Hitler's Second Army

Washington DC: Infantry Journal, 1943. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Fair/Fair. [8], 245, [3] pages. Illustrations. DJ is worn, torn, soiled, and chipped. Endpapers and pages have some browning/discolorment. Ding to top edge of front board. Includes a Foreword, Introduction, and Chapters on The Nazi Storm Troopers, The Bodyguard Echelons, Hitler's Foreign Legions, The Nazi Motor Transportation Corps, Nazi Air Organizations, Organization Todt of OT, Technical Emergency Corps, The Reich Labor Service, The German Labor Front, National Socialist League of Ex-Service Men, National Socialist People's Welfare, Hitler Youth, and National Socialist Womanhood. This work is a description of Germany's military and semi-miltary organizations, besides the regular Army, that can be expected to fight bitterly as Allied forces penetrate deeper and deeper into Hitler's "Fortress Europa". Alfred Hermann Friedrich Vagts (December 1, 1892 in Basbeck - June 19, 1986 in Cambridge, MA) was a German poet and historian. Vagts served in the First World War as a Captain in the German military and was awarded the Iron Cross first class. In the years 1923-1932 Vagts was a historian at the Institut für auswärtige Politik (Institute for Foreign Affairs) at the Hamburg university. In this role Vagts visited the Yale university in the United States where he worked with American historian Charles A. Beard. In 1927 he married Beard's daughter, Miriam. Their son, Detlev, was born in 1929. In 1932, with the rise of Nazism, the Vagts family left Germany for the UK. In 1933 they moved to the US, where Alfred became a US citizen. Initially he worked as an independent scholar. Between 1938 and 1939, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he remained until 1942. Then, until the end of WWII, Vagts served on the Board of Economic Warfare. After the war, and until his death, Vagts continued to work as an independent scholar. Vagts's work comprises scientific and literary books as well as essays. His most well known work is The History of Militarism, Civilian and Military. Vagts collaborated with Hajo Holborn, Eckhart Kehr, George W. Hallgarten, Fritz T. Epstein and Hans Rosenberg. Vagts is best known for his 1938 A History of Militarism, Civilian and Military, which drew an important distinction between "the military way" and "militarism." The former term described a reasonable, rational approach to waging war with the purpose of accomplishing the objectives of state policy, a manner "limited in scope, confined to one function, and scientific in its essential qualities." The latter involved a "vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actions and thought ... transcending true military purposes ... so constituted that it may hamper and defeat the purposes of the military way.... Militarism displays the qualities of caste and cult, authority and belief." Vagts also distinguished between militarism as practiced by professional soldiers and by civilians, often regarding the latter as the worst offenders. Vagts was a salient commentator on Clausewitz, and he frequently referred to him and had a sophisticated grasp of his theories. Vagts was unusual among the expatriate German military writers in being essentially critical of the philosopher. Vagts's critique was similar to Liddell Hart's in that he saw much of the negative impact of On War as being due to his disciples' misapprehension of the concept of "absolute war." Vagts argued that this was a misapprehension for which Clausewitz's method of expression was only partly to blame; the laziness and stupidity of his readers played as great a role. More fundamentally, Vagts argued that Clausewitz himself had not properly conceived the relationship between the army and the state.