Megargee, Geoffrey P. Inside Hitler's High Command. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

Hitler's style of command, and especially the so-called Fuehrerprinzip, or leader principle, was beginning to have insidious effects on the command system. According to the Fuehrerprinzip, every commander held sole responsibility for decisions within his command, and he was also duty-bound to obey every order he received from his superior commander. The Fuehrer himself stood, of course, at the top of this hierarchy; his will was quite literally law. Every senior commander (and more junior commanders, too, as the war went on) knew that Hitler had the power to issue or change any order. More and more often they began to appeal to him directly , as Guderian did on December 20, and his personal style was such that he allowed such behavior, even though it clearly violated the chain of command.

For a time Hitler simultaneously held four levels of command: head of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, commander-in-chief of the Army, and commander of Army Group B, the latter at a distance of some 800 miles.

As Allied material superiority increasingly made itself felt, the lack of German resources caused greater and greater competition between OKH and OKW for their own purposes. Some of these disputes, despite their deadly seriousness, were laughable.


In late February, for instance, the commander in chief west, Rundstedt, complained to the OKW that the General Staff had ordered a division to move out for the east on April 3; he said that the unit was not yet ready for combat in Russia. The Armed Forces Command Staff then reminded the General Staff that, in accordance with the Fuehrer's policy, only the Command Staff could determine departure dates for units in the OKW theaters. Finally the problem went to Hitler, after which the OKW notified the General Staff that the division would be available on April 4-- one day later than the General Staff's original target date. Such were the quarrels that were taking up an increasing amount of the staffs' time.

Command arrangements grew ever more nightmarish. Eventually, an OKW-controlled army group, E, was part of the front line facing the Soviets, but the Armed Forces High Command obstinately refused to transfer control of the force to OKH. Tactical units on the ground, side by side at the theater boundary, had to appeal all the way up to the very top of the chain of command to coordinate with each other.

The next 1a was Lieutenant Colonel Ulrich de Maiziere, whose story sums up the status of the General Staff in the last weeks of the war. He was not quite thirty-three years old when he took up his post, and yet for the last two weeks of his tenure (April 10-24, 1945), he was the de facto chief of the Operations Branch. In an interview in 1996 he emphasized that he would not have been qualified for that post as it had existed earlier; he was not experienced enough to plan major operations. De Maiziere was extremely busy, but his role was almost clerical. The Operations Branch collated the situation reports and updated the maps as always. Hitler reviewed the reports in his briefings and made his decisions, which de Maiziere would record and issue as orders.De Maiziere went so far as to place a quote from a film in his office: "It is not my place to think about the senselessness of the tasks that are assigned to me."

In April 1945 Hitler finally rationalized his command apparatus by officially subordinating OKH to OKW. He was a day late and a dollar short. "When Hitler issued that last order regarding the command structure, Russian artillery shells were already bursting in the Chancellery courtyard above his head."

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