“Our leader is hale and hearty, apart from his chronic bowel problems,” Albert continued.
“Not if you speak to Morell,” was Jodl’s cheeky reply, referring to the Chancellor’s disgusting and obese doctor, who was universally considered a quack by all, apart from his “Patient A.” Milch often told the stories of how Morell would poke two of his fingers (with filthy black fingernails) into an orange and them proceed to suck out the contents of the orange, or how he would plunge his dirty and hairy hands into a glass bowl of ice cubes and grab some ice for his drink, or how he bathed once every two weeks.
“Nevertheless, our host’s general health is good—for now. But if this is an empire for a thousand years, what happens when he is no longer blessed with such good health, which must happen sooner or later? ‘All that live must die, passing through nature to eternity,’ as the old play has it. And health aside, his choice of comrades is based solely on loyalty and his ability to manipulate them—look at our good friend Martin. And there is the little matter of the oath.”
At this statement, Jodl’s demeanor suddenly changed—“that fucking oath, total fucking madness—the German army swearing total alliance to a fucking foreigner. Christ Alive! Next, we will be swearing alliance to a French queer—there are enough of them these days.”
It was true that the German army’s swearing of the oath in 1934 had raised the hackles of all of the officers—to swear an oath to one person—not to the country, or even to an office. And to someone who was not even a German citizen until 1932, for God’s sake.
Jodl’s fuming subsided a little. Keeping to the safety of the hypothetical, as any good academic would, Albert went on,
“Just imagine for one terrible moment that the leader suffers a heart attack; how would Germany continue?”
The bishop had just been moved to determine the outcome of the match—both grandmasters said nothing, but both appreciated they were playing at the highest level.
Jodl’s reply was shocking in its directness and simplicity, “There would be no difference.”
Jodl drew on his cigar.
“Look, Albert, all three of us are adults here. I know precisely what you are asking me, and I would not trust this to another civilian. But you have a brain between your ears, so as you have been frank with me I will return the compliment. There are three military-types who run the Reich: me, Milch and Donitz. That’s it. Milch can speak for himself, and I know Donitz and I think I can speak for him. He is no more enamored with the current regime than I—the murderers, the criminals, the fucking Gauleiters.”
Jodl stopped, but the point had been made.
Albert probed, “So, if the terrible occurred and the leader was suddenly incapacitated or even died?”
Albert paused for effect, which was completely ineffectual on Jodl, who simply looked directly at Albert and waited for the obvious question.
“So, what would happen; I mean, what would be the mechanics?”
Jodl paused, looked out at the mountain range in the distance and said:
“The Untersberg is truly magnificent today, isn’t she?”
Albert could not believe that Jodl was toying with him, but it both impressed and reassured him.
Albert smiled, “So, what happens?”
Albert had deliberately changed the tense as he sensed Jodl was clearly with him. Jodl drew in a deep breath and started to explain as if lecturing young cadets,
“Clausewitz teaches us the nation state needs a political structure, like a ship needs a command superstructure. Everyone agrees on this. What they do not agree on is the form of that political structure. We could discuss that until Jesus returns, if that ever happens. But for now we will agree a structure is needed. Today, we essentially do not have a structure. What we do have is a foreign dictator from Austria who is a superb actor and who is marvelous at reading people and especially good at detecting and exploiting their weaknesses. Remember how he played that homo Röhm in Operation Hummingbird—Operation Fuckingbird would have been a more appropriate name for the purge. But at running a country?”
Jodl turned up his face, and knocked the white-gray ash off the end of his cigar and continued—his blood was up:
“I have seen it for far too long. Have you seen him write a note—the man is almost illiterate? His handwriting like that of a child—that is why he never writes anything. That is why he dictated that pile of horse manure, ‘On Five Years of Struggle Against Lies, Morons And Idiots,’ or whatever the original title was. It’s unreadable shit—total shit, and until his rise to power it had sold 971 fucking copies—the first edition sold 971 copies, then it became our fucking bible, a bible of shit. He cannot write; he cannot organize. And my army has a fucking oath to this man. Christ all fucking mighty, whose side is God on for the sake of fuck?”
Unfazed, Albert simply stated: “so if the leader died or decided to retire, you, Milch and Donitz could take over?”
Jodl paused, “Albert, you do not understand—we are already in control, our obstacle is the current political structure.”
The treasonous talk petered out. And the conversation returned to the current situation in Russia.
Jodl expanded his explanation, as much as a review for himself as for the other two:
“Our problem is oil, or more specifically the lack of oil. We’re in much the same boat as the Japanese and the dago shit-eaters, our so-called fucking allies to the south.” Jodl hated the Italians with their posturing, their laziness, and worst of all their desire to leave brave Germans soldiers unsupported when even the weakest enemy appeared.
The strategic genius returned,
“It’s the simplest classic problem of military logistics: every kilometer we advance into Russia is one more kilometer our tanker trucks need cover. And in contrast to our tanks, these oil tankers are thin skinned—even the simplest raid by enemy ‘planes can leave a critical oil convoy in shambles.”
“And as I earlier said, our intelligence has been poor for Russia. It is true that in the early weeks we made amazing progress—Leeb reached Dvinsk; Smolensk was in our hands; Rundstedt was at the gates of Kiev. In contrast to our leader’s proclamation about kicking in the front door, he should have quoted his beloved Frederick the Great: ‘You have to shoot every Russian dead twice, and still turn him over to make sure.’ That is our problem.”
No one smiled at this stark truism.
“The Russians are precisely—precisely—the opposite of what we were led to expect. Sometimes they charge our machine guns armed with pitch forks or axes. It’s medieval, not 1941. And much of Russia is trackless. I feel we are the Romans fighting in the northern forests in 9 A.D.—and we all know how the three legions were massacred in the Teutoburg Forest; it’s the same today in Russia. This whole campaign is a massive gamble—France was a bad enough gamble, but a loss or a stalemate in France would not have been fatal to the Reich. And we started the current campaign in Russia with all of 10 divisions in reserve. Guderian told me that the Chancellor had said to him four weeks ago, ‘Had I known the Russians had that many tanks, I would have thought twice about attacking.’ Wonderful. Fucking wonderful.”
A neutral assessment by the Swiss intelligence service after the Armistice of ’42 ranked Jodl with Alan Brooke as the two outstanding strategic thinkers of the European war, followed—a long way behind—by Rundstedt, Student and Guderian. His next statement showed the Swiss were correct.
“In Russia, we face two unrelated problems. The first is lack of focus—against all that Clausewitz taught us about ‘maximum force on the minimum front’—we are trying to do everything. The second is the civilian administration—using the more brutal elements of the Gestapo, and the clowns—the fucking clowns—that are being assigned.”