... These meetings were monuments to time wasting and irrelevance such as few cabinets can ever have had. They would go on for hours at a time, a grotesque mixture of discussion on high policy interspersed with trivial interjections when Hitler aired his knowledge of individual weapon performances, or gave the minutest examination to some local deployment or reminiscence about the triumphs or sins and omissions of years gone by. The transcripts frequently make bizarre reading, filled as they are with the phobias of Nazidom in its dying throes. The rise and fall of voices is lost in flat transcript, but the provocation of the Amy by Hitler and his adherents stands out along, somewhat astonishingly, with Gudarian's patient and persistent efforts to guide the discussion back to essentials. Warlimont quotes, with italicised comments of his own, an attempt by Guderian to have implemented, in September, a ruling by Hitler in July that the Navy, Air Force and civil authorities should relinquish badly needed lorries to the panzer divisions.

Guderian: All that's necessary is for the Reichsmarschall to give his agreement.
Hitler: I am giving the agreement now. We have got a Defence Staff. We have got an organisation the envy of every country in the world, OKW. No one else has such a thing. It hasn't been much talked about merely because the Amy Staff didn't like it.
Keitel: (as usual using stronger words to express the same idea): Has in fact fought hard against it!
Hitler: (taking up Keitel's expression): Has in fact fought hard against it! After we had fought for years to get this organisation.
Guderian: Air Fleet 3 has such a large number of lorries.
Thomale: We must flush them out.
Kreipe: (Chief of Staff Luftwaffe): We've already lost so many using them on Amy jobs (refuses).

By the first week in January, when Hitler still persisted in trying to revive the offensive in the West and incontrovertible evidence accrued of an imminent Russian offensive, the tone of the meetings deteriorated. In an effort to achieve the essential concentration of resources along Germany's eastern frontier, Guderian doggedly endured the conferences, entering into asperity only when the main issue was under consideration or when the welfare of officers and soldiers was being harmed. He visited the fronts to gather a consensus of Army Commanders' opinions and from these drew the conclusion that the war was hopelessly lost. Not only was Germany overwhelmingly outnumbered but 'We had neither commanders nor troops of the 1940 quality any more ...' On January 9th he resolved upon a show-down and produced a detailed intelligence report that proved beyond doubt the imminence of the Russian offensive and the impossible odds mounting against the German Amy in the East. Hitler lost his temper and rejected the report, declaring that the man who made it, General Gehlen, was a lunatic and should be shut up in an asylum. Guderian says that he, too, lost his temper and told Hitler that Gehlen was '... one of my very best Gentral Staff officers ... If you want General Gehlen sent to a lunatic asylum then you had better have me certified as well'. He refused to sack Gehlen and the row subsided. But Gehlen's conclusions were not converted into remedial action so that, when the Russians attacked three days later (precisely as Gehlen and Guderian had predicted), there was another disaster among troops whose deployment Hitler had refused to change to meet the conditions. At the end of the conference Hitler had once more tried to placate Guderian with soft words of gratitude and flattery, but these no longer availed. Guderian says that be told the Führer, 'The Eastern Front is like a house of cards. If the front is broken through at one point the rest will collapse ...' And so it proved to be, though it would probably have happened whether or not reinforcements had arrived from the west.

Disaster at the front impelled, all too late, the counter measures which should already have been taken. Either reinforcements were tardily moved to localities where the situation was out of control, or transferred by Hitler to places where they were least required. The Sixth SS Panzer Army was sent from the Ardennes to Hungary, there to be wasted as yet another diversion of strength on a front of lesser importance. This made it all the easier for the Russians to take Warsaw and flood through Poland and East Prussia, their spearheads thrusting towards Deipenhof where Gretel persisted to the last minute in her attempts to ran the farm. Guderian was driven to distraction, but protest and intrigue were the only levers remaining since real power was long ago lost. When he confronted Jodl and angrily pointed out, for the umpteenth time, the iniquities of Hitlerian strategy, all that officer did was shrug his shoulders. Jodl, too, was baffled and must surely have realised the hopelessness of it all when, on 21st January, Himmler was given command of Amy Group Vistula.

The depths to which debate in council had descended - if that is the way to describe fiery protests against intransigence - reached rock bottom in February when Guderian once more tried to persuade Hitler that the forces locked up in Kurland must be withdrawn by sea. Prior to the meeting he had taken a few drinks with the Japanese Ambassador. Speer, who was present, takes up the story:

'Hitler disagreed ... Guderian did not give in, Hitler insisted, the tone sharpened, and finally Guderian opposed Hitler with an openness unprecedented in this circle, probably fired by the drinks he had had at Oshima's, he threw aside all inhibitions. With flashing eyes and the hairs of his moustache literally standing on end, he stood facing Hitler across the marble table. Hitler too had risen to his feet.

'"It's simply our duty to save these people and we still have time to remove them!" Guderian cried out in a challenging voice.

'Infuriated, Hitler retorted: "You are going to fight there. We cannot give up these areas!"

'Guderian held firm: "But it's useless to sacrifice men in this senseless way", he shouted. "It's high time! We must evacuate these soldiers, at once!"

'What no one had thought possible now happened. Hitler appeared visibly intimidated by this assault. Strictly speaking he really could not tolerate this insubordination which was more a matter of Guderian's tone than his arguments. But to my astonishment Hitler shifted to military arguments ... for the first time matters had come in an open quarrel in the larger circle. New worlds had opened out ... '

But Hitler did not alter his decision. A week later battle was joined once more over the marble table, this time in connection with a quick counter-attack which Guderian deemed it was essential Himmler's Army Group Vistula should make. Himmler wished to postpone the attack, pleading shortage of fuel and ammunition. Guderian felt convinced that this was merely an excuse to hide the incompetence of Himmler and his inexperienced SS Chief of Staff. This time, however, he was doing far more than arguing for the saving of life or for an operational expedient. He was standing firm against the principle of SS men taking charge in the Army's province. The row developed over a petty wrangle concerning Himmler's competence, as Guderian stated his demand that Wenck should be attached to Himmler's staff' '... so that he may ensure that the operations are competently carried out'. For two hours Hitler, in a fury, resisted, while Guderian, apparently stimulated as well as calmed by having provoked the Führer into losing his temper, kept his - and won.

It was, as he wrote in Panzer Leader, 'The last battle I was to won'. The attack, launched by Wenck on 16th February, enjoyed initial success, but on the 17th, after Wenck was seriously injured in a car accident, the momentum was lost. Wenck's replacement, Generalleutnant Hans Krebs, was of lower quality, lacking in high command experience and the sort of creature Hitler preferred to employ. He was thus a natural choice for Burgdorf. But the loss of Wenck came as hard blow to Guderian though, in the final analysis of doom, it was of little account. Such rare accomplishments as came to his credit, like the attachment of Wenck to Himmler, were ephemeral and rapidly made negative: always he was engaged in the attempted reversal of bad measures without the privilege of initiating constructive ones. But the spectacle of an Army Chief of Staff at last meeting the Führer's fire with fire of greater heat inevitably raises the questions as to what might have happened if, in 1938 -or even so late as 1940 - Beck or Halder had employed similar methods? Or what might have been the result if Guderian, in the mood of 1945, had been made Chief of Staff in 1938, as unbased rumour suggested might have happened? Or supposing Below and Stauffenberg had succeeded in 1941? At last it had been demonstrated, in the eleventh hour, that Hitler could be overborn. In that case, might he not earlier have been overthrown by men of implacable determination and personality? All too obviously the scrupulous Prussian soldiers had never been a match for unscrupulous Nazi cold-bloodedness: an established system of disciplined ruthlessness had fallen victim to anarchic, modem gangsterism.

True to his conclusions that the war was lost, Guderian, in collaboration with Speer, opened a defective campaign to limit its effects on Germany, and a major effort to bring it to an end with the connivance of anybody else in the Nazi hierarchy who might help. Speer's efforts to circumvent the programme of industrial destruction which Hitler wished to wreak upon the German homeland and economy was of only marginal use: what damage he managed to prevent with the aid of all manner of military and civil leaders was as nothing to the destruction wrought by the enemy who bombed, shelled and burnt at will - and often without discretion. Likewise Guderian's efforts to restrict the demolition of bridges and communications were doomed to failure. So, too, were his diplomatic advances, though these are a revealing commentary on Government circles and his own disenchanted and sulphurous attitude to those in power.

On 25th January he had a private meeting with the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to whom he described in detail the hopeless state of military affairs along with the recommendation that they jointly see Hitler and propose the initiation of steps for an armistice. Ribbentrop dared not face the Führer with such a request. Moreover, although Ribbentrop asked Guderian not to mention their talk to Hitler, he at once wrote the Führer a memorandum explaining what had taken place. Guderian comments, 'So much the better', One more row in the midst of so many was of little importance to him, as the record shows. Almost recklessly, day by day at every opportunity, he was attacking Hitler and his systems as well as pleading for Army officers who had been demoted to the ranks for some petty indiscretion. These were attacks upon Hitler's kind of Reich: for himself he did not care any longer; in loyalty to his subordinates he was unbending.

Guderian: Table of Content

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