Reading Ernest R. May’s Strange Victory and Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, Joseph Fouché decided that Hitler was a “good” Clausewitzian, contrary to some other interpretations he’d read:
In May’s account, Hitler refrained from day to day interference in the Polish campaign but as soon as Poland surrendered, Hitler began pressing for an immediate attack in the West against France. The high command of the Wehrmacht was vehemently opposed, rationally calculating that such an attack would be suicidal given France and Great Britain’s qualitative superiority in men and material. May portrays Hitler, a politician, as having a better grasp of the political frailties of Chamberlain and Daladier and their respective publics than his generals. Hitler used to read translations of the front pages of major foreign newspapers at breakfast. This gave him a valuable insight into what the Allied powers were currently thinking. So Hitler prodded and pushed the high command until they produced a plan and then prodded and pushed them until they produced a better plan. After the massive victory over France, Hitler naturally took credit and was even more actively interventionist during later stages of the war.Tooze portrays the political and economic vision behind Hitler’s entire political career. Hitler saw Germany (and Europe) as being doomed to fall further and further behind in international competition with Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and especially America with their vast captive markets and vast resources. This meant Germany was doomed to strategic and therefore racial oblivion. The only way to reverse this trend, Hitler believed, was to carve a vast new empire out of Eastern Europe with all the precious resources of the Ukraine and the Caucasus that came with it. Since the same coalition that had defeated Germany in World War I, Britain, France, and America, dominated by International Jewry, would stand in the way of Germany’s Ukrainian Manifest Destiny, there was to be war. Hitler’s strategy, therefore was to make Germany economically self-sufficient to prevent the economic strangulation of blockade that ended World War I, to rearm, and to seek peace in the West while he dealt with the Little Entente and Russia in the east. When the British and French intervened, Hitler sought to knock them out of the war before the US fully mobilized its economy for war and made its power come to bear. When he failed to take Britain out with France, Hitler sought to hit their Bolshevik tool in the east. After the beating the Soviets received at the hands of tiny Finland, Hitler and most of his generals though Russia was a house of cards that was ripe for the plucking. When Germany failed to take Russia out of the war quickly, all that was left was playing for time in the hope that fissures would appear in the uneasy alliance between the Western democracies and their brutal Russian ally. In sum, Tooze demonstrates that from beginning to end that German policy was guided by passably coherent politics and strategy.
The problem with Germany’s military performance is not a lack of political involvement in the military decision-making process. The problem was that the policy Hitler pursued was wrong. Though he came remarkably close, Hitler couldn’t go to war with most of the industrialized world and hope to win. This fundamental flaw meant that, irrespective of the degree of political control he exercised over the Wehrmacht, he was doomed to failure barring a miracle and miracles were evidently in short supply in Nazi Germany. A wrong war is a continuation of wrong political intercourse with the addition of other means. Paying heed to Clausewitz in that one regard would have gained Hitler nothing. Only if Hitler had changed his policy would his chances improved. However, if Hitler offered a fundamentally different policy than he never would have gone to war in the first place, he probably never would have become Chancellor, and he might of never had a career in politics at all. The rot starts at the center and radiates outwards.