Generaloberst Franz Halder

Chief of the General Staff - Patriot or Traitor?

by Gary Komar

During the early morning hours of June 22, 1941, some three million German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Already master of most of western Europe, Adolf Hitler now coveted the extensive living space and economic prizes in the East. But this new adventure would destroy him, his Thousand Year Reich, and almost four million of his soldiers.

In no small way, one man contributed significantly to Germany's destruction. As Chief of the German Army General Staff between 1938 and 1942, Colonel General Franz Halder helped Adolf Hitler attain some of his earliest victories. At the same time he plotted Hitler's downfall and deliberately impeded his goals.

"Now, although it may be given to a politician to play the dual role of the responsible adviser and conspirator," Field Marshal Erich von Manstein wrote of Halder after the war, "soldiers are not usually fitted for this kind of thing." This situation, von Manstein pointed out, "inevitably created an insoluble dilemma" for the Chief of Staff.

At the Nuremberg Trials Halder testified that the terms "treason" and "plot against the state" do not exist for the German soldier. To resolve the dilemma he faced between his duty as a soldier and a higher moral duty, he chose the higher duty.

Although critics still questions Halder's self-proclaimed virtues and his motives, his direction was consistent. Outwardly ambivalent, seemingly contradictory, overly cautious, and highly emotional, this complex, enigmatic individual never wavered from the opportunity to frustrate Hitler's ambitions.

Halder's early career gave no warning of treasonable intent. Born in Wuerzburg on June 30, 1884, his family had served in the Bavarian officer corps for 300 years. He entered the army in 1902 and held various staff appointments during the First World War. In 1933, when Hitler took power, Colonel Halder was Chief of Staff of a military district. He joined the General Staff as a training and manoeuvres specialist three years later. In 1938, Halder became General of Artillery, and the army's Chief of the General Staff.

Rapid promotion, however, did not bring him personal satisfaction. Halder was deeply troubled by the Nazi's unscrupulous methods, and developed a passionate resentment toward Hitler's regime. As early as l934, his blunt reports cited the disgraceful conduct of the SA, SS and Gestapo, and the pressure the regime put on the churches.

More disturbing was the challenge by rival and duplicitous command organizations to the army's power base. In 1935 Hitler created a German air force including its own General Staff. And after the Blomberg-Fritsch scandal in 1938, he formed the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), which functioned as his personal military secretariat.

Far from again becoming the preeminent military authority in Germany, the Army High Command (OKH) found itself curbed, controlled, and diluted. It became little more than an advisory unit and forfeited its historic and fundamental right to decide when, and how, to make war. This prerogative became Adolf Hitler's alone, and he moved in a direction and at a pace the army found unacceptable. In 1938 after General Ludwig Beck, then army Chief of Staff, resigned in protest over Hitler's aggressive policies Halder accepted the position, he later claimed, "only to make use of the opportunity that...[it] offered to fight against Hitler and his system."

Military historians have criticized Halder for not taking more of the strategic initiative in the Russian campaign. They have argued that the unimaginative and reconstituted plans he produced for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and France in 1940, were an "appalling disaster" and provoked scorn.

Yet often downplayed are the restrictions Hitler placed on the army General Staff by limiting its activities and interfering in its operations. And often ignored are the circumstances that removed any incentive for Halder to cooperate with Hitler and the other command groups. As British historian B.H. Liddell Hart once noted, "Unwilling executants do not make for good execution."

Within a month of taking office, the new Chief of the General Staff was locked in a bitter debate with Hitler over the plan to invade Czechoslovakia. Unable to sway Hitler's resolve, Halder and the compliant General Walter von Brauchitsch, the army's new Commander-in-Chief, ignored their leader's directions and sent out their own invasion instructions. General Alfred Jodl, OKW's Chief of Operations, noted that Hitler had "the whole nation behind him but not his generals" who still see him as a mere corporal. As in 1914, Jodl said, the "disobedience of the Army was becoming distressingly evident."

But Halder was more than disobedient. He was seditious. Far from serving Hitler's needs, Halder became the first Chief of Staff to plan a coup. He not only took the treasonable step of meeting with members of a group determined to overthrow the head of state, but Army High Command headquarters was infused with conspirators. Between 1938 and 1940, every aggressive plan ordered by Hitler had a counter plan to "cut across the first plan provisions and....sabotage Hitler's conduct of the war."

On September 28, 1938 Halder, "in bitter conflict with his conscience", sent out an order for the coup, only to cancel it the next day when the Munich Agreement gave Hitler everything he wanted. On hearing the news Halder fell into "a state of complete collapse, weeping...that all was lost."

Ordered to draw up invasion plans for the West after Poland's defeat in 1939, Halder was again pulled into another plot to depose Hitler. Von Brauchitsch's refusal to join the resistance movement left the Chief of Staff "under such stress that he ceased to function effectively." One of the conspirators recorded in his diary that "...The Chief of the General Staff has no business breaking down."

On November 5, 1939, frightened that Hitler had discovered the conspiracy, Halder broke off active participation in the plot. He ordered all papers connected with the revolt destroyed and had opposition members at OKH posted elsewhere.

In the meantime, von Manstein pressed Halder with a new plan to push the weight of the German offensive through the Ardennes, instead of Holland and Belgium. Halder ignored him. Not only was the Chief of Staff opposed to any extension of the war, which was scheduled to proceed at any moment, it is probable he was not about to promote any new scheme that might promise Hitler success.

But Hitler had his own way of dealing with the army's opposition. Without consulting OKH, Hitler ordered General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst to alone prepare plans for the invasion of Norway. Von Falkenhorst, however, needed specially trained mountain troops from Halder. Miffed, Halder refused, only to be overturned by Hitler who was "overjoyed at the opportunity to put Halder in his place."

After the victory in the West, Hitler pointedly excluded his Chief of Staff from any honours. On July 19, 1940, William Shirer noted that Halder was "...Not made Field Marshal tonight but merely promoted one grade [to Colonel General]. After Poland Hitler skipped over him in bestowing honours, but the Army kicked so hard Hitler belatedly made amends." Shirer added that Halder "...seemed to be hiding...a sadness, as he warmly congratulated his younger generals who were now...over him as field marshals."

While still fighting Britain, Hitler turned his attention to the Soviet Union. Deceived by a sense of infallibility and caught in a web of erroneous impressions about the East, Hitler and most generals believed the Soviet armies could be destroyed in a matter of weeks. But they could not agree on how to do it.

Halder and many commanders thought the Soviet Union would collapse with the capture of Moscow. Hitler had political and economic goals. He wanted Russia's raw resources and industrial regions, and "the Bolshevik breeding grounds" of Leningrad and Stalingrad. Unimpressed with the army's plans, Hitler issued his own variation in December 1940 emphasizing Leningrad as the primary target.

But Halder was not about to be swayed. He began in deadly earnest to promote his own vision and block Hitler's. When Halder was asked to prepare a study on the Pripet Marshes, assumed to be unsuitable for military operations, he failed to include in his report that the area could be used to threaten the flanks of armies advancing on Moscow or Kiev. In February 194l, Halder only paid lip service to Hitler's intention to establish supply bases in the Baltic. And in June, Halder and von Brauchitsch countermanded the Commissar Order, which called for the execution of all captured Soviet Commissars.

On June 22, 1941, with most of the technical problems still unresolved, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Over the next six months Halder conspired to obstruct Hitler's intentions, if not by "direct disobedience then by circumvention of unwelcome instruction."

To frustrate the Leningrad objective, Halder rejected General Hermann Hoth's appeal to move his tanks northeast. He refused to interfere when General Erich Hoeppner, already half-way to Leningrad, bogged down by sending his weakened panzer corps in two different directions. And the Chief of Staff "systematically insulated" General Heinz Guderian "from interference from above" when the panzer commander pulled his forces east in the direction of the Dnieper bridgehead toward Moscow. At end of June, the Chief of Air Operations came to coordinate plans for an attack on Leningrad. Halder did little to cooperate.

Halder's "ideas seemed to shift in such a way that they were always diametrically opposed to Hitler's". Each time Hitler wanted to move the panzers in one particular direction, Halder saw the importance of taking them in another. "This conspiracy, fumbling and barely articulate though it may have been, was none the less obstructive enough to result in a completely disastrous effect on the German campaign."

After Hitler ordered a halt in July 1941, Kiev became the focus of attention. While Hitler ill, von Brauchitsch and Halder attempted a compromise plan to satisfy both the Moscow and Kiev operations. But their scheme was discovered and stopped. In August, Hitler resolved the issue by ordering an assault on Kiev.

A month later, with Kiev encircled, Hitler finally authorized the advance on Moscow. But when his armies stalled in the mud in October, von Brauchitsch and Halder were accused of "treachery" for sabotaging the plan. By then, it was too late. Heavy November snows and falling temperatures caught the unprepared German troops without adequate protection on the outskirts of Moscow.

On December 6, 1941, a Russian counteroffensive threw the Germans back and five days later, Hitler sealed his fate by declaring war on the United States. In mid-December Hitler fired von Brauchitsch, became Army Commander-in-Chief himself, and further complicated an already unworkable military system.

Although Halder stayed on as army Chief of Staff, his relations with Hitler continued to deteriorate. Von Manstein, who met with them in August 1942, said "Hitler was abusive, Halder obstructive and pedantic. Hitler would taunt Halder with his lack of combat experience. Halder would mumble under his breath about the differences between professional and 'untutored' opinion". In his more vociferous moments, Halder referred to Hitler as that "criminal", "madman", "sexual psychopath" and "bloodsucker".

Finally on September 24, 1942, Hitler relieved his Chief of Staff. "Half my exhaustion is due to you", Hitler said. "It is not worthwhile going on."

After the abortive attempt on Hitler's life in 1944, Halder was arrested and imprisoned, but insufficient evidence existed to link him to the conspiracy. In May, 1945, after being liberated by the Americans, Halder escaped the indictments so many of his colleagues faced at Nuremberg.

In 1961, a former enemy honoured him. For his achievements during fourteen years with the United States Army Historical Division, Halder was honoured with the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the highest recognition that could be given to a civilian. Franz Halder died of a heart attack in April 1972 in Aschau, West Germany at the age of 87.

As Chief of the German General Staff, Halder had played a delicate and dangerous balancing game. Although his cautious nature probably saved his life, the accumulation of disobedience and deceit was fatal to German strategy and the conduct of the war.