Clausewitz in Nazi Germany

ion on the analogy of the Kantian Ding an sich. In its purely military essence, war is a struggle fought with all available means until one side is unable to offer any further resistance. Two rational creatures, locked in combat, both realize that the victory will go to whichever exerts the most effort. Thus a continual escalation of force follows until one is completely vanquished. True to his philosophical calling, when Clausewitz writes that, 'never can a principle of moderation be introduced into the philosophy of war itself without committing an absurdity', he is making a statement about the nature of war in a logical sense.' He is not, as he is often misunderstood to say, advocating utmost brutality as the w2y to conduct any actual war. Absolute war is the peak of the escalation of violence in the struggle between two rational creatures. It is the ideal type of war, never found in reality, which all real wars approximate but never attain. Clausewitz thought that, in his own day, Napoleonic warfare represented a new type of people's war which came much closer to the absolute form of war than the cabinet wars of the previous era. To explain why absolute war is never met in reality, Clausewitz borrows the image of friction from physics. Not all forces can, in actuality, be deployed simultaneously, nor will those in charge of 8 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.112 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 04:40:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Baldwin: Clausewitz in Nazi Germany making the appropriate decisions ever be of one mind. Due to such 'modifications of reality', actual wars do not escalate to the absolute stage as a purely theory-bound consideration would expect. Nevertheless, although Clausewitz did at one time think that all wars, however limited in scope and objective they might on occasion be, aimed at the idea of absolute war and were prevented from achieving this goal only through the interference of the frictions of reality, the development of his thought led him to argue that limited wars with circumscribed aims and motivations might represent a special class of war, one no less 'ideal' than absolute war.'2 He distinguishes various types of war in accordance with the intensity and importance of their motivations. The stronger the motives, the more every aspect of the peoples concerned is involved, the more war approaches its abstract form, the more it aims solely at crushing the enemy and, consequently, the more completely the military and political objects overlap, 'the more purely military and less political the war seems to be.' The weaker the motives, the more the war takes on a political cast.'3 Thus Clausewitz distinguishes the purely military aims of war, the aim of struggle as a theoretical concept (destruction of the enemy), from the political manoeuvres which make use of war for ends which may very well be far more modest than those dictated by military considerations. Yet he wrote in the eighth book of Vom Kriege (one he did not live to revise) that, given sufficiently urgent political motives, it is possible for political and military goals to coincide. 'If war belongs to politics, then it will assume its character. As politics become greater and mightier, so does war; this can continue to the point at which war attains its absolute form.'4 Given the ultimate motives of a battle for sheer survival, war can apparently lose its political aspect and be characterized wholly by the military goal of a completely vanquished opponent. 'It would be conceivable that the political viewpoint should lose its influence at the outbreak of war only if war were fought out of pure hatred as a struggle for life or death ... . This is not to say that, prompted by even the strongest of motivations, war is not actually political, but rather that at this extreme the political and military intentions seek one and the same object. The point, therefore, is not that Clausewitz did not regard war as subordinate to politics or that he thought of limited wars as mere aberrations of the ideal war of utmost violence, but that his thought is genuinely ambiguous and therefore easily used and abus9 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.112 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 04:40:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Journal of Contemporary History ed. 'Should an early death interrupt my work', he cautioned in his preface of 1827, scant years before one did, 'then what is here will, of course, only deserve to be called a shapeless mass of thoughts, . . subject to endless misunderstandings

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