Hitler takes command of the Army

On 19 December 1941 Adolf Hitler accepted the resignation of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and himself took over the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Army (Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres). He appointed no successor from among the generals: he took into his own hands the command of an army that for two weeks had been falling back under the blows of the Soviet counter-offensive at Moscow. This was more than a change of personnel. The dictator, who since February 1938 had been the direct supreme commander of the whole Wehrmacht, now also took over command of the largest of its services, the one bearing the main burden of the war.

It is often written that Hitler became “supreme commander of the German army”. Some accounts state that he then took personal command of the entire Wehrmacht. That is inaccurate: he had been supreme commander of the armed forces as head of state since 1934, and he had taken direct command of the Wehrmacht in February 1938. What was added in December 1941 was command of the Army – a post that had until then stood as an intermediate level between him and the generals.

Brauchitsch and Hitler

Brauchitsch had become Commander-in-Chief of the Army on 4 February 1938, after the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, in which Hitler rid himself of the war minister and of the previous commander of the army. That same day saw the abolition of the War Ministry and the creation of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), headed by General Wilhelm Keitel and directly subordinate to Hitler. From the outset, then, the High Command of the Army (OKH) had to share its influence with the dictator’s own military staff.

Brauchitsch was a capable officer, but he could not stand up to Hitler. In November 1939, when he tried to dissuade him from an offensive in the West, he was berated so severely that he never made a similar attempt again. Hitler claimed the victories in Poland, France and the Balkans for himself. In the summer of 1941 Brauchitsch and the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, wanted to drive straight on Moscow, but the dictator sent Guderian’s tanks into Ukraine. More and more often he issued orders to army group commanders over the head of the OKH, and Brauchitsch became a mere transmitter of his decisions. In November 1941 he suffered a heart attack. According to those around him, he asked several times to be relieved, especially after a stormy conversation on 30 November in which Hitler held him responsible for the retreat on the southern part of the front.

The December crisis

At the turn of November and December 1941 the plan to defeat the USSR in a single campaign collapsed. In the south the Red Army recaptured Rostov, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had fallen back to the Mius against Hitler’s wishes, lost his command on the night of 30 November–1 December. At Moscow the November offensive of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre stalled on the approaches to the capital, and on 5 December the Soviet counter-offensive began. In frosts that in the first days of December reached thirty-odd degrees below zero, exhausted German divisions without winter equipment abandoned their weapons and fell back from Kalinin, Tula and Yelets. In the north the Germans lost Tikhvin on 9 December.

On 8 December Hitler signed Directive No. 39, which, because of the “surprisingly early winter”, ordered the troops along the entire Eastern Front to go over to the defensive. The retreat, however, was slipping out of control. In those same days the war widened: after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on 11 December. Hitler was convinced that the generals had lost their nerve and that only his will could hold the army together. On 16 December by telephone, and on 18 December in writing, he forbade Army Group Centre to make any major withdrawals. The troops were to offer “fanatical resistance” in the positions they held, regardless of breakthroughs on their flanks and in their rear. This was the so-called stand-fast order (Haltebefehl).

Bock, who had long complained of stomach trouble, asked for sick leave in mid-December. Hitler agreed on 18 December, and the next day command of Army Group Centre passed to the commander of the 4th Army, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge.

19 December

Brauchitsch, who had spent recent weeks shuttling between Hitler’s headquarters and the staffs at the front, became a convenient scapegoat. Hitler accepted his resignation – which, according to most accounts, he had in principle already accepted a few days earlier – and on 19 December announced that he was taking over command of the Army himself. In a proclamation to the soldiers of the Army and the Waffen-SS, published in the press over the following days, he explained that the war was entering its decisive phase and that he had therefore decided, as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, to place himself at the head of the Army. Officially Brauchitsch was leaving for reasons of health. In private conversations Hitler blamed him for the defeat at Moscow and called him a vain and cowardly man.

Halder, who remained in his post as Chief of the Army General Staff, recorded after the war a remark that Hitler is said to have made to him at the time: “Anyone can do this little bit of operational command. The task of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army is to educate the army in the National Socialist spirit.” These words are known only from Halder’s account, but they capture well the dictator’s attitude towards professional officers.

From then on the Army General Staff was directly subordinate to Hitler. Halder briefed him daily on the situation on the Eastern Front, and Hitler himself decided on the movements of armies, and often of divisions too. The administrative matters that had belonged to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army were taken over largely by Keitel, while the Replacement Army at home continued to be run by General Friedrich Fromm. In time a division of labour took shape in which the OKH was responsible for the Eastern Front and General Alfred Jodl’s OKW for the other theatres of war. Between these two staffs there was no one but Hitler.

The style of command changed as well. The daily situation conferences at headquarters, at which Hitler heard reports from the front, became the place where the fate of corps, and even of individual regiments, was decided. Army group commanders, who had until then enjoyed freedom of action within general directives, now had to ask permission for every significant withdrawal, and situation reports went through Halder straight to the dictator. The German tradition of mission command, in which the superior set the objective and the subordinate chose the means himself, gave way to detailed orders from a headquarters hundreds of kilometres from the battlefield. In the Battle of Moscow, which went on into January, Hitler directed the army himself for the first time, and the way he did it became the pattern for the rest of the war.

The purge of the high command

Brauchitsch’s departure was part of a wider purge. After Rundstedt and Bock came the turn of the commander of the 2nd Panzer Army, General Heinz Guderian. Since the beginning of December Guderian had been pulling his divisions back from Tula; he quarrelled with Kluge, and on 20 December he flew to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia to persuade him to allow a withdrawal to a winter line. He failed. When he went on retreating over the following days, Kluge demanded his dismissal, and on the night of 25–26 December Hitler transferred him to the reserve; the army was taken over by General Rudolf Schmidt. On 29 December in the Crimea General Hans von Sponeck, commander of XLII Army Corps, faced with the Soviet landing at Feodosia, ordered the evacuation of the Kerch Peninsula on his own authority. He was relieved, and in January 1942 a court martial presided over by Hermann Göring sentenced him to death; Hitler commuted the sentence to fortress imprisonment.

The purge continued in January 1942. On 8 January Hitler expelled from the army the commander of the 4th Panzer Army, General Erich Hoepner, who had withdrawn his troops against orders; he stripped him of the right to wear uniform and of his pension. In mid-January the commander of the 9th Army, General Adolf Strauss, was relieved and replaced by General Walter Model. On 16 January Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb stepped down after asking in vain for permission to withdraw his troops from Demyansk; Army Group North was taken over by Georg von Küchler. Within a few weeks several dozen corps and division commanders also lost their posts. Hitler was not consistent in this: after the sudden death of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau in January 1942, he put Bock at the head of Army Group South.

Halder’s role was ambiguous. In his diary the Chief of the General Staff criticised Hitler’s amateurism and made no secret of regarding many of his orders as mistaken. At the same time he did not follow Brauchitsch out of office but stayed in his post, convinced that only in this way could he save anything. In the first weeks it was he who conveyed the dictator’s will to the front and enforced the ban on retreat.

The dispute over the stand-fast order

The front of Army Group Centre did not collapse. The Germans fell back 100–250 kilometres, but in January 1942 they halted the Red Army on a line that they held for the following year. Hitler took this as proof of his genius: from then on he was convinced that in a critical situation it was enough to forbid retreat, and that the generals always exaggerated the danger. Some German generals admitted after the war that the order had saved the army from the fate of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812. Other historians point out that it cost many divisions, bled white in worthless positions, and that the front stabilised also because the Soviet offensive, dispersed by Stalin along too many axes, ran out of strength on its own.

Place in the war

Taking command of the Army completed a process that had begun in 1938: the generals lost their influence over the conduct of the war, and Hitler became at one and the same time head of state, party leader, supreme commander of the Wehrmacht and commander of its main force. The lesson of the winter of 1941–1942 – that it was enough to hold on at any cost – weighed on the years that followed. In 1942 Hitler also personally commanded Army Group A in the Caucasus for more than two months; in September he dismissed Halder and replaced him with General Kurt Zeitzler, and at Stalingrad he forbade the 6th Army to break out of encirclement. Successive bans on retreat cost the Germans whole armies.

Some of the generals dismissed in the winter of 1941 ended up on the other side. Hoepner, involved in the military conspiracy, was executed after the 20 July 1944 plot, and Kluge, who had known of the conspiracy, committed suicide in August 1944. Sponeck was shot after the assassination attempt without a new sentence. Brauchitsch was never given another post and died in British captivity in 1948. Hitler remained Commander-in-Chief of the Army until his suicide on 30 April 1945.