Guderian becomes Inspector General of Armoured Troops

On 1 March 1943 Colonel General Heinz Guderian took up the newly created post of Inspector General of Armoured Troops (Generalinspekteur der Panzertruppen). The order – or, more precisely, the service instruction defining his powers – had been signed by Adolf Hitler on 28 February; from 1 March Guderian formally held his new office. The general, who had been removed from the front more than a year earlier for an unauthorised withdrawal, was returning to favour at a moment when the German armoured arm was going through its deepest crisis since the start of the war.

A general in reserve

Guderian was the best-known German armoured commander of the early years of the war: in September 1939 his corps cut across Pomerania, in May 1940 it broke through the front at Sedan, and in 1941 his Panzer Group 2, later the Second Panzer Army, advanced via Smolensk and Kiev as far as Tula. In December 1941, during the Soviet counter-offensive in the Battle of Moscow, he withdrew his troops against the orders of Hitler, who had forbidden any retreat. He also quarrelled with the commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. On 25 December 1941 he was relieved of his command and transferred to the Führer reserve.

For the next fourteen months he remained without a posting. He suffered from heart trouble, lived in Berlin and sought to return to service, keeping up contacts with people in Hitler’s entourage, above all with his chief military adjutant, General Rudolf Schmundt. The situation changed at the turn of 1942 and 1943. The end of the Battle of Stalingrad cost the Wehrmacht the whole of the Sixth Army, and in the winter fighting on the Don and the Donets the panzer divisions suffered enormous losses. At the beginning of 1943 many of them had only a dozen or a few dozen serviceable tanks. There was a shortage of men, of spare parts and of unified direction: tank matters were handled simultaneously by the Army General Staff (OKH) under General Kurt Zeitzler, by the Replacement Army, by the ordnance offices and by Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry. Among armoured officers the conviction was growing that the arm had to be rebuilt under the direction of someone who knew what he was doing and had Hitler’s ear.

The meeting at Vinnytsia

In mid-February 1943 Schmundt told Guderian that Hitler wanted to entrust him with the armoured forces. According to German studies, the conversation with the adjutant took place on 20 February; Guderian himself, in his memoirs, dated it a few days earlier and described 20 February as the day of his meeting with Hitler at his field headquarters near Vinnytsia in Ukraine. Hitler is said to have admitted that there had been misunderstandings between them in 1941 and assured him that it was precisely Guderian he now needed. Guderian set conditions: he was to be directly subordinate to Hitler, not to the Chief of the General Staff or the commander of the Replacement Army, and to have real influence over the development and production of armoured vehicles and over the training and organisation of units.

Hitler accepted most of these demands. The service instruction of 28 February stated in its first article that the Inspector General was responsible to him for developing the armoured forces in a manner befitting their “decisive importance for the war”. Article 7 authorised him to issue binding instructions to all army agencies in matters within his remit. Guderian was given the powers of an army commander, and his authority covered the training, organisation, doctrine and replacements of the army’s armoured units and, in matters of organisation and training, also the armoured formations of the Waffen-SS and the Luftwaffe. The armoured schools and replacement units were placed under him, as were the reconnaissance and anti-tank troops. He did not, however, succeed in taking over the assault artillery: the StuG III assault guns, at the time among the Wehrmacht’s most effective weapons, remained with the artillery, which Guderian regarded as a serious mistake.

The Inspector General’s staff was housed in the Bendlerblock in Berlin. Its chief was Colonel Wolfgang Thomale, and the Inspector of Armoured Troops subordinate to Guderian was General Heinrich Eberbach. The inspectorate sent so-called travelling officers to the front to assess the technical state and manpower of the divisions on the spot. On 25 March the existing branch known as the “mobile troops” (Schnelle Truppen) was renamed the “armoured troops” (Panzertruppe).

Tanks, Panthers and Tigers

Guderian took office just as German tank production was switching to new designs. The heavy PzKpfw VI Tiger tanks had been fighting since the autumn of 1942 near Leningrad and in Tunisia, but they were being produced in small numbers. The medium PzKpfw V Panther, Germany’s answer to the Soviet T-34, was just entering series production and suffered from numerous teething troubles, especially with its engine, transmission and running gear. In January 1943 Hitler had approved a programme prepared by Speer’s ministry which provided for a manifold increase in the production of armoured vehicles.

At his first major conference with Hitler, at Vinnytsia on 9 March, Guderian presented his programme for 1943–1944. He proposed that in 1943 a limited number of panzer divisions should be brought back to full fighting strength and used only for attacks with limited objectives, while the forces for large-scale operations should be built up for 1944. He insisted that production of the proven PzKpfw IV, which was to remain the mainstay of the divisions’ equipment, should not be halted until the Panther had been perfected. It was also at this conference that his attempt to take over the assault guns failed.

On production matters Guderian established a good working relationship with Speer, who likewise favoured concentrating on simpler, proven types and increasing the number of vehicles produced. In 1943 German output of tanks and armoured guns rose markedly, though far less than planned, and it fell well short of Soviet and American production. The inspectorate also dealt with crew training, manuals, replacements and equipment repair – matters less spectacular than command at the front, but decisive in determining whether the rebuilt divisions would be fit to fight.

The dispute over the summer offensive

The key question of the spring of 1943 was what to do with the armoured forces being rebuilt. After Erich von Manstein’s counter-offensive the front stabilised, leaving a large Soviet salient around Kursk. The Army High Command under Zeitzler prepared an attack on this salient, which was given the code name Citadel. According to his post-war memoirs, Guderian opposed it from the outset. At a conference in Munich on 3–4 May he and Speer warned that the new tanks were not ready and that the losses in attacking heavily fortified positions would be enormous. On 10 May he is said to have asked Hitler why attack in the east at all that year, and the dictator is said to have replied that whenever he thought of the operation his stomach turned over.

Historians treat this account with caution. The German scholar Markus Pöhlmann points out that it is difficult to reconcile with contemporary sources: Joseph Goebbels noted that, during a visit to him on 6 March 1943, Guderian had called for forces to be concentrated in one place in case of a new summer offensive against the Soviet Union. What is certain is that Guderian did not have the decisive voice in the matter – he was subordinate to Hitler, but he neither held a field command nor ran the General Staff, with which he frequently clashed.

Place in the war

Guderian’s appointment showed how much importance Hitler attached to the armoured forces after Stalingrad: they were to bring Germany one more great victory in the east. According to some historians, the Inspector General’s sweeping powers quickly improved the organisation and training of the armoured troops, but at the same time further fragmented the army’s leadership – yet another general had direct access to Hitler and his own opinions in disputes over strategy.

The panzer divisions, rebuilt with great difficulty and equipped among other things with the first Panthers and Tigers, were thrown into the Battle of Kursk in July 1943. The offensive collapsed, and the losses in men and equipment wrecked the plan to create a strong armoured reserve. From then on the Wehrmacht in the east was purely on the defensive. Guderian remained Inspector General until the end of the war, and after the attempt on Hitler’s life of 20 July 1944 he also took on the duties of Chief of the Army General Staff.