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jagd messer · 2024-07-26T09:58:03Z

General Heinz Guderian. ‘Operation Citadel’ On March 29th I flew to the headquarters of Army Group South, at Zaporozhe, to see Field-Marshal von Manstein. Here a considerable victory had recently been won; by using armoured formation in the correct operational way Kharkov had been recaptured. The lesson to be learned from this, in particular concerning the way the Tiger battalions of the Gross-Deutschland and the SS-Leibstandarte ’Adolf Hitler’ Divisions had been employed, provided the reason for my flight to see Manstein. At his headquarters I found my old friend Hoth, the commander of the Fourth Panzer Army, who also told me of his experiences. I once again realised what a pity it was that Hitler could not tolerate the presence of so capable and soldierly a person as Manstein in his environment. The characters were too opposed: on the one hand Hitler, with his great will-power and his fertile imagination: on the other Manstein, a man of most distinguished military talents, a product of the German General Staff Corps, with a sensible, cool understanding, who was our finest operational brain. Later, when I was entrusted with the duties of Chief of the Army General Staff, I frequently proposed to Hitler that Manstein be appointed chief of the OKW in place of Keitel, but always in vain. It is true that Keitel made life easy for Hitler; he sought to anticipate and fulfil Hitler’s every wish before it had even been uttered. Manstein was not so comfortable a man to deal with; he formed his own opinions and spoke them aloud. Hitler finally answered my repeated proposal with the words: ‘Manstein is perhaps the best brain that the General Staff Corps has produced. But he can only operate with fresh, good divisions and not with the remnants of divisions which are all that is now available to us. Since I can’t find him any fresh, operationally capable formations, there is no point in giving him the job.’ But the truth is that he did not wish to do so and was trying to justify his refusal by such circuitous excuses. I then flew on to Poltava, where General Kempff’s army command (Armee-Abteilung) was located, and from there went to visit the Gross-Deutschland on March 30th and the SS Panzer Division SS-Leibstandarte’Adolf Hitler’ and General Von Knobelsdorff’s corps headquarters on the 31st.At these headquarters my primary purpose was to study our recent experience with the Tigers, so that I might form a clear picture of the tank’s tactical and technical capabilities and thus be able to deduce how best Tiger units might be organised for the future. A final visit to Manstein at Zaporozhe ended my first trip to the front as Inspector-General. These journeys resulted in a conference with Speer concerning an increase in the production of the Tigers and Panthers; in the same connection I went to see Hitler on April 11th at Berchtesgaden, on the Obersalzberg, my first visit to this place. A remarkable feature of the Führer’s villa, the Berghof, was that – at least in the part accessible to us – there were no connecting doors between any of the rooms. Only the great conference hall was impressive: it had large windows commanding a magnificent view, a number of valuable hangings and picture, including a wonderful Feuerbach, and a raised area by the fireplace, where Hitler, after the so-called evening briefing, was in the habit of spending a few hours in the company of his more intimate circle, his military and party adjutants and his female secretaries. I was never included in this circle. On the same date I called on Himmler, with the purpose of arranging that the armoured formations of the Waffen-SS be organised in accordance with the establishments laid down for the Army. My efforts met with only partial success. In particular Himmler would not agree to my urgent request that the setting up of new units be abandoned. It is true that Hitler had approved my views on this subject during our conference of March 9th , when I pointed out the disadvantages of new formations; but so far as the Waffen-SS were concerned, he and Himmler had reached certain conclusions which they did not impart to any of the soldiers. Hitlers idea was to make himself independent of the Army, whose leaders he never trusted, by forming this private army in which he believed that he could place implicit confidence; it would thus be a Praetorian guard that would be ready for anything, should the Army ever refuse to follow him on account of its Prussian-German traditions. This policy of Hitler’s and Himmler’s was to put the Waffen-SS in a very unpleasant position after the war, since the Waffen-SS was blamed for the misdeeds of the rest of the SS and particularly of the operational commanders of the SD or Sicherheitsdienst. But even during the war the preferential treatment received by the Waffen-SS in the quality and quantity of its replacements, as well as of arms and equipment, led to a certain amount of understandable ill-feeling on the part of the less...