Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: War and revolution in Europe, 1789–1945
- Part I Origins and dynamics
- Part II Foreign policies and military instruments
- 3 Fascism and Italian foreign policy
- 4 The Italian army at war, 1940–43
- 5 The Prussian idea of freedom and the “career open to talent”
- Conclusion
- Frequently Cited Works
- Index
5 - The Prussian idea of freedom and the “career open to talent”
Battlefield initiative and social ascent from Prussian reform to Nazi revolution, 1807–1944
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: War and revolution in Europe, 1789–1945
- Part I Origins and dynamics
- Part II Foreign policies and military instruments
- 3 Fascism and Italian foreign policy
- 4 The Italian army at war, 1940–43
- 5 The Prussian idea of freedom and the “career open to talent”
- Conclusion
- Frequently Cited Works
- Index
Summary
… the change in men weighs more heavily than that in technology. The French we met in battle were no longer those of 14/18. The relationship was like that between the revolutionary armies of 1796 and those of the [First] Coalition – only this time we are the revolutionaries and Sans-Culottes.
– Generalmajor Erich Marcks, 19 June 1940Erich Marcks, soldier son of an eminent neo-Rankean, saw more clearly than he knew. In July 1940, a few weeks after he had written these lines, the German army staff gave him the intriguing task of drafting Germany's preliminary plan for an attack on Soviet Russia. That attempt at global Blitzkrieg, in both aims and consequences, was National Socialism's most revolutionary deed. Limitless military violence and pitiless racial-ideological genocide, conquest both external and internal, fused in the “East” into the consummation of the German Revolution.
Like the Paris revolutions of 1789–94 and unlike the German “military strike” of 1918, the German Revolution of 1933–45 transformed politics and society at home while generating unprecedented external destruction. Yet except in the air, German technological or numerical superiority was either absent or contributed relatively little to the ruin of France and the humiliation of Britain in April–June 1940. In the attack on Soviet Russia, as Omer Bartov has shown, most German units found themselves by winter 1941–42 reduced almost to the technological levels of the First World War against an increasingly mechanized and motorized enemy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Common DestinyDictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, pp. 186 - 226Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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