Books: Ghosts in Field-Grey

THE NEMESIS OF POWER: THE GERMAN ARMY IN POLITICS, 1918-1945 (829 pp.) —John W. Wheeler-Bennett—St. Martin’s ($12).

Unter den Linden was alive with demonstrators. Snatches of the Internationale seeped into the Wilhelmstrasse chancellery, where Socialist Friedrich Ebert, shaky head of a shaky government, sat wondering if he was another Kerensky doomed to fall before his country’s Communists. It was Nov. 9, 1918. Shipwrecked in the field, rudderless at home, Germany was drifting into anarchy.

One of Ebert’s telephones rang—the private line from the headquarters of the beaten German army at Spa, 360 miles away. With vast relief, Chancellor Ebert heard the voice of Hindenburg’s First Quartermaster-General Wilhelm Grb’ner offering an alliance with the Socialists on behalf of the German officer corps.

“The high command,” said the crisp voice from Spa, stating the terms, “expects the government to cooperate with the officer corps in the suppression of Bolshevism and in the maintenance of discipline.” Ebert accepted, and out of this uneasy marriage of convenience between frightened Socialists and nerveless Junkers was born that spindly political problem child, the Weimar Republic.

True to the pact in its own fashion, the army soon settled the immediate Communist threat by marching shock troops into Berlin. When Adolf Hitler and his beer-hall fanatics flared up in their 1923 Putsch, the army ground it out in the Munich gutters. Later the officer corps began to think it could use Hitler to fashion a Reich more to its liking. But once the ex-corporal got to twirling the hourglass of history, the sands of power ran out fast for the corps. The day was to come when German generals would be framed, tortured and hung from meat-hooks, and their fellow officers could not lift a hand except to heil Hitler.

Sphinx with a Monocle. The saga of the German army in politics from 1918 to 1945 is the story Oxford Historian John W. Wheeler-Bennett tells in The Nemesis of Power. When it was published in London last month, British critics bravoed. Proclaimed the Observer: “The most important book on Germany published since the war.” Said the Sunday Times: “In all the literature about the Weimar Republic and the Nazis, there has been nothing like it.” Grand in scope, minute in documentation (829 pages), Nemesis of Power may not get the U.S. readers it deserves, but it will hold those it gets in a vise of armchair fascination. It is rich in characters and scenes that a novelist might envy and an actor yearn to play. And as the field-grey shadows of the Reichswehr’s erstwhile leaders goose-step across the pages of Nemesis of Power, they may well be passing in review on the parade ground of posterity’s judgment.

Among the first to strut by is the brilliant, bemonocled chief who led the army through the early post-World War I years. Steel blue of eye, trap-tight of lip, Hans von Seeckt was called “the Sphinx.” The Sphinx’s two rules for the Reichswehr as a political power: it must be 1) “above party,” and 2) “a state within a state.” In the early ’20s, Seeckt kept the telephone pact with the Socialists, at the same time busied himself with building up the cadres of a new German army and a new armament industry—both in violation of the Versailles peace treaty.

The Plot That Failed. Out of favor with President Hindenburg, Hans von Seeckt finally gave way, in 1926, to another general, sly Kurt von Schleicher. Under Schleicher, the army was not above, but in, politics. Vain, unscrupulous, he schemed incessantly behind the republic’s back. Worst of all, he let Hitler’s private army of brown shirts grow to a scrap-happy, unmanageable mob.

When Hitler took power, the officer corps became “accessories before the fact,” in Wheeler-Bennett’s phrase, for policies it approved and methods it detested. The generals that Hitler detested—and he liked few—were smeared on trumped-up charges and booted out of power. Yes men got their jobs.

Giving the German generals their due, Wheeler-Bennett makes plain that they did not want World War II, rightly fearing the double ruin of Germany and their caste. Ironically, Hitler ranted at them as pacifists as late as 1941 on the Eastern Front: “Before I became Chancellor, I thought the general staff was like a mastiff which had to be held tight by the collar . . . Since then … it has consistently tried to impede every action that I have thought necessary . . . It is I who have always had to goad on this mastiff.”

As long as victory smiled on Hitler’s “intuitions,” the mastiff barely lifted a paw against him. When a bomb was finally exploded in the Führer’s presence in July 1944, he was stunned and his famed forelock was set alight, but he lived to revel in the torture deaths of many of the men who made the plot. So dear to Hitler’s baleful eye was the sight of a German general slowly strangling on a slim cord at the end of a meathook that he had a film of the hangings run off for his benefit.

Historian Wheeler-Bennett ends his book in a race with the headlines. As a realist, he approves the rearmament of Western Germany; as a realist, he also has qualms about the lessons of the past. Historian Bennett’s hope, and the hope of the rest of the free world, is that Germans also can learn the lessons of the past.