I looked it up, it is casualties, not KIA.
Just making sure. Of course, in the end such a definition means little beyond that, on average, the Germans were better at the sub-unit level. It was nothing that was going to win them the war.
And the best of the Romanian army fought great.
The difference being that the best of the Romanian Army was very small, even in proportion to their own forces. The best of the Red Army wasn't small at all. The number of men in the Soviet mechanized forces in 1944 alone was only 100,000 men smaller then the entire Romanian Army. The number of men in the non-mechanized guards formations add something like a million men.
We are speaking about how the army performed as a whole, excuses don;t matter.
Except you clearly aren't. To begin with, I was just correcting your erroneous statement which stated, and I quote, "that the entirety of the Red Army was Osttruppen". This is like stating the entirety of the German army was Volkssturm or SS... or Osttruppen, for that matter. It's manifestly untrue. A large part of the Red Army was as good as anything the Germans or Anglo-Americans fielded despite the fact that an even larger part... wasn't. However, even more to the point is that your comparison is inapt because ill ratios say nothing about how the army performs on the operational-strategic level and thus cannot speak as to how an army performs as a whole.
I wasn't aware that Manstein was the entire rest of the Heer.
Beck heavily respected Manstein and recognized his talent. In that sense, he did represent the much of the Heer as far as Beck was concerned. Nonetheless, Megargee in
Hitler's High Command record further rejections of Beck, like how throughout July and August Beck attempted to convince the other Generals to join him in opposing Hitler's plan but was met with stony silence. Megargee also notes that Manstein's letter was representative of the rest of the Heer's generals in another sense:
"Manstein managed to encapsulate, in just a few pages, the main problem with officers of the high command: their inclination to deal with operational and organizational details instead of broader issues of "politics"; their unwillingness to let go of personal power for the sake of unified leadership; and their complete obliviousness to the dangers of Germany's strategic position."
Megargee, pp.50-51
Manstein also begged him not to resign and felt that resigning would remove potentially moderating and necessary professionals from the force, giving Hitler free reign to appoint whomever he liked,
Except he did not say anything about Beck resigning nor did he say that it would remove potential moderation. The closest he came is noting that he respected and support Beck as a fellow professional officer and Chief of the General Staff, but he also noted that said support was conditional and advised Beck to basically give up the role of strategic advisement in favor of focusing on purely military matters which would have turned Beck's position into... well, what it ultimately became: a further extension of the Fuhrer's will on the issue of strategy. This, as well as the recommendation that Hitler should take command of
the army as well as the armed forces, is rather the opposite of what you are suggesting as it would have increased Hitler's ability to appoint whoever he liked. (Megargee, Pg 25). In fact, I was wrong about Beck writing to Manstein: the letter was actually unsolicited by Beck.
Naturally, Manstein left out those parts in his memoirs and only focused on the part where he offered respect and support to Beck.
which with Keitel's advice he appointed several relatively pliable professionals like Halder. Not everyone can afford to simply quit on principle, some people need the work and like it, so expecting people to resign in protest rarely works.
And all bringing that up does is highlight how inept Beck's efforts to oppose Hitler were. The appointment of Keitel and Halder do as well, as both were ultimately the results of Beck's attempt: Halder via being recommended by Keitel after Keitel gained his position at the recommendation of Beck. Beck advanced Keitel's name in the belief he was a good administrator who would
not just be Hitler's toadies and sell the army out to him. That Keitel did just that highlights just how wrong he was. As Megargee observes, the fact that Beck's efforts increased Hitler's authority over the military rather highlights how alone he was.
There were multiple references, including Richard Overy's "Goering: Hitler's Iron Knight" to his opposition to the conflict as well as a number of government and military officials. I'm just not sure of how much military opposition actually reached Hitler's ears, as his staff at OKW was pretty much picked to be vehicles for his decisions rather than a team of mixed opinions that would challenge him.
I'm not discussing the opposition by Goring or the Nazis. I'm talking about that of the military.
Hitler was willing to take insane risks over and over based on supposed payoffs, so just because he was willing to gamble on something based on how it was presented to him doesn't necessarily mean he was supporting the operation based on sound reasoning, he was willing to base it on payoff alone.
And my point is that Hitler's willingness to take insane risks on nothing but the payoffs, ultimately, proved better in getting Germany victories then the German generals own conceptions about how the war would go... which would have seen Germany smashed right off the bat, if not ruined by economic collapse. My point, furthermore, in bringing this up is noting how this says less about Hitler's strategic abilities then it does about the
German generals strategic abilities.
Halder did eventually turn it into the actual plan rather than just a concept.
No. Manstein was the one who created the plan. Halder just eagerly adopted it after Hitler approved it and adjusted his own to match.
What should be kept in mind was who those planners were in the first place and who put them in charge of making the choices. Ignoring realities of the serious problems with the operation was done to conform to Hitler's conceptions of how the war would go. Again I'm talking about planning in 1941, not the early studies in 1940 by Marcks and Lossberg. Lossberg's study was right about the Soviet plan to stand fast and counterattack to avoid losing territory for prestige and economic reasons.
And even keeping that in mind, they all suffered from the same problems. Even the earliest plans that were drawn up
before Hitler's decision, like the Marck's plan, was made had the exact same conceptions of how the war would go, a conception that was
never questioned, as they were present in the Marcks and Lossberg plan too. As Stahel writes on the Marcks plan:
"While enlightening in its own right, Marcks's 'Evaluation of Situation Red' also reveals a great deal about the intellectual process employed in planning the eastern campaign from the earliest stages. The unquestioning assumptions of Marchs's 'Operations Outline East' that, as will be seen with subsequent army studies, made no assessment of the ability of the Wehrmacht to achieve victory in a single campaign, proved symptomatic of the responses he received to the 'Evauluation of Situation Red'. Such blind supposition of success-among the very body charged with establishing the operational parameters and feasibility of the campaign-is strong evidence of the 'closed circle' of discussions and debate that was fostered within the army General Staff. It also hints ominously at the vast and unseen implications of an invasion of the Soviet Union."
Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East, Pg 44.
And on the Lossberg plan:
"Just as Marcks had done, Lossberg's plan never questioned the
ability of the Wehrmacht to achieve victory and concerned itself only with the best method of achieving that end. His outline of the campaign included no timetable for operations and is remarkably vague concerning the critical advance of the main army groups. There appears a wanton lack of consideration for the difficulties Soviet counter-measures could represent and an astounding under-estimation of the size and robustness of the Soviet economy." -As above, Pg 51.
So regardless of who was doing the planning, the exact same issues manifested. This powerfully reinforces my point that the issue in operational planning wasn't just Hitler, but rather the senior German military leadership as well.
OKH created special study groups with Marcks and Lossberg to create contingency plans, but Barbarossa itself was done by OKW's operations department with some input from the OKH special studies. Even in those Stahel says Lossberg says there were major problems getting intel about the USSR. P.51 of Stahel's Operation Barbarossa notes that:
That confirms what I was saying: planning was conforming to Hitler's preconceived ideas about the campaign, rather than what information was available.
Unfortunately for you, what you fail to note is that Stahel and Megargee are not speaking about just Hitler's preconceived ideas, but also those of his generals. And the same on the decisions being made. Which is
my point. Had you actually
read their books, as opposed to just read them, you would be aware of this.
Here is the section Stahel is citing: "Clearly the upper echelons of the German military were not interested in information that did not match their plans and preconceptions. Michael Geyer's conclusion about Hitler can be broadened to include the senior military leaders: they did not gather information in order to make major decisions but only plan the implementation of decisions they had already made. For their part, the German intelligence services did well at evaluating doctrine and tactics, the areas closest to their own General Staff training, but when faced with an army whose doctrine was unfamiliar-such as the Soviets'-they relied upon old biases." -Pg 116
And yes, Hitler created a cult of personality around which planning was done to meet his preconceptions,
Except the German military's system of confirming decision makers preconceptions regardless of said preconceptions attachment to reality long predates Hitler. They were already a built in feature, not something Hitler added.
I'm going through Stahel as I type this and what he says I've quoted above: planning was done around Hitler's decisions, not around the evidence because Hitler had selected a staff that would conform to what he wanted, not to objective fact.
Your obviously then failing to comprehend what he is saying. Stahel's entire point in that section can basically be summed up by this line from Megargee:
"The point is not that they missed an opportunity to resist Hitler's strategic decision; Hitler never allowed them such an opportunity. The point is that, contrary to their later assertions, they supported that decision though their own assessments of the Russians operational capabilities." -Inside Hitler's High Command, Pg 110.
Sure, as I said Halder was selected to replace Beck because he was pliable to regime and hardly a genius; in the end he got himself fired for not being enough of a toady.
Except during the planning for Barbarossa, he wasn't pliable.
The survivors of the purges followed because their jobs depended on it. Anyone with a problem with the regime was either sidelined from decision making or kept their mouths shut and went along otherwise they were out; later in the war as people disagreed with Hitler militarily or disregarded his orders in the field, they were dropped, like von Rundstedt, Guderian, and Manstein.
Except for all those times they disagreed and were not dropped. Rundstedt in 1940, Guderian in August 1941, and Manstein repeatedly in 1943. So obviously disagreement alone wasn't enough to get fired.
In terms of a military following orders to launch an unprovoked war of aggression...far too many examples of that exist through western history, including concurrently and post-WW2 to really even bother listing, sadly militaries don't oppose illegal orders in most cases, they carry them out even outside of dictatorships. Just following orders for Hitler's handpicked toadies certainly is to their eternal shame as individuals, but sadly there aren't many examples in history of militaries standing up to dictatorial regimes.
Unfortunately, your still missing the point. My focus here is not so much on the German generals failure in morality nor on how common a failing it is in history. I think we're both in agreement there. My focus is on their failure at their ultimate, actual job: waging and winning a war. Megargee goes into all of this, like on the High Command's role and culture:
"Try though he [Hitler] might, though, he could not work without a command system, a collection of individuals bound together by common values, ideas, and practices. The system itself emphasized, though a culture that had evolved over centuries, the individual's subordination to the collective whole. In that sense it helped Hitler to maintain control, since the system did not produce individual rivals. But that whole also constituted an entity in and of itself, one that Hitler could neither discard nor completely dominate. He could not be the sole voice in the command system, much though he wanted to be. Despite his jealous dislike of much that defined, the system's culture and ideas permeated every sphere they touched: political, strategic, operational, and organizational. That fact limited Hitler's power, but it also pulled the rug from under the generals' postwar apologies, because the evidence shows that most of the time the high command strove to work with the Fuhrer, not against him. The command's values and ideas were not nearly so different from those of Hitler and the National Socialists the myth would indicate. The dominant military culture was ripe for cooperation before the Nazis every became a factor in German politics. For all the talk of conflict that arose after the war, the two sides both contributed to Germany's downfall."-Pg 230-231
On the political fight:
"In political terms the military's leaders demonstrated from the start that their goals and those of the Nazi Party coincided. Just as much as Hitler, they wanted to see Germany become powerful again, to see the terms of the Versailles treaty dismantled, and to retake the territories lost at the end of the Great War. Throughout the Weimar years they had maintained the fiction that the army was apolitical, but in that time they had deliberately undermined the constitution they had sworn an oath to uphold. They wanted an authoritarian government; they believed that only such a system could bring about the necessary militarization of Germany. When the Nazis appeared on the scene, the generals though they had the perfect instrument. They believed Hitler could harness the power of German society and industry for them, without threatening their monopoly on armed force, and Hitler naturally encouraged that belief. He even sacrificed his old comrade Rohm to demonstrate his fidelity to the army, and in return the army swore personal loyalty to him.
That loyalty would prove remarkably strong, even after the army's leaders could see that their position in the state was not nearly so secure as they had thought. When the Nazis killed army officers in the course of the coup against the SA, the army accepted the loss with barely a murmer. The reaction was the same when Hitler and his cronies framed Fritsch and purged the officer corps in 1938. In fact, Hitler did more to distance himself from the army's senior generals than vice-versa. With time came increasing hubris and distrust on the dictator's part, along with a corresponding disinclination to take the army's side in any dispute. Through it all, though, most army officers strove to demonstrate their loyalty, to prove themselves worthy of Hitler's respect and trust. The exceptions-those behind the July 20 coup attempt and other conspiracies-were notable as much for their small numbers as for their courage. Most of their comrades either opposed their efforts or stood by to await the outcome. The army did not lose the political battle so much as it failed to offer one." -Pg 231-232
On strategy:
"Hidden below that superficial argument [referring to Hitler's early successes in 1936-1940 blinding German military leaders], however, lies the Germans' fundamental inability to make sound strategic judgements. This was a problem with deep historical roots that, at the very least, stretched back to Schlieffen and the senior officers and officials of his era. With almost no exceptions, the Nazi-era military and government were devoid of people who could correctly balance means and ends in order to come up with a realistic strategic plan. They welcomed war with Poland, despite the certainty of conflict with Britain and France. Likewise, they believed that they could conquer the Soviet Union easily. Then, they not only failed to recognize that effort's collapse in front of Moscow but also simultaneously accepted a war with America without batting an eye. From there the strategic picture rapidly became hopeless, but the generals drove their troops to fight on. The myth of the high command focuses on Hitler's lack of strategic acumen, but in this respect he was in good company. The generals' postwar protestations of innocence and their attempts to place sole responsibility on Hitler's shoulders now stand out as obvious falsehoods. At best, they deceived themselves. At worst, they cynically tried to deceive everyone else." -Pg 233.
And on operations:
"The problem with the Germans' image-like their operations to begin with-is that it is one-dimensional. It emphasizes the positive aspects while glossing over the negative. As far as Hitler's performance is concerned, one must give him credit for his successes, which often occurred in the face of opposition from his subordinates: his support for the thrust through the Ardennes and his "no retreat" order in the winter of 1941-42 come immediately to mind. Admittedly, the balance of inspired versus foolhardy decisions stands firmly against Hitler. But what of men who served under him, whose operational genius is still so often lauded to the heaven? Their record is much less positive than most people know. Operations consists of more than the ability to maneuver forces on the battlefield. To be effective operationally, an army must be able to figure out what its enemies are doing, disguise its own intentions, and keep its formations properly manned and supplied. In these respects the Germans proved themselves to be woefully inadequate. Their intelligence efforts were a cruel joke. They consistently misjudged their enemies capabilities and intentions, especially on the Eastern Front. At the same time, the Allied were quite regularly able to discern German plans. In terms of logistic and manning*, as was true of strategy, the Germans could not balance ends with means. The underlying fault was the officers' fixation on the maeneuver plan and their unwillingness to integrate the support functions into the planning process." -Pg 233
*"Manning" here means the issue of personnel administration I mentioned earlier. I'm still trying to coagulate that bit into a easily presentable form, as it takes up a third of a chapter..
And on the issue of the
fuhrerprincip's:
"After 1945 the surviving generals made much of the conflict between Hitler's top-down command philosophy, the Fuhrerprinzip, and the long-standing general staff traditions of joint responsibility and "command by directive." There is no question that such a conflict existed. The history of the war is replete with examples in which Hitler refused to allow a subordinate commander any flexibility in whatsoever in the execution of an order. (snip some boilerplate stuff about how this lack of flexibility took over during the course of the war). They key question is: Was this somehow Hitler's fault? In order to believe that, one has to accept that he forced his commanders to adopt his style of command against their will, but the evidence clearly contradicts that interpretation. The senior officer corps adopted the Fuhrerprinzip with only occasional token resistance. For whatever combination of reasons-duty, fear, loyalty, and ambition among them-they proved only too willing to enforce absolute obedience on their subordinates, in many cases under threat of death."-Pg 235
Quite frankly, you have an extremely romantic view of the German General Staff as competent not only tactically, but operationally and strategically as well. This is the view which they themselves propagated after the war but one which conforms ill with the reality. But I can easily see why your so eager to say it was all Hitler's fault and belittle the idea the generals had a role in it: it lets you continue to pretend that they had the ability to come up with a sound plan to defeat the Soviet Union for which you base much of your suppositions about German victory on and obsess over.