The Nazis' March to Chaos: The Hitler Era through the Lenses of Chaos-Complexity Theory. - Review - book review

Aerospace Power Journal, Summer, 2001 by James S. Corum

The Nazis' March to Chaos: The Hitler Era through the Lenses of Chaos-Complexity Theory by Roger Beaumont. Praeger (http://www.greenwood.com/praeger.htm), 88 Post Road West, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007, 2000, 213 pages, $59.95 (hardcover).

In The Nazis' March to Chaos, Roger Beaumont, the author of several books on military affairs, attempts a new approach to analyzing the history of the Third Reich. This fairly short book takes the form of an extended essay on the "nonlinearity" of German history, using aspects of chaos-complexity theory as a framework for analysis and commentary.

Beaumont gets into trouble from the beginning by putting forward a fairly muddled description of chaos-complexity theory. The author explains chaos theory more as a series of characteristics than as a coherent theory that attempts to account for the unpredictability of historical events and applies this to a study of the Third Reich. It's a very tall order for a short book, and this work does not live up to its intended promise.

While the author muses over developing a new methodology to look at the history of Nazi Germany, the book itself exposes some of the problems with the methodology of applying chaos theory to historical events. The first major flaw in the work is the emphasis upon dealing with the phenomenon of Nazism and the Third Reich without relating it to the general political conditions in Europe at the time. A traditional historical view, which the author generally ignores, looks upon the rise of Nazi Germany not as an unpredictable and unique event but as a consequence of the general European crisis set off by the carnage and devastation of World War I. The Great War was the immediate cause of the collapse of four great empires (Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German) and followed by a general lack of confidence in liberalism and democratic institutions throughout Europe. As Italy became a fascist dictatorship and Russia a communist one and as French politics swayed between extremes of left and right (and even tually chose fascism in 1940), only Great Britain seemed relatively immune to the European tendency toward totalitarian government in the 1930s.

While the author emphasizes the uniqueness of the Nazi ideology and system as a "dialog of chaos and order," a look at Nazi Germany through a European context would note the remarkable similarities of Nazi Germany and the other totalitarian states on the Continent. Beaumont argues that the Nazi "Voelkisch" race ideology was unique to Germany, but, in fact, Fascist Italy and Vichy France had their own variations on this theme. Some of the most remarkable similarities of the era include the propaganda themes, methodology, and even art of the totalitarian states. Much of the propaganda and art extolling the Nazi regime or Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union is virtually interchangeable. Similarities abound in the concept of the all-wise leader as the embodiment of the people in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Even the party's control apparatus in the totalitarian states shared many characteristics. In short, the more traditional view that sees Nazi Germany as the result of a European crisis that fostered a variety of totalitarian states and ideologies still holds up as far more useful than chaos theory for understanding the history of the twentieth century.

However, a far more grievous flaw in the book is the author's fairly weak grasp of modem German history. Beaumont's analysis of the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht reflects a lack of acquaintance with the last 20 years of scholarship on the German military, He repeats the long-discredited notion that Guderian and the "tank enthusiasts" encountered strong opposition to the creation of a panzer force from the traditionalist generals at the top (pages 79-81). This is totally unsupported outside of Guderian's self-serving memoirs. He repeats the old saws that Hitler delayed economic mobilization, kept civilian production at a high level during the war, and kept German women out of the workforce during most of the war (page 35). Richard Overy's detailed analysis in War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1994) has very capably demolished these myths. However, it is disconcerting that the author seems unaware of many important, recent works on German history.

Some of the analysis is pure nonsense--for example, the author's description of blitzkrieg tactics as "anti-doctrine" (page 33). The German doctrine of maneuver warfare of the 1930s and 1940s did not have as its primary goal inducing "turbulence and confusion" amongst the enemy, as the author tries to argue, but was an operational method of outmaneuvering and outflanking the enemy with the goal of annihilating his forces. Rather than "anti-doctrine," it was a clear evolution of concepts deeply rooted in the German military tradition going back to Clausewitz, Moltke, Schlieffen, and World War I.

In one case, the author gets it right in his chapter-long analysis of the theory of several prominent Holocaust historians that if the Allies had only bombed the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944, the mass murder of Jews could have been halted. Beaumont points out that such an operation at such long range would have been an extremely complex undertaking and that there is no real certainty that the desired result could have been obtained by such a raid. The author understands in this case that the interplay of weather, intelligence, technology, military operations, and the enemy's response is so complex that simplistic "what if" scenarios are usually a historical dead end.