The German campaign in Russia 1941-1943

By Gustavo Uruena a

As a German historian recently remarked, for Germany Adolf Hitler was the "off-spring," the outstanding legacy, of World War I, and no one doubts that.1 He himself started his political career in 1919 in the wake of a lost war and the crushing peace of Versailles. That treaty reduced Germany's territory by 14 percent and its population by 6.5 million citizens. It created for Germany large minorities outside its new borders and for the time being an unlimited reparations liability.2 Hitler's rise to dictatorship is unthinkable without the humiliation and misery that resulted for the German people out of their defeat. And still: was he bound to become the war's nemesis in destroying the Weimar Republic? This article thus asks the question whether Hitler's rise to power from Germany's defeat to the proclamation of the Third Reich was inevitable. For that purpose the ways in which Germans tried to come to terms with their defeat and the war's legacies will be discussed. As an illustration the article focuses on two highly popular political doctrines, both legacies of the war of its own-both in different ways denying the hopelessness of Germany's military situation at the end of the war. These were: (1) the doctrine of the so-called "stab-in-the-back" (Dolchstoss); and (2) the doctrine of the so-called "war guilt lie" (Kriegsschuldlge). At its conclusion, this analysis will raise the question as to whether Hitler's exploitation of these two doctrines immediately led to his dictatorship.(1) The stab-in-the-back doctrine first was foreshadowed, when, on October 3, 1918, the German government requested an armistice with the Allies and peace negotiations on the basis of the peace program that President Woodrow Wilson had propagated. To the German public this move was an absolutely shattering surprise. Until then the German High Command had failed to admit the increasing seriousness of Germany's military position resulting from strategic overstretch and military exhaustion.3 Instead, all the public had perceived was that the German troops fighting in France had protected them against the direct experience of war and that in the East Germany's predominance extended as far as the Caucasus Mountains. How then could Germany's bid be explained?4 Could it be that the million-fold sacrifice of lives had been in vain? The gap that throughout the war had yawned between far-flung popular hopes and the grim military reality thus deepened even further. Other, non military reasons, it was believed, must have been behind Germany's sudden giving up. The German military command concealed what it had confessed to the political leadership in Berlin-that it feared German troops in France were on the verge of being routed. To avoid a public loss of face, it claimed that nonmilitary reasons lay behind Germany's critical military situation. Ludendorff, the de facto highest commander of Germany's troops, concocted an explanation by inventing the stab-in-the-back doctrine. Germany had sued for an armistice, he asserted in a confidential talk with his officers, because it had become impossible to continue the war. This was due to the "poison" of Marxist-Socialist propaganda that had undermined the soldiers' resolution to go on fighting and made them "unreliable," although the chances of a successful defense, if not victory, continued to be good.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1542764475
• ISBN13: 9781542764476
• Release Date: December 2016
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 668 Pages
• Weight: 2.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.5" x 6.0"