a commentary by General Siegfried Westphal, Chief of Staff to Commander-in-Chief West, explains the background of each campaign described, and _ synthesises events in their proper sequence. The generals are at one in bitterly resenting Hitler’s interference. He clung

with fanatical obstinacy to the maxim that no German army should ever surrender an inch of conquered territory. On one occasion, at least, his judgment proved to be correct — as General Blumentritt is honest enough to confess

-when he ordered the Fourth Army, checked before Moscow in the winter of 1941, to hold its ground rather than retreat under conditions that would certainly have brought about its ,destruction. But on the whole the consensus of opinion expressed in these pages shows Hitler to have been a disastrous liability. His obsession for standing firm was a harassing impediment to manoeuvre after El Alamein and during the Normandy landings, but at Stalingrad it was manifested in a form that verged on lunacy according to General Kurt Zeitzler, Chief of the Army General Staff, whose account of that campaign is, to my mind, the outstanding one of the series. Avoiding undue preoccupation with the cetails of battle and manoeuvre Zeitzler describes his persistent but abortive efforts to obtain Hitler’s permission, first for the Sixth Army-sto retreat, and later on for it to make an attempt to break out of its encirclement. With the inevitability of a Greek tragedy the story approaches its climax as time after time the general pleads with his hysterical leader. "Hitler lost his temper again and again, and began to interrupt, but I went on: "*There is, therefore, only one possible solution. You must immediately order the Stalingrad army to turn about and attack westwards. . .’" "Hitler now lost all self-control. He crashed his first down on the table, shouting: "JT won’t leave the Volga! I won’t go back from the Volga!’" — One may question the suitability of this book’s title. The six decisions herein described did not, as Westphal points out, "turn assured German victory into certain cefeat." The primarily fatal decision was made by Hitler in

1939.

R. M.

Burdon