History of the German general staff, 1657-1945

The History of the German General Staff is the first comprehensive history of the Prussian and later German General Staff from its earliest beginnings in the Thirty-year War to the German unconditional surrender in 1945. With the dawn of the industrial age, war is taken out of the hands of monarchs and aristocrats and is being directed by highly trained technical specialists who remain basically anonymous. During the first decades of its existance the German General Staff was led by idealists with constructive political conceptions and ethical and Christian mentality. The emergence of the anonymous technicians, whose political convictions were either non-existent or formed by military necessity or military ambitions, only served to aggravate an expansionist, adventurous and militaristic national temperament. After the collapse of the second Reich, the German General Staff was surreptitiously resurrected, but remained basically anti-republican.^

The outstanding leader during the twenties, Seeckt, always maintained an icy reserve and contemptuous distance to the official government while he built his imperium in imperio. Hitler's decision to force his country into a war which could not end well and his deep hostility towards the General Staff created the greatest tragedy in its history when most of its members were continually torn by the struggle between human, ethical and patriotic responsibilities on one side and by military obedience as exemplified in their military oath on the other side. The continual conflict ended in the attempt on Hitler's life and also in the complete destruction of the German General staff by Hitler himself. Perhaps Hitler was able to destroy it because the modern German General Staff, with all its vaunted uniformity of purpose and action was subject to many different intellectual and political strains and tendencies.^

There were aloof and cold technicians, warm-hearted, emotional men with European conceptions, fanatical Nazis, gullible dupes, drill sergeant types and true idealistic aristocrats like Stauffenberg. -- from dust cover.