Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France by Ernest R. May

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Harvard history professor May argues that Germany's seemingly easy victory over France is puzzling, given that France's armed forces were actually considered more formidable, and given the common consensus that a move by Germany into France would be a major risk. So how did Hitler pull it off so easily? And why did French and British military authorities feel so certain he wouldn't even attempt it?

From the Publisher

A dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940.

Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the French Resistance, the great historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, about the treatment of his nation at the hands of an enemy the French had believed they could easily dispose of. In Strange Victory, the distinguished American historian Ernest R. May asks the opposite question: How was it that Hitler and his generals managed this swift conquest, considering that France and its allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own skepticism about their chances?

Strange Victory is a riveting narrative of those six crucial weeks in the spring of 1940, weaving together the decisions made by the high commands with the welter of confused responses from exhausted and ill-informed, or ill-advised, officers in the field. Why did Hitler want to turn against France at just this moment, and why were his poor judgment and inadequate intelligence about the Allies nonetheless correct? Why didn't France take the offensive when it might have led to victory? What explains France's failure to detect and respond to Germany's attack plan? It is May's contention that in the future, nations might suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes in judgment.

Paul Kennedy

A splendid revisionist work . . . A truly international study in European diplomatic and military history . . . May’s description . . . is superb. —Los Angeles Times Book Review

Richard Bernstein

A broad-shouldered, cogent, powerfully argued revisionist study of the battle of France of 1940. —The New York Times

W. R. Louis

. . . A beautifully written narrative, rendered in deft prose and in riveting and fascinating detail, Strange Victory will become a classic.

Publishers Weekly

The book's title inverts Marc Bloch's classic Strange Defeat because, for Harvard historian May, it is the German victory that requires explanation. In this provocative analysis, May argues that the French and British defeat in 1940 was a consequence of neither moral decay nor military ineffectiveness. In the late '30s, the Wehrmacht was still a network of improvisations, by no means the formidable instrument of later mythmaking. After Poland had fallen, Hitler demanded an immediate attack on France, and his generals balked; an "encounter battle" in central Belgium was what the French expected and were prepared to fight. Instead, the Germans famously developed an alternate design, based on a thrust through the Ardennes. May argues convincingly that a major factor in the offensive's reorientation was the German army intelligence service's justified conviction that the French and British high commands would respond slowly to a large-scale surprise. More than enough evidence was available to turn French and British eyes to the Ardennes in the spring of 1940. But since 1933, May argues, generals and politicians on both sides of the English Channel had failed to read German intentions and German decision-making processes. Instead, they sacrificed thought to habit, and put unexpected events into preconceived models. This well-written book, suitable for general readers as well as specialists, offers no easy counterfactuals, no check lists for future guidance, but it illustrates the importance of common sense--its presence and its absence. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Steve Forbes - Forbes Magazine

Most histories say that Germany’s rapid, crushing defeat of France in May0June 1940 was no surprise at all. Utter nonsense, says this absorbing conventional-wisdom-shattering account of those dreadful days that put the Nazis on the brink of obliterating much of Western civilization. The reasons for France’s totally unexpected loss deserve study as we grapple with a new kind of war. (12 Nov 2001)

Library Journal

Thirty-one years after Alistair Horne's classic World War II history, To Lose a Battle: France 1940, May, a prominent and prolific historian, has produced a detailed study of how Hitler was able to defeat France in just six weeks of blitzkreig warfare. He now offers a slightly different analysis of how a weaker Germany could defeat a stronger France despite Allied military superiority and risky German gambles. Deflating conventional wisdom, May argues that French and British forces outnumbered and outgunned the invading Germans and that Allied leadership was not paralyzed or afflicted with a defeatist attitude, as many others have claimed. He even asserts that skeptical top German generals had argued with Hitler against attacking France. Instead, May believes that the Germans simply outfought and outthought the Allies at the tactical level. He also credits several dangerous but accurate German assumptions of how their enemy would react when faced with rapidly changing tactical scenarios. Much of the narrative is focused on German and Allied preparations for war, with only a third of the book dedicated to the actual conduct of the battle for France. May's prose is scholarly but accessible and flows nicely, so the complex prelude and opening weeks of World War II are easy to follow and understand. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Col. William D. Bushnell, ret., USMC, Sebascodegan Island, ME Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

New York Times Book Review - David Stafford

By shining a spotlight on intelligence, May has written an important and original account of the events of 1940. He also draws relevant lessons for the present.

New York Times - Richard J. Bernstein

Mr. May combines diplomatic and military history in a critical inquiry of great breadth and understanding.... that is what the best historical writing does; it confronts the reader with staggering possibilities. Mr. May's book is a brilliant and essential contribution to the store of knowledge and wisdom.

Kirkus Reviews

An engaging, thoroughly researched account of Nazi Germany's surprising, rapid defeat of French and Allied forces in the spring of 1940. Historian May (The Kennedy Tapes, 1997) argues that "fatal misjudgments" of the Allied command brought a defeat that was "almost inconceivable" to just about all the participants. Prior to the German victory, virtually no one but Hitler himself believed that the superior forces of France (allied with Britain, the Netherlands, and—too late—Belgium) could lose. With the swift felicity of a scholar in total command of his subject, May moves from Berlin to London to Paris, describing and assessing the decision-making and the decision-makers. We meet a Hitler who, though a late sleeper and habitual moviegoer, had "a broader conceptual framework than his professional advisers and a broader base of knowledge." His strident, intransigent insistence on having his way is one of the principal reasons for Germany's military successes from 1938 to 1940, and also accounts for Britain's ability to evacuate nearly 340,000 men from Dunkerque (Hitler had issued a puzzling stop order that prevented his forces from capturing or killing tens of thousands). The German invasion involved an elaborate feint in Belgium, followed by a major attack through the Ardennes Forest (the so-called "Plan Yellow"), which succeeded because the "best French soldiers [were] in the wrong places, and the worst-prepared French soldiers" found themselves confronting "the best that the Germans had." May notes a number of eerie parallels to our own day (when Americans expect to fight wars without casualties).Hitler,for instance, believed that the French were "preoccupied with their comfort" and that the British were "materialists" who would "quit once their pocketbooks suffered." Among May's many provocative conclusions are that the "imaginativeness" of Nazi planners far surpassed that of the Allies and that "Allied intelligence services performed abominably." Many informative notes, a 50-page bibliography. Both a lucid history and a gripping cautionary tale. (b&w photos, not seen; 19 maps)

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INTRODUCTION

0n the afternoon of May 9, 1940, at the resort town of Clervaux, in the forested north of Luxembourg, Camille Schneider entered the telephone booth outside the post office. An undercover representative of the French Secret Service, Schneider had tried in vain to reach his chief in Luxembourg's capital and was risking a direct call to the next echelon, the regional intelligence center at Longwy, just over the border in France. Schneider's message was urgent. With his own eyes he had seen soldiers on the German side of the Sûre River preparing pontoon bridges on which heavy vehicles could cross into Luxembourg.

Two days earlier, Schneider's chief, Fernand Archen, a pretended wine merchant in Luxembourg, the duchy's capital, had reported to Longwy the arrival of German commandos disguised as tourists. On signal, he had been told, these commandos were to seize bridges on the Sûre and the two other rivers that separated Luxembourg from Germany, the Our and the Moselle. On May 9, he missed Schneider's calls because he and his radio operator had taken the evening off to see Errol Flynn in a dubbed version of Dawn Patrol. As soon as he returned to his quarters, he heard not only from Schneider but from others, including informants in the Luxembourg gendarmerie, who reported exchanging shots with armed Germans discovered at a lonely farm not far from the Moselle. Using a clandestine transmitter, Archen radioed Longwy at 11:45 P.M.: "Reports of important German troop movements on the German-Luxembourg frontier." Through the night, his messages became more detailed and frantic.

At Vormeldange, on the Luxembourg side of the Moselle, meanwhile, two Luxembourg customs officers had been trying to make out what was happening on the German side of the river. They heard horses neighing and men calling to one another, but the fog was heavy and their field glasses showed them nothing. Then, just before dawn, as the fog was turning into mist, a German lieutenant ran across the international bridge with twenty soldiers behind him. Since the bridge is a good seventy yards long, the guards had plenty of time to use their rifles, but they did no more than yell "Halt!" Then the German lieutenant had them at gunpoint, and his sergeant sent up a flare. At this signal, foot soldiers and horse-drawn guns and wagons of the German Twelfth Army began to file across.

North of Vormeldange, German soldiers simultaneously seized other crossing points or laid pontoon bridges of the type spotted by Schneider at Clervaux. Infantry marched over, followed by horses pulling guns or supply wagons. At Echternach, Bollendorf, Wallendorf, and Wanden on the Sûre, it was not shoes and horse hooves that rattled the bridges but mile-long files of tanks accompanied by trucks, cars, and motorcycles carrying motorized infantry. Nazi Germany had commenced its war to conquer France.

The messages from Schneider, Archen, and other spies in Luxembourg and elsewhere made little impression in France. Responsibility for guarding the France-Luxembourg frontier lay with General Robert Petiet, commander of the Third Light Cavalry Division. He was taken completely by surprise when awakened around daybreak by the sound of German bombers passing overhead to raid air bases in France. In Paris, similarly, the first news was of attacks on French air bases, then of German parachutists dropping on Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Orders went out to respond to the German attack by executing a long-prepared plan, the result of which would be to send the best-trained troops and newest tanks of France and Britain to the southern Netherlands and eastern Belgium just as Germany's best-trained troops and newest tanks entered Luxembourg, headed for the Ardennes Forest and the Meuse River of eastern France.

Within a few days, French and British leaders would recognize that they had made a tragic mistake. German tanks by then were chugging several abreast across fields in the French heartland. Allied forces in Belgium were cut off from those in central France, partly by civilian refugees clogging the roads. The situation proved beyond rescue. Britain eventually evacuated as many troops as possible from the port of Dunkerque. French armies retreated farther and farther to the west and south. A new French government, formed under the aged Marshal Philippe Pétain, agreed to armistice terms. On June 22, not quite seven weeks after the first German soldiers had crossed into Luxembourg, German cavalry clattered down the Champs-Élysées in Paris in a victory parade, with their Führer, Adolf Hitler, looking on.

More than anything else, this happened because France and its allies misjudged what Germany planned to do. If leaders in the Allied governments had anticipated the German offensive through the Ardennes, even as a worrisome contingency, it is almost inconceivable that France would have been defeated when and as it was. It is more than conceivable that the outcome would have been not France's defeat but Germany's and, possibly, a French victory parade on the Unter den Linden in Berlin.

This book tries to explain how and why leaders in Paris and other Western capitals made such fateful misjudgments, even though France had an intelligence network that included not only Schneider and Archen but men and women high in the German government and at the very top of Germany's own intelligence apparatus.

In June 1940, and for a long time thereafter, the fact of France's rapid defeat seemed to speak for itself. Three conclusions were thought obvious. First, Germany must have had crushing superiority, not only in modern weaponry but in an understanding of how to use it. Second, France and its allies must have been very badly led. Third, the French people must have had no stomach for fighting. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who headed the satellite French government of 1940-44, ascribed France's defeat to "moral laxness." Though not everyone would have used Pétain's particular term ("relâchement"), most people around the world agreed that France's defeat owed something to lack of moral fiber.

Now, sixty years later, in light of what is known about the circumstances of France's defeat, none of these conclusions holds up well. Overall, France and its allies turn out to have been better equipped for war than was Germany, with more trained men, more guns, more and better tanks, more bombers and fighters. On the whole, they did not lag even in thinking about the use of tanks and airplanes. A few German military men may have been ahead in this respect., but not many. The Allied commander in chief, General Maurice Gamelin, had worked hard to increase and improve France's tank forces. The German army commander in chief, General Walther von Brauchitsch, by contrast had tolerated the formation of all-tank divisions but said to his staff that this was wasteful -- wars would continue to be decided by foot soldiers and horses. In computer simulations of the war of 1940, if the computer takes control, the Allies win.

While evidence that France was not inferior militarily might seem to strengthen the conclusion that leadership was bad, this proposition also has come to seem doubtful. It should probably have seemed so long ago, for the implicit corollary is that Germany was comparatively well led. At a tactical level, this might be defensible, for the best field commanders in the German army -- Heinz Guderian and Erwin Rommel, for example -- were very good indeed. But it is hard to make a case that, all in all, Germany's timid, wrangling generals had an edge on men similarly placed in France or Britain, let alone that Hitler and his henchmen were more astute or adroit than political leaders in Paris and London. Recent studies of General Gamelin, of France's prime minister, Édouard Daladier, and of Britain's long-maligned prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, not only explain why they were thought to be heroes before the débâcle of 1940 but why they deserved to be held in high regard. None, to be sure, was Churchill, but Churchill was not then what he would be later. In fact, as a member of Chamberlain's wartime cabinet, he was often harebrained, urging, for example, that the Allies go to war with the Soviet Union as well as with Germany. And the more we have learned about the Nazi regime, the more its appearance of strength and efficiency seems an illusion created by its own propagandists.

The third proposition -- that France fell in 1940 because of moral rot -- is not so easy to dismiss, in part because France earlier in the 1930s had unquestionably suffered deep malaise and in part because the moral condition of any country or people is hard to gauge. France had had four and a half million men killed or wounded in the Great War of 1914-18. The Great Depression had bruised French workers and farmers. Clashes between dogmatic leftists and rightists sometimes became so intense as to seem omens of a new French Revolution. When Hitler began to threaten war, the French government and people were alarmed and appalled, and many reacted like the students at the Oxford Union who in February 1933 had voted 275 to 153 never again to fight for king or country.

But the more we have studied the period 1938-40, as opposed to the earlier 1930s, the more we have seen indications of a profound change in mood and spirit among people in both France and Britain. By the summer of 1939, when a new Great War clearly impended, Daladier complained that he could not appear in an open place or in a bistro without seeing people stand up and cry, "Lead! We will follow you!" When war came in September, reporters said the prevailing mood in both countries was one of resigned determination. When fighting actually commenced in May 1940, after more than eight months of military inactivity, reporters told of celebrations. A Danish journalist described Paris as "bubbling with enthusiasm."

In the field, soldiers of France and Britain fought well. They won battles. At Hannut in Belgium on May 12-13, 1940, for example, two divisions of French tanks clashed with two divisions of German tanks and carried the day, losing 105 tanks to the Germans' 160. Even when losing, most French military units showed gallantry. At Monthermé, a plaque commemorates a French African regiment's Thermopylae-like defense of a crossing over the Meuse River. At Stonne, a few miles south of Sedan, stands a small monument which says accurately that the town changed hands seventeen times between mid-May and mid-June 1940 and became "a cemetery of tanks."" During the six weeks of fighting, France lost approximately 124,000 men, with another 200,000 wounded. The total number of French battle deaths was two and a half times that of the United States in either the Korean War of 1950-53 or the Vietnam War of 1965-75. Do these bits of evidence suggest "moral laxness"?

And again arises the matter of comparison. Foreigners in Germany in 1939-40, including Italians and Hungarians, whose governments sided with Hitler, described a public with little or no appetite for the war, carried along by sureness that their adored Führer would find a way out of it. In the winter of 1939-40, after the Allies had rejected Hitler's proposal for a negotiated peace, an Italian diplomat in Berlin wrote of "frightening demoralization" among the German people. As for Germany's generals, they believed to a man that Hitler had gotten the country into a war for which it was not prepared and which it might well lose. Among themselves, they talked of a possible coup. When Germany opened its offensive against the Low Countries and France in May 1940, not a single general expected victory to result. The chief of staff of the German army wrote to his wife that his fellow generals thought what they were doing was "crazy and reckless ." Can one say that morale was stronger in Germany than in France?

But if the Allies in May 1940 were in most respects militarily superior, were not badly led, and did not suffer from demoralization (not yet, at least), what then accounts for Germany's six-week triumph? I entitle this book Strange Victory in conscious if presumptuous imitation of the great French medievalist Marc Bloch, who, before his execution by the Germans in 1944, wrote a wonderfully perceptive essay on the fall of France with the title Strange Defeat. My book is intended as a complement to Bloch's, not a challenge to it, for the only serious defects in Bloch's analysis were due to his understandable lack of awareness of weaknesses on the German side. He did not appreciate that it was in many ways easier to tick off French vulnerabilities than to explain how a disorganized, divided German government, poorly equipped for war, managed to identify those vulnerabilities, take advantage of them, and achieve the equivalent of a successful Pearl Harbor attack -- that is, a victory of the weak over the strong.

Even so, much of what Bloch wrote continues to seem clear-eyed -- more so than most of what was written later about the same event. His very title captures an important fact largely lost to sight in the postwar years, namely, that France's defeat astonished both the French and their allies. The postwar consensus was that France was doomed from the start and that the French and their leaders were defeatist because they recognized their relative weakness. Bloch, by contrast, remembered that he and most people he knew had expected France to win. They had assumed that France was stronger than Germany. The key question for him was not why France had succumbed to fate but why the common expectation had proven wrong.

The point is crucial, for the whole history of the period 1938-40 is misunderstood if one fails to keep in mind the high level of confidence that prevailed in France and Britain prior to May 1940. Whatever doubts may have obtained earlier, French leaders in 1939-40 were sure of French power, indeed arrogantly so. And this arrogance seems to me one of the three keys to explaining both France's strange defeat and Germany's strange victory.

By the time serious fighting commenced in May 1940, most French and British leaders had become convinced that Hitler would never dare an offensive against France and that Germany's seeming preparations for such an offensive were deceptive maneuvers intended to pin down Allied forces and prevent their deployment in other, potentially decisive theaters such as Scandinavia or the Balkans. This accounts for the fact that, while Allied air forces were numerically superior to those of Germany, the French air force's official history is technically accurate in crediting Germany with a five-to-two edge in combat aircraft on the Western front, for the air force's high command had transferred most bombers and fighters to other sectors and had, in fact, designated the Western front as a mere training area. The British Royal Air Force, meanwhile, hoarded bombers and fighters at home on the presumption that a German air offensive against the British Isles was more likely than a reckless land offensive against France.

Confidence that France had superiority and that Germany recognized this superiority made it difficult for French and British leaders to put themselves in the place of German planners, whom Hitler had commanded to prepare an offensive no matter what their opinions about its wisdom or feasibility might have been. Imagination was not paralyzed; far from it. Witness the enthusiasm for opening fronts in Scandinavia or the Balkans. But the possibility that the Germans might use ingenuity to shape a surprise version of a frontal offensive seemed too fanciful for consideration.

A second factor, also stressed by Bloch, was the French and British emphasis on minimizing loss of life. This was inevitable, given the losses in the Great War and the extent to which leaders in Paris and London were responsible to voters whose fathers, brothers, lovers, and friends had been among the lost. But writers after Bloch failed to understand the force and effect of this eagerness to minimize battle deaths, for they assumed that it was part and parcel of a defeatism that also showed in an alleged "Maginot Line mentality." In fact, the Maginot Line, the chain of fortifications on France's border with Germany, was indicative neither of despair about defeating Germany nor of thought mired in the past. It was instead evidence of faith that technology could substitute for manpower. It was a forerunner of the strategic bomber, the guided missile, and the "smart bomb." The same faith led to France's building tanks with thicker armor and bigger guns than German tanks had, deploying immensely larger quantities of mobile big guns, and above all committing to maintain a continuous line-that is, advancing or retreating in such coordination as to prevent an enemy from establishing a salient from which it could cut off a French unit from supplies and reinforcements. (Today, military strategists call this "force protection.") But having machines do the work of men and putting emphasis on minimal loss of life carried a price in slowed-down reaction times and lessened initiative for battlefield commanders.

Though Bloch is often cited as documenting French "moral laxness," he actually insisted that, insofar as he could tell, the French people and their soldiers were committed to winning the war. He disputed the proposition that their sense of commitment was less than at the beginning of the Great War, in 1914. Indeed, he hazarded the observation that commitment was stronger in 1939 because the war's "'ideological' complexion ... [gave] a touch of beauty to the sacrifices entailed."

A third factor, emphasized by Bloch and reemphasized recently in Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac's monumental work Les Francais de l'an 40, was the cumbersomeness of French (and British and Belgian) procedures for making decisions and carrying them out. Like most democracies, France had institutions better suited for protecting citizens against the government than for mobilizing them to defend against foreigners. Its elected leaders necessarily spent most of their energies constructing cabinet or parliamentary coalitions. Their assertions about and their prescriptions for dealing with foreign nations tended to be functions of their domestic political needs. (The German air force was seen and described as a fearsome threat when domestic politics dictated finding reasons for avoiding conflict. It ceased to be seen or described in this way when public opinion appeared to prefer resoluteness.)

But French procedures were particularly sclerotic when it came to making and effecting military decisions, for the military establishment was a foreign body inside the Third Republic. Its officer corps tended to be conservative, Roman Catholic, even royalist, and to be so perceived by politicians and the public. Hence the military high command was watched and constrained. To guard against republican intrusion, the military establishment in response sheathed itself in bureaucratic armor. One result was to protect the promotion prospects for a number of senior officers who probably deserved involuntary retirement. Another, which was to have serious effects in 1940, was copperbound compartmentalization within the armed services, so that line commanders and their operations officers formed an elite from which staff officers such as those dealing with intelligence or supply were shut out, left to the company of surgeons and veterinarians. Bloch, who served for a time in army intelligence, described how officers in that branch responded by developing their own arcana and their own walls of separateness. As readers of this book will see, this compartmentalization, combined with arrogant assumptions of superiority, virtually blinded the French high command and gave German leaders opportunities to achieve what Hitler and others characterized as a "miracle."

Germany's strange victory occurred because the French and British failed to take advantage of their superiority. The Germans, meanwhile, spied out and exploited the psychological and procedural weaknesses that Bloch would catalogue. The story is particularly well worth recalling now, for in the post-Cold War era, the United States and the other seemingly victorious Western democracies exhibit many of the same characteristics that France and Britain did in 1938-40 -- arrogance, a strong disinclination to risk life in battle, heavy reliance on technology as a substitute, and governmental procedures poorly designed for anticipating or coping with ingenious challenges from the comparatively weak.

But I am getting ahead of the story. I first began to muse about the episode a decade and a half ago, when putting together a book about intelligence analysis before the two world wars. Since then, I have discussed the puzzle of Germany's strange victory not only with college students and graduates specializing in modern history but with thousands of men and women in mid-career or executive programs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Several hundred of these came to Harvard from U.S. intelligence agencies, chiefly the CIA, in a special program -- utterly unclassified -- aimed at improving delivery of intelligence analysis to decision-makers. They were especially interested in the puzzle of 1940 -- and their comments were particularly interesting to me -- because the story speaks to their professional concerns.

This book was shaped by all these people. It is written for them and others like them and for my wife and children, none of whom habitually goes to bed with a book about warfare. That means that I assume readers who are not experts or even necessarily history buffs. Hence I retell some tales that experts or buffs already know.

Even for the experts and buffs, however, the book should hold some novelty. It is the only account that deals in equal depth with both Germany and France. The best works in German use little source material or literature in French, and the reverse is true of the best works in French. This book is also the only one with a focus on intelligence analysis as an element in explaining what happened in 1940. Though there are good histories of the German and French intelligence services, no previous work connects the intelligence story in either country to the story of high-level decision-making, let alone compares performance on the two sides. Though the whole book is based on research in original sources, the segments that will be new even to experts are those based on archives of the German and French intelligence services. (Incidentally, these archives do not confirm the claims of prescience that have been made by former French intelligence officers.)

Most important, this book tries to explain Germany's strange victory in terms applicable beyond its characters or epoch. This claim of real-world usefulness is brash and needs qualification. For that, I borrow from the lore of The Times of London, where, it is said, a new leader-writer turned in some bold copy and waited heart in mouth for the reaction of her distant and forbidding editor, William Rees Mogg. She then saw her copy printed with no word changed but three words added: "Or perhaps not."

Judgment by the reader of whether this story serves as a parable for our own and other times will come more easily after it has been told.

Endnotes were omitted

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Chapter One

ORDERS

"The Führer already said in my hearing on September 29 [1939], this offensive [against France] could well cost him a million men, but also the enemy, who cannot bear it."
—Diary of Ernst von Weizsäcker, October 17, 1939

"Prolonged conference with the commander in chief [Brauchitsch] on the overall situation: commander in chief: Three possibilities: attack; wait and see; fundamental changes."
—Diary of General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German army, October 14, 1939

Anyone with a taste for old movies can visualize the scene. It is late afternoon, Wednesday, September 27, 1939. What is already being called the Second World War is entering its fourth week. Berlin is a city no longer at peace but not yet at war. Heavy five-liter Horch and Mercedes limousines with wide running boards roll along the Wilhelmstrasse. On their gull-wing fenders flutter miniature flags with white-circled black swastikas on bright-red backgrounds, the symbol of the Nazi state. At the old Chancellory, they turn into the narrow, dead-end roadway fronting the courtyard of the New Chancellory. The giant white building, just nine months old, looms over the old limestone-block Chancellory next door as, in his imagination, Chancellor and Führer Adolf Hitler looms over predecessors such as Frederick the Great, the eighteenth-century monarch who made Prussia a great power, and Otto von Bismarck, the nineteenth-century chancellor who transformed Prussia into the German Empire, themost powerful state in Europe from 1871 until the end of the Great War in 1918.

    The passengers leave their limousines. Army generals are in field gray with glistening black boots; air-force officers wear pale blue, naval officers blue-black. Every chest is spangled with medals. Up marble stairs, through massive Corinthian columns, past huge gilded statues of Aryan athletes, the visitors walk through seventeen-foot-high bronze doors flanked by guards wearing the black uniforms and black boots of the Nazi Schutzstaffel—the SS. The five-hundred-foot-long entry hall has a polished marble floor which Hitler has left uncarpeted because he relishes seeing dignitaries slip and fall. At the far end, doors open on an oversize reception area, beyond which is Hitler's four-thousand-square-foot study, characterized by Life magazine as the "biggest private office in the world."

    Beside the study doorway stand other SS troopers. Each has Hitler's name braided on his left sleeve, on his helmet a white death's head, and on both lapels the emblem of the Hitler bodyguard. Inside, above the doors, a mural depicts the Virtues—Wisdom, Prudence, Fortitude, and Justice. Over a fireplace, not quite so out of place, hangs an oil portrait of Bismarck. Hitler's huge desk is ornamented, even more appropriately, with an inlay of a sword emerging from its scabbard.

    One can imagine Hitler standing in front of this desk this early-autumn afternoon. Northern light streaming through the high windows silhouettes him. He is of medium height and slender, though with the beginning of a paunch. Previously, his standard costume had been the brown uniform of the Nazi Party's now largely ceremonial Sturmabteilung—SA, or storm troopers. Now he has on a simple field-gray uniform, which he has vowed to continue wearing until the war is over. Except for a swastika armband and the Iron Cross he won as a front-line soldier in the last war, he is without decorations. His brown hair slants down over the left side of his forehead, matching in color the brush mustache which, for foreign cartoonists, has become his emblem. (Hitler grew and kept the mustache to distract from his too-large nose.) One can imagine him nodding to the arrivals, gesturing them to seats, tossing his head, then beginning to speak. It was his custom to speak softly at first, then to let his voice and emotions rise in tandem.

    Those in attendance include the commanders in chief of the armed services: General Walther von Brauchitsch for the army; Field Marshal Hermann Göring for the air force; and Admiral Erich Raeder for the navy. Brauchitsch is slight, rigidly erect, with a handsome face that is beginning to sag. Göring, almost comically fat, is stuffed into a white, gold-trimmed uniform of his own design and has a Crusader's sword at his waist. He has natural dimples and a set smile but, above it, small, malicious, pale-blue eyes. Raeder is squarely built but wide-bottomed, like one of his cruisers. The most detailed notes are taken by the army chief of staff, General Franz Halder, who has cropped hair, wears rimless spectacles, and, out of uniform, might be taken for a schoolteacher rather than a soldier.

    Less than four weeks earlier, on September 1, German armed forces had invaded Poland, and France and Great Britain, after demanding a ceasefire and German withdrawal, had declared war. All the men gathered in Hitler's study had feared that French armies would march against Germany. At the time, German defense forces on the Western front had been feeble. Their commander, General Wilhelm Ritter yon Leeb, had warned Brauchitsch that he could do little to stop French troops from walking in and taking over the Ruhr River Valley. A 1,280-square-mile area less than forty miles from Germany's western border, this valley included cities such as Essen, Dortmund, Duisburg, and Bochum, where a large percentage of German heavy industry was concentrated. Hitler, who had gone to the Polish front on the Amerika, a special twelve-car double-locomotive armored train, had opened every morning's meeting in the train's command coach by asking, "What's new in the West?" Brauchitsch had said to his staff, "Every day of calm in the West is for me a gift from God."

    Apart from a noisy show of force on the border with Germany and some leaflet dropping, France and Britain had done nothing. Meanwhile, the Germans had thrown more than a million and a half soldiers and almost two thousand aircraft into a campaign aimed at the quick and complete defeat of Poland. In the first few days, German bombers had decimated the small Polish air force and disrupted life in the Polish capital, Warsaw. From then on, German planes made it difficult for Polish forces to move either by road or by rail.

    A German Army Group commanded by General Fedor von Bock attacked from the north. After breaking through Polish lines, its two armies turned south to envelop Warsaw. A corps under General Heinz Guderian, composed primarily of armored divisions and supported by air-force dive-bombers, stormed northern Poland, not stopping until it reached Brest, more than a hundred miles west of Warsaw. A second Army Group, commanded by General Gerd von Rundstedt, meanwhile struck from the west and southwest, closing in on central Poland like the lower jaw of a wire-cutter.

    Just a week before the start of the war, Nazi Germany had astonished the world by signing a nonaggression pact with the communist Soviet Union, supposedly its mortal ideological enemy. This pact had ensured the Soviet Union's not joining France and Britain in declaring war. The commitment made by Germany to obtain this result became apparent when, on September 17, four Soviet armies marched into Poland from the east. Germany and the Soviet Union soon afterward agreed on a partition line, and, for the time being, Poland disappeared from the map.

    Though the Polish army mounted a briefly successful counteroffensive, it was soon overwhelmed. During the second week of the war, Brauchitsch and Halder had felt able to begin transferring some forces to Leeb in the West. As early as September 12, Brauchitsch said to one of his aides that he could now "nip in the bud any attempt by the enemy to invade German territory." He and Halder began to plan for recruiting, training, and equipping forces with an eye to a possible offensive against France in 1941, if the war was still going on. They drew up orders for partial demobilization so that skilled workers could go back to their factories. On an assumption that any fighting in the West in the next year or two would be defensive, they also planned to "demotorize" some infantry divisions that had fought in Poland, thus conserving both vehicles and fuel.

    Göring's air staff had returned to planning a bomber force that would be large enough by 1942 for a strategic air campaign against Britain. Raeder, who had advised Hitler that a serious effort to blockade the British Isles would require three hundred submarines and that Germany currently had only fifty-seven, wanted raw materials diverted from both the army and the air force so that, in a year or two, the navy could play a decisive role in a war. The military chiefs lined up in front of Hitler were all looking forward to a very long period of, at most, defensive warfare.

    Halder's notes show their gradual discovery of the different message that Hitler had in mind, for Hitler described the victory over Poland as giving Germany only a temporary advantage. "All historical successes come to nothing when they are not continued," he said. "Great victories have little enduring luster." He attributed the French and British inaction to weakness, which would not last: "The enemy adjusts. After the first engagement with an enemy, even bad troops get better."

    For the present, said Hitler, France held back because England would not yet "bear enough of the cost in blood." That would change when British troops arrived. Learning from the Polish war, the two enemy powers would strengthen their anti-aircraft and antitank defenses, and that would make another quick German victory increasingly difficult. Therefore, Hitler concluded, Germany should take the offensive against France now. "The sooner, the better," Halder recorded his saying. "Do not wait for the enemy to come to us, but rather immediately take the offensive ourselves.... Ruthless methods. Once time is lost, it cannot be recovered."

After being dismissed by Hitler, the generals and admirals made their way back to the courtyard of the New Chancellory. The staff cars of Brauchitsch and Halder went down the Wilhelmstrasse and around Belle Alliance Platz, with its sixty-foot-high Peace Column, put up just one century earlier to celebrate the twenty-five-year peace following what was remembered by Germans as their war of liberation and by other Europeans as the last of the Napoleonic Wars. The route went out of the city along the Berlinerstrasse, passing first industrial suburbs and then farmland still green with late cabbage rows and beanstalks, where, between stands of linden, maple, and oak, Holstein and Jersey cows grazed in high grass.

    The destination of Brauchitsch and Halder, about twenty miles from Berlin, was a huge fenced-in army-training facility neighboring the village of Zossen. The grounds had barracks, stables, vehicle-weighing stations, a large recreation center, and fields for sports, parades, and maneuvers. They also had sugarloaf-shaped structures mounting anti-aircraft guns, near which stood two large A-shaped buildings mistakable, at a distance, for ski chalets.

    Built on marshland, these A-shaped buildings had to be approached across wooden planks. They contained offices and living quarters. But their north doors gave admission to elevators that descended sixty feet downward and opened onto long, steel-walled corridors lined with insulated cables and broken at intervals by airtight steel doors. These corridors led to a warren of offices, communication centers, and service and storage areas. Under the code name "Zeppelin," this was the army high command's supposedly bomb-proof, gas-proof quarters for wartime. (It was sufficiently well built so that, throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union would use it as a command post for its armies in East Germany.) Brauchitsch and Halder had moved there six days before the attack on Poland.

    Early in the afternoon on the day following Hitler's order for an early Western offensive, Halder gathered some key officers of the general staff in his office, a Spartan pine-paneled room with barracks furniture. He directed these officers to analyze possibilities for an offensive against France. If his own diary account is trustworthy, he himself made a strong case for such an offensive. He said that Hitler hoped France and Britain would agree to some negotiated settlement, but if not, Germany would face the reality that time worked in favor of the enemy. Even with the Western front being reinforced by troops transferring from Poland, France and Britain could still seize the Ruhr Valley if they made a determined strike. Since the two powers had only recently begun to modernize their military forces, they would grow progressively stronger, and their prospects for success would improve. Hence, said Halder, the general staff needed to develop a contingency plan for a possible German offensive to be launched as early as late October, seeking to take as much territory as possible in the Netherlands and Belgium and conceivably in northern France, with a view to providing defense in depth for the Ruhr and gaining coastal bases for air and naval operations against the British home islands.

    Halder asked General Kurt yon Tippelskirch, head of the general staff's intelligence directorate, and Lieutenant Colonel Ulrich Liss, chief of Tippelskirch's Foreign Armies West branch, for a quick, rough estimate of enemy numbers and materiel and of fortifications in the Netherlands and Belgium. He asked General Karl Heinrich yon Stülpnagel, head of the general staff's plans-and-operations directorate (and effectively his own number two), to outline a plan based on Tippelskirch's estimates of likely enemy forces and of German forces that could be shifted quickly from the Polish front to the West. He allowed less than two days for this work. Suspecting a negative reaction to the very idea of an offensive, he closed the meeting by emphasizing: "Extreme urgency to obtain basic data for a thorough discussion with the Führer about what is possible. No reservations or hesitations."

    When the group assembled again on the morning of Saturday, September 30, the reports all discouraged even thinking of an offensive in the West any time soon. General Eduard Wagner, the army's chief supply officer, confirmed the conclusions of General Georg Thomas, who headed the economic section in Hitler's own armed-forces staff, that the Polish campaign had sapped Germany's reserves of fuel and ammunition and that Germany lacked the industrial base, particularly in chemicals and steel, to produce adequate quantities of gunpowder or artillery shells before 1941. Noting that about half of Germany's tanks had broken down or been disabled in Poland, General Adolf von Schell, who was in charge of motor transport, predicted that most of these tanks would still be out of action at the end of October. In any case, only the newer-model tanks—Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs—had a hope of standing up against French and British tanks and antitank guns, and they could not come on line in any numbers until much later in the year, if then.

    Tippelskirch, the intelligence chief, and Liss, his expert on Western armies, ticked off obstacles to a successful offensive against the Low Countries and France. For one, Belgium had a respectable army and some of the strongest fortifications in Europe. For another, France and Britain had sixty divisions on the French-Belgian border, eighteen of which were mechanized or motorized and could quickly come to Belgium's rescue. Stülpnagel and his operations staff, having already analyzed on their own the possibilities for a German offensive in the West, reported that there was no way in which it could be conducted with any prospect of success before 1942 at the earliest.

    Anticipating negative reports from the general staff, Halder and Brauchitsch had already put their heads together to outline arguments that might persuade Hitler to change his mind. They agreed to point out to him the extreme vulnerability of the Ruhr Basin. They would explain that, though fast-moving German tank formations with air support had had success in Poland, they could not be equally effective in the West, where the terrain was different and the opposing forces would be much better equipped, trained, and led. Tanks moving into Belgium or France would encounter concrete fortifications, deep trenches, and steel barricades, none of which had existed in Poland. German tanks would become sitting targets for French and British bombers and for the thousands of artillery pieces arrayed along the French and Belgian frontiers. Moreover, the days were getting shorter. The weather was becoming more unpredictable. These factors would hamper ground operations and make air operations more and more chancy. Still, if the offensive were postponed even to 1940, Brauchitsch and Halder proposed to point out, the German army would not only have time to build up supplies and to train recruits but would also have significant numbers of Panzer IIIs and IVs and, among other things, new mortars capable of firing poison-gas shells. With their brief thus assembled, Brauchitsch and Halder arranged to see Hitler.

    When Hitler's armed-forces high-command staff gave him advance notice of what the generals planned to say, he reacted with rage. He was already angry, because some generals had raised questions about his orders systematically to murder or enslave Jews in occupied Poland. His personal aides saw him pacing his private quarters in the Chancellory, fulminating against army officers who lacked faith in their own soldiers and were afraid of the French and British. Though he had agreed to see Brauchitsch and Halder, he gave them only the briefest of audiences. Dismissing their arguments almost out of hand, Hitler said that he intended to offer France and Britain a chance to retract their declarations of war but that, if they declined to do so, his position would be "absolute resoluteness" for an early offensive.

    Returning to Zossen, Brauchitsch and Halder began to make some token preparations for an offensive in the West. For practical purposes, their planning focused on making ready to counter an Allied offensive. When the chief of the naval staff asked Halder if he was thinking of reaching the Belgian coast, where the navy wanted bases, Halder told him that such notions were "utopian."

    Brauchitsch and Halder continued to hope that Hitler could be persuaded to change his orders. To gather additional arguments, they consulted General Leeb, whose Army Group was still the only one holding down the Western front. Leeb told them that most of his troops were not ready for anything but position warfare. They might fight if attacked, but not otherwise. Though Leeb's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Georg von Sodenstern, had a slightly higher opinion of the troops, he warned that the German army as a whole was crippled because of France's overwhelming superiority in artillery, which had been the decisive weapon in earlier wars. General Wagner, the chief supply officer, came in with a calculation that the army had only enough ammunition for one-third of its divisions to conduct operations for two weeks. From other sources, Brauchitsch and Halder learned that Göring and his senior staff officers doubted the air force's capacity to wage offensive operations before the spring of 1940. Of planes committed in Poland, 564 (almost 30 percent) had been lost or seriously disabled—and this against an enemy with a small air force and minimal anti-aircraft artillery.

    On October 6, Hitler made his promised speech proposing that the Allies retract their declarations of war. He said that there were no direct issues between Germany and the Western powers. Germany had no designs on France or Britain. But the price of peace would be French and British acquiescence in Germany's control over all Central and Eastern Europe. Brauchitsch had said hopefully to Leeb and Sodenstern that Hitler's preparations for an offensive might just be part of a big bluff intended to bring the Allies to the bargaining table. According to Adolf Heusinger, then in the operations section of the general staff, all the junior officers at Zossen expected Hitler somehow to patch up a peace with the Western powers. Now it was evident that this expectation was wrong. Quick, uncompromising responses from Paris and London guaranteed that the war would go on.

    On October 10, Hitler ordered Brauchitsch and Halder to appear in his office at 11 A.M. For most of the two previous nights, he had kept his two secretaries awake taking dictation. When the generals appeared, he had in hand a fifty-eight-page manuscript, which he proceeded to read aloud. His principal points were as follows:

1) If France and Britain were forced to give battle, they would be defeated. Germany was stronger, no matter what Halder's intelligence officers told him, for France was weaker than it appeared to be. France's population was smaller than Germany's, and France could not or would not lose millions of men in battle again as in 1914-18. Faced with a Germany prepared for war to the death, French leaders and the French populace would lose heart and give up. (A week later, Hitler would say casually to a senior official in the Foreign Ministry that this offensive could well cost him a million men, "but also the enemy, who cannot bear it.")

2) Belgium could be disregarded. Belgian defenses would collapse almost at a touch.

3) If the British Expeditionary Force tried to rescue Belgium, it could be cut off before it reached Antwerp and would have to retreat.

4) Even if France and Britain could rally and defend the French frontier, Germany would be in occupation of the Low Countries and would have a base for bombing Britain.

5) When Germany mounted an offensive, Italy would join, forcing France to fight on a second front, for Italy's Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, Hitler asserted, was only "waiting for the suitable moment to take the plunge."

6) It was important to act soon, because there was no Eastern front. In return for the eastern half of Poland, the Soviet Union had agreed to stay out of the war. The Soviets could be counted on to remain quiet for a time, but not forever.

7) The army could manage this offensive even given some critical shortages if it used primarily small-caliber ammunition, deployed tanks only in open country, bypassed urban areas, and swept forward on a broad front but with concentrations at particular points of vulnerability.

Hitler made only one concession to the generals. The timing of the offensive would depend, he said, on readiness for combined armor-air operations such as those that had been successful in Poland.

    On the day after the Chancellory meeting at which Hitler first called for an early offensive, Halder's diary recorded that he and Brauchitsch had spent the evening in "talk regarding [our] stand on the subject set forth at the Führer conference." After their first failed effort to change Hitler's mind, the two generals again devoted the evening to "prolonged conversation ... about our stand on the Führer's plans in the West." A few days after sitting through the reading of Hitler's long memorandum, Brauchitsch and Halder had another very long talk. Halder recorded in his diary:

Prolonged conference with the commander in chief [Brauchitsch] on the overall situation: commander in chief: Three possibilities: attack; wait and see; fundamental changes. None of these three possibilities offers prospects of decisive success, least of all the last, since it is essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable. Quite apart from all this it is our duty to set forth military prospects soberly and to promote every possibility for peace.

    The language in Halder's diary entries has to be understood against the long history of the army in Germany, and against the shorter but eventful history of the army's relations with Hitler since the advent of the Third Reich.

    When Brauchitsch and Halder talked to each other of what "stand" they should take toward Hitler, they did so with assumptions they shared as generals in the German army. For them, the army was the nucleus of the nation. Duty therefore demanded not only preservation of the army but preservation of its pre-eminence among German institutions. As possible models for their action in 1939, they could look back at predecessors—Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz in the eighteenth century; Yorck von Wartenburg in the early 1800s; and Wilhelm Groener in 1918, at the Great War's end.

    Seydlitz symbolized obedience by the soldier to the head of state. The roots of Germany had been in the kingdom of Prussia, which, as recently as the mid-1600s, had been only a collection of properties scattered across Northern Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Rhine River. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hohenzollern dynasty had created a Prussian state, primarily by forming and using an outsize army. The fact that more than 80 percent of all royal revenues went to the army accounted for the often quoted observation by the Marquis de Mirabeau that Prussia was not a state with an army but an army with a state.

    Then, as later, the Prussian army was noted for its discipline. King Frederick the Great likened its workings to the machinery inside a watch. He laid down as a principle that his soldiers should be more afraid of their own leaders than of the enemy. "If a soldier ... so much as sets foot outside the line," he ordered, "the non-commissioned officer standing behind him will run him through with his bayonet and kill him on the spot." The king's commands were as if from God.

    Seydlitz, the first of possible models for Brauchitsch and Halder, had been Frederick's foremost cavalry commander. At the battle of Kunersdorf in 1759, during the Seven Years' War which Prussia waged against Russia and Austria in 1756-63, Seydlitz was ordered by Frederick to charge Russian and Austrian forces half again stronger than Prussia's, and entrenched to boot. Seydlitz warned the king that the charge would be disastrous. When Frederick repeated the order, Seydlitz obeyed, even though the result was as he had predicted and he himself was killed.

    Yorck symbolized service rendered by soldiers guiding their head of state. During the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon between 1793 and 1815, the Prussian army had gained some independence. In 1806, in the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Napoleon had routed the Prussians, and, as an English campaign historian writes, a "perfect epidemic of surrender set in amongst the higher commanders," while the Prussian people "welcomed the conquerors as deliverers, and turned their own soldiers, even the wounded, away from their doors." With Napoleon occupying Berlin, Prussia seemed destined to survive, if at all, as a dependency of France.

    Prussia's rescue from this threat was remembered, especially by German soldiers, as primarily an accomplishment of its officer corps. With little help from the ruling Hohenzollern monarch, a small group of reformers began to build a new Prussian state and Prussian army. The new army embodied and symbolized Prussian nationhood. The reformers redesigned recruitment to make service a duty associated with citizenship—not, as previously, a fate akin to being enslaved. Imitating France, they opened the officer corps to nonaristocrats. Moreover, the army put a premium on brainwork and began the practice of attaching to every commander a staff officer experienced in planning and preparing campaigns. When Napoleon began to founder after his failed invasion of Russia in 1812, this new Prussian army proved able to defeat a French army in battle and to participate in victories culminating in Napoleon's surrender at Waterloo in 1815.

    Yorck's role in these events had been to sign, at the very end of 1812, the Convention of Tauroggen, which effectively allied Prussia with Russia against France. Yorck had not done this on orders from the then Prussian king, who would almost certainly have chosen for Prussia to remain Napoleon's puppet. Yorck had not been a reformer—he had even protested the notion that Prussian officers should be required to be able to read and write—but he nevertheless presented his king with a fait accompli.

    Afterward, into the late nineteenth century, when Brauchitsch and Halder were cadets, German school textbooks insisted that Yorck could not have acted on his own in 1812. Nationalist historians hypothesized that oral instructions had been given authorizing Yorck to act against his monarch's written orders. Yorck, wrote historian Heinrich von Treitschke, "would never have thought of setting himself against the king's will." Yet during the Great War, when the generals-to-be of 1939 were lieutenants, captains, or majors, the army high command, headed by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, assumed dictatorial powers more in place of Kaiser Wilhelm II than on his behalf, largely because it had become evident that the Kaiser could not manage a war. In light of current events, Yorck came to be recognized as having acted on his own and done what the king should have done. He, along with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, became a model of the soldier doing for the statesman what the statesman should have done for himself.

    General Groener exemplified the soldier who went one step further and took control of the state. In 1918, when both the Western front and the German home front began to collapse, Groener succeeded Ludendorff. At Spa, in November 1918, he told Kaiser Wilhelm II that the officer corps no longer felt bound by its oath to him. "The personal oath of loyalty," he said, "is now just a notion"—"nur eine Idee." Thus deserted, the Kaiser surrendered his legal powers to Marshal Hindenburg, abdicated, and went into exile. Groener negotiated with the civilian chancellor of Germany's new republic what both men characterized as "an alliance." The army would protect the republic from radical revolutionaries. Apart from exacting an oath to the new Constitution, the republic would leave the army to rule itself. When Brauchitsch and Halder used the phrase "fundamental changes" to describe one option they had vis-à-vis Hitler, they probably had in mind the example of Groener at Spa.

    In the German officer corps of the 1920s and 1930s, it was accepted truth that the army had always been the soul of the nation. General Hans von Seeckt, who headed the army staff during the first of these decades, wrote an essay, published in 1928 as "The Army in the State," which asserted that the army had evolved beyond its earlier bonding with monarchy: "Drawing men from all sources and stations, the army embodies the manifest national unity of the state and serves as one of the strongest clamps holding together the national edifice.... The army serves the state, only the state; for it is the state." An eminent Frankfurt jurist, writing on the army and the state in 1938—five years after Hitler came to power—echoed Seeckt, writing, "The basic political order springs from the structure of the military establishment."

    A majority of the German army's senior officers in 1939 were Prussians. Those who were not, like Halder, a Bavarian, had the traditions of the Prussian army equally fixed in their minds. They had studied the career of Seydlitz. Whenever they visited Hitler, they passed a bronze statue of him in the Wilhelm-Platz, just opposite the old Chancellory. They also had before them the models of Yorck at Tauroggen and of Hindenburg and Ludendorff later, taking decisions into their own hands. And they had the model of Groener at Spa, saying that the higher interests of the state required "fundamental changes."