Eine Geschichte des Grossdeutsches Reich - Germany/Road to Doom's Day

Reader poll - coda for the war years, or on to the after-war years? Be warned, after-war is probably going to start with an analysis of the Reich's internal politics over the course of the war, so either way, you're looking at a couple fairly dry posts (though frankly, I think the pre-game work on this AAR's still the best part).

7. The War Years: Conclusion

On March 1, 1948, the return of soldiers from Britain and Africa began in earnest. The British government was sufficiently stable to allow Reich troops to begin withdrawing to the mainland; however, this was not, as many had hoped, for immediate demobilization. The Fuehrer had decided to preserve Germany's military at a high state of establishment. Privately, he pointed out that the number of generals was rapidly eclipsing the number of divisions - drawing divisions down to cadre was fine in theory, but the officers needed men to lead.

He himself did little to stem the tide of promotion: the victory parade celebrating the destruction of the Western Powers began at the Garrison Church in Potsdam, where fifteen years prior, the Fuehrer had spoken to the Reichstag beside President Hindenburg, and stretched all the way to Berlin's Olympic Stadium - an unimaginably long distance of thirty kilometers' march, with the lead units departing the Garrison Church the night prior by torchlight and arriving at the stadium as the sun rose. The parade dwarfed the previous million-man Sowjet victory parade. At its culmination, in another torchlit ceremony, the Fuehrer celebrated the British victory by naming another forty-three Reichsheer and Waffen-SS field marshals, thirteen grand admirals, and two air marshals. The Fuehrer had, in fifteen years, created half as many marshals as in all German history prior to his rise. The marshals thus created were decorated as lavishly as they had been promoted, with the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross being awarded for the first time under the new Reich. The awardees were:

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt (Poland, 1937)
Field Marshal Fedor von Bock (Russia, 1942)
Field Marshal Julius Ringel (Russia, 1943)
Hauptgruppenfuehrer Paul Hausser (Scandinavia, 1943)
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (Italy, 1946)
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (France, 1947)
Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (Britain, 1948)
Field Marshal Walter Model (Egypt, 1948)
Field Marshal Heinz Guderian (India, 1948)

It was an illustrious list, to be sure, but there remained the problem of peacetime employment both of these men and their armies. It was a problem which Germany had given little consideration to, outside of certain offices of the SS, including the Reich Settlement Main Office, which fell under Heydrich's purview.

What, then, had these men accomplished? True, Germany was free of Versailles, and had revenged all of the wrongs of 1918, but new problems arose. Germany held an empire stretching pole-to-pole, and from Ghent to Grozny, an empire which even the Fuehrer was forced to admit was largely useless, assimilated mainly to discomfit the Reich's enemies. They had accomplished this through a series of daring gambles resting on the idea of reaching a goal by any means available before the defense had a chance to organize. When this plan was executed according to these principles - such as throughout the Balkans - the world considered the German army the finest in the world. In circumstances ill-fitted to the German method of waging war, such as Italy, losses on the scale of the Great War could be expected.

There were solid foundations to this method of warmaking, however. Starting in the 1930s, the German military had begun working from the premise of being badly outnumbered in any potential conflict, or of the opposition being entrenched in the world's most modern fortifications. To this end, the Reich had established its armed forces on the principle of achieving local superiority, and requiring that the Reichswehr be the best-trained, best-equipped force which it could possibly be, invoking Voltaire's maxim that "God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best." Certain weapon systems epitomized this mentality. Foremost among these was the PzKpfW V "Panther" tank.


The Panther was the foundation of the Reichsheer's armored formations from the Sowjet War to the invasion of Britain, and in the form of the Standardpanzer, it continued to serve until the early 1950s. Its success was due to a number of features, foremost of which, as with all of the German military, was crew training. Beyond excellent, well-trained vehicle crews, though, the Panther was a vehicle developed in perfect tune with the doctrine by which it was employed, and equipped to overpower any vehicle of any opposing nation. Reservations which the Reich leadership had felt regarding tanks in first Russia, then France, and finally Britain were overwhelmed by the reality of the Panther's superiority on battlefield after battlefield. Even when the Panther was poorly employed, such as in Rome or London, it is hard to imagine another armored vehicle performing the same duties as well.

The Panther's main armament was a long-barreled 75mm smoothbore cannon, the KwK42/L70, which proved capable of penetrating the armor of its most notable opponent, the much scarcer Sowjet T-34, through its glacis plate (the thick, sloped armor plate on the front of any tank) at 300 meters, and through any point in its turret armor at 2000 meters - beyond the Sowjet tanks' theoretical maximum range! An emphasis on superior gunnery in German armored crews exacerbated this problem, with men like SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Balthasar Woll, once an enlisted tank gunner with Michael Wittmann, achieving confirmed kills against the Sowjet T-34 at ranges of up to 3000 meters. This combination of crew and armament superiority partially explains why the German advance through the Sowjet Union was so rapid: the Sowjets simply did not know how to respond, and even when they were able to lure German armored forces into confrontations nominally favorable to them, the German superiority in crew training generally won out - it was an armored force, after all, which broke through the Sowjet mountaineers' defenses north of Vladivostok and linked up with General Ringel to end the Sowjet War in 1943.


Ringel's parachutists were another area in which the Reichswehr was markedly superior to any of its rivals. Though the Sowjets had pioneered the use of air-deployed soldiers in the 1930s, they had failed to grasp their significance, and only Germany had developed any significant airborne assets by the early 1940s. They were under-employed during the Reich's early wars, with a few detachments participating as regular infantry in Poland and Hungary, and launched a massive, successful invasion of Crete in 1942, but the Sowjet war truly saw them come into their own, with a mass landing along the Dnieper which allowed the rapid advance of the armored forces deep into the Ukraine. The airborne forces were continuously upgraded during the war, but generally their armament from the Sowjet War onward remained fairly constant. The average soldier was armed with an MP43 rifle or variant thereof and a sidearm, the average squad equipped with at least two disposable anti-tank rockets and two machine guns, and the average platoon equipped with a long-range radio which allowed it to contact higher artillery assets. In peacetime conditions, they thought nothing of marching upwards of fifty kilometers in a day for days on end; this paid off in circumstances such as Africa or the isolation of Vladivostok, where generals like Student and Ringel were able to persuade them to continue operations where even mechanized units would have begged for a halt.


If Germany's land forces were founded on the parachute and the Panther, the Reichsmarine rested on a tripod of battleships, aircraft carriers, and submarines, the so-called "balanced fleet" that the British had hoped to trap Germany into building so that it could be destroyed by their own home fleet. As it happened, the Fuehrer's decision to ignore the Anglo-German Naval Agreement proved prescient. It allowed the construction of more and larger vessels, and in the mid-1940s, Germany's aircraft carrier technology especially leapt forward. The primitive, flush-decked Graf Zeppelin-class carriers of the 1930s were abandoned in favor of heavier, better-equipped ships which were in turn capable of launching heavier, better-equipped aircraft, generally the Luftwaffe's hand-me-downs; naval aviation design would not become fully independent until Goering's death. In comparison, the Reichsmarine generally felt that they had a perfectly designed set of weapons in the Bismarck-class battleship and the Scharnhorst-class battlecruiser. With a few updates such as strengthened belt armor, improved fire control, and the Seetakt radar system, they remained virtually unchanged through twelve years of war. They proved themselves in engagements in the Mediterranean against the Italians, and again in the Channel against the Royal Navy, but increasingly the Reichsmarine became aware that the future of warfare rested with the carriers and, perhaps, the submarines.


The main submarine used by the Reichsmarine during the 1940s was the Type XXI U-Boat, which, unlike previous models of submarine anywhere in the world, was designed to operate submerged for its entire patrol. It operated successfully against the French Navy during the Australian handover, and even in American waters during the temporary hostilities between the United States and Germany in 1947-1948. Even more than the surface vessels, the Type XXI saw improvements over the submarines of the Great War. These improvements were partially crew comfort - a freezer, a shower, a washroom - and partially technological - advanced passive acoustic sensors, a Zuse machine in each boat, and a sophisticated loading-firing system that would allow it to fire all of its torpedo tubes in the time once required to fire a single tube. The ability to fire and flee undetected made the Type XXI an exceptionally dangerous opponent, and it would not be until the mid-1950s and the advent of nuclear power that an adequate replacement could be found.


The Luftwaffe suffered from two major drawbacks in its war planning. The first was that, unlike the Reichsheer and Reichsmarine, it was seemingly impossible for the Luftwaffe to achieve local superiority, even in the Sowjet War. Sowjet anti-aircraft guns seemingly outnumbered Sowjet tanks; even so, the Luftwaffe, not the Reichsmarine, claimed the first battleship of the war years, the Marat at Leningrad. The second deficiency was compounded by the first. Despite Goering's tremendous political influence, the clear superiority of its aircraft, and the best efforts of its officers, the Luftwaffe was never able to maintain air parity in the West, against Britain's Royal Air Force. Even during the British war, when the RAF was flying antiquated propeller-driven, cannon-armed Spitfires against the Reich's cutting-edge Kurzbogen missile-armed Me-262 jets, there were simply so many British aircraft that they could not be swept clear until the Reichsheer overran the British Isles - as General Galland exclaimed, "We have to land sometimes, and the damned Tommies are there when we do!" It was not until the postwar reforms and the "Grossere Staffel" movement, spearheaded by Galland and Field Marshal Kesselring, would establish the Luftwaffe at sufficient size that this difficulty would never again arise.

These, then, were the weapons and men who fought the wars; however, their planning processes have not been thoroughly outlined. Much has been made, especially by the British historian B.H. Liddell-Hart, of the influence of British prewar thought on German doctrine during the war years; however, this influence exists largely in the minds of Hart and his supporters. Even in Field Marshal Guderian's own writings, which Hart claims clearly show his influence, no distinct philosophy in the Clausewitzian manner emerges. What emerges is the idea of a fighting spirit, rather than a system. The foundation of this spirit is the offensive mentality, and the desire to seize any opportunity presented to achieve the objective. The momentary removal of enemy troops from one section of the line to reinforce another, for instance, may be ruthlessly exploited, such as happened in Warsaw in 1937. Similarly, on the national level, the political isolation of a small neighboring country is practically an invitation for intervention in its internal affairs by the Reich by this viewpoint.

The establishment of local superiority and the ruthless exploitation of any opportunity presented are the foundations of the offensive spirit inculcated by Guderian and his followers; however, it had its risks. A common "what if?" exercise involves the airborne forces - what if, at any point during the war, the vulnerable air transports had been intercepted by enemy aircraft? It is unlikely that they would have been able to achieve their objectives at all, and if they had, considerable loss of life would ensue. Similarly, Guderian especially was guilty of rushing forward ahead of his supporting elements and leaving himself vulnerable to encirclement and destruction. In Russia especially, units would occasionally find themselves encircled by Russian troops even as they attempted to encircle the enemy themselves.

Similar problems permeated the Reichsmarine. The achievement of local superiority could only occur in a battle such as that of the Thames by denuding Germany's entire naval frontage, and this is why subsidiary actions against the Americans were fought in Normandy-Brittany and Sicily. The Reichsmarine was capable of overwhelming any one enemy in any one location, given sufficient planning, but such success came at a steep price, which is to say the exposure of the Reich to landing anywhere else along its rather extensive coastline and the inadequate protection of the vulnerable supply convoys to Indochina and Africa.

In the 1930s and 1940s, then, German military policy was one of calculated gambling. The Fuehrer guessed, correctly as it turned out, that the Western powers would not intervene until it was too late for them to stop the eastward, northward, and southward expansion of the Reich, and his military staff followed his lead, gambling over and over again on the superiority of German arms and soldiers against a succession of opponents. If any one of those opponents had proven to be more than the Reich had been prepared to face, especially in Russia, it is chilling to think of what the present political situation might be. Captured Sowjet documents make it clear that Germany was to be subjected to the most brutal of occupations, with no clear end save perhaps a Communist-controlled puppet government and the wrecking of the Reich's most treasured institutions (for more information, see Suworoff, Icebreaker and related works).


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Next up - The Occupation (1948-?), including decolonialism, the death of Goering, and an update on that fellow in the basement of the RLM building with his clicky machines.

EDIT - Two points before I go back to playing the game in very close to real time (multiple nations with thousand-plus division armies equals bog-down).

1 - That's an actual flying Me-262 replica, though not the "real" White-1 of JG7, which is a two-seater you can apparently pay to ride.

2 - The map shows it badly because Kazakhstan and NatChi have the same map color, but NatChi has NOT become a super-monster in central Asia, that's Kazakhstan.

Brazil. Narvik is owned by Britain, controlled by Brazil. I forgot about the Narvik beachhead until the peace treaty was being negotiated, and the Brazilians landed troops during the London Conference. I strongly suspect that garrison duty sucks for those guys.

Part VI: The Occupation

1. From War to Peace

The Reich had lived under a military junta during the war years, with the War Cabinet and War Minister von Blomberg controlling the vast majority of economic production from 1937 to 1948. As a result, historical focus has largely been on their deeds and actions during the war, rather than on the evolution of the Economic Cabinet during the same period.

The Economic Cabinet had indeed changed radically; the 1940 retirement for health reasons of Economic Minister Franz Xaver Schwarz had led to his replacement as Economic Minister by Walther Funk, a journalist and one of the few leading Party members with no combat service in the Great War, despite a brief service as an infantryman before a medical discharge in 1916. Nevertheless, he was viewed within the Party as a keen economic observer, and from January of 1933 had served in a number of sensitive spots as the Fuehrer's direct economic representative. Funk spent the early War Years, before Schwarz's resignation, as the coordinator of the disposition of the economic remains of Poland and the Balkan states. As a consequence, he was well-acquainted with economic policy throughout the occupied region, a key recommendation for any economic minister in the post-war Reich.

Additionally, General Ott had been relieved of his duties as chief of intelligence during this period to return to Japan as ambassador - not due to any failing on his part, but because of the importance and sensitivity of the Japanese connection during the last days of the war, while a de-facto alliance existed. He would be recalled with the collapse of the Japanese government after their own peace settlement, but in the meantime, he was incapable of managing the Reich's intelligence apparatus. His replacement was a member of the Canaris faction of the Abwehr, Major-General Hans Oster. The Fuehrer had doubts about Oster's loyalty, as his private papers show, and a poor relationship with the man as Oster's own journal indicates, but Oster had, along with a number of other officers including Major-General Georg Thomas, drawn up the Reichswehr's post-war infrastructure development plans for the eastern territory, and as such he was a vital addition to the Economic Cabinet.

It is a sign of how far Field Marshal Goering had fallen from the political center of the Reich that he had relinquished all control of the Four-Year Plan to the Economics Minister in 1940, after its completion, and the Second, Third, and Fourth Four-Year Plans contained minimal subsidies for his pet Hermann-Goering-Werke steel plants. Goering's withdrawal from Reich politics was concordant with the discrediting of the "Wilhelmine" school of foreign policy, and his successors as Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe lacked his drive to dabble in all aspects of Reich society, including economics. They were content with filing their requests through the same channels as the rest of the Reichswehr, which maintained its connection to the Economics Ministry through General Thomas and his Economic Planning Staff, and General of Artillery Becker and his Research Staff.

Finally, in February 1948 at the end of the Western War, Field Marshal von Blomberg quietly tendered his resignation as war minister. He had led the German military through the greatest period of conquest in its history, and felt that such strains, combined with an active field command, were sufficient for more than a decade. The Fuehrer agreed, and asked him to name a replacement. Von Blomberg surprised everyone concerned by naming a Waffen-SS officer as his replacement: Paul Hausser. Hausser was the most respected armored commander in the entirety of the Reichswehr, including regular Reichsheer generals, and as a retired Reichsheer general, he was more palatable than most of the Waffen-SS leadership. Von Blomberg's posthumously released journal also indicates that he had foreseen the outcome of the struggle over eastern settlement between regular Reich justice and the police forces, and wished the Reichsheer to maintain at least a formal independence from the Party, a cause to which Hausser was sympathetic as a former regular general.

Von Blomberg became the military administrator of Russia, and Paul Hausser became the first Reichsmarschall, a special promotion lifting him to the level of his previous nominal superior Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler and a cabinet-level position. Grand Admiral Raeder became Reichsadmiral Raeder; Field Marshal Goering became Reichsmarschall Goering (a largely honorary promotion; Goering did not even protest when, during his life, his successor at the Luftwaffe, Robert Ritter von Greim, also became Reichsmarschall). The promotion was handed out more sparingly after these initial promotions, to recognize that the holder held a cabinet-level responsibility and was equivalent to a cabinet minister in all respects.


In many ways, Hausser was an excellent choice on von Blomberg's part - he believed strongly that the military was and should always be separate from the Party, and had argued persuasively for a separation of the Waffen-SS and the General SS. Indeed, one of the first reforms which Hausser pushed through as Reichsmarschall and War Minister was the expansion of the role of the Waffen-SS from a strictly German force to one which bound together the disparate national entities beneath Reich protection. Thus, he ordered the creation of Dutch, Belgian, and even French divisions. Surprisingly, the response from the east was much greater than that from the west; this may perhaps be due to the announcement of the colonization terms.

The Reich government faced a quandary to the east. On the one hand, it controlled a vast territory with thus-far untapped resources. On the other, it had generously released into independence all of the Sowjet subjects east of the Urals, and as much of sub-Saharan Africa as was feasible for self-rule at any given moment. Thus, the portions of Europe and the Middle East under direct Reich rule expected that this would be due to them, too. They were, of course, mistaken. This space was the "living space" which the Fuehrer had prophesied Germany would need to survive. To supervise this, the Fuehrer had several tools at his disposal. The first was the Eastern Ministry, under Alfred Rosenberg, which had supervised the dismantling of post-Sowjet Asia. The second, of course, was the Reichsheer, though the generals balked at the idea of an indefinite garrison force. The third was an office of the SS, the Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA, for Rasse-und-Siedlingsheithauptamt - trans.). Seeing the diminuition of his power elsewhere, Reichsfuehrer Himmler strongly pushed the third option, and for reasons of his own, the Fuehrer agreed. One suspects that he viewed the existing structures as very slender reeds for providing himself an heir, and that perhaps he viewed the SS as a potential wellspring of a successor; however, this is supposition based on subsequent events.

The Fuehrer had another problem, a huge military due its discharge papers in many cases. The two of them were mated together in a solution borrowed from the ancient Romans - communities of veterans were to be established throughout the east, under RuSHA guidance and placement, and were to "Germanize" Russia as far as could be reached. This concept had, of course, been presented in one form or another as far back as 1939; however, the difference was that subsidiary communities of acceptable local populations were to be attached to each German settlement, with the goal of eventually splicing the two strands, German and culturally German (Volksdeutsch, a hard-to-translate concept that varied in implementation from location to location - trans.) and cementing the east as a German possession. Certain incentives were offered - for a given time of service, a soldier was entitled to either a cash pension or land and seed implements, and for those willing to settle in the east, garrison service in the east counted as double service time, Waffen-SS service counted as double service time, spouses and children counted as various additional fractions of service time.

There was, of course, resistance to German settlement, in the form of an increase in banditry throughout the east. The man best suited for dealing with this was SS-und-Polizei-Hauptgruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, who had developed a sterling record during first his establishment of a Reich-wide political police force in the 1930s (sullied only by his tangential involvement in the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair of 1938), then his wartime service as a fighter pilot (the Fuehrer grounded him after his twenty-third air-to-air kill in Sowjet Russia), and finally as the Fuehrer's wartime Balkan viceroy. Heydrich's military arm was Waffen-SS General Erich von dem Bach, but he was handicapped by the 1930s agreements regarding Reich justice and extrajudicial processes. Thus began the struggle between Heydrich and Walther Buch's 1946 replacement as Reich Minister of Justice, Roland Friesler. It could not have been worse-timed; international events worsened the Reich's internal stresses.

During the occupation of Britain, many of the United Kingdom's leading politicians had been able to abscond from Reich justice, using the confusion of the Scots-Welsh-Irish border situation as an opportunity to flee the island. In May of 1948, these men reappeared en masse, led by a distant cousin of the Royal Family, Louis Lord Mountbatten, to proclaim that the British Commonwealth still existed in exile, its capital in Delhi. The Fuehrer was, of course, furious - but he had also just begun the great work of Germanizing the East. Despite the blatant confrontational attitude of the Indian puppet and their American masters, the Reich's leadership stubbornly refused to be drawn into yet another war. It was a thoroughly unpopular decision, but the Fuehrer declared that the settlement policy must come first.


The settlement policy itself came under fire shortly thereafter, a consequence of American "fact-finding" journalists who had been allowed access to Russia to show that the Reich had behaved throughout in a civilized manner. These men were shown the handiwork of Stalin and his cronies - the Belomor Canal, the Volga-Don Canal, the penal camps of the Solovetsky Islands - which some among them steadily insisted on attributing to German deeds rather than their obvious Stalinite origin. Foremost among these were the American rabble-rousers Cronkite of the United Press and Murrow of the Central Broadcasting Service, both men who had broadcast from London during the Battle of London; however, their American audiences remained unaware of the clear slant of their so-called "unbiased reporting*." It is small wonder that neither would be invited back for many years despite their outsize influence on the American public.

Nevertheless, a small percentage of Germans believed the reports of these lying scribblers, and for the first time since 1933, Germany seemed to be on the verge of serious internal turmoil. Friesler of the Justice Ministry reported a steady increase in politically-motivated crime from May to June of 1948, and only steadfast work by Ministers Friesler and Goebbels, and the steadfast application of police power by Heydrich's police successor, Heinrich Mueller, brought the situation back under control. Even then, elections for the Reichstag were delayed until July of 1949 by emergency decrees all the way down to the local level.

The Fuehrer stunned the newly-seated Reichstag of 1949, filled though it was with the Party faithful, used to the Fuehrer's lightning-bolt proclamations, by announcing that the invasion of Spain had commenced on September 1, 1949. Why he chose to invade Spain has never been fully established; the operation itself was so swift that it does not even merit inclusion in the War Years, and was mostly notable for General Student's surprise drop into the Aragonese hinterland and subsequent march on Madrid. Most historians believe that this was due to the persistent influence of the Spanish emigre and Fascist leader, Francisco Franco Bahamonde, who promised the Fuehrer a Spanish force for Hausser's new Waffen-SS if he could be reinstated. Unfortunately, Franco had few followers remaining in Spain; disillusioned, the Fuehrer ordered the Spanish Partition, undoing efforts at reuniting Spain since the 1400s.


The Spanish Partition was most popular with the various regional movements that succeeded the unified government, though even there, most of the regional independence movements had been left-leaning socialists who felt exceptionally awkward receiving their freedom from Madrid from the Fuehrer. It was intensely unpopular in the Spanish-speaking portion of the Americas, where there was a sudden upwelling and outpouring of support for the "Mother Country" even though Spanish rule in the New World had been a miserable history of oppression and misrule devoted strictly to the enrichment of a small section of Castilian society - much like Moscow's rule of the Sowjet Union, three hundred years early. These countries made their protests felt in Berlin, and again, there was a small section of German society which believed their protests had weight.


All of this necessitated a close cooperation between police and judicial officials, and delayed the inevitable resolution of the conflict between the police and the lawyers. Even Minister Friesler saw that a demand for clarification from the Fuehrer of the role of each would be misplaced, for though he was sure that it would strengthen his hand personally, it would weaken the Reich fundamentally. Thus, it was not until May of 1950 that the Fuehrer was comfortable enough with the Reich's internal situation to name the Reichsfuehrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, to the position of Interior Minister, and give his subordinates their rein to prosecute the eastern settlement policy without interference from the Ministry of Justice, whose authority would stand only within areas which the Reichsfuehrer and his police subordinates had deemed were both fully Germanized and peaceful - one more incentive for the eastern communities to remain pacific and not rise in riot every time someone spoke German in Poland.

It was also in 1950 that the settlement program bore its first fruits; in August, Ostfuehrer Heydrich felt sufficiently confident in its success to proclaim former Poland and the Baltic states as eligible for full Reich membership; with the lifting of occupation rule in those territories, the level of banditry decreased substantially and their populations were allowed to begin applying for full membership as Reich citizens, rather than remain as a subject people. Since these territories had always been either adjacent to or ruled by Germany historically, the procedure of Germanizing the regions was relatively painless.

This period also saw the elevation of Field Marshal von Manstein to Reichsmarschall and the creation of the African Ministry, which had quietly worked to divest Germany of as many regional powers as could be deemed prudent. Von Manstein had been the center of the Reichswehr party disgruntled at Hausser's elevation, and his promotion to a parallel position and distraction with the political and engineering problems of Africa largely defused this potential source of trouble. The Africans were quite willing to listen to a man with von Manstein's tremendous planning talent and military credentials, and the result was today's African Economic Union. The Reich held onto Kamerun, South Africa, and portions of the Congo, since regional leadership which could be trusted to follow Reich guidance proved impossible to locate.


Thus, as the 1950s began, Germany's position was as benevolent leader of an economic sphere which dominated three continents and had research outposts on Antarctica, allies on South America, and no particular interest in North America or Australia. It could safely be described, in the Englishman Shakespeare's words, of bestriding the world like a colossus. However, there is evidence that even at this early date, the Fuehrer may have been thinking beyond that sphere.

* This is one of the few times where it is difficult for me to present Keppler's writing; Cronkite and Murrow belonged to the finest tradition of American journalism and their exposition of both German occupation and Stalin's cruelty took incredible courage given that they began drafting said work while still in Hitler's Germany. - W. Fredlund, trans.

Yes, it's CV-9, USS Essex, undergoing trials in 1942. Germany really has caught up in the carrier department, as you'll see in Part 2 (when I get to it...), wherein the Hermann Goering-class is deployed, featuring such wonders as supersonic aircraft before the Luftwaffe is routinely breaking the sound barrier and an angled runway. Matter of fact...

10,000 views - not bad for someone whose pace is either dry and academic, or breathless and overlooking every other significant event!

What are you talking about? There were no concentration camps in Germany, the extralegal measures of the 1930s were strictly temporary and had no place in a state ruled by laws. Ernst Thaelmann was a German patriot and a hero for his espionage activities against the great Red menace to the East!

(Though in this case, I'm running off units.csv, and happened to know that the Thaelmann was commissioned at about that time in about that place. YMMV - there are two DRMS Richtofens, one for Manfred and one for Wolfram, and I'm sure that gets very confusing for crewmembers.)

EDIT - Since Thaelmann was arrested in 1933, I'm going to retcon this one further. Thaelmann was part of a high-level prisoner exchange following the debacle of the Spanish Civil War in 1936; he died on Stalin's orders in 1943 in the Soviet war, and German propaganda insists to this day that he was a German first, a Communist second, and died as a martyr to German-ness.

I had planned on running this thing through 1955, but there's just so damn much text here already I decided to cut it off.

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2. The Changing of the Guard

The salient feature of 1950s German society was the rise of a generation which had grown up under Party rule, in a Germany unfettered by the concerns of Versailles. Often, they displayed a reluctance to recognize the concerns of their elders. In many ways, it echoed the divide between the generation of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Kaiser Wilhelm II - those who could remember a Kingdom of Prussia and those who knew only an Empire of Germany; in this case, the elders remembered the dark period between the Wilhelmine and modern Reichs. Only among the Reich's uppermost levels of leadership was the inter-war period still a vivid memory, and even here, the names of the players changed in the 1950s.

First to leave the stage was Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who had in any case largely left public life by 1950 and handed the day-to-day operation of the Luftwaffe to his subordinates. Indeed, in the late 1940s, the Luftwaffe was largely managed by three men, the bomber marshals Albert Kesselring and Hugo Sperrle, and the Inspector of Fighters, General Adolf Galland. It came as a surprise to these three men when the Fuehrer promoted a relatively unknown man over all three of their heads - Robert Ritter von Greim, previously a relatively unknown fighter commander in the West who had seen some moderate action against the British. Von Greim, while a winner of the Knight's Cross for his performance, was hardly in the first rank of German aviation thought. It is the first instance of the Fuehrer's political instincts overriding the military situation so blatantly; the new Reichsmarschall was generally viewed as a political appointment only marginally better than the proposed promotion of former Lufthansa director General Eberhardt Milch.


Against this backdrop, Hermann Goering withdrew into a sort of splendid isolation, living on his south German estate, Carinhall, and indulging in his passion for hunting and fine living. Goering had increasingly put on weight from the end of his active flight days, around 1942 or so, and by 1950 was grossly corpulent. Finding horses to fit his frame was a full-time job for his Luftwaffe adjutant, and the Reichsmarschall found himself in declining health as the 1950s began. It was difficult to suppress his spirit and zest for life, but increasingly his reliance on medically questionable treatments to keep him up and moving led to taking perhaps unnecessary health risks. On July 20, 1951, the long, eccentric career of Germany's first huntsman came to an end.


The Reichsmarschall's funeral was the most lavish in history, eclipsing even that of Field Marshal Hindenburg almost exactly 17 years prior. Every Geschwader of the Luftwaffe sent a representative flight to participate in the memorial parade, led wherever possible by pilots who had distinguished themselves in the War Years. Goering himself was buried at the foot of the new control-tower complex of Berlin's expanded airport, on the site of the prewar Tegel rocket research facility. Tegel-Goering Flughafen remains Berlin's main air traffic hub, and the Hermann-Goering-Luftmuseum, designed by Albert Speer in the immediate wake of the Reichsmarschall's death, remains a remarkable structure for the fact that it integrates a fully functioning control tower for the surrounding airport into a public-access space which includes every known surviving aircraft flown by the Reichsmarschall, and a wide selection of his memorabilia. The funeral eulogy was delivered by the Fuehrer himself - past the age of sixty and in clearly failing health, it would nevertheless be one of his most powerful peacetime speeches. It is worth quoting in part for the hints it gives to the Fuehrer's thinking during this period.

... We, the German people, must never forget what this man wrought. In war, he was a lion, in the traitors' peace a heroic defender of his nation and his people, and in the rebirth of Germany, the stalwart defender of the Reich. In 1923, he was betrayed by the army which he served, abandoned on the field before the Odeon. A lesser man would have abandoned the Party to its fate; Hermann Goering did not. In 1933, he was tempted by the radical socialists and communists - those crawling worms offered him the Chancellory! A lesser man would have leapt upon it; Hermann Goering did not. In 1939, when the madman Elser made his move, there was Hermann Goering by my side.

I cannot pay great enough tribute to the deeds of Hermann Goering. He created our Luftwaffe, he did everything in his power to make Germany strong. To his memory, I make the following promise: Germany will rule the skies... and beyond. The time for war is beyond us, and Germany is establishing her world-historical purpose by the union of Europe. It is time, then, to look beyond our own shores, beyond our own skies, as Reichsmarschall Goering doubtless did from his cockpit.

To his daughter, Edda, I can but offer the condolences that while you have lost a father, the Reich has lost a guardian, and gained a vision...

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The Reichsmarine's response to their longtime rival's death was somewhat surprising. A new class of aircraft carrier had already been planned, and the first generation of German carriers was due for replacement. At the same time as the Reichsmarschall's death, the first generation of carrier-capable jet aircraft had been developed, culminating in the Messerschmitt P.1101 "Wanderfalke." The Wanderfalke was unique in its time for being able to vary its wing geometry in flight; this was in response to a Reichsmarine requirement that it maintain acceptable levels of structural rigidity for supersonic flight, while at the same time occupying minimal deck space.


To the Wanderfalke's revolutionary new design was mated the concept of the steam catapult; this feature would be new on the ten new carriers which Reichsadmiral Raeder authorized following Goering's death. These ships would be known as the Hermann Goering-class; the Admiral could afford to be generous, since he had outlived his rival, and indeed would himself stay in uniform long enough to be present at all ten vessels' commissioning. Admiral Raeder was, by this point, beginning to feel his own age, though he was considerably better equipped to handle it than the Reichsmarschall had been. He had been in continuous service since 1894, and few admirals of any nation of any time had attained all that he had during that period. At this point, he could have chosen to retire at any time. He did not.

Instead, in addition to the Goering-class carriers and the Wanderfalke, the Reichsmarine entered into a doctrinal and technical renaissance. Two schools of thought emerged during this period, the so-called "Russian" and "Dutch" schools, with their names tied to the bases where their exponents were based. The Russian school held that carrier warfare was the future of modern naval thought and focused on big-ship, big-fleet operations, perfected over the early 1950s in the Baltic. The Dutch school held that the key to maintaining the Reich's supremacy was the oversight of the Reich's trade routes, and that the emphasis must be placed on trade protection and defense against so-called asymmetric threats, such as submarines or aircraft, which surface combatants had traditionally neglected. The fact that the Royal Air Force and the French Armee de l'Aire were available for inter-service training gave the Dutch school training exercises an additional realism which the highly secret Russian school operations in the Baltic perhaps lacked.

Technically, the Reichsmarine was at the top of its form during this period, developing new classes of all vessel weights - though, curiously, the submarine force was neglected for much of the early 1950s, perhaps because the Type XXI boats in service were already exceptional compared to the rest of the world's submarine forces. In 1952, the Reichsmarine test-launched its first ship-to-ship cruise missile, the Seeteufel. Though they were less than impressive, the Reichsmarine nevertheless ordered the laying down of a new class of battleships - the so-called "Marshals' Class," alternately referred to as die alte Pickelhaube (a kind of spiked helmet worn by the old-fashioned Prussian officer class - trans.) for their name-sources. The Hindenburg, Luddendorff, Schlieffen, and Bluecher were, admittedly, an intermediate step, but they were the first battleships anywhere whose primary armament was missile-based, though the missiles were launched from the same 450mm barrels that conventional shells would use.


The continuing expansion of the Reichswehr - which had reached approximately 5% of Germany's population, or about 3,000,000 servicemembers, in 1951 - was in response to two conditions. First, there were still a large and vociferous number of generals promoted during the war who found themselves without commands during the post-war consolidation - new divisions would keep them employed. Second, there was the so-called "Steel Curtain" that had descended across the Atlantic. This term was coined by Anthony Eden, Foreign Minister of the so-called, illegitimate "Free Commonwealth" in India, in a speech which he was invited to deliver at Westminster College, in the American state of Missouri. Certainly, it is true that relations with the United States, which had been cordial even through the war years, deteriorated badly after the London Conference. Both the United States and the Reich engaged in a continuous cold war during the period (Kalter Krieg in German, and in fashionable American academic circles to this day - trans.). This continuous exchange of espionage activity, combined with each attempting to pick away at the peripheral strength of the other, progressively worsened relations between the United States and the Reich. The matter was not helped by the 1948 re-election of Harry S Truman to the Presidency of the United States, on a platform of unashamed scaremongering. The so-called "Gray Scare" of the late 1940s and early 1950s owes much to Truman and men like him; the Reich certainly knew no such silly obsession over American subversion during the period*.


It was perhaps inevitable that, after the inability of a string of politicians to manage American security, the American electorate would turn to a military man in the election of 1952. The military man of choice was a relative unknown, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower rose to prominence not because of any innate charm, though he was a more than able administrator and had done a great deal of good as a staff officer, but because he was cautious, circumspect, and above all careful. After seven years of Harry Truman's blustering speeches, and twelve years before that of headlong policies under Roosevelt, then Willkie, then again Roosevelt, the American people were ready for a man who relied not on dazzling speeches, but on carefully thought out premises. His rival, General Douglas MacArthur, was the exact opposite, a flamboyant speechmaker even in the confined American military fraternity. MacArthur remained in service as Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, counterbalanced by the one staff officer the Americans had who was Eisenhower's equal, George C. Marshall, a man almost Prussian in his level-headed planning abilities.

The Fuehrer's telegram of congratulations to President Eisenhower was met coolly by the new President, but it represented something of a thaw compared to the near-active hostilities of the Truman Administration. It seemed possible that the new President would at least consider the matter of international cooperation in maintaining world peace. Nevertheless, the doctrinal focus of Reichsheer, Reichsmarine, and Luftwaffe all changed significantly during this period, from a focus on superiority over a near-Europe battlefield to the possibility of having to project to the American continent. In the Reichsheer, this was the heyday of Skorzeny and Ramcke; Skorzeny of the Waffen-SS had developed a philosophy of unorthodox warfare that he had practiced in Russia as part of the ongoing colonial work, identifying sympathetic forces within the occupied territories and organizing them to do the Reich's work. He continued this service throughout the 1950s in South America, acting as an unofficial intelligence agent in the region. Bernhard Ramcke, however, was the only general officer to have completed the exacting training of all three of the special-circumstance branches, the mountain, airborne, and amphibious forces. During his assignment as Inspector of Marine Forces (a position equivalent to the American Commandant of the Marine Corps - trans.), he brought training standards to a heretofore unheard-of height and spurred the development of advanced landing craft. Ramcke was one of the few officers of whom the Fuehrer apparently had reservations about deploying into a combat zone, citing his influence as a planner. The field-minded Ramcke adamantly insisted on combat readiness for all under his command, himself included, and managed to dodge all efforts to place him in a strictly training and doctrinal role.

At this point, the Luftwaffe lacked the long-range capacity required to conduct operations in the Americas; as a result, Luftwaffe focus during this time related to three main aims, all of which were in line with General Wever's 1930s development program but out of Reichsmarschall Goering's area of interest. First, a strategic bomber force had to be developed, largely from scratch. Second, a strategic missile force had to be developed - at least here, the Stralsund Test Area was of tremendous assistance. Third, every means available had to be found to extend the operational radius of existing units. All of these fell under the supervision of Field Marshal Sperrle, Wever's successor as torchbearer of Luftwaffe strategic warfare. The first was the most difficult, as the Reich's experience in fielding four-engined bombers was limited; however, at least the development was aided by the ready availability of jet engines. Early prototypes, such as the Messerschmitt Me-264, rapidly found themselves shunted to other projects, such as the midair refueling program.


Thus, the Reichswehr transformed itself from a European force to a global force over the years 1948-1960, with the goal of facing the Americans in their own territory. At the same time, Hauptgruppenfuehrer Heydrich continued the Fuehrer's Eastern Policy, bringing Russia under German settlement to the point that the former Sowjet city of Stalingrad was now a safely German settlement - surely the Fuehrer's ultimate victory over his onetime nemesis. Finally, German diplomatic initiatives began to pay off; a thaw in relations between Germany and the new Eisenhower administration in the United States seemed possible, even likely, as the first days of 1953 began.

It was a hope enhanced by the Reich's atomic deterrent. The Goettingen Pile complex had grown from a simple stand of outbuildings on the University campus to a full-blown research institute named after Max Planck, after the Nobel-laureate physicist who had led the University's physics program until his 1947 death. The Planck Institute continued its spearhead research efforts into atomic theory, totally eclipsing similar American efforts in Chicago. The situation had advanced to the point that German researchers felt secure in declassifying the existence of atomic weapons, confirming American fears and allowing allied nations like Britain and France some limited access to the research facilities. It is likely, if the Nobel process had not been suspended by the annexation of Sweden by the Reich and the continuing difficulty of normalizing education in the annexed territories, that the Reich would have dominated the Nobel fields of chemistry and physics, to say nothing of culture, throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

Matters were greatly complicated by the Fuerher's deteriorating health. Since the mid-1940s, he had suffered from a progressively worsening neurological condition known as Parkinson's Disease, which led to a deterioration of control over his own body. This condition was made public in 1953, when the Fuehrer collapsed during the twentieth anniversary celebration of the Party's ascent to power. The January 30th celebrations were marred by the Fuehrer's worsening medical condition, and even the Americans sent a note of inquiry. The Fuehrer, surprisingly, was not attended by his regular physician, Dr. Morell, but rather by a Reichsheer medical officer who had been first on the scene upon his collapse, Major Dr. Eugen Hake. Hake stubbornly refused to relinquish his patient to Dr. Morell, citing his authority as a physician to ensure the proper care of his patient, and as a result, Dr. Morell's since-discredited medical practices were not forced upon the Fuehrer. Later evidence suggests that this may have extended the Fuehrer's life by as much as a decade; certainly Dr. Morell felt his influence decline in the following years.

By the end of March, the Fuehrer had, of course, returned to work; Germany had survived his two-month convalescence largely unaffected. The first reports to cross his desk were from the Reich Research Council, headed by General Becker, which explained the current state of the Zuse program. Zuse machines had permeated the Reichsmarine, with a fairly simple Zuse machine to be found on practically every ship larger than a patrol boat, and Zuse machines were the basis for the strategic rocket program's guidance telemetry systems. As such, Becker recommended a strong continued investment in Zuse's research, refining the semiconductor technology which Zuse had developed at the time of the British war so that electronic devices could be shrunk and their deployment broadened into all sectors of the German economy and military. The Fuehrer, whose legacy as conqueror of Europe was fixed, had by now set his sights further, and pencilled a note on the report that Becker, Dr. Zuse, Dr. von Braun, and Luftwaffe Marshal Sperrle should set aside time for a meeting to discuss the foundation of a Reich space program.

The Raumrenn (literally "space run," but figuratively "space race" - trans.) had begun.


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* Readers interested in a contrary view may wish to consult The Nemesis of Neglect: American-German Relations in the 1950s, by James Wallis, Dulles Institute, Georgetown. Wallis posits that the German mentality during the period was one of constant anxiety over known American manufacturing superiority, and that German espionage, rather than the usual cloak-and-dagger routine, was almost exclusively focused on industrial espionage and reverse-engineering. - W. Fredlund.

No, not the end - I'm planning on playing through the succession crisis of the 1960s. It's just that it's midterm season and the game slows painfully in the '50s. Believe it or not, that last update pretty much played out in real-time while writing.

3. To The Urals

The Fuehrer, after twenty years at the helm of the Reich, could not be brought to withdraw from that position. Rather, after his January 1953 breakdown, he threw himself further into his work, reminding his ministers that he could die at any time - every day which he lived was another day in which he could work.

The first fruits of this newfound zeal were, as has been discussed elsewhere, the foundation of Germany's space program. The program was under joint military administration, headed by General of Artillery Walter Dornberger, who reported through Generaloberst Becker of the Reich Research Council; however, because transatmospheric flight clearly fell within the Luftwaffe's purview, this led to a heated political debate within the Reichswehr. The eventual result was that Luftwaffe personnel and resources would contribute, but that the manned flight program would be a joint program between all of the services that wished to contribute - in short, all four branches of the Reichswehr. It was an ungainly compromise, but Becker had supervised the Aggregat, Uran, and Zuse programs together for so long that he was as close to comfortable managing the new, expanded Aggregat program as anyone could be - especially given the number of personnel drawn from all three programs contributing to the new program, tentatively codenamed "Atlas."

The second program which received the Fuehrer's direct attention was a visit from Vice-Admiral Doenitz of the Reichsmarine. Doenitz was taking a tremendous risk by jumping his chain of command and ignoring the Reichsadmiral, but Raeder had already expressed his belief that a surface-based fleet was the future of the Reichsmarine, and Doenitz vehemently disagreed. It was the first time since the 1930s that he had appealed directly to Hitler, and it would mark a dramatic shift in the Reichsmarine. Doenitz's appeal was driven by a project which he had initiated more or less on his own in the Black Sea; this project had occurred in parallel with Raeder's own "Schlachtschiff-50" propulsion development project, and had managed to avoid drawing attention by using that very program's output. Schlachtschiff-50 entailed the development of nuclear propulsion for surface vessels, and had concluded in early 1951 with the premise that nuclear propulsion was viable, but current shipbuilding technology could not accomodate the reactor.

Submarine design already entailed a series of nested pressure vessels, which had been the stumbling block in adapting atomic propulsion to surface vessels, and the power requirements were considerably smaller. However, Raeder had not authorized the development of further submarine refinements past the elimination of all later Type XXI-class submarines' surface-warfare capacities and a limited exploration of missile launch from the Type XXI, a project which he scrapped to Doenitz's consternation. As a result, when the Reichsadmiral visited Varna in late 1952, he was furious to discover that Doenitz's secret project was closer to completion than his long-sought atomic battleship.


The preservation of DRMS Triton was the cause of Doenitz's visit to Berlin in May of 1953. Admiral Raeder, also in attendance (Kiel being much closer than Doenitz's temporary headquarters at Varna), presented his side of the story as follow: He did not object to the atomic submarine in itself; it was the unauthorized use of materials and personnel to create a weapon by a commander who deemed himself near independent. The Fuehrer, surprisingly, agreed with both points. The result was that submarine forces were placed under regional control, as with every other branch of the Reichsmarine - but Doenitz himself was assigned full-time as the head of submarine development, with instructions to develop a submarine capable of penetrating the St. Laurence Seaway as far as the confluence of the Saguenay without detection. He had access to whatever resources he might require to do this, but was effectively stripped of his influence on the currently fielded submarine force.

A similar explosion happened within the Luftwaffe, nervous over the sudden emphasis on missile technology presaged by Projekt Atlas. Reichsmarschall Ritter von Greim visited the Fuehrer in June, with General Galland and Marshal Sperrle to support him. The new Reichsmarschall, unsure of his ability at the high command, continued to rely very heavily on the triumvirate of Galland, Sperrle, and Kesselring to support his decision-making; only Kesselring was absent, as the matters under consideration did not directly concern him. The matter, simply put, was that the Luftwaffe's fighters could no longer keep pace with its long-range bombers, and for that matter could not keep pace with the Reichsmarine's own carrier-fighters; though the Goering-class carriers were far from ready, their fighter complements had been drilling relentlessly since mid-1952. Their main opponents were Luftwaffe fighters out of Kiel, and the results were disheartening for Galland and his fighter troops: the Me-1101 was faster, better-armed, and more maneuverable than the Luftwaffe's own Gotha "flying wing" fighters, which retained the sole advantage of being exceptionally difficult to detect. The Reichsmarschall petitioned the Fuehrer to update the fighter force; the Fuehrer's response was affirmative, but he specified that initial improvements must be armament-based, as the mass of rocketry work being done at Stralsund must surely be adaptable in some degree to the Luftwaffe's problem.

Within days of the Reichsmarschall's visit, the Fuehrer was invited to the military airfield at Stendal, where airborne training was conducted. His health was still not fully recovered, but the Fuehrer's tremendous admiration for Field Marshal Student, who had invited him, was such that he traveled anyway. The visit became known as the Surprise among the Luftwaffe - only a handful of staff officers and planners knew of the Fuehrer's visit, and the same cadre knew of its purpose. Hitler arrived on June 28, 1953, was escorted to Drop Zone #3 by Field Marshal Student and his staff, and, to all intents and purposes, sat down to wait. The Fuehrer, never known for patience, became querulous, but the Field Marshal quieted him just in time.


The Fuehrer's reaction to the appearance of a flight of helicopters was caught on film by the Field Marshal's publicity team; while the Fuehrer's Parkinson's Disease had imbued him with an unfortunate tremble, he practically danced at the low-flying team of aircraft, and barely clung to his hat in his excitement as they landed. The audio from the landing is, of course, washed out by the noise of the helicopters, but they departed immediately, with Fuehrer and Field Marshal aboard, for Berlin, and Student himself reported the Fuehrer's response as "Can I fly?"

The return flight to Berlin illustrated the helicopter's key advantages for airborne troops - they flew low enough and swiftly enough that they were not detected by Berlin's extensive air-defense network until they were practically on top of the Chancellory building. The four craft landed in the garden at the center of the Chancellory complex to stunned SS guards. It was a potent demonstration, and the Fuehrer immediately ordered that the Focke-Achgelis helicopters be given study and design priority over land warfare systems. Famously, he is said to have told the Army generals who protested, "The Americans have cannon, tanks, of course, but how many of these?*"

It would be safe to say, then, that the Fuehrer had experienced a kind of epiphany during his January 1953 breakdown, and his exclamations on the subject of helicopters make it quite clear that he viewed the United States as Germany's only real rival. This new sense of destiny was reinforced by Ostfuehrer Heydrich's telegram from his operational headquarters in Moscow:

My Fuehrer, the settlement and pacification policy in the east is completed.

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Heydrich returned to Berlin, his role in the colonization policy relatively little-known; as a result, there was some protest when the Fuehrer bestowed upon him the coveted Blood Order of the Party, an order generally reserved for those who had participated in the events of November 1923. Heydrich received his award on November 9, 1953, the thirtieth anniversary of the attempted Bavarian revolution early in the Party's history, which was celebrated in the usual Party fashion in Munich. The Fuehrer attended, but given his continued health problems, his speech was shorter than in previous years. One more significant event marked the 1953 Feldherrnhalle memorial, the presence of Vice-Admiral Doenitz on the reviewing stand in the official party with the Fuehrer. Less than two weeks prior, he had notified Berlin that the Triton experiment was a full success, and the submarine had navigated the Bosporus without being detected. The Fuehrer, seeing the opportunity to trump the Americans at sea, ordered Doenitz to field an atomic-powered fleet.

This moment marked the beginning of the end for the Reichsadmiral. While he was one of the Reich's great military heroes, he had disagreed violently with the Fuehrer, whose penchant for "wonder weapons" had led to the development of everything from automatic rifles to jet fighters to the Reich's radar network. The atomic submarine and the helicopter were merely the first post-collapse manifestations of this predilection. Raeder was ill-advised to continue fighting the Fuehrer after the development of a nuclear battleship failed to materialize, during a climate emphasizing long-range doctrines targeting the United States. His influence within the Admiralty began to wane starting at the end of 1953, and Admiral Doenitz's political reliability and technical prowess made it seem inevitable that Raeder's successor, like Goering's, would be a relatively low-ranking "political" rather than the naval establishment's choice.


Within the SS, an additional power struggle had developed. Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler was deeply suspicious and jealous of Hauptgruppenfuehrer Heydrich, newly returned from his position as coordinator of the eastern settlement policy. Heydrich, however, had an advantage over the Reichsfuehrer: he controlled the vast file indices of the Gestapo, which he had been slowly transferring to Zuse machine over the first years of the 1950s in addition to managing the east. Himmler had largely lost control of the organization which he had created. Heydrich controlled, through his appointees, proteges, or directly, the police apparatus which the two of them had labored to bring under SS control; Hausser had done his utmost to split the Waffen-SS from the general SS; and the onetime dream of creating an independent SS state in the west had been dashed by his long-time obsession with the anthropology of Persia-India. It was here that Himmler had spent the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Ironically, the very period which saw Himmler lose control of the SS also saw him establish himself, both academically and in the Reich's service, as a leading orientalist. He had, with great difficulty, learned Farsi, Pashtun, and Hindi, and had developed an intelligence network which permeated the Free Commonwealth, especially in the fluid Commonwealth-Pakistani border region. It was a poor consolation for the man who was viewed publicly as Hitler's obvious successor, becoming spymaster and anthropologist.

Himmler made a feeble effort to strike back at Heydrich through the genealogy and heritage office of the SS, the Ahnenerbe. Here, he found that Heydrich's military henchman, Erich von dem Bach, was born Erich von dem Zelewski, a clearly Polish name. The accusations he brought forward also pointed out that Reichsmarschall von Manstein, Minister for Africa and a close cousin of the Fuehrer's beloved Field Marshal von Hindenburg, had been born Erich von Lewinski - also a Polish name despite the Reichsmarschall's ancestry being clearly traced back past Frederick the Great. This fact alone sabotaged the Reichsfuerher's efforts: no right-thinking German would claim a Prussian officer family like von Manstein's was actually Polish. The truth of von dem Bach's - that he did, indeed, have distant Polish relations, but that they were far enough back that he was eligible to be an SS officer - was thoroughly obscured by this. In the end, it was Heydrich who closed the matter with his flat declaration, "I decide who is a Pole."

There was no immediate or public fallout from the Reichsfuehrer's misstep, one of many over the years, but to recoup the vast amount of prestige he had lost in the upper levels of the Reich's leadership, he quietly began to gather military support for a military intervention in Afghanistan. Only a handful of regular officers were willing to go along with the Reichsfuehrer's military intervention, mostly ambitious careerists like Lieutenant-General von Vietinghoff-Scheel, but one of the Reich's best accepted the challenge: Gruppenfuehrer der Waffen-SS Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny, who had some experience in Afghanistan as a rising field-grade officer, was fascinated with the concept of succeeding where Britain had failed. The wily Skorzeny was the only one of the "Afghans" who bothered attempting to find a strategic reason for the invasion; he posited that the invasion would be the last regional power independent of the Asian Economic Union and the Free Commonwealth. Binding Afghanistan to the Reich would allow the invasion of the Free Commonwealth, widely regarded as inevitable, without the fear of a stab in the back along the Pashtun frontier.

Himmler's own papers, released posthumously, reveal that he did have a larger strategic vision, considering Afghanistan a fair test for operations in Tibet and the mountainous regions of China. He had a vision of a pan-Asian federation under Reich protection. Where much of the Reich's effort during the period was focused on rapprochement with the Americans, and on wooing the few South American nations not entangled in the American net, Himmler saw the key to success in sealing Africa, Asia, and Europe against American intervention. In any event, it was a vision which would have to wait until after the Reichsfuehrer's own death.

On December 26, 1953, all was ready for the invasion of Afghanistan. Under Skorzeny's guidance, the western half of the operation was completed in hours; to the east, it took the Reichsfuehrer three days to open the route to Kabul. He was unable to reach the city in time for a triumphal entry. The Fuehrer, furious that the dictation of policy was being taken from his hands, ordered the mobilization of an airborne corps from Baku under Lieutenant-General Bräuer into Kabul. Within hours, Bräuer turned his force northeast into Feyzabad Province. The last remnants of Afghan resistance collapsed on January 10, 1954 - and the Fuehrer granted only Bräuer a Knight's Cross. The Afghan government grudgingly entered the Asian Economic Union and the Reichsfuehrer was ordered in no uncertain terms to return to his anthropological studies.

At the same time that the Reichsfuehrer was seeking redemption in Afghanistan, Henrich Focke, through Field Marshal Student, was able to report to Berlin that the Focke-Achgelis plant was now ready for full production. The Fuehrer gave approval for a limited expansion of the airborne forces, to include three divisions as a test formation equipped with "Drache" transports. Focke continued his work on a separate tangent, looking for the opportunity for a helicopter capable of destroying a tank. Volunteers for the new formations, surprisingly, were easily found - the project achieved such early notoriety that General Ramcke prodded the General Staff into allowing him his own helicopter experiments.

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* The answer, according to War Department records, was around 400, but they were not used in the organized fashion that Student envisioned. Student's innovation was not the helicopter itself, which had existed since the 1930s, but the use of helicopters en masse. The Fuehrer's ignorance of helicopter technology since the 1930s is an example of his blind spots, rarely found in German literature. In this case, the blindness is somewhat surprising, because Hitler's favorite test pilot, Hannah Reitsch, had flown one extensively in the 1930s. - W. Fredlund.