Background
Franz Haider was born on 30 June 1884 in Würzburg into a Roman Catholic officers’ family.
Franz Haider was born on 30 June 1884 in Würzburg into a Roman Catholic officers’ family.
In 1902, he joined the 3rd Royal Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment in Munich. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1904, upon graduation from War School in Munich, then he attended Artillery School (1906–07) and the Bavarian Staff College (War Academy) (1911–1914), both in Munich.
During World War I he served as a General Staff officer and joined the Reichswehr Ministry in 1919, remaining in the army and receiving thirty regimental and staff appointments between 1921 and 1930.
In 1930-1 he joined the Organization Department of the General Staff and in 1935 he was promoted to Major General, followed by his appointment as Lieutenant-General in 1937 and as Chief of Staff of the German Army in 1938, replacing General Ludwig Beck who had been forced to resign.
His dismissal on 24 September 1942 arose out of a disagreement with Hitler's decision to divert forces to take Stalingrad. After the July plot of 1944, Haider was arrested and only narrowly avoided execution, being confined in a concentration camp until the end of the war, when he was liberated by the Americans.
He died on 2 April 1972 in Aschau, Upper Bavaria.
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1949Haider was aware of the resentment of army officers towards Hitler, and in 1938 even went so far as to promise the latter's opponents that he would support a putsch so as to avoid a European war. Haider and the Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, Walter von Brauchitsch, both of them torn between their dislike of Nazism and their oath of loyalty to the Führer, nonetheless considered using the army to arrest Hitler should he declare war on France and Britain.
After the Munich agreement the plot came to nothing and Haider gradually found himself drawn into Hitler's orbit, being intimately involved in the planning of the early battles in World War II, even though he had initially opposed the war and Hitler's strategy.
Although the High Command of the Army was increasingly subordinate to Hitler’s own interference - after the war Haider claimed that this intervention had been disastrous and had paralysed the armed forces - the Chief of Staff supported the policy as long as it brought success and he contributed substantially to the early victories on the eastern front.
The quiet, laconic Haider, a professional soldier of exceptional ability and an able writer, claimed in his best-selling pamphlet. Hitler als Feldherr (1949), that the Führer was a fanatic whose principles of strategy were catastrophic; that he had no human contact with his troops and was completely indifferent to their welfare; that he wasted lives and material to win superfluous victories; that he believed will power to be more important than military science and brought about Germany’s defeat by removing control of the army from the professional generals.
What Haider did not explain was how he could serve Hitler for so long and whether he had not betrayed the essential principles of the Army General Staff in doing so.