Why was Hitler so obsessed with "fight to the last man"? He constantly ordered troops to never retreat and hold hopeless positions. What was his rationale behind this? Surely he should have known that defending troops that are cut off and surrounded against overwhelming enemy men & material don't stand much of a chance?
I think he may have done this because i believe that he still had hopes that somehow, someway they would be able to fight off every invader and that they would be able to still conquer the world. It wasn't until the Russians entered Berlin did he realize that all hopes of German domination were crushed. Thats just my opinion.
hitler was so desperate for his superreace and empire to suceed that he believe there was a hope that his army could fight back and turn the war aruond. hitler also thought that the allies might side with germany and fight russia to gether,as long as the war was going hitler really thought this was possiable.
One explanation Hitler used was that if the Generals are allowed to make any plans for retreat it is alwasy easier to let go of the positions they are holding onto. Also the winter 1941/42 "victory" in Russia seemed to prove Hitler that not a step back strategy was working.
Indeed, i read somewhere that Hitler was stenghtened by this event in his resolve not to listen to the generals anymore and using the "no step back" strategy more and more. Aglooka
I'd say - Hubris. His belief in himself, and what could be achieved by hanging on rigidly to the last 'superior' Nazi Bullet fired by the last 'superior' German soldier overrode all common sense, and went well beyond his grasp of military matters. The Ideological stance really was everything to him. Cheers, Adam.
Ditto. This would be my guess. This seemed to be his answer to all of the Generals who submitted requests for a withdrawal. He did as early as 42' with Rommel.
rommel was actaully very smart in making great discions and hitler very rarly listen to rommel,i believe you.
Hitler used a lot of the Festungen as economy of force measures (as strange as that might initially sound). If one looks at the orders of battle of the Festungen, they often included many second-rate or largely immobile troops who would have likely been lost anyway in a retreat of any length. By placing them in the "fortresses" Hitler got some mileage from them as they forced the enemy to deploy troops to besiege these cities; for example, Festung Posen had to be surrounded and assaulted by Chuikov's Eighth Guards Army. I'd quote some of the orders of battle but I'm away from home for a couple of weeks and don't have access to my sources. Some of the Festungen served strategic purposes in that they blocked the enemy use of them as points along their lines of communication (like the French ports, Poznan, and Breslau). Cheers BW
This is my opinion only, not backed up by any concrete research. I suspect that his "no retreat" might be traced back as far as his own experiences in WW1. In that case he felt the soldiers had NEVER been defeated in the field, and would have continued to fight on if they had NOT been "stabbed in the back" by the spineless Jews, moneylenders, Communists, and politicians in Berlin. He could now justify his "hold the last meter, fire the last bullet" position in his own mind feeling perhaps that if the men were ordered to fight as hard and long as necessary, the German military superiority would come to the fore. This time they would NOT be stabbed in the back by their leader, and forced into a humiliating defeat. But given every possible opportunity to prove their superiority! As I said, just guess on my part. The other explainations may be just as, or more valid than my own.
I also read previously about "Führer defence order" dated Sept 8th 1942 but unfortunately cannot find the details on this in the net.....and it is based somewhat on his personal experiences from ww1.
Here is the Fuhrer directive establishing those fortresses and his reasoning for them. Fuehrer Order No. 11: Fortified Areas & Strong Points Kai, is this the directive you meant? http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/1084/hitler_directives/dir67.htm
Excellent stuff, thanks. So much desperate rhetoric.. It is interesting how the Germans and the Japanese placed so much faith on the "Spirit". Their newsreels often talk of "our soldiers achieving superhuman feats", etc.etc.
I concurr: ideology. To Hitler the fighting spirit and personal will counted more than tactical skill. It was the superior race the one that would prevail in the end, by no other means than will, just as he thought his own personal experience was. There is too the place ideology had in nazi ideology, specially the 'vital space' in the east for the future of Aryans. Also, there is his obsession with natural resources and economics (the excuse to dismiss his generals suggestions, since they 'didn't know anything about politics or economics and the overall good for the German Volk'...) There was dishonour in giving up ground and a sign of weakness, unthinkable for the master race.
You guys are making sense. But that's the problem, Hitler made no sense. He was a meglo-maniac and completley insane. No man with any good common sense would sacrifice the life of Germany's best. But he did. And all those men died believing in him in a slow agonizing painful and horrific death. Even Rommel, (though he was murdered), was loyal to him. If only they could of succeeded in blowing him up....so sad....so very sad. :mourn:
What did Hitler say at the end of the war, when he finally acknowledged defeat and ordered the annihilation of the German people? That they were a sick, weak race, not up to the task he had set for them... All the best had died in the front; the rest were inferior and therefore expendable. So, Hitler would go and he would take all Germany with him in a full-scalle Götterdämmerung...
By the ending stages of the war Hitler was probably quite mad and certainly delusional. The war was very much Hitler's war, he seldom listened to anyone but his own inner voice for making decisions. Without his number 2 man Herman Goering helping pulls the strings and drumming up the funding, Hitler could never have achieved his status as Fuehrer. Goering certainly did not want a second world war and did everything he could to prevent it without angering Hitler - but as he told others many times, he realized once Hitler made up his mind to do something, no one on earth could talk him out of it. This is the reason Goering became so lazy about the luftwaffe after the battle of britain - Hitler had lost faith in him but was allowing to keep his myriad posts (nominal head of the Luftwaffe, one and only Reichsmarshall thus outranking everyone except Hitler himself, head of economic planning, even "Reich master of hunting") only out of loyalty for what Goering had done in the past. (At one point in 1944, by which time German airpower had been almost swept from the skies, Hitler turned to Goering at one of the few meetings Goering still attended and said "Goering, your luftwaffe isn't worth a damn!") As the war progressed Hitler gradually began keeping his own council more and more. After the failed bomb plot in 1944 Hitler's paranoia and delusions naturally got much worse as he had always distrusted the army, whose officers had plotted to kill him. More and more he began to rely on the SS to keep the army in line (as these were the true believers). As the Russians closed in from the east and the allies from the west and defeat drew ever closer by the day, Hitler's orders became more and more bizarre and senseless, resulting in needless losses to his own troops for no purpose. Towards the end of the war Hitler was sending orders to commanders who were dead or captured or whose units no longer existed. In April 1945, as the Russians approached Hitler's bunker, one of his secretaries suggested that perhaps he ought to go down fighting in battle. Hitler was lucid enough to tell her that there was no way he was going to risk being captured and brought to Moscow in a circus cage by Stalin, and committed suicide instead.
Well, we can comparatively analyze Hitler and Stalin. Both were somewhat genius, as can be seen by their rises to political power over their entire nations. Both were extremely effective, in their own ways, at securing the faith of their people. Both were very paranoid, as can be seen by the Great Purge and Hitler's entire life in World War 2. However, the major difference is Hitler's pride and belief in racial superiority. If you believe that your soldiers are supermen, and you yourself is infallible, then you really have nothing to fear from an "inferior" enemy. This belief also caused him to disregard anything his generals might have to say to him, since he believed that he was better. Interestingly enough, the turnaround of the war did not dampen his pride, it actually increased it. Hitler's reasoning was, if it was a defeat, it was his generals' fault, and victories were supposedly attributed to himself or his own advice. As a result, the string of defeats from 1942 onwards did not cause him to lose faith in His Own Excellency, instead, he repeatedly heaped the blame on others, usually his excellent strategic commanders. And these commanders represented the tactics that the early Wehrmacht exhibited. When the commanders fell one by one, the only real tactic left was to just make every city an Alamo. After all, Hitler had seen the Soviets do it, in fact, three times in Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow, all of them to his demise. Hubris changed the way he saw the world, and as a result changed the way he reacted to it. Stalin, on the other hand, did not have this innate feeling of superiority. He acknowledged that his generals knew more about war than him, and he followed their advice many times. Although some might claim that Stalin was widely different from Hitler (which he is), I believe that every single difference can be associated with the main difference, that Hitler believed himself beyond-normal. Hitler's supposed insanity is actually just a very developed stage of his pride and paranoia. His own rationalizations, as Friedrich said above, was that the chosen people had not lived up to him, and had failed him.
