rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

VICTORY IN THE WEST 659divisions, halted on the water lines west and south of Dunkirk, would merelystand pat and keep the enemy hemmed in. But neither the Luftwaffe nor Bock’sarmy group proved able to achieve their objectives. On the morning of May 26,Haider was fuming in his diary that ”these orders from the top just make nosense . . . The tanks are stopped as if they were paralyzed.”Finally, on the evening of May 26, Hitler rescinded the stop order and agreedthat, in view of Bock’s slow advance in Belgium and the movement of transportsoff the coast, the armored forces could resume their advance on Dunkirk. Bythen it was late; the cornered enemy had had time to strengthen his defensesand behind them was beginning to slip away to sea.We now know that there were political reasons too for Hitler’s fatal order.Haider had noted in his diary on May 25, a day, he says, that started ”off withone of those painful wrangles between Brauchitsch and the Fuehrer on the nextmoves in the battle of encirclement,” thatnow political command has formed the fixed idea that the battle ofdecision must not be fought on Flemish soil, but rather in northernFrance.This entry puzzled me and when I wrote to the former General Staff ChiefI asked him if he could recall Hitler’s political reasons for wanting to finish thisbattle in northern France rather than in Belgium. Haider recalled them verywell. ”According to my still quite lively memory,” he replied, ”Hitler, in ourtalks at the time, supported his reasons for the stop order with two main linesof thought. The first were military reasons: the unsuitable nature of the terrainfor tanks, the resulting high losses which would weaken the impending attackon the rest of France, and so on.” Then, writes Haider, the Fuehrer citeda second reason which he knew that we, as soldiers, could not argueagainst since it was political and not military.This second reason was that for political reasons he did not want thedecisive final battle, which inevitably would cause great damage tothe population, to take place in territory inhabited by the Flemishpeople. He had the intention, he said, of making an independentNational Socialist region out of the territory inhabited by the German– descended Flemish, thereby binding them close to Germany.His supporters on Flemish soil had been active in this direction fora long time; he had promised them to keep their land free from thedamage of war. If he did not keep this promise now, their confidencein him would be severely damaged. That would be a political disadvantagefor Germany which he, as the politically responsible leader,must avoid.Absurd? If this seems to be another of Hitler’s sudden aberrations (Haiderwrites that he and Brauchitsch were ”not convinced by this reasoning”), otherpolitical consideration which he confided to other generals were more sane – andimportant. Describing after the war Hitler’s meeting with Rundstedt on May24, General Guenther Blumentritt, the latter’s chief of operations, told LiddellHart, the British military writer: