Wehrmacht and National Socialism

The relationship between the Wehrmacht, as the armed forces of the Third Reich were known, and the regime it served has been the subject of a voluminous historiographical debate. Broadly speaking, there have been two camps. One insists that the Wehrmacht was the "untarnished shield", an apolitical force that had little to do with Nazism, kept its distance from the regime, had nothing to do with the criminal policies of the regime, and was even a bastion of resistance. The second camp argues that the Wehrmacht started out as a loyal part of the regime, became increasingly integrated into the regime as time went by, and argues the Wehrmacht was a genocidal organization.

The German military had traditionally functioned as a "state within a state" with a very large margin of institutional autonomy. Thus Chancellor Bismarck had been forbidden to attend meetings of the Supreme Council of War because as it was insultingly phrased "Lest this civilian might betray the secrets of the State". In the First World War, the military began to complain more and more that both the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and the Emperor Wilhelm were grossly incompetent, and needed to step aside in order to allow the military to win the war.

In March–April 1915, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz stated that the only thing that was keeping Germany from winning the war was the poor leadership of the Chancellor and the Emperor, and his solution was a plan in which Bethmann-Hollweg be sacked and the office of Chancellor abolished, the Kaiser would "temporarily" abdicate, and Field Marshal Hindenburg be given the new office of "Dictator of the Reich", concentrating all political and military power into his hands in order to win the war. Through the Tirpitz plan was not implemented, the very fact it was mooted showed the extent of military dissatisfaction with the existing leadership, and the strength of the "state within the state" in that Tirpitz was not punished despite having essentially called for deposing the Emperor. In August 1916, Germany become a de facto military dictatorship under the duumvirate of Field Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff, who ruled Germany until 1918. During the rule of the "silent dictatorship" of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the German government advocated a set of frankly imperialist war aims calling for the annexation of most Europe and Africa that in many ways were a prototype for the war aims of the Second World War.

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