School of War - Ep 116: David Stahel on Guderian and Hitler’s Panzer Generals

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

David Stahel, associate professor of history at the University of New South Wales and author of Hitler's Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded, joins the show to talk about Heinz Guderian, the myth and the man. ▪️  Times      •      01:38 Introduction      •      02:57 Diving into the letters     •      08:43 Debunking     •      15:30 A sinister figure       •      19:39 Achtung - Panzer!       •      27:37 Guderian the Nazi      •      33:42 Poland and France      •      45:49 Russia       •      50:50 Barbarossa bound to fail?     •      54:48 Guderian the chameleon    Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Buy the book here - Hitler's Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded

Heinz Kudarian, one of Hitler's most famous Panzer Generals in World War II, was an innovator in armored tactics and a battlefield commander whose daring in France established a reputation for success that lasted, well, about six months into the invasion of Russia when he was relieved of his command in late 1941. But he made a comeback later in the war, and even more dramatically, after 1945, shaping his legacy post-war in a famous memoir. What was the truth behind the layers of self-promotion and how impressive and how ugly was that truth? Let's get into it.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people are not seen. We shall fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing. grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender.

For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today to welcome back to the program. David Stahl, who is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, is the author of numerous books, generally focused on the Second World War and generally focused on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, most recently Hitler's Panzer Generals, Godarian, Hupner, Reinhardt, and Schmidt unguarded. David, thank you so much for coming back.

Thank you very much for having me. I've been really looking forward to our conversation today for a number of reasons. The main one of which is your work touches on a number of themes that have become recurring themes on the program. So just the nature of war in the East in both the first and second world wars, the way in which innovation in the interwar period plays out on the battlefield in the Second World War, and of course, you know, sort of blitzkrieg, armored warfare, things like that. And then finally, in many ways, this is an overt subject of your most recent book, you know, how to think about history and how to use history as we consider our present day strategic or policy concerns. And maybe we'll start with there. So my first question to you is

your book is this very detailed, really kind of fascinating study of the letters of these four generals. And today we'll focus on Heinz Guderian for reasons we can discuss in a moment. And I guess I'll ask you what is a dumb question, but I think your answer to it will be interesting is, you know, a lot of these guys, you know, we obviously have Guderian's memoirs. He gives a full account of what he did in the war. There's lots of other material out there. Why spend all this time in the archives going through these letters beyond sort of pure, narrow academic interest? What's in it for people more generally interested in the war that you can find as evidence in these letters?

In some ways, that is a really great starting point because if anyone did know my works very well, I've spent a lot of my early career doing these big operational histories of the Panzer groups in particular, because they're the things that I've always seen that German Army is driven forward by. And, you know, in those books, if someone wanted to be very critical of my work, you could ask, hey David, why are you doing these letters at this point? What about the letters way back then? So perhaps there's a little bit of context for that. It comes back to your question there. How much of value would there really be in these letters? Because in many of the histories I grew up reading, these letters weren't really there or where they were there. So Kenneth Maxey from the

1970s has a biography, another guy named Wade, or I think it's Wade, he's a German and he's done some work with these letters as well. They appear, but they only appear in very brief context. And here's the thing. In the German army in the Second World War, there is an ordinance on communication, which basically stipulates just what an average soldier can write, and it's very strict. You are not allowed to write about any commanders or any of the people you associate with. You're not allowed to write where you are, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if all of that is for the individual soldier, you would probably suppose, as indeed I did, well, it would always always, obviously also apply to people in possession of far more important information. Hence, if I can see

that Guderian's letters are in the archive, the problem with those will be that he can't write about anything to do with operations. He'll only be able to write about, you know, his auntie Bessi's Vericus Fane's doing better, all this home life stuff. Now, the other thing is you might say, well, wouldn't you just look at them to have a bit of a read? One of the fascinating things is a starting context is Germans can't read these letters. I know that sounds crazy, but the reality is that in the late 19th century, they hadn't had a lot of educational reforms yet around this now unified Germany to get people to form basic things like the alphabet. It's the same alphabet we have, but to get them to all in everywhere form the letters the same way. So it's a bit of a choose

your own adventure, depending on what school system you went through, just how you build, how you write the letters. So in the early 20th century, there's something called Zittalyn, which is brought in just inside Prussia, which is the Zittalyn reform. And it basically tries to determine this this is how we will write across this Prussian part. That's not even the whole of Germany, but we'll try and write the alphabet. But even some of those letters would look like Egyptian hieroglyphics to the modern Anglo-American. Like what in the world is that? But that's where these guys come out of. So when you see the original letters, it's not just the usual cursive writing. can be really hard depending on the person's, you know, on, you know, handwriting.

There's actually a real problem with just identifying what this is. So to control for that, I basically went to two handwriting experts. They, one of them transcribed the letters, you know, into German, but just into a German we can read. And another one checked them and then I translated them. And it was only at that point, and I didn't do this as a graduate student because I thought, that's a lot of money up front to do all of this. So I can read about Auntie Bessis Varragus Faines.

I don't need to do that. Besides, I've got all the war files. They're probably better. Much later in my career, I thought, I'd still be fascinated to read them in the original. And with a bit more money behind me, I went and basically got, I started with Guadarians, and I got all of those transcribed. And I'll never forget the day I sat down to read them, I thought, oh no, here's another book. This is two things.

Number one, they absolutely do talk about operations. And he's doing it not in a way that perhaps a modern general might, where he might suspect someone's going to read my private letters. You know, in a modern context, you would have to assume that. Back then, he didn't have any sense of that. He was very unfiltered, so that's very good for a historian. And the other factor is, not only is he writing about all of this stuff, he's also writing a lot about himself, as you would expect in private letters.

And, you know, I think in the stage of the evolution we're at with these, you know, Panzer operations, you said it at the beginning there, oh, we're interested in a modern context and how we apply these things. One thing, we know a lot about the Panzer Arm, at least relative to a lot of other subjects. What we don't know much about is the human element, and that's always really important. So, you know, the book is based on not just obviously Guderian, but looking at Herpenter, Schmidt, Reinhart. And the one thing I would say by way of conclusion to this rather long answer is all of these guys make Panzer Group commander. That's a very, very high level. And they're all Panzer Group commanders in

1941, so they're directly comparable, and we have the private letters to all of them. And what we start to learn from that says a lot about, yes, the individuals, but also the panzer trooper itself. What is the culture behind that? And we start to realize that whatever the institutional and the technological, I guess, body of knowledge, we're learning now vastly more about the human element that's grafted on top of that. So when we focus in on Guderian, I assume, probably with the others as well, but in particular in Guderian's case, as somebody who was kind of romanticized

or even lionized a bit after the war. If you watch old American World War II movies made in the, you know, the 50s and 60s and 70s, you know, the German generals seem like basically a decent lot. You know, they've got a crazy person at the top, but they're sort of recognizably Western, you know, military commanders, you know, like we might have. And Guderian's memoir is obviously contributed

intentionally to that impression. And I assume that what you find these letters adds, you could say, at a minimum nuance, but probably direct contradiction as well to that, to that myth. Yeah, they're very, very true. Look, I think that's one of the things that, and people who have perhaps taught World War II or are very interested in reading the newer books, you can see not just an evolution. I think you see almost a bit of a revolution.

If you were reading books about the Panzer Arm or about the German Army generally in the 1970s and 80s, the kinds of books you will find today, certainly the scholarly ones, a night and day difference. And a big part of that, maybe even the most important part of that, is the German generals. Because you have to imagine, as very well-meaning historians in the post-war era, tried to make sense of all of this, they don't have until the 1960s any archival material. The archive material is there, but it's all been shipped off to the United States. These days, you can also say some of it was shipped off to Moscow.

So they don't have anything. And what they end up getting as primary material are these memoirs. And the two most famous, and there's numerous memoirs, but the two most famous are Guderians and Munsteins. And these guys are in command of large forces. And it has to be said, they write very well. It's a very compelling narrative. And there's nothing in there because there's no ability to provide a corrective, right?

It's not like you can go to the archives and do what subsequent historians would do, but decades later and say, well, that's incorrect. That's clearly incorrect. The other thing is that those guys ingratiated themselves to, you know, major people of the time. They had relationships to them, Anglo-American historians, Little Hart probably being the most famous. So they get their narrative out there. There's no real ability to correct for it. And they're very convincing people.

In fact, that's the one thing I would definitely say of Guderian is the single probably greatest success of that man. I would not say is in the military realm. it's very much in a political sense. This is a guy whose career spans a lot of different Germany's, right, from the Kaiser's Reich, right through to the Weimar and then the Nazis and then this post-war German world. And in all of them, he's a success. Now, I think what he's doing is he's able to understand the sort of ethos of the times and respond to it. And he's a bit of a chameleon.

He reinvents himself, I mean, most famously, I think, after the war. because if anyone knows the more recent sort of view of Guderian, not the 1970s views that came out. There's a number of biographies from then that are probably some of the most famous because they've just been around for a long time. But if you look at much more recent work, Russell Hart has a wonderful, you know, sort of A to Z biography of Guderian from about 20 years ago.

Oh, he's shifted hugely. And my work, I think, is also taking that part. And if you just look at those letters, the letters are, I think, censored. I did try to get something very specific on that. The archive has no real... I said to them, is this the full collection? Did they give you any information when they were donated?

And they didn't have any information. I even spoke at one point to his grandson, who had subsequently died. He didn't have any information on it. But I was able to conduct a little bit of a... I guess you could say a bit of a test on these letters to try and... I spent some, I think even a year or so, I wonder if this is the full collection.

I have about, I don't really remember the total number, maybe 50 to 60 letters across the war, but they're very heavily concentrated in 1941. So more than half a 1941. There's only four from 1944. I think there's only two or three from 1943. It gets scamp, right? So 1941 is rich. He's got a lot of them.

And maybe as a quick story, what I basically suddenly thought one day is, what I could do is I've got this body of, letters and I can basically do a little calculation to find out if you've got over a six month period, you know, it's 32 letters or 33 letters, something like that, you do a basic, you know, calculation. On average, how often would he have written one of these? And it came out that it was something like every 5.5 days, there should be a letter. And then I just correlated that with what are the dates of all these letters? Suddenly it turned out there were huge gaps.

And gaps like six weeks, I think is the longest one. And then I suddenly went to the letter that he writes after. at this six-week gap. Does he explain this in any way? And there's no such explanation. But maybe one more quick thing that makes Guderian so fascinating as a subject to study through these letters is he is the absolute only general for whom we have letters from his wife as well. So Margaretta is there. And at one point in one of her letters, she basically says, oh, your letter of the 17th turned up, and I went back through all my all my dates. There is no letter from that. So we know that letters turned up at his home for,

which they are not in the collection. And the question is then what happened to those letters? And why were they excluded if they were excluded and not lost? You know, the distortions in Goderian's record, who, you know, when reviewed in the full light of information that we have today, comes up, it's funny, you put it in a very neutral way. You know, he's a sort of chameleon-like figure who succeeds in various germanys. Well, indeed, and one of those germany was Hitler's Germany. And he was quite stressful. So, you know, what is that? He comes off. as a sinister figure at best, I think, as one really reflects on the reality as opposed to sort of the post-war myth. And this is, I have to say, just from my own personal experience, you know, this is a myth that is sticky.

I know among serious historians of the period, that's all, you know, generational old news. You know, people were kind of on to the fact that the memoir is largely full of it 20, 20, 30 years ago. But I went through officer training in the Marines about 15 years ago now. And then, and I think to an extent still now, but especially then, Marine Corps officer training was heavily influenced by a man named John Boyd, you know, a theorist of maneuver warfare. Very interesting guy. And we've talked about him on the show numerous times. And he, of course, was heavily influenced by Liddell Hart. And Little Hart, of course, was, we can talk about this maybe in a minute, but had this weird relationship with Guderian, where they were kind of dependent on each other for this mutual deception, right?

Lidell Hart wanted Guderian to say that what Guderian had done on the battle. Field had been inspired by Lidl Heard's writings in the interwar period. And Guderian, of course, needed Lidl Hart to say he was not a monster. He was a all but a resistor to Nazism, just trying to save the German army from one scrape after another generated by Adolf Hitler, whereas the record seems to show this. It was not exactly the case. So it's sticking. It is.

In military culture today, the Guderian is this kind of, well, I don't exactly know how to finish that sentence that I think about it. is this sort of impressive innovator and patriot. I agree. And I think that's one of the things that we get out of, you know, studying figures in history. Students and maybe even a lot of people, they want a black and white narrative.

Well, was he good or was he bad? And I get it. Look, Guderian in my book is clearly a negative. Two reasons. One, I don't think he's a particularly good general. I know that's controversial. I don't care. I spent way too much time on his stuff.

And yeah, he falls down in a lot of. of ways. Maybe we can get into that. But the other thing that I think you cannot get past is his affiliation with Nazi Germany and the criminality in that. Two things, he absolutely knows what's going on. There's no question about that, and he has absolutely no problem with it. This is a man who makes his career after the July plot. That's when he becomes the acting commander and chief of the German army. Sorry, not the commander and chief, the chief of the army general staff. and, you know, he goes on to have Christmas 1944 at Himmler's house. I mean, he is both feet in, and he's building his career.

This is the one thing he does very well. He knows who he needs to ingratiate himself too, and he's got no limits there. He is very good at the career building. What that says about the man, you know, morally, what that says about the man as a general, who, you know, for all their claims post-war, I served Germany first, you know, well, really, if you were serving Germany first, you would have taken a very different stance to Hitler. And certainly, if not before, certainly by 1941, when you realize in your rear area he is mass murdering women and children. And the fact that he doesn't do those things, just like all the others, I mean, that's why it's sort of fascinating in some ways to study more than just one man because you could say, well, he's an anomalous guy, right?

At the same time, then you start to realize, well, there is no rebuke of Hitler in any of my four German generals in all of the 140 letters across all four of them in 1941. And yet even met people like Herpenter, who does join the July plot, he's seen to be this great resistor. They named schools after him and barracks after him and streets after him after the war. He is skeptical, much more so, of other German generals. He even has the temerity to refer to Hitler. as Adolf in his letters.

It's definitely, you know, but that's just because, yeah, he has his own issues and some of those issues are very personal as well. He doesn't like the fact of where he's at at this point in his career. So there's all kinds of other motivations. And why does he join? Well, his career ends in January of 1942 and it ends with quite the bang. So you could say sitting on the shelf for a couple of years, he recognizes that, again, if I'm going to build my career like a lot of the things.

these guys are career focused. It's not going to happen under Nazi Germany. So I'm willing to throw my lot in with who are these other people, the anti-Nazi guys. Is that a response to the moral situation, you know, the mass murder, the fact we're losing the war? Or is it just once again, yeah, I'll do better in my career if we could get rid of these guys? There's a lot of good motivations that we need to look at. Yeah. Well, let's, so, so with that sort of methodological preface, let's let's talk about Guderian, the reality, who this guy was and what his record actually was. So one of the reasons why he's sort of sticky and, you know, going through officer training when I did. I mean, it's not like his stuff is on an official curriculum, but John Boyd's

stuff certainly is and is cited. And then Boyd is speaking positively about Goderian and Little Heart. So it's sort of on this unofficial kind of things you ought to check out to include, you know, the book he writes in the interwar period, Akhtun Panzer, which is this, you know, to my eyes sort of interesting, and I think he would have thought of it, right, as a kind of reformist document. A document designed to push back against the German military culture and say that tanks essentially are the future. Talk a bit about that book, and this is what, 37, 38 somewhere in there? Yeah, I think 37. Yeah.

Talk a bit about how his service in World War I and then post-war leads up to this book. And, you know, it does seem to give the devil his due, as it were, it does seem that he is a kind of reformer and he is pushing for something that will be important on the battlefield in the years of them. I mean, I think that that is absolutely who he is. And again, we get away from these black and white narratives. So in the memoir that he writes, he is the mover and shaker in this period and he is the one advocating for this. But of course, that's Goderian doing what Goderian does. Beyond anything else as well, he has an enormous ego, right? And that can very quickly pervert his record of the times. So he does have a lot of service appointments after the First World War where he's exposed to very much new ideas. He's teaching at the War Academy. He is asked to publish some work,

or at least he does publish. I think he's got about five articles. They're very obscure in the 1920s. But of course, he's going to go on to do Akhtung Panza. And he's exposed to a lot of personalities who are also in this, I guess you could say, reformist mindset. And he's also exposed to a lot of traditionalists as well. There's a very real debate there. But there are, if you want to put Kudyrian in context, there are other very junior officers doing a lot more in the 1920s and 30s, well, perhaps first the 1920s, publishing things. There's one, I can't remember his name. He does five books and I think 20 articles.

And he's really in pushing the Panzer narrative. Guderian's exposed to guys like this. They're publishing in the same areas. They're clearly reading this stuff. Guderian is, you know, people often think these people come out of nothing, right? They just sort of, oh, they were just having these epiphanies. No, no, there's a cultural context. And when you start reading around, you start to realize, okay, Guderian's reading a lot of things,

things that he will later own for himself. And in the 1930s, the sort of famous relationship is when he is subordinate to General Oswald Lutz. And Lutz is, I think by all accounts, the real, I guess you could say, innovator. He's having a lot of the ideas. He's a very different personality. And in giving Guderian his due, the fact that they are different personalities, I think, helps the cause. Lutz is a much more level-headed guy. He understands the institutional, you know, sensitivities,

and he's much more prepared to have a conversation, whereas Guderian tends to get angry, yell, scream. He's good for the public side of it as well. He goes out there. But even things like Akhtung Panzer, it's Lutz. Lutz tells him in the autumn of 1936 to write that book. And it's a rush job. I mean, for whatever we think, oh, book, it's a whole book.

No, it's not really. What it is is all of Guderian's War Academy lectures, tacked on with some other random thoughts. It's a very potted history, military history of various events, shoved together in a book. But wonderfully for Goderian, it turns out to be a bestseller. And so it really raises his esteem and it's very popular with more junior officers. He was apparently a very popular lecturer as well. You can kind of see that. Gordarian is a dynamic personality. And people who go in with a great deal of self-belief and talk well, and I think he could do that, he did carry people along with him, but he certainly sacrificed a lot of facts along the

way. It was often about building, in a sense, that cult of personality. He was very successful at it. And then when Lutz is forced to retire in 1938, Guderian is, I mean, he's not the most important person. There's a lot of other people as well, but he's certainly got the personality for it. And he's now got this other thing. I think Akhtung Panza really gave him a sense that, ah, there's a very popular world out there. I don't think he'd recognized. that and that, you know, in the popular space, that's going to be important in building my career. I'm reaching an audience in a way that you don't necessarily reach just by standing in front of soldiers.

I'm talking to a popular audience as well. And I think it does. I think he absolutely owns that in the Second World War. Never forget in the Third Reich, there are no celebrities as we understand celebrities. Yes, there's singers and actors and things like that. But the real, even for the youth, the real celebrities, the preeminent figures of the time are generals. And people like Guderian absolutely get that. One fascinating thing is, I never knew this before I read the letters, is he complains to his wife on a number of occasions about how overwhelmed he is.

Keep in mind, he's on the eastern front in 1941. That's a very dynamic and busy place to be with a lot going on. how every day he has to struggle with the autograph hunters, because he's signing cards and sending them back to him and managing this correspondence. Why would he do that with a bunch of kids, right? There's a kids who want these things overwhelmingly. He does it because he understands that's part of my popularity.

That's what I've worked for, and he is not giving that up. By the way, I then decided to realize, okay, is he the only one doing this? The other Panzer General's turnout, they are doing it too. They can get so many letters that Guderian innovates in this space. He gets a like a card. Has it printed up with his signature on it? He still signs it, but it's printed on the front. So I guess he could even save more time if he wanted.

And then he sends those sorts of things back. And then I started to look how many more of these kinds of cards, you know, photos with their signatures on them to send explicitly to these order cards. And it turns out generals, even generals that are very low on the totem pole where, you know, I can find core commanders or divisional commanders, and then I found, oh, yeah, this guy's got one of them as well. In other words, it reflects how pervasive this was that kids were writing to these guys, and they knew her the divisional commanders and the core commanders, not just the big names. There were a lot of people besides, and they're looking for Luftwaffe aces, and they're looking for a lot of different people. It'd be like those kids today who are searching for, I don't know what it is in America, baseball cards. I don't know much about baseball, but, you know, you want to get every.

everybody and they're probably, I don't know how many people are in a baseball team even, but you know, there's a- Are there a cricket cards? Is there such a thing as a cricket card? Thank you. Yes, there are. They certainly are. I collected those as a kid.

Well, to your point about the book being a rest job, you know, I was paging back through it in preparation for this conversation. And, you know, chapter one is called 1914. How did positional warfare come about? Which is like, you know, a very relevant kind of question to consider today in 2024 when everyone sort of worried about protracted war and what war would actually look like in the Pacific and things like that. And so I started to read through the chapter first time in years and years.

I'm not going to say I read the full book as a brand new second lieutenant. I was more accurate to say I read in it at the time. But I noticed, you know, he starts with August and the fighting in Belgium. And then you turn the page and all of a sudden you're in, I guess it's October and the first battle of Eap. And I was momentarily confused. And I thought, well, wait, there's a lot of stuff that happens in September and October. Before you get to that, what happened? And, you know, it's very clearly, you know, sort of an impressionistic series of assertions

more than an effort at actually sort of a serious treatment of the subject. And then I wanted to read you, because this will lead to my next question, just his, a quick bit from his introduction. We live in a world that is ringing with the clangor of weapons, mankind is arming on all sides, and it will go ill with a state that is unable or unwilling to rely on its own strength. Some nations are fortunate enough to be favored by nature. Their borders are strong.

They have chains of mountains, wide expanses of sea on their frontiers. By way of contrast, the existence of other nations is inherently insecure. Their living space is small, and in all likelihood, ringed by borders that are predominantly open, lay lie under constant threat, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he goes on to say, such nations have been forced to consider what means may best conduce to bring an armed conflict to a rapid intolerable end. It's not their fault that they're developing Panzer formations and tactics. It's been forced upon them.

So, you know, I'll let you spell out the implications of this. But what were for somebody who after the war seems to present a picture of himself as somebody who tolerated Hitler and the Nazis while trying to save the army from their excesses. What were his politics? There's a number of letters. I've not seen these, but a guy named Dermit Bradley did a study of Guderian. and he apparently has letters, and I wasn't able to find these letters, but let's go on that, where in the, I believe in the early 1920s, and I could be wrong on that, but it's certainly

post- First World War. And remember, after the First World War, he is in the Frye Corps, which is a, let's just say, they're fighting battles that are maybe battles and maybe a lot of atrocity as well, almost certainly. And Guadarian's definitely a part of this, and this radicalizes people, in addition to whatever the First World War might have done. And of course, now we're talking about a very truncated Germany. So there's a real sense of being, you know, a lot of these guys are very aggrieved at, after all their toils, Germany is, as they see it, weak.

And, you know, in these letters, or in this one letter that I can remember, Guderian complains to his wife about how politically problematic Germany is and how we absolutely need a dictatorship. We need a strong man to come and save Germany. And I think, you know, if you then look at his progression, it's not as though he's a, you know, I wouldn't say he's a national socialist right from the beginning, but he's certainly sympathetic to that form of government. I mean, we know he's also a monarchist. He, you know, like a lot of generals, he didn't have a problem with that style of government, certainly nothing that I know of. And he very much backs Paul von Hindenberg, right? So he is, you know, and if he was a monarchist, right? So there's always been that sympathy.

And then once the Nazis or national socialists are in power, Hitler gravitates very strongly to this style of government. And not all German generals do through the 1930s. There is an evolution there as well. Guderians, I think he recognizes two things. He is East Prussian, at least in terms of where he's born. And there is a lot of questions there around Poland and the Dunzig Corridor and all this sort of stuff. So, of course, a lot of the things that Hitler is railing about in terms of the international settlement, Guderian's naturally sympathetic to, like a lot of the officer corps, but I think also

the style of government fits him. I mean, he's a guy who believed whoever should be running the country should be a military-style commander. I mean, Hitler maybe not, but at least he's served and he speaks in the same terms, and he's certainly not one of these weak Democrats, as Guderian would have seen it. And, you know, I think we'd probably see that even more clearly by the increased radicalization of the Nazi state, certainly into the war, and the fact that, as I say, Guderian is always comfortable with that. He does not have any problems. In fact, one of the themes

of the letters, once you start to get them and you read letter after letter after letter is knowing as we do what's going on, you're always waiting for that moment where you will hear some kind of complaint about the atrocities or so. And I think this is the other point about what I was saying before about now it's quite clear that they seem to be censored is not just the absence of of letters you know we know that there are letters missing it's also in this body of knowledge the fact that we have whatever it is 32 33 letters and not a word of complaint not a word of criticism in fact there's no criticism among any of the german generals no one ever mentions the holocaust it's quite possible they don't mention something like that because they don't want to share that

with their wives. It's also possible that they did, but all of them recognize when it gets to the point of donating letters, all that doesn't age very well at all. So not surprisingly, those letters are cut. But it's instructive that in all of those letters, there's almost no overt criticism, not just for the Holocaust, but for the Nazi experiment and the occupation methods and, you know, even just anti-partisan ideas. No, they're on board with this. They agree with the politics. And I think the key thing is they see the survival of Germany, perhaps returning to the past. you just read out, they see the survival of Germany as being this, the necessity of a violent response to the, to the opposition we face. That's what we need. And the problem would be a weak-willed

response. You have to respond. It's a very national socialist idea that you respond always with, you know, four times the amount of violence you're met with in order to deal with it, right? But that just escalates and it solves every problem the same way. And ultimately, you would have have to say that they win far more enemies because that's their only solution time and again, even late in the war. Well, it's just the invocation of living space specifically, but then more broadly, just the whole logic of the passage is interweaving what seems to my untrained eye is pretty straightforward Nazi ideology and worldview with, or using it as a basis for a new operational

method. You know, really just fusing the two is kind of fascinating. And I must admit when you're reading that and I thought, oh, living space, he mentions that? I mean, I'm sure that was a word. I'm not sure when that first started circulating, but I must have made it as you read it. I thought, wow, I don't remember reading that. But yeah, you're right. It's very instructive. It's how they think as well. So obviously, a large part of Guderian's post-war reputation rests on his leadership in Poland in 1939 and then France in 1940, obviously Barbarosan, which we'll get to in a moment. But these two early campaigns

of the Vermeacht and the Nazis, which are the implementation in certain respects, right, of what he's writing about in Akhtun Panzer, what will become known originally in Time magazine, but over time is Blitzkrieg, which is, of course, not official German military doctrine, but something like it seems to be occurring. So what is the truth of his battlefield command in Poland and in France? Is it as simple as the story, here is the man who formula, I'll put it in pure sort of Liddell-Heart terms. Here's the man who formulated Brits Creek in the interwar period, and here he is doing it in Poland and France. And if that's only partially true, how is it only partially true?

Tell us the reality of his battlefield command in those early campaigns. Yeah, I'd say there's no question he meets with a great deal of success. I mean, Poland different from France. France is the shining star in his career in a lot of ways. But the one thing I would say about that is, you know, yes, yes, absolutely, he is making a lot of very good choices. as I think anyone who studies enough of military history. And certainly if you're aware of that idea, we refer to it as the great man of history, right?

That military historians have always tended to construct their histories around these great figures. Oh, Napoleon. And what we now start to see in a different age where we have so many more contextualizing studies is time and again these great men, oh, it turns out there's all these other great men around them. And that they suddenly assume far,

less of this greatness because a lot of their success is due to many related factors. In other words, what I'm saying is, I don't want to take anything away from what Goderian does indeed achieve, but there's two things. He's not the only one doing what he's doing. So it's a team effort. And he also has a lot of luck. It has to be said. Poland, again, is different from the French campaign. He's commanding a very new motorized core. It's the 19th core. And he doesn't have one of the most important operations. That bothers him in some ways. He's only really connecting the sort of Dunzik corridor. So, I mean, it's still an important operation, but he's not against the cream of the Polish army. This is not where the success of the campaign will sort of rise or fall. And he's

only in command of about 15% of the Panzer forces. This is a bit of a problem for a guy with a huge ego. But he has some luck in weird ways. I think it's the, I don't know what it is, the fifth day of the campaign or something, where basically Hitler comes to his arm at core, partly because it's a safer for court to visit at this point in the war. And he's there with a number of other luminaries. I know Himmler was there. There's some others. And Goderian's showing them around. This is a great moment for him because he's in control of the narrative. And he gets to assume the sort of the limelight. And it's also an opportunity because he's very aware of that political dimension of ingratiating himself to the single most important people in the land. That helps to raise

his profile in addition to the latter part of that Polish campaign, he does go on to Warsaw. It's the French campaign, of course, where he has such an important role. He is absolutely at the epicenter. And, you know, the famous story of his, you know, units crossing the Meuse River as the sort of the single most important part of this. Again, there's a lot of luck. I can't remember on which afternoon it is, but it's the afternoon before or after. He just narrowly escapes a French bombardment on his command center. He just sort of moved away before it gets, you know, badly hit. So, you there's always a bit of chance in this, but, you know, taking nothing away from Guderian, it's this campaign where that enormous ego in many ways benefits him in the way that that same

enormous ego in the next campaign is a huge problem. That, you know, if you have this inflated self-belief, I mean, some people could say, you know, getting through the Ardennes, you know, trying to cross this river, it's, you have to understand. People think, you know, they see the metrics of the German army. and they're huge, right? This is a very big campaign. But actually in these these kind of forward operations, it's sometimes surprisingly small numbers of guys enacting these maneuvers, getting across these rivers. You're not doing it in thousands and thousands of minutes, small numbers who achieve these things. And then they begin their exploitation. And, you know, it's very common

that people look at the case yellow, so this German plan and say, oh, you know, the short-sightedness of the German command, they all try to restrain people like Guadarian. Of course, everyone who studies this knows that this is going to lead to the channel, that this is going very well, there's no, well, there are actually allied countermeasures against this. Charles de Gaulle is one of them trying to cut into the rear of Guderian. And it has a measure of success. But we, again, know just how, I guess, off balance the allied response is and how surprised they are by what's happening. Guderian is really driving for that channel and, you know,

blowing past not just the threat of allied forces on his very deep flanks, but he's doing it against orders at points. And of course, the famous order that comes through that you are allowed to, well, he's been halted with the exception of reconnaissance in force, which he takes for, okay,

that's the out that I'm looking for to continue doing what I just wanted to do anyway. that's probably another point to make about Guderian and maybe the German army as a whole. People do know about Alftrarch's tactic. I don't know what the American Armed Force. The mission tape orders is what we would call it. That's probably much more familiar to people as a concept. So if people aren't aware, you know, the German army, one of their sort of changes dates back to the 19th century is rather than the rigidity of an army where orders get passed down from the all-knowing general at the top, there's a, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, flexibility introduced whereby the, yes, the high command identify an objective, but it's

devolved to lower commands given a degree of autonomy in how to achieve that. People often allow this as, you know, oh, wow, what the Prussians came up with here is great. But the single best work done on this is by a Swiss historian, Marco Zieg. It's only unfortunately available in German. But he has example after example where he shows that this concept is exploited and the degree to which a personality like Goderian can take this and completely manipulate it for just doing his own thing. And we see a lot of that on especially the Eastern Front. And you could say that what he's doing in May of 1940 is similar, whereby, yeah, I know what the orders are. I also don't care. I'm running my own war here.

One of the things that's changed in my head after doing a lot of operational studies to try and understand all of this. One of the new insights very much for myself, I do write about it in the book, but it was an evolution for me. I always knew of this problem of Panzer Commander sort of doing their own thing, but it really crystallized when I was reading their private letters because they're all into this. And now I kind of think of the Eastern Front less as a top-down war directed by the OKH and then it goes through and there's a field martial army group center and they command. And yeah, we've got some recalcitrance out there, people who push the envelope. Now I really think of it as the Eastern Front is a collection of filedums. There are the local lords, and that is the

commanders. I'm also quite convinced you see a degree of this in the Army commanders, although I haven't seen all of their private letters. I don't even know if they all have them to really chart this, but certainly among, I had four very high-ranking people with excellent primary material, very contemporaneous, and they're all doing it. And they all, they have no big picture. It's not because they don't have information. They don't care. This is all about me. And they are all quite narrow-minded. This is why I said before, I'm very skeptical as to how good these guys are as generals, because I would imagine as a general, I've never been one, of course, you need to have a balance between the bigger picture what my commanders need to achieve and then my own sector,

and I'm a part of a whole. They could not care less. It doesn't matter. In fact, they know better than everyone above them, and they are the victim of not getting the resources, the very limited resources. Everything should come to me. No, I don't care about left or right. It doesn't matter. It's all about what I'm doing. And if I'm not given it, that's why I'm not having as much success. It's nothing to do with the Soviets. They have no agency here at all. It's all about what I'm not being given by my commanders because they're too narrow-minded, too short-sided, and that's being replicated across the Eastern Front in real time by all these commanders. They're all suffering the same thing. And one of the questions I have going forward is

how much of this is the ethos and the culture of the panzer trooper, that's sort of unbelievably forward thinking and all about me and drive, drive, drive. They almost can't accept that they're not having all the success, so it must be someone to blame. It's not the, it's not the terrain, it's not the lack of logistics, it's not the, we've bitten off more than we can shoot. They don't talk about that stuff. It's all about my commanders are too narrow-minded to understand how important I am to

this campaign and they don't resource me. And they write this stuff quite openly. They complain to their wives. That's another great thing about these letters. You start to see these letters serve as a kind of cathartial. resource for them to process all of this negativity that they feel. And another quick point, I don't want to jump ahead here out of the 1940 stuff, but I guess I already have, is that there's a progressive decline in their mental health seen in all four,

but particularly in Goderian over 1941. You can measure that very clearly. He's euphoric in the early part. Towards the end, I would even go so far as to argue his, his, his, departure from the Eastern Front is engineered by himself. He is so depressive. And it's not just his letters, there's others who are engaging with him who write about this. And they're writing about it in real time as well, not after the fact there is a famous meeting in the early part of December 1941. I know I'm jumping ahead here a bit, but I'll just do this now that I've

gone down this rabbit hole, where Richtholfen, one of these Luftwaffe guys, goes to meet him and he basically says in his diary, I was just feeling I was really low. And I went to Gurdheim. And I went to Guderian because he's the great, you know, he's the lion of, you know, the Eastern front. That's how he comes across in all the propaganda. And he said, I met a man more broken than myself. Guderian is, is only a, he calls him a Gumi Lover, a rubber lion. He just saw how broken he was. And that's very much what you're seeing in the letters as well.

And, you know, and understandably, I'm not necessarily being critical. These guys are physically as well as emotionally being tested in this environment in a way they never have before. But they're unable to be critical of the campaign. They're unable to be critical of their own role in it. And maybe to link now our question with what I've taken it into, in the same way that his drive to the channel in 1940 was rewarded because he got there and he'd reached an endpoint and the paralysis of the Allied armies and their inability to respond allowed him the rest, the time to bring up the forces, catch their breath for the case red that would follow and wonderfully successful, because there is no end point in Barbarossa. His drive and drive

and drive and drive and drive, he's the one exhausting his forces. He's the one that outstrips his logistics time and again. And he's the one that massively over-extends his own forces. And then when they suffer huge losses because of this, he's never able to be self-critical. It's always someone else's fault. It says a lot about the guy. Well, so he has this tremendous success in France where he is, you know, implementing this style of war that he was an advocate for in the interwar period, this war of this armored war of rapid maneuver. And, you know, feel free to characterize it more. I'm curious to know how you would, how you would describe in practice what this style of warfare looks like. How does it go so badly when he tries his third.

Act out in the Soviet Union in Barbarossa, and how much of that is, you know, no effort would have succeeded under the circumstances and how much of it is fit. So that's element one, I guess, is, you know, fate was, the cards were against them. Russian expanses, the Red Army, et cetera. That's factor one. Factor two, which after the war, all of these guys, Gadarian very much included, want to pin all the blame on Hitler and the high command. and how much of that was real and how much of the high command's role was holding them back from success.

And then three, and I think most interestingly, how much of it was them and how much of it was Guderian in the areas for which they were responsible? Yeah, sure. And give us just a bit of a sketch for listeners who are, you know, I expect most people listening to the sure are aware that the Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 41, but may not know sort of the details. No, sure. And look, I think that's one of the things that, you know, perhaps as a starting point, right? any answer on, you know, Barbarossa on what it is, is it's very easy, very sympathetic to an Anglo-American audience who look at the Eastern Front, and it's just kind of, it's just too huge to really comprehend exactly. I remember when I first started reading about it, I didn't know where any of these

places were, and it's just sort of lost in the number of units. I mean, even in this conversation, we talk about a guy like Goderian, well, there are four other Panzer Group commanders, right? So, okay, there's four of those, but if you imagine there's three army groups, there's 13 armies, there's something like 44 cores and 150 divisions. Now, you put all that together. There's a whole bunch of names that even someone like me who spent years, even you could say two decades or so studying this, I can tell you there are commanders you hear about this divisional commander, this core commander, know nothing about him. So, you know, lost in the ethos, and these are very large formations still. I think that's a really important point. Maybe one thing just off

that, just as a quick aside, you know, Rommel is the most famous German general, I imagine, for the Anglo-American world. Keep in mind, he's a core commander. Now, what I just said then, there are 44 core commanders on the Eastern Front. It puts that in a bit of context, right? In some ways, these guys, they assume this huge role in a core in the Anglo-American world in 1941 is a very big formation. We don't have as many. The British are a strip. The Americans are still, you know, developing Australia. My God, a core, it's a frightening number of people. But in the German context, it's much smaller. So in some ways, in terms of how much we know, people often ask me questions like, well, who's your favorite Joe? Who's the best

German general? You have to understand how many there are. And the assumption is, I know them all. Actually, there's 1,800 German generals in the army over the war. So of course we don't know them all. It's impossible to really answer these questions. Coming back to the point. So Barbarossa, right, it's a huge campaign, Guderian is in the central part, looking at, you know, to what extent does he understand what he's getting involved in? And to what extent is there, I guess, a to this war on some level. We don't have a lot from Guderian, also including it the letters, of what he thinks of this campaign and that sort of year of planning between France. But there is one instance where he is giving a report, and that report is, let's just say, favorable toward

doing this. There's certainly no indication that he's seeing what he says in his memoir, which is all the men of the OKH that I came into contact with, had this inflated idea of what this campaign would be another one of those clear moments in the post-war era where he's going to look great when he calls, you know, puts a big question mark on this. But luckily there's, there is, you know, some evidence to suggest when he gave one report, it had none of this in it, right? Again, it shows a lot about Guderian. And look, in fairness to Guderian, one of the things that's famous about the Barbarossa campaign is not just the underestimation at all levels, you can say, of the German army. And it's not because they don't have studies that point to problems. It's what

the human element is. People produce this stuff. The staff work is still getting done. The staff work is still at a very high level. It identifies very real problems. They correctly assess. We can get about 300 kilometers in. After that, there's logistic system just, unless we can bring up trains in really large and really have these railheads developed and everything, this thing's not going much further. And what do they do with that? I'm sure by then we'll have won. You know, that's a very big question mark, right? There's a very real human element. We really, really need to be focused on that. But the other point I was going to make is, and I imagine a lot of your listeners know this,

Anglo-American intelligence studies of the time came to similar conclusions. No one gave the Soviet Union more than weeks or months. I think it's about three or four months. I can't remember it's the British or the American conclusions. But after that, the Soviet Union is toast. So why was everyone so certain about that? Because in your book, you make a really interesting observation about the letters and I think it's Guderian but also others in the role that there's a very interesting.

their sort of Nazi vision of will and willpower sort of keeps triumphing and they're thinking over the kind of staff analysis that they've all been trained in as senior officers. They're all, they're all products of this fairly impressive military staff training process. And yet, every time there's this kind of cognitive dissonance where it says, okay, well, actually at this point, the math doesn't work anymore. You run out of fuel or whatever. There's, oh, but, you know, we'll figure it out. You know, like, Hitler, we have been so successful in all these mad gambits up till now.

we've just got some kind of secret sauce here. And then, of course, it finally stops working. Why does American analysis also, this is reminding me of Ukraine, by the way, in the spring of 22, winter spring. But why does the American analysis fail? I would say, yes, you're absolutely right. And that's a whole really important cultural context of looking at that German army and, again, that human element.

But on the American side, I think one of the things we can easily forget is if you have any idea of, you know, Russian-stroke Soviet history in the sort of 20 years before Barbarossa, what do you see? Well, in the First World War, with a two-front war, the Russians collapse, right? Then we see a civil war, so that's even worse, devastates the economy, all the best officers leave, then they're having these terrible famines. Then the Soviets, God, is a lot of anti-communism, and that's anti-communism, not just because people don't like the politics, because it undermines the state, right? And they don't yet know what the five-year plan have done, people haven't really nest, I mean, they know that they're there. They know there's

been a big drive toward industrialization. But what do we see from that by 1941? Yeah, well, the Soviets, you know, they didn't win in the Spanish Civil War and their war against the Finns, the Winter War went kind of terribly. In fact, they even struggled to make their objectives when they invade the Soviet, they invade Poland on the 17th of September. And they struggle to get to their, so what is this? This is a, you know, Hitler refers to it as a colossus with the feet of clay or something like this, I don't know that you just need to have a national socialist perspective to look at these guys and think, yeah, it's a lot of mass and no, nothing good. And from a German point of view, one of the things that we need to remember is, you know, it's a kind of an extraordinary

event that in the 1920s and early 1930s, German officers were going to the Soviet Union and practicing the, what we would now refer to as their Blitzkriek, although, of course, they don't think of it in that term at all. But they're practicing their, maneuver warfare and this this bevigungs-krieg, this war of movement, a lot of the ideas, because of course, they're not allowed to have planes, they're not allowed to have tanks in this time,

and the Soviets are, and they're going there and doing this. Guderian also goes, and a lot of my guys, I can't remember all of them, I think Reinhardt doesn't go, but he has Soviet officers coming to Berlin, secretly, and he's teaching them.

So, you know, their idea actually is, I don't know for Guderian specifically, but generally rather positive about these Soviet officers. But what do they also all know? Yeah, these guys are mostly killed in the purges. So what is the Soviet Union in 1941? Yeah, it's the best have been lost. They were innovating a lot.

But now they're back to this kind of foot and hoof type army because that's what Stalin is reacting against, Tukoshevsky and his radical ideas are what we're targeting. So the Soviet Union by 1941, For all we know about it and what it's going to become in the Second World War does not look that way to anyone. And as I say, I don't think you need a national socialist framework to conclude that. Sorry, that was a rather long answer and a bit of a point. No, no, no, no, it's fascinating.

In fact, total digression, but maybe you could nominate someone. Maybe it's you. But at some point, I want to do an episode on Vasili Grossman's war in Stalingrad and life and fate and all of that. It's primarily how I have come to understand the Russian experience. the Eastern Front through those novels. And that's it. That is a digression. Maybe you can propose some names when we're done recording.

Roger Reese. He did a book called Why Stalin Soldiers Fight. I'm not trying to give you any names or anything, but it's very fascinating book. Yeah, plenty of others. So Goderian, he's done in December of 41. He's out of the war. But he comes back. Talk a bit about his career at the end of the war.

And then just I want to be respectful of your time here, but I want to also quickly touch on his efforts to, in chameleon-like fashion, transition to a post-war career that is remarkably successful. He's the only one of your four who's not, who's not imprisoned, right? Well, one in his death. Two are imprisoned,

and then he gets off the hook. He's detained at the fresh, but he's not convicted, something like that. Yeah, no, he is definitely interrogated and detained. I can't remember how long,

but not that long. He's certainly never put before any kind of trial or anything. And that's remarkable when you consider how high he is, right? Chief of Staff. Chief of Staff, the German military. Yeah, German Army. And I do wonder, I haven't done the work to confirm anything like this, but I do wonder if part of what's going on is when he's being interrogated and we have got the reports of some of that, some of it, you know, it's transcripts.

So it's golden stuff for historians. Is it possible that he just sells himself so well that they almost rule him out in the way that perhaps others don't talk as well and explain as well? And think about how fast he's done that. He's gone from being a leading man in this state and very, very, very. close to the centers of power and absolutely fine with that to almost quick almost immediately. And that's the, that's what I don't think it's not positive about the man himself. I think, you know, he's as guilty as some of the leading Nazis. But it's interesting how quickly he understands the dynamic of the time.

And he's no sympathetic person to a democratic worldview. But he understands, okay, that's now who's in charge here. And in some ways, part of that is, well, they're not Soviet. And that was our only other choice, right? But you're right, yes. So very, very quickly, Schmidt does end up in Soviet custody. Herpena is killed in the war by the Nazis. The July plot doesn't go well for him. And Reinhardt goes on to have a lovely career as well, right? Post-war career. Sorry, what was the question before that?

Just talk us through how, well, first of all, two, so double part question is, one, how does he come back to prominence? Oh, yes, of course. First of I guess, chief inspector of the armored corps, and then, and then obviously on the chief of staff. And then two, how does he manage to save his skin, which you just touched on a bit? Sure, yeah, no. So one of the key things I would say about Guderian and his career, which is, I think, going to be quite fascinating to people is I was surprised when I was again looking at him.

I was interested in his letters, obviously. And in the file that Guderian had, these letters from Margreta, his wife, there are 13 letters. Now, at first I thought, oh, I'm taking everything I can possibly find, all this contextualizing information and I was interested, obviously, in what are these letters? One of the fascinating things is we have almost no visibility whatsoever for German generals' wives' full stop in the Second World War. Now, a lot of people probably would sit there and say, well, they're also the homemakers. They're not on the Eastern Front. How much influence could they have? I don't mind saying I was shocked at how much. There's two big things about someone like Magrata, and it has a lot

to do with how Goderian's career gets rehabilitated. Number one, emotionally, as I sort of alluded to before, she is the bedrock for Gordarian. Guderian doesn't confide in anyone. He is extremely close with his wife. He loves her dearly. He comes across as a very, very warm, sensitive guy. And in no other thing that I've ever read does he come across that way? But he absolutely does with his wife.

He has a very close. In fact, I would say the letters are remarkably sensual. For this era, and I can see it through the other letters, people don't write that way. In fact, I've read, I don't know how many hundreds, perhaps thousands of German soldiers' letters, who are also writing to their wives. Guderian's remarkable for how sensual he is, right? So he's very, very, he's very loving, but it's more than that. It's much more than that.

In Kenneth Maxey's biography in the 1970s, he, and you have to understand that Kenneth Maxey is dealing with Guderian's son. Guderian's son, Heinz Gunter, becomes a general. In fact, he becomes the inspector of Panzerrupa in the Bundesweir. So he has a big career. This is not a man who would use military terms in a frivolous way. He was in the Vermacht. He's gone right through to the Bundeswia. He knows what this is.

And he describes to Kenneth Maxi at one point, one of the gold pieces of this book, look, you have to understand my mother was kind of like my father's chief of staff. And chief of staff is a key word there. That's a very important position. And I thought, wow, that's curious. I remember reading it back in the day thinking, what kind of role did she play?

Then I connected with the letters, and it's very clear she's giving him advice. Now, she plays two roles. On the one hand, she knows what the ethos of the time is. In national socialism, a woman's role is in, and you do not step into the man's space. And some of the passages in her letters play to that. She says things like, oh, I wouldn't presume as a wife to ever give you advice,

my darling. But then there's the opposite. Then she has moments where it is extremely clear. In one instance, just after Brokich has been removed as chief of the army, she writes to him very, or not very cryptically, but she's very guarded in how she writes this. She says, I am aware that there are, I can't remember exactly how many, seven other people whose names are being mentioned as possible replacements. Your activities must change.

I can't tell you what you're going to have to do, but we need to talk. I can't talk to you on the telephone about this. She's very smart. She doesn't want to put it in the letter. She knows that telephones are everyone in a command can pick up the receiver and listen. So she needs to talk to him privately to give him his instructions of what she said. And you might be thinking, how could she possibly know? She lives in the most exclusive suburb of Berlin.

So Himla's houses down the road, right? A lot of people live here. And she associates with all the wives, all the wives of the most important people. And she's gathering information. That's her role. and she's mining this to provide good area. That's how she's on the inside of who's jostling for whom in what position. So fast forward, he's fired in December.

His career is kind of in ruins. It's very much Hitler who steps in to get rid of him. She has family connections through Budwin Keitel. That's the brother of Keitel, who is the guy, the central guy in the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht High Command, so above the Army High Command. He is the head of the personnel umpt. She's related to him through marriage, I think. I can't remember.

Maybe it's her sister or someone. He is then set up with Goderian to go on hunting visits, all the rest of it, read between the lines. He's ingratiating himself. Then he makes the big return. And Goderian really was suffering in 42. He at one point, I can't remember where I got this from, but he was complaining to his barber at one point, oh, I'm just useless, you know.

And he writes that it's embassied. It's embarrassing to be out in public because here I am a great general going out to the barber. There's a war to be for it. It's so embarrassing for me. And then he gets back in, right? And then he is rebuilding his career. So, you know, it just underlines the importance of, I mean, if that's the one woman we see of all these German generals, it's remarkable what role she plays. It suggests your wives might have been playing a lot more in those private circles than we've ever been a way. where and it shows how even a man like Guderian, beyond his own acumen and an ability to sell himself, he is very much dependent on his wife as well for his rehabilitation. Sorry, that's a long answer. But it says a lot, right? It says a lot about how it works on the inside. Because people

like to believe, oh, it's just your prowess as a general. That's what, you know, accounts for your career. It's also your media. It's also the working, the relationships. Absolutely. Now, you have a photo in the book of for the two of them, Heinz and Margueretta, together. And it's the early 50s looking like, you know, I mean, but for the, but for the Hitler mustache, a kind of nice, you know, German couple of a certain age and certain level of wealth. And, you know, everything you outline right there makes me think they both should have been put on trial. She's certainly part of the success indeed. Yeah. David Stahl, author of Hitler's Panzer Generals. It has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. And looking

forward to your further work. Thanks so much for having me. And yeah, thanks, mate. It's been a great conversation. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.