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

THE GREAT TURNING POINT: 1942 STALINGRAD AND EL ALAMEIN825determination to take both Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time,against the advice of Haider and the field commanders, who did not believeit could be done, was embodied in Directive No. 45, which became famous inthe annals of the German Army. It was one of the most fateful of Hitler’s movesin the war, for in the end, and in a very short time, it resulted in his failing toachieve either objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the historyof German arms, making certain that he could never win the war and that thedays of the thousand-year Third Reich were numbered.General Haider was appalled, and there was a stormy scene at ”Werewolf”headquarters in the Ukraine near Vinnitsa to which Hitler had moved on July16 in order to be nearer the front. The Chief of the General Staff urged thatthe main forces be concentrated on the taking of Stalingrad and tried to explainthat the German Army simply did not possess the strength to carry out twopowerful offensives in two different directions. When Hitler retorted that theRussians were ”finished,” Haider attempted to convince him that, according tothe Army’s own intelligence, this was far from the case.The continual underestimation of enemy possibilities [Haider notedsadly in his diary that evening] takes on grotesque forms and is becomingdangerous. Serious work has become impossible here. Pathologicalreaction to momentary impressions and a complete lack of capacityto assess the situation and its possibilities give this so-called”leadership” a most peculiar character.Later the Chief of the General Staff, whose own days at his post were nownumbered, would come back to this scene and write:Hitler’s decisions had ceased to have anything in common with theprinciples of strategy and operations as they have been recognized forgenerations past. They were the product of a violent nature followingits momentary impulses, which recognized no limits to possibilityand which made its wish-dreams the father of its acts . . . 1137As to what he called the Supreme Commander’s ”pathological overestimationof his own strength and criminal underestimation of the enemy’s,”Haider later told a story:Once when a quite objective report was read to him showing that stillin 1942 Stalin would be able to muster from one to one and a quartermillion fresh troops in the region north of Stalingrad and west of theVolga, not to mention half a million men in the Caucasus, and whichprovided proof that Russian output of front-line tanks amounted toat least 1,200 a month, Hitler flew at the man who was reading withclenched fists and foam in the corners of his mouth and forbade himto read any more of such idiotic twaddle. 1138”You didn’t have to have the gift of a prophet,” says Haider, ”to foresee whatwould happen when Stalin unleashed those million and a half troops againstStalingrad and the Don flank. ∗ I pointed this out to Hitler very clearly. Theresult was the dismissal of the Chief of the Army General Staff.”∗ Haider relates that ”quite by accident” he came across in the Ukraine about that time a