History Of The German General Staff 1657-1945 [Illustrated Edition]

Book excerpt: Includes more than twenty portraits and the World War Two On The Eastern Front (1941-1945) Illustration Pack – 198 photos/illustrations and 46 maps. 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 Years’ War to the German unconditional surrender in 1945. With the dawn of the industrial age, war was taken out of the hands of monarchs and aristocrats. During the first decades of its existence 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 ambitions, only served to aggravate an expansionist, adventurous, and militaristic national temperament. Hitler’s decision to force his country into a war which could not end well and his deep hostility toward 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 the one hand and by military obedience as exemplified in their military oath on the other. 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...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. The...HISTORY OF THE GERMAN GENERAL STAFF, which is based on tremendous research in German and foreign sources and on many interviews with German generals and staff officers who survived World War II, is considered the standard work in the field.