Tapping Hitler's Generals

HEIM: Could the war have been won at all, even if no military mistakes had been made? My opinion is: no. From 1941 onwards at the latest it was just as much lost as the Great War because the political aims bore no relation whatsoever to GERMANY’s military and economic possibilities.[169] The only thing HITLER’s particular method of waging war cost the German people, was millions too many people killed. That’s the only thing–the war could not be won. The remarkable thing is this, a thing about which I am always thinking: how is it that a country like GERMANY, which is situated in the middle of the continent, has not developed politics to an art, in order to maintain peace, a sensible peace, in this much more difficult situation, than, for instance, the English situation; that on both occasions we were so fatuously stupid as to think that we could challenge the world–which is of course what it eventually amounts to when the war has been lost–without seeing that that is absolutely impossible in the situation in which we find ourselves in GERMANY. What are the reasons for it? Is it lack of political understanding, is it lack of political experience–I am no politician, I am no historian, I don’t know, I only see the question. We never could have won the war. Only in my opinion this method of conducting the war cost us millions too many lives, and secondly the complete plundering and looting of GERMANY in all directions. Had the war been conducted differently, it might have lasted another six months or a year but the outcome would have been exactly the same.

The Russians are excellent soldiers. Even FREDERICK THE GREAT admired their toughness.[170] I have seen various Russian Generals being interrogated; they included the most varied types. Young men between 30 and 40, for instance, who were originally labourers at MOSCOW and who then attended these military academies and were trained there, men with plenty of brains and sense, extremely clever. Others, the older ones, whose roots go back to the Czarist time, who were young men at that time and were then taken over. They were more or less people who were good soldiers, but who were not Communists at all at heart, whereas these young people were out-and-out Bolshevists, they made no bones about it, on the contrary, and one must admit that the Russians are extraordinarily quick to learn. They have learnt a tremendous amount from all the fighting, from all the campaigns in FRANCE etc., and knew how to pass on to the officer corps quickly the lessons they had learned from the fighting, and then gradually, under the very strict and energetic leadership of STALIN, got things so much in hand in time, that, together with their material superiority–for you must never forget that RUSSIA only had a war on one front, and that she was able to turn her whole military might towards the West–so at the same time as our warfare was becoming more and more stupid, they finally gained superiority, and then got on not only through this superiority, but then undoubtedly also very ably commanded in the course of the years 1942, 1943 and 1944.[171] I am convinced that if their command had been as good in the winter of 1941/42 as it was later, there would probably have been a collapse on the Eastern Front then. The fact that we did succeeding holding them up on the Eastern Front was on the one hand due to HITLER and the brute-force which he brought to bear behind the front with this victory slogan: ‘Hold out at all cost’–and on the other hand it was perfectly clear that the Russian command from top to bottom didn’t quite recognise their big chance or see the big gaps there which could have been taken advantage of by quick action.

The Russians did not carry our a ‘Blitzkrieg’ quite to extremes. They adopted a great many things we used in our ‘Blitzkrieg’: the use of tank corps, the idea of large encircling movements, the formation of pockets etc., they adopted those, but in contrast to us they were commanded in a much more reasonable, substantial way, and did not set themselves such enormous aims[172] which were fulfilled in FRANCE in a way which no soldier would have believed possible. That was one of HITLER’s ideas,[173] and he was right about it. The Russians took from us the idea of fighting with large tank armies, and how to carry out large outflanking movement, but they did it more slowly and carefully; with us it always immediately overran all bounds and that was because HITLER’s ideas were always like that: in FRANCE he was right, in RUSSIA he made the fundamental mistake of thinking that it was only necessary to attack the enemy properly and penetrate his front, and that we should then have more or less complete freedom of movement. In FRANCE that was the case![174]