Dr. David Grier - Stukes Lecture 2021 | Erskine College & Theological Seminary

Transcript

well welcome everybody and thank you for coming to our annual stux lecture and this is a lecture series that is supported by the stooks family and we're delighted that two of the stuke's family could join us this afternoon and this stuke's lecture brings a distinguished speaker to erskine and this time we brought david greer who very much belongs in that crowd and i believe dr greer that your wife was once the stoops lecturer she was so you're trying to get even finally you're coming up to her level do you think not yet not yet maybe maybe soon dr greer has uh expertise in 20th century german history the second world war nazi germany in particular and he has already published one book and he's working on the second and that is the subject of his talk today a nice cheerful history lecture for dr richardson we've all been expecting but here it is thank you john thank you everyone in the history department for inviting me it's it's an honor to be here to give the stigs lecture and i haven't had a chance to bore any students for 10 months because i'm retired so i'm really looking forward to this i want to talk today about somebody probably very few of any of you have ever heard of before this rather relaxed looking fellow here called ferdinand scherner he is not well known in this country because schoener never fought the americans in world war ii he fought almost entirely on the russian front there's no book on him in english i doubt there's more than five to ten pages on any single book in english about this guy there are two books in german one's awful the others okay um i hope to change that but we'll see some of you may justifiably wonder more than 75 years after the end of the second world war with tens of thousands of books on germany and world war ii if there's no book on this guy yet he must not be very important i hope to change your mind about that just to let you know where i'm going i'm going to give a brief summary of schurrner's life or career and then look at three topics for cerner during the war the type of commander he was some of his successes primarily and then his actions at the very end of the war and then finally i want to look at some broader implications of cherner now i'll have to warn you usually when somebody starts to wrap things up it's just going to be a couple of minutes i've got 10 minute wrap up so i'll still i'll have you out of here within an hour it's okay um scherner was born in munich in 1892 he was the son of a police official he served in the first world war and was wounded twice and oh dear technology's already at work there well that's one too many there we go he was awarded the poor la merite this was prussia's highest honor for bravery it's like the congressional medal of honor so he won this medal in the first world war he remained in the military after world war one and rose very rapidly in the ranks after hitler came to power in 1933 and carried out a massive expansion of the german army during world war ii he served on virtually every front except north africa he participated in the invasions of poland of france and then of greece and then from mid-1941 on he was exclusively on the eastern front first in the arctic in the far north and then as an army group commander in the southern northern and central sectors and a lot of americans aren't quite as familiar with the eastern front world war ii but this is really where the war was um we like to think we won the war and yeah you could say we beat the japanese but it was the russians that beat the german army the u.s suffered somewhere between three to four hundred thousand combat deaths in world war ii the russians alone lost 26 to 28 million and 80 percent of all german soldiers killed in world war ii died on the eastern front so this was the decisive theater what have historians had to say about charter they usually devote a sentence or two to him and it's not very favorable hitler's biographer ian kershaw referred to scherner as the most brutal and most nazified of all commanders who ordered countless executions for cowardice and desertion robert citino judged scherner hands down the war's worst general in terms of humane treatment for one's own men and a staff officer in german army high command later wrote of scherner hated by the troops the general had the reputation of being a bloodthirsty monster well historians may not have liked cherner but hitler and other top nazis did scherner was one of only 27 recipients of the knights cross with oak leaves swords and diamonds most people have heard of the iron cross that was kind of a lower award hitler created the knights cross to be the next level up and if you did something great after you earned the knights cross you could be awarded the oak leaves and if you did something after that they'd add the swords to it and if you did something after that you got diamonds on the oak leaves and the swords the 27 germans in world war ii got this award and only 11 were in the army the rest in the other branches so this was a very high honor hitler also awarded cerner the golden party badge which granted nazi party membership hitler once claimed that the golden party badge should rank higher than any other honor conferred by the state so he didn't give that out too often in april 1945 hitler promoted scherner to field marshall kind of like a five-star general he was the last army officer to reach this rank and in hitler's political testament he appointed scherner commander-in-chief of the army and this was a post hitler himself had held since 1941. hitler respected and honored cherner and always treated him well a situation very few generals enjoyed in the last year of the war once when scherner arrived at hitler's headquarters the fiora greeted him with the comment if i had my way i would draw and quarter you so i had four cerners i don't know if that's the most reassuring greeting and in late 1945 hitler praised scherner claiming and i quote on the entire front only one man has proven to be a real field strategist the one who has to endure the worst attacks has the most orderly front schurner with every assignment he was given scherner achieved excellent results scherner within a few weeks made a front out of a mess and he didn't just build it up but filled it with a new spirit and held the front hitler selected schurner to be the first head of the army high command's national socialist leadership corps this is a group whose duty was to indoctrinate soldiers with nazi beliefs and hitler once described cherner ideologically as a fanatic which was a compliment nazi propaganda minister joseph goebbels praised him as more than 100 behind hitler and referred to him as a great military commander with superb political insight who hanged stragglers from the nearest tree near the end of the war german air force commander-in-chief hermann gehrig hailed scherner as the only true general and the only one he trusted scherner also enjoyed a cozy relationship with ss leader heinrich himmler himmler as head of the ss was in charge of the concentration and extermination camps and he was the true architect of the holocaust and he and sherman were big buddies scherner embraced nazi ideology as evidenced by his own comment that he considered himself a half ss man many of his orders reflect the preoccupation with nazi ideology and he insisted that his soldiers must be indoctrinated to stiffen their will to fight he instructed his men that the conflict in russia represented a different type of campaign from earlier campaigns in the west and that the war on the eastern front was an ideological struggle a struggle for existence against a beastial asiatic enemy he repeatedly referred to the war in the soviet union as a struggle of world views and irreconcilable ideologies and he assured his troops that in this battle there was only victory or death nothing in between scherner's style of command is perhaps best illustrated by an order he missed he issued on the murmansk front in 1942 he received reports that arctic conditions were harming morale so he simply decreed the arctic does not exist and i'm sure they didn't feel the cold after that one of his more extreme orders came in june 1944 and again i quote a generation must be created that removes every bourgeois concept of human dignity and every touch of softness we must surpass our enemies even in ardent hatred by the blazing flame we vow to overcome our miraculous good-naturedness in asiatic war and to draw strength from the destructive fire to consume ourselves in merciless hatred for our enemies so he didn't mince any words in his orders among his fellow officers and subordinates scherner was either greatly revered or profoundly hated for he was an unconventional commander in several respects german army group commanders usually spent most of their time at the headquarters they're receiving reports from subordinate units and issuing orders not sure he spent most of his time away from headquarters his main goal appears to have been to catch soldiers doing something wrong and he loved to terrorize soldiers behind the front lines if you were a front line soldier he didn't mess with you but behind the lines he was awful he enjoyed sneaking into the back door he'd occasionally crawl through a window of a mess hall or a field kitchen to make sure that the officers and the cooks ate the same food that was served to the troops woe to the soldier who tried to catch an afternoon nap drove a little over the speed limit or tried to loosen his collar for these were the types of offenses he particularly sought for reasons i will get to in a minute old vic von notzmer emerged as scherner's main nemesis after the war now knoxville was cerner's right-hand man he was the chief of the army group general staff both at army group north and center so we're talking the period july 44 till the end of the war of may 1945. this was his right-hand man while knoxmoor recognized scherner's personal bravery an ability to restore and maintain order he criticized him for terrorizing cooks when he should have been leading the army group according to knottsburgh scherner left the business of fighting the war to his staff while he roamed throughout the rear area searching for soldiers guilty of minor infractions that's were also claimed that although front-line soldiers enjoyed knowing that rear area troops suffered under sherner's reign of terror that didn't mean that they trusted him scherner was too mercurical too harsh and too unjust to win the full confidence of the soldiers in the trenches several commanders who served under cerner including may not have liked his methods but they admitted that he got results furthermore scherner really did play a more active role in leading the army group the nazmur concedes reached many of his decisions to order retreats after visiting the front lines and most four and five star generals in world war ii did not get as near the front as scherner did but his methods were questionable at the very least scherner was pedantic and irritating with his micromanaging and obsession with unimportant regulations there can be no doubt that many soldiers hated him solely because he was so annoying even as a general in a field marshal he continued to concern himself with matters that are normally dealt with with much much lower ranking officers for example in preparation for the invasion of england which was later called off he simply decreed that every man had to be able to swim within two weeks he repeatedly and i mean repeatedly issued orders limiting telephone conversations to three minutes fixing the maximum speed of vehicles at 40 mile 40 kilometers per hour and that's a little less than 25 miles an hour and criticizing soldiers for wasting wood on fires i don't know what he expected them to do with the wood on three separate occasions he warned his troops against engaging in sexual relations with women in occupied territories specifically in france in greece and in russia he threatened amorous soldiers with a court martial and inspired them with the statement that abstinence does not harm your health although armies do have to be concerned about stds this is something lieutenants and captains do not colonels and generals [Music] scherner has drawn a lot of criticism for the harshness of his sentences and his enthusiasm in punishing soldiers he posted lists of soldiers okay that's right lists of soldiers crimes and their punishment intending to deter others from similar misconduct and so what he's got here is seven people who've been sentenced to death and only one's going to prison so that kind of gives you an idea of how he did things angered that soldiers were not returning from leave on time cerner warned that any soldier who returned late from leave intentionally left spend one year in prison for every day late he returned a driver and a supply unit received six months in prison for exceeding the speed limit he was traveling 43 miles an hour another driver was sentenced to three weeks arrest for driving on the wrong side of the road to avoid potholes troops who shot reindeer he was in the arctic received sentences ranging from three to six months in prison and at times he would demand that judges in a court martial revise their verdict one example a soldier had been sentenced to four weeks in prison for a traffic violation certainly demanded it be increased to six months offenses that were more grave received harsher judgment falling asleep on guard duty five years in prison and one soldier who supposedly allowed his face and hands to become frostbitten to avoid action at the front receive the death penalty on more than one occasion schurner instructed troops to fire above the heads of retreating german soldiers to try to get them to turn around after the war a magazine published an article in which it said that schurner there was a bridge that he was at and he had instructed troops to fire machine guns over the fleeing soldiers heads schurner indignantly wrote the magazine and said he most definitely had not had machine guns fire over their heads they were anti-aircraft guns which are much less accurate so this is very dangerous although he had a reputation for commanding through fear especially in 1945 he ruled through absolute terror and he undoubtedly exceeded the norms even for nazi germany he was infamous for finding more combat troops by combing out soldiers from supply and support services and sending them to the trenches he repeatedly inspected hospitals searching for malingerers and he dragged seriously ill soldiers from their hospital bed some who could barely stand and sent them all for action at the front the most extreme of his misdeeds was the execution of many german soldiers as deserters particularly in the war's final months and these flying court marshals would be behind the front and if they called anybody not at the front they would give them a five-minute court martial and either shoot them or hang them now two former members of schurrner's staff have claimed that in order to maintain discipline scherner invented lists of condemned soldiers with fictitious names and offenses this may have been true sometimes but many of those executed were not fabricated there were two legally documented cases where scherner ordered soldiers immediate execution even before the court marshal this was in 1945 and the diaries and memoirs of many soldiers who served under cerner testify to the senseless execution of comrades soldiers and civilians alike reported seeing german soldiers of all ages either shot or hanged with placards around their neck proclaiming they were cowards and deserters [Music] now i have just spent about 20 minutes telling you what an awful person scherner was and he was but that doesn't mean that he was ineffective despite the generally accepted interpretation i think that sherner was actually a skillful commander and he saved the lives of thousands of his troops furthermore in contrast to his depiction as hitler's toady his yes man scherner repeatedly disobeyed hitler's orders and never lost his job it's a little more difficult to assess scherner's talents early in the war because he was not making many decisions he took part in the polish and french campaign and the french campaign he captured 120 000 french which was about 10 times his number in 1941 his division broke through the mataxas line in northern greece and it was shurner's troops who first entered athens and you can see here's one of his soldiers racing across the acropolis to raise the swastika over athens then certainly to his great dismay in august 1941 here's some of the reindeer scherner was sent to the arctic german troops north of the arctic circle surely felt as if they were mere onlookers unable to take part in the great german victories in the first months of the russian campaign when advances were made in hundreds of miles scherner remained in this remote theater for more than two years in a sector with relatively few troops where weather and terrain ruled out rapid movement and with key events occurring elsewhere scherner probably thought that his career had literally been put on ice his greatest accomplishment in the arctic was to prevent the encirclement and destruction of his troops when the soviets launched a major attack in may 1942 in a blizzard vehicles could not travel on roads that had disappeared under snowdrifts and so what scherner did was he gave all the soldiers he could round up in the rear area a pair of skis and a knapsack filled with food and ammunition and said go supply the front and it worked in october 1943 he finally left the arctic and hitler sent him to the extreme southern end of the front to the nicopol bridgehead now after the german defeated stalingrad they had retreated to the nipper river hitler wanted a bridgehead on the other side of the river to protect the manganese mines manganese is a key element in making steel for tanks and other armored vehicles and hitler was always very attuned to economic imperatives of the war and it was here that scherner displayed two characteristics that he was to follow throughout the rest of the war first he insisted that his troops hold the line and they better not retreat but when the situation became too dangerous and this happened in february 1944 he disobeyed hitler's explicit written and oral commands and he pulled all 17 divisions across the river and abandoned the manganese mines instead of dismissing schroeder hitler rewarded him with the oak leaves to the night's cross and shortly thereafter gave him command of army group south ukraine now commanding an army group for germany consisting of several hundred thousand men in 1944-1945 was neither a particularly easy nor desirable task by this time the russians are winning and when scherner commanded army group south ukraine he endured a major soviet attack he gave up ground as we could see here but he held the front intact he did suffer a major defeat on the crimean peninsula due to hitler's stubbornness and i'll talk about that just a minute at the end of july 1944 hitler sent sherner to the other end of the eastern front to army group north and he took over at a very dangerous time at the end of june the soviets launched a big offensive against army group center and inflicted a much more serious defeat than its stalingrad everybody's heard of stalingrad nobody's heard of migration the soviets had ripped a 100 mile hole in the front and scherner was sent up here and you can see he's going to get cut off in estonia scherner ignored hitler's orders and sanctioned several major retreats involving either great distances as when he evacuated estonia or strategic sites as in the case of the sforba peninsula on the baltic island of usual the retreat from estonia was a major withdrawal from here to here was 400 kilometers around 300 miles that's a long ways to go then to the surprise of both schoerner and knottsburgh around noon on may 7th they received news that the surrender would go into effect at midnight the following day not wishing to cause panic by sending out this information by radio the army group invited its three subordinate armies to send a staff officer for important information the next day when they arrived and this began at 10 o'clock in the morning on may 8th just a little more than 12 hours left in the war the army group issued a written order that the surrender takes place at midnight no equipment no weapons are to be destroyed and when midnight comes soldiers have to remain in place they couldn't keep retreating towards the americans that was the written order there was an oral order to break into smaller groups and have a mass flight to the west and if you have to fight your way through fight your way through okay up to this point there's little disagreement but the events of the following 24 hours are hotly contested according to knottsburg this is why he's the nemesis already on the evening of may 7th scherner approached him and informed him he would be leaving his escape had been prepared and he was too important to be captured he then opened a briefcase full of cash and offered knots for some to fund his escape natsuma refused and insisted that schurner remain with his men furthermore there was only one small command aircraft notzmer said he needed it to be in touch with the subordinate units because radio communications were unreliable cerner angrily refused telling knoxville leave the army on as best you can and he sent an orderly out to find some civilian clothes for him early on the morning of may 9th he boarded the plane and flew away that's nutsmer's version scherner vehemently disagrees with this version he insists that on his last visit to hitler's headquarters his bunker in berlin on april 23rd hitler gave him a secret mission to take command of the alpine fortress also known as the national redoubt scherner also insists that on may 8th he turned over command of the army group to a general fontasa who is the commander of 17th army so to scherner when he left on the 9th of may he was following hitler's order after turning over command of the army group furthermore the terms of the surrender forbade any command activity insurner said well if i can't lead why should i just sit here and be captured by the russians now there are former german officers who support both viewpoints but by this point hitler had been dead for over a week and if scherner recognized that the war was over why is he going to lead soldiers somewhere else and the alpine fortress was really more fiction than reality in any event scherner's response to these charges was that there were rumors and there was some evidence that the british and americans were going to begin to recruit german soldiers to fight the russians and sherner viewed the alpine fortress as a rallying point for german troops but the fact remains that a commander who had executed hundreds if not thousands of soldiers for cowardice ran away when faced with imminent capture for many this was a stain darker than his harsh command methods and for this reason he was denied a pension when he was not only a brute to his soldiers as a young officer in the general staff he had a reputation of being rude even to the secretaries he liked to play cards at which he cheated and again a quote and he drew a childish delight in doing so winning a few pennies off his subordinates who could not challenge him so how does someone learning about someone like this further our understanding of nazi germany in world war ii in the first place it tells you something about the limits of obedience and disobedience in the third reich the standard interpretation is that hitler never permitted retreats and if a general did retreat he would be fired and replaced with someone else this is clearly not the case with scherder on several occasions he disobeyed hitler's explicit orders but suffered no consequences why was this the case with scherner but not with so many other generals i think there are several reasons for one thing sherner was from munich hitler liked munich when he moved to germany in 1913 he settled in munich he kept his apartment there until his death munich was the birthplace and always considered the home of the nazi movement his secretary travel junga was convinced that she got the job primarily because she was from munich and hitler liked to be around people from munich a second reason was cerner's lower middle class background unlike many high-ranking german officers cerner was not a noble or from a wealthy family hitler felt uncomfortable around aristocratic officers he sensed they looked down upon him and they did scherner felt the same way and this was something the two had in common hitler also liked commanders who had risen through the ranks and were tough by the time scherner reached a high level of command hitler needed tough generals who would hold the line and not constantly be asking for retreats in the final year of the war hitler wanted generals to fight scherner represented a new and a different type of german general who believed that determination and an iron will could accomplish much i think all these reasons play a role but what scherner possessed that no other army general possessed at least to the degree was unreserved support for national socialist ideology and personal loyalty to hitler hitler had created national socialism and took its ideas very seriously they were his ideas many commanders had no interest in ideology some paid lip service but were really unconcerned scherner was a true believer hitler recognized this and felt he could trust scherder and scherner skillfully used this to his advantage he learned from his experiences with hitler especially dealing with retreats he couldn't always convince hitler and one particular example is the crimea here on the black sea in late 1943 the russians had come across here and cut off german troops in the crimea cerner repeatedly asked that they'd be evacuated but hitler said the crimea was of the utmost importance for control of the black sea as well as for diplomatic relations with turkey bulgaria and romania so he refused then the russians attacked in april and by the end of april the germans just have a little tiny area around the port of sevastopol this is when scherner decided to seek a decision now hitler often accused commanders of being out of touch with the real situation at the front and so scherner took three front line commanders with him and on the flight to hitler's headquarters he said okay present the situation in your sector realistically but you need to support my proposal for an evacuation during the situation conference sheriff informed hitler that the evacuation was urgent and must be done immediately the three commanders presented their reports and then upon the conclusion of their presentations hitler looked each one in the eye and asked them the same question and you sir will you still beat back all russian attacks with your brave men and hold your positions to the last man all three answered javor my fuhrer sherner was probably ready to rip his hair out that was not what they were supposed to do but such was hitler's charisma hitler turned to scherner and said evacuations out of the question two weeks later hitler finally approved but the russians had taken more territory and they were able to disrupt the loading of troops on ships and over twenty five thousand german or romanian troops were captured senselessly the second example is that withdrawal from estonia in september 1944. schwerner went to hitler's headquarters he had this beautiful map with all these lines on it and began to explain to hitler how when we withdraw here we're going to free up this many divisions to use somewhere else and then here there'll be more hitler reached into a bowl of colored pencils and held them over the map and the person who described it said he held it over the map menacingly but didn't say a word scherner didn't quite know what was going on he continued giving the report and finally he was so unnerved that he swept the map off the table and said all right we'll hold our present positions hitler put the pencils back into the bowl and said i knew i could rely on you scherner a week later sure ordered the evacuation of estonia anyway and from this and the example of the crimea i think that scherner learned how to manage hitler if you show up in person and make a proposal for a retreat if hitler doesn't go for it just stop and what he began to do was to defy hitler from a distance he would wait until the last possible moment he was very good at gauging the last possible moment then he would order the retreat on his own authority and phone hitler and tell him he was never fired and what this shows you is that to some degree hitler could be managed and in 1945 i don't know of any other general that could manage hitler a final reason to understand how the germans were able to resist so many countries for so long even when it was blatantly obvious germany had lost the war is again scherner's methods were effective they were brutal but effective after the war a russian remarked to a member of of hitler's entourage if hitler had a dozen sure nurse you would have had a chance soviet commander marshall cunniv reportedly said that without scherner the red army would have ended the war on the rhine many stories of scherner's excesses are invented and knoxville recognized this and admitted that fear of scherner was a powerful motivator but they were not all fabrications there are so many surener tales by so many people that there has to be some truth to them shortner was at best an extremely unpleasant person and more likely a brutal murderer but this is the general that hitler liked best and it tells us something about hitler as well thank you