Edited by Helmut Heiber and David Glantz
Enigma Books, 2003 (softcover edition, 2004)
1,200 pp., $26 (softcover)

Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

What's the best road map to the twisted pathways of a madman's mind? His own words. Hitler may have lacked the men, weapons and strategy to conquer the world. But he was never at a loss for words.

Hitler and His Generals is perhaps the record of how Hitler directed his war. The justice is deliciously poetic. Determined to prove that Germany's declining fortunes were the fault of his generals, Hitler ordered in 1942 that stenographers record his conversations with them, thus enabling him to prove that they disobeyed his orders. Instead he left us a testament to the la-la land of the Wolf's Lair and the Fuhrerbunker, the obsessiveness and pettiness of Hitler, and the way his mind flitted from topic to topic like a crazed butterfly.

Consider the transcript at a conference in March 1945, less than two months before Berlin fell. The meeting began with Hitler being briefed on the Eastern and Western fronts, then meandered as Hitler steered the conversation toward heavy infantry howitzers, what thickness of concrete is needed to make a bunker bomb-proof and the combat qualities of a small unit of Indians fighting for Germany. ("I think that if the Indians were used to turn prayer wheels or something like that, they'd be the most untiring soldiers in the world.")

There is no better illustration of why Germany lost the war. Instead of focusing on the military situation, or letting his military advisers conduct the war, Hitler constantly meddled in minutiae. The man who commanded the obedience of millions of soldiers, whose decrees meant life-and-death for most of Europe, spent his time issuing tactical instructions to battalions a thousand miles away in Russia. Or, like a befuddled uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, he would reminisce about his First World War experiences as a corporal in the trenches. In Hitler's mind, this made him smarter than his generals.

And occasionally he was. Hitler had an agile, if facile, mind. His comments on war and politics are frequently perceptive. Nor was he the only Second World War leader to meddle; war may be too important to be left to the generals, but when Stalin and Churchill also directed military operations, the results were equally disastrous. Yet those two leaders learned to let go, while Hitler's micromanagement grew as Germany's plight worsened. In a state like the Third Reich, where the guiding precept of the "Fuhrer Principle" tended to centralize authority in the absolute power of Hitler, this proved fatal. And in today's world, where satellite communications enable civilian leaders to instantly command their troops around the globe, it's an object lesson in the dangers of too much control.

Comedy and Hitler are oxymorons, but some passages of this book are funny in a lunatic way, like the December 1943 conference on defending France against an Anglo-American amphibious assault. Hitler suddenly convinces himself that flamethrowers will magically stop the Second Front. He telephones an armaments official: "Saur, how many flamethrowers do you produce per month now? ... It's only 1,200? I thought it was 2,400. I wanted three times as much ... Thank you very much! Heil! Happy holidays!"

Hitler and His Generals is not a conventional military history. It's literally a series of transcripts that frequently are missing sections (the records were partially destroyed at the end of the war). Fortunately, it contains 400 pages of remarkably informative footnotes that are worth the price of the book itself.

For those interested in grand strategy and how leaders — even lunatic ones — make their decisions, this book is invaluable.