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About the Author

Stephen G. Fritz, professor of history at East Tennessee State University, is the author of Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II and Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich.

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Works by Stephen G. Fritz

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Common Knowledge

Birthdate
1949-02-21
Gender
male
Nationality
USA
Occupations
historian
Organizations
East Tennessee State University

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Reviews

Frontsoldaten got tedious and I lost interest. It drew a lot from books I had already read, such as The Forgotten Soldier (Sajer) and Soldat (Knappe).
½
 
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Slipdigit | 3 other reviews | Nov 26, 2021 |
Germany's initial victories, both diplomatic and military, during the late 1930s and early 1940s have given rise to a few myths about how they were accomplished. Hitler is usually given credit for his ability to persuade and cajole Western leaders into stepping back from promises made in the immediate aftermath of the First World War as Germany's borders once more expanded to the detriment of her neighbors. However, when it comes to discussions about military achievements, it's usually the commanding generals and Field Marshals that receive the laurels of victory while Hitler suffers in the corner as the lowly corporal who couldn't keep his mouth shut and listen to his generals when they told him exactly what he should do.

In 'The First Soldier," Stephen G. Fritz revisits the many key decisions made by both Hitler and his commanders and attempts to contextualize how much influence each had on the other and on the final decision-making process that was visible on the ground. For Fritz, Hitler's victories have to be accepted alongside his failures. That is, Hitler's numerous diplomatic triumphs that many of his commanders often opposed were accomplished in spite of his generals. The decision to invade Poland and France was also made in the face of many nay-sayers and it was in many respects Hitler who pushed Manstein's plan for the invasion of France to the forefront, which ended in utter humiliation for the French and a victory no German general, or Hitler himself, could have predicted. The victory over France reinforced and reenergized Germany's commanders so that by the time Hitler wanted plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union there were no longer voices of disagreement to be heard. The final major accomplishment Fritz sees fit to assign to Hitler is the decision to issue the "stand fast" order of the winter of 1941/1942, which many German commanders themselves agreed was the correct choice of action.

Fritz shows that for the majority of the war Hitler leaned on and listened to his generals or was able to convince them of his ideas. In truth, both played off each other and used each other to accomplish their respective goals. To what extent were German victories a reflection of Hitler's genius is a question that's still too difficult to answer. The decision to invade Poland was based on the idea that at worst this would be a localized conflict with a partner in the form of the Soviet Union. That plan quickly came undone and the Western Allies declared war on Germany, which Hitler was not expecting or prepared for. France's quick defeat/surrender was as much a surprise to Hitler as it was to the Allies. The outcome was a combination of numerous factors, part of which was the decision to employ Manstein's plan - another example of Hitler and his commanders working together. The invasion of the Soviet Union, however, saw both Hitler and Halder interfere in numerous decisions that eventually resulted in defeat. But, as Fritz correctly points out, the invasion was doomed to failure from the very beginning because of flawed planning and intelligence. The decisions that followed the invasion of the Soviet Union only compounded the many inherent flaws of Operation Barbarossa. There was no way to achieve victory militarily, only politically, but any attempt to reach out to Stalin or the Western Allies to ask for peace was out of the question for Hitler.

As the war progressed Hitler's generals often worried about the obstacles before them and gave little thought to the greater geo-political landscape Hitler inhabited. Fritz argues convincingly that many of Hitler's decisions, up until the last days of the war, were made with political, diplomatic, military, and economic ideas in mind, whereas his generals had only need of more men, tanks, planes, and supplies to finish off the enemy standing before them. Both Hitler and his generals failed to take into account how the war they had unleashed on Europe and the world would play out strategically. Compounding their flaws on top of each other, Hitler and his commanders found themselves in a situation that few thought manageable toward victory as early as 1941. By contextualizing Hitler's decision making process, Fritz has shown first and foremost the flaws of the German commanders that surrounded Hitler. It wasn't that Hitler was unable to wage war successfully, it was that German commanders have left a legacy of memoirs that claimed that only they could. Their postwar accounts portrayed Hitler as a temperamental dilettante who refused to listen to reason, whereas in reality their flawed ideas revolving around military strategy, combined with Hitler's racist worldview, meant the Second World War was lost before it began.
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Kunikov | 1 other review | Mar 17, 2019 |
The First Soldier

Stephen G. Fritz

Five/Five

Essentially a military biography of Hitler. Well written, well documented – all and all an excellent work and one that the student of Hitler and the European World War II Military would do well to read.

That said I do not agree with his premise that Hitler was The Feldherr. Hitler in the four years of World War I did not rise above the rank of Corporal (Volker Ullrich in Hitler has him as a PFC, I haven’t found why the discrepancy). During the Vietnam war I rose to the rank of Sargent (or rather the equivalent as Sp/5) in well under 3 years.

Much of my disagreement can be centered on two examples. When Hitler the Feldherr has a brilliant idea such as an attack through the Ardennes in 1940 it is his idea. When Hitler has an idea that becomes an abysmal failure, such as an attack through the Ardennes in 1944, he was given bad information.

Dunkirk, the tanks were stopped by Runstead, North Africa is barely mentioned as is Italy.

Russia, yes it was too wide a front. Is that Hitler or his Generals or both. It seems to depend on when and what is the objective. Not mentioned is the way the locals and POWs were treated.

Yes Hitler wanted this as Lebensraum, but perhaps if he had waited to starve the locals until after he had won. Keep them producing and some for Germany. As in Western Europe, the Resistance sprang from the ground.

Hitler never seemed to understand that the tail of the Army is of vital importance. No matter how excellent your troops are, if you put them on half rations for two weeks, they are not worth much. Tank divisions are fine, but they must have spare parts, much less ammunition and fuel.
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wwj | 1 other review | Feb 28, 2019 |
OSTKRIEG: HITLER’S WAR OF EXTERMINATION IN THE EAST, by Stephen G. Fritz

Stephen G. Fritz, professor of history at East Tennessee State University, is the author of Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II and Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich. He lives in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Stephen G. Fritz produces solidly written and researched history on the subjects of Germany and the Second World War. His academic and scholarly success seems to come from within, and is the result of hard work instead of patronage, devotion to a particular cause, or association with a perceived wellspring of scholarly genius. Like the other fruits of his labor, Fritz’s latest work, Ostkrieg. Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East, is all the more valuable as a result.

Early on the morning of June 28, 1940, one week after the execution of the Franco-German armistice, Adolf Hitler and a small entourage that included Albert Speer and Arno Breker took a brief tour of some of the more well-known cultural sites of Paris. The Fuehrer was at his ease, surrounded by his security detail, and showing off his knowledge of the artwork encountered along the way. At some point a member of his party suggested that Hitler be the central figure in a formal victory parade in the French capital. The dictator promptly rejected the idea. “I am not in the mood for a victory parade,” he said. “We aren’t at the end yet.”
This little vignette, as related by Fritz in Ostkrieg, informs the reader in somewhat cryptic fashion both as to the author’s thesis and the mind of his subject.

Concerning the mind of Adolf Hitler, even a casual student of the Second World War must face the question whether the German Fuehrer was possessed of all his faculties when he decided to launch the single largest and most violent military operation in history, thereby putting at risk all that he had already achieved. And as for Stephen Fritz, his thesis might be boiled down to this: the Ostkrieg was Hitler’s war.

Here we do not allude to the fact that the dictator immersed himself in the micromanagement of that war almost from its beginning. Adolf Hitler most certainly did this, but that is not the point. The Fuehrer “owned” the Ostkrieg because it was the “real” war, the conflict that came from his heart and soul, the crusade that expressed the essence of his being, the cause for which he had been brought into the world.

Ostkrieg is probably not for the casual reader. Its narrative runs to 500 pages, while the footnotes and bibliography (vital to some, but inexplicably of little interest to others) consume another 100 pages. And notwithstanding the author’s protestations to the contrary, Fritz did in fact generate a work based on both original research and the use of secondary works. Fritz’s original sources—the original war diary of Franz Halder, the speeches of Adolf Hitler, the diaries and letters of German soldiers in the field, the diaries and records of the German Armed Forces high command, the daily record kept by Joseph Goebbels, and other like material— have been treated as such by many scholars in the field.

Stephen Fritz brought to his sources his considerable analytical skills and clarity of expression. The product is a very readable consideration of the European war’s most important front, and one that expresses a new understanding of its causes and effects. Fritz is not the first scholar to bring to the fore the complex obsessions that enslaved Adolf Hitler’s mind, nor is he the only one to associate those obsessions with the war the Fuehrer made. Fritz is the first, however, to correctly connect Hitler’s obsessive character with specific decisions made by him that determined the fate of Germany and the lives—and deaths—of tens of millions of Europeans.

Adolf Hitler’s conviction that “international Jewry” controlled the course of human events, and aimed to eradicate Germany and the German “Volk”, was the root cause of the war that forever altered western culture. For the Fuehrer, Jewry was a contagion that must be eradicated forever, and failing that, at the very least removed from Europe once and for all.

Initially, however, Hitler confronted the not insignificant problem of the Versailles Treaty and Germany’s resultant military weakness. Hitler resolved this problem during the period 1938-1940, expanding the borders of the Reich and removing from the equation as military threats not only Poland but France and—for the moment at least—Great Britain.
Nevertheless the German victories of 1938-1940, both diplomatic and military, seemed in some ways to have multiplied Germany’s problems, rather than allay them.

The fundamental issue, in the view of Hitler and his toadies, was that the string of victories merely added substantially to the number of Jews under German control without providing the means to deal with them. By this point in time the Nazis’ options for resolving the “Jewish problem” were fast shrinking, in part because their efforts to deport the European Jews had run aground on the inability, particularly with Britain still in the war, of the German armed forces to mount a successful campaign to seize the island of Madagascar and make use of it as an appropriate haven for the Jews.

If the Jews could not be removed physically from Europe, then Germany must expand the reach of its control still further, and that could only be accomplished through the use of force, which must be applied to Ukraine and the rest of European Russia. And in this case time was of the essence, since Great Britain had chosen to continue its fight, and more importantly would have the greatest opportunity to persuade the United States to join in the struggle on the side of Britain.

Finally, if the war went badly for Germany, as it began to do in December 1941, this could only be the result of the machinations of “international Jewry”. If the Jews of Europe therefore could not be pushed out, Nazi Germany would be forced to adopt—and this was clearly the fault of the Jews—more radical measures, and in the here and now, not the future. The end result was four years of bitter fighting and the slaughter of tens of millions of innocent people.

The thesis set forth by Stephen Fritz in Ostkrieg is so simple and compelling that it merits consideration even by those who have studied the topic for years.
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tenutter | 2 other reviews | Apr 26, 2015 |

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