4 November 2024

Donald Trump Is Wrong. Hitler’s Generals Were Failures

Michael Peck

For someone who considers himself a winner in business and politics, Donald Trump’s admiration for Hitler’s generals is peculiar. Why admire soldiers who lost the biggest war in history?

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump reportedly said during his final days in the White House, according to The Atlantic. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” To Trump, such loyalty would include a willingness – or perhaps an eagerness – by the U.S. military to use force against what Trump terms “the enemy from within.”

America’s generals opposed then-President Trump’s threat to deploy troops in American cities during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and they would certainly oppose such a move now. Perhaps that’s why Trump has called those who serve in the U.S. military “losers.”
Donald Trump and History

But the real losers were Hitler’s generals. Not only was the Third Reich ultimately defeated on the battlefield, but Germany was devastated, occupied by foreign armies, and even divided into two nations that would not be reunited for 45 years.

To call Hitler’s generals unconditionally obedient is false. In 1944, a few German officers nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler. Privately, senior German generals – many of whom were Prussian aristocrats – sneered at Hitler, a World War I veteran of humble Austrian origin whom they dismissed as the “Bohemian corporal.” Given Trump’s contempt for the military, such as dismissing dead American soldiers as “suckers,” they probably wouldn’t have thought much of him, either.

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