Heinz Guderian

In other cases, they were pretty much destroyed and then they were rebuilt.

So although there is an Eastern Front, that winter, 44-45, Heinz Guderian, who is now Chief of General Staff, tours the Eastern Front and comes back and presents his findings to Hitler saying, it's pretty much over.

We've restored a front line by scraping the bottom of the barrel, but this is a house of cards.

It's not going to survive any serious blow.

It's the poor recruits, either the ones who have come through the very truncated training or people who've just been press ganged and thrown into line.

They're the ones who are contributing to the bulk of these horrendous losses that the Soviets continue to suffer.

Now, we did talk a little bit about Hitler's relationship with the Wehrmacht high command and his generals, especially Guderian, who's the chief of the general staff.

But especially at this point, late stage in the war, what is that relationship? Because, of course, a major issue that affected it was the July bomb plot of July 1944, where Hitler becomes even more mistrustful of his generals.

Much of this involved unimaginative bureaucratic work, but it also placed Paulus in a position of some influence.

He taught up-and-coming tank commanders here and cultivated relationships with some individuals who would become the leading German generals of the Second World War, notably Heinz Guderian, the foremost tank commander of the war.

In the spring of 1938, during a major shakeup of the Wehrmacht as Hitler imposed full Nazi control over the leadership of the armed forces, Paulus was promoted to become the chief staff officer of Guderian’s Sixteenth Army Corps, a division which was largely a motorized tank unit by the time the Second World War was started by the Germans in September 1939.

There is little indication of Paulus’s rise during this time as being in any way the result of a personal relationship with Hitler.

On the 2nd of July 1953, shortly after he returned to Germany, Paulus gave a talk in Berlin which he entitled On the Vital Issues of Our Nation.

Here, he set out his political views, such as they were after a decade living in the Soviet Union and having lived through an immensely traumatic period for Europe, Germany, and for himself as an individual.

Paulus made it clear that he remained first and foremost a German patriot and commended Heinz Guderian who had died seven weeks earlier, as one as well.

He was blunt in laying the blame for Germany’s division into two countries and its modern woes on the leadership of it during the First and Second World Wars.

Entire formations surrendered because they thought resistance was pointless.

Behind this was a man obsessed with speed and communication, Heinz Guderian.

He argued that tanks should never wait, never pause, never look back.

Break through, race forward, sever command lines, and let the enemy collapse under its own confusion.

It was remarkably accurate.

And von Manstein and Guderian Their assessments, quite literally in the month before Barbarossa, the Soviet forces in being were exactly what they estimated them to be.

In reality, it was Stalin who was looking west and saying that Germany has no meaningful offensive capability and the mighty Soviet Union has nothing to fear.

And this is the key to why...