The old Prussian firm

One consequence of the continuing and unhealthy fascination in this country with the Third Reich has been an ignoring of the Second, whose Faustian story had yet more terrible consequences.

At the beginning of the last century Germany could claim to lead the world; not only in industry, science and technology, but in what she proudly termed Kultur: philosophy, poetry, music, philology, historiography, law. As a welfare state Bismarck had provided a model that Britain was only beginning to follow a generation later. Germany’s constitution may have given too little power to the legislature to suit Anglo-Saxon tastes, but few people complained: the French, after all, gave rather too much. Yet 40 years later the German nation was in the grip of a psychopath who led her to utter disaster. So what went wrong?

What went wrong, of course, was that Germany lost the first world war — a war, most historians agree, that, if she did not provoke, she did nothing to prevent, and which she fought in a manner that ultimately left her friendless. But she fought it brilliantly. Had she not provoked the United States into joining her enemies she might have won it. And responsibility both for her victories and for her ultimate defeat can be laid on the shoulders of two men — Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Luden-dorff.

The two are so indissolubly connected that Winston Churchill in The World Crisis referred to them throughout simply as ‘HL’. They are rightly seen as the epitome of the pattern of command bequeathed to the world by the old Prussian Great General Staff; a commanding general providing leadership through his prestige and force of character assisted by a chief of staff whose military expertise gave him primacy in the formulation and execution of plans.