14 - “Blitzkrieg” or Total War?: War Preparations in Nazi Germany

Summary

No satisfying and convincing answer to the question posed in the title of this chapter can be offered without reference to World War I. For the military leadership of the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht, this war posed the basis for analyzing all questions of their military craft, and it dominated all their plans and preparations for a future war. Friedrich von Bernhardi, whose provocative and influential book, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War), had appeared in 1913, turned shortly after the end of the Great War to the military consequences of this conflict. In a work that was published in 1920, Vom Kriege der Zukunft (On War in the Future), he took it as self-evident that a future war would be fought between mass armies. However, he also adopted the eccentric idea that “the troops” must be separated “inwardly from the home front,” in order to avoid a repetition of the situation that arose in Germany at the conclusion of World War I, which Bernhardi interpreted in the light of the “stab-in-the-back” legend. Like all his successors in the interwar period, this conservative cavalryman was preoccupied with World War I, an industrialized people's war, as the model of future warfare.