Memoirs of the Wehrmacht

PANZER LEADER [528 pp.)--Heinz Guderian--Dutton ($7.50).

Watching a weapons demonstration at Kummersdorf one day in 1933. Chancellor Adolf Hitler exclaimed with delight: "That's what I need! That's what I want to have!" The man who was giving him what he wanted was a stocky Pomeranian lieutenant colonel named Heinz Guderian, showing off his new Panzers and motorized troops. He had developed them in the face of opposition from most of the Wehrmacht generals and he had brought them a long way from the days when schoolboys used to slit his canvas dummy tanks for a look inside. He and his tanks were to go farther yet--to the English Channel and almost, but not quite, to Moscow. On the way, he was to help revolutionize modern warfare.

The Snows of Russia. Guderian's autobiographical Panzer Leader is in many ways the most revealing book written by or about a German general since World War II. Like a lot of his colleagues, Guderian finds the ivory tower of professional soldiering a convenient retreat from the grimmer facts of Nazi life. Concentration camps, persecutions and the like were Himmler's business, a "secret" that was kept in a "masterly" way. Guderian's business was war, and he writes about the military side of war with a fullness and clarity that military historians will be grateful for.

Much of Guderian's record has the quality of a G-3 report. But when the Russians turn on Guderian in subzero weather, the military prose gives way to simple despair: "Only he who saw the endless expanse of Russian snow during this winter of our misery and felt the icy wind that blew across it, burying in snow every object in its path: who drove for hour after hour through that no-man's-land only at last to find too thin shelter with insufficiently clothed, half-starved men: and who also saw by contrast the well-fed, warmly clad and fresh Siberians, fully equipped for winter fighting: only a man who knew all that can truly judge the events which now occurred."

Guderian & Hitler. One thing that occurred was the firing of Guderian. Hitler had bitten off more than he could chew and, claims Guderian, he alone among the generals had the guts to tell him so. If Guderian is to be believed, he alone stood up to Hitler, begging him to be satisfied with limited objectives, finally demanding a withdrawal in Russia and an armistice with the West.

Guderian agrees that Hitler alone ran the war; Himmler, Goering and Goebbels feared him as much as did the generals. After the assassination attempt in 1944 (which Guderian still deplores as unsoldierly and un-Christian), only complete sycophants could hold their jobs. But there was one exception: Guderian. He was called back twice, once to rebuild the Panzer armies and set up the Eastern defenses, again to hold the biggest job of all: chief of the general staff.

Guderian, now living in retirement near the Bavarian town of Fuessen, has no regrets for his part in the war. As he tells it, he did only what a soldier and patriot had to do. His failures, he says, were all the fault of shortsighted and timorous colleagues and, toward the end, of a sick and irrational Hitler. But still faithful to his Fuehrer, Guderian intones: "This sickness was his misfortune and his fate. It was also the misfortune and fate of his country."

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