Franz Halder

Franz Halder (born June 30, 1884, Würzburg, Germany—died April 2, 1972, Aschau im Chiemgau, West Germany) was a German general who, in spite of his personal opposition to the policies of Adolf Hitler, served as chief of the army general staff (1938–42) during the period of Germany’s greatest military victories in the early years of World War II.

Halder was born to a military family with ties to the Bavarian army dating from the 17th century. He began his military career in 1902 as a member of the 3rd Field Artillery Regiment of the Royal Bavarian Army. He was commissioned a lieutenant two years later, and he soon built a reputation as an able staff officer. Halder attended the Bavarian War Academy (1911–14), and, although he did not receive a frontline command during World War I, the static slaughter of the Western Front made him a proponent of maneuver-warfare doctrines such as those expounded by British strategists Basil Liddell Hart and J.F.C. Fuller.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Halder received numerous general staff assignments, leading to his first command post in October 1934, when he was promoted to major general and made Artillery Leader VII. In reality, that title represented command of a full-strength infantry division concealed within the German army’s order of battle in an effort to skirt the disarmament terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1936 Halder was promoted to lieutenant general and transferred to the army general staff headquarters in Berlin. As Hitler pressed the case for an invasion of Czechoslovakia—citing the national interests of the Sudetenland—Ludwig Beck, chief of the general staff, resigned in protest. Although Halder had openly criticized the Gestapo, the SS, and other elements of the Nazi Party, he was appointed to succeed Beck in September 1938. In fact, Halder’s resistance to the Nazis went far deeper, and both he and Beck were actively involved in a plan to overthrow Hitler. After the diplomatic victory that resulted in the Munich Agreement, however, Halder determined that Hitler’s position was too strong, and he refused to proceed with the plot.

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Along with army commander in chief Walther von Brauchitsch, Halder orchestrated the invasion of Poland in 1939, a monthlong campaign that demonstrated the brutal effectiveness of 20th-century maneuver warfare. When Hitler announced his plan for an offensive against France and the Low Countries in autumn 1939—a plan that Halder and other senior officers thought would be disastrous—Halder was again drawn into a plot to assassinate Hitler. As before, Halder’s nerve broke, and the plot fizzled. Despite the reservations of the general staff, Hitler adopted an audacious plan suggested by Erich von Manstein, and the success of the spring 1940 offensives in the Western Front affirmed Hitler’s faith in his own strategic vision while reinforcing his low opinion of Halder. Increasingly marginalized, Halder clashed with Hitler over the details of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and he was accused of defeatism when he suggested a halt to the German advance in the interest of consolidating the front. Halder shared the widely held belief that German forces could capture Moscow before the onset of winter in 1941; his failure to ensure the efficient distribution of cold-weather gear meant that when the German advance stalled on the edge of the Russian capital, troops on the Eastern Front were sorely unprepared for the harshest winter in decades. Tens of thousands succumbed to frostbite.

As the campaign in the east faltered, Hitler’s tolerance for Halder reached an end, and he was dismissed as chief of staff in September 1942. During his retirement, he remained in contact with Beck, and this connection implicated him in the failed July Plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Halder was arrested, along with hundreds of others, but he managed to avoid execution. He was imprisoned at Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps. In the closing days of the war, a number of prisoners who were of high value to the Nazis, including Halder, French premier Léon Blum, and Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, were transferred from Dachau to a hotel in the Tirolean Alps, and the group was liberated by Allied troops in May 1945.

Unlike other members of the German high command, Halder was not tried as a war criminal. From 1947 to 1961 he worked with the U.S. Army to construct a record of German military history and doctrine, and Halder’s personal diaries provided an invaluable chronicle of daily life at the highest levels of the Third Reich. For this work, the United States awarded Halder the Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1961.