I see most of the officers of the Wehrmacht as not necessarily Nazis in the way that they would, you know, shout 'Hail Hitler' all the time. They were highly intelligent, highly trained, super professionals that ran a very effective war machine.
And at one point more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler was giving were not really helping, you know, and they had their men dying because of it. So that creates a lot of tension and that led to the mistake that Hitler made in Dunkirk. Basically what Churchill called the sickle cut, which was the idea to storm through the Ardennes mountains and kind of cut off the British and French troops who were still, you know, in the north of Belgium trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly the Germans are behind them, so they kind of cut like a sickle into enemy territory. A sickle cut that was so successful that basically the campaign was won already.
So then the Germans invaded, like occupied all the cities on the canal back to England to kind of cut off the British completely, so they couldn't, you know, even flee. But there was just Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open, and the German army was like, you know, they were already on the outskirts of Dunkirk. They could have just taken it and closed that, you know, that hole for the British military to get out. But Hitler then did his famous — and this is all the dynamic of the Western campaign. You know, a lot of things happen every day. And then they're saying like, 'We're going to have Dunkirk tomorrow and then it's over,' and then Hitler stops the tanks. It's this famous Haltbefehl, the order to stop.
And, you know, they were all on meth. You know, they didn't want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. Hitler was — he basically, it was a little bit similar to the Berlin–Munich thing. Hitler didn't really understand that campaign. It was too fast for him. Because they didn't say like, 'Oh, they're all on meth. They're not going to sleep. They're going to behave erratically.' They didn't discuss this. They discussed this in the old-fashioned terms. And Hitler was seeing like, 'They do not protect their flanks. What if the British come from the north? This is terrible.' Like militarily, they were already fighting World War II while Hitler was still fighting World War I. And especially the Allies, they were still fighting World War I. But the tank generals on meth, or the tank generals without meth, the tank generals per se, they were fighting a new type of war.
And Hitler then got a visit from Göring, the head of the air force, the Luftwaffe. And Göring was a morphinist. That is very well documented. Like he was on morphine. He was high as a kite most of the time. And that comes with losing touch with reality, I would say, or at least it changes your grip on reality. You know, maybe you're still a good decision maker, but it could lead to — you know, if you're intoxicated, let's say you're writing and you're intoxicated, you think it's great, but the next day you read it and, you know. So, Göring was using morphine in the morning, then met Hitler at the Felsennest, which was Hitler's headquarters to command the Western campaign, the Felsennest.
And Göring said to him, 'If the army generals are now going to take Dunkirk, then basically the army has won this campaign, and that will give army high command, which is already against you,' because they were, you know, for them Hitler was always like the small, kind of regular army guy, because that's what Hitler had been in the First World War, and now suddenly he was the big decision maker. So they thought they could make much better decisions than him. So Göring says, 'Their power will be so overwhelming that they will from now on call the shots how this war will continue and what will be done next. You should let me with the Luftwaffe do the job from the air. The National Socialist Luftwaffe is going to end the Western campaign.' So he thought that he could destroy — it doesn't make sense, you know — destroy the British military from planes. Maybe you can do it, but certainly he couldn't do it.
So the tank generals received the Haltbefehl, the stopping order. They didn't believe it when they received it, because this would have been complete victory over Great Britain. This would have been the end of Great Britain. The whole British military was encircled, but they did get out through Dunkirk. That's why the movie Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan is not good, because he doesn't describe what happened on the German side. He's just this heroic British thing: 'Yeah, we just got out and we reformed and then we beat...' You know, this was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of army high command and convinced by Göring's morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't. Yeah, I mean he bombed and then the British, you know, they had ships and few ships were sunk, but basically they got out. You need to do this on the ground. At least back then, you would have needed to do it on the ground. So that was a big mistake by Hitler.
That's why von Manstein, one of the three tank generals from February 17th — it was Rommel, von Manstein and Guderian. And von Manstein, he later spoke of a 'verlorener Sieg', a lost victory. He said the Western campaign was a lost victory because we really could have achieved the victory. We could have dominated, you know, the British. They could have, you know, invaded Britain. There was no more military.
