Franz Halder (30 June 1884 – 2 April 1972) was a German general and the chief of staff of the Army High Command (OKH) in Nazi Germany from 1938 until September 1942. During World War II, he directed the planning and implementation of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Halder became instrumental in the radicalisation of warfare on the Eastern Front. He had his staff draft both the Commissar Order (issued on 6 June 1941) and the Barbarossa decree (signed on 13 May 1941) that allowed German soldiers to execute Soviet citizens for any reason without fear of later prosecution, leading to numerous war crimes and atrocities during the campaign. After the war, he played a decisive role in the development of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.
Halder began his military service in 1914. In 1937 he met and became a supporter of Adolf Hitler. Halder participated in the strategic planning for the 1939 German invasion of Poland. The plans authorised the SS to carry out security tasks – on behalf of the army – that included the imprisonment or execution of Poles. In July 1940 he began planning for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, which began on 22 June 1941. That summer Halder engaged in a long-running and divisive dispute with Hitler over strategy. Hitler removed Halder from command in September 1942. After the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Halder was arrested as it came to light that he had been involved in an earlier plot, leading to his imprisonment. As chief of OKH General Staff, he had kept extensive notes, later published as The Halder Diaries.
After World War II Halder served as a lead consultant for the US Army Historical Division. He oversaw the writing of over 2,500 historical documents by 700 former German officers, whom he instructed to remove material detrimental to the image of the German armed forces. Halder used his influence to foster a false history of the German-Soviet conflict in which the German army fought a "noble war" and which denied its war crimes. The US Army overlooked Halder's apologia because Halder's group was providing military insights on the Soviet Union that were deemed valuable in the Cold War. In 1961, he was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award.
Early life and military career
Halder was born in Würzburg, the son of an officer. In 1902, he joined an artillery regiment under the command of his father. Halder was educated at the Bavarian War Academy, graduating in 1914. During World War I, he served in a variety of staff roles and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class. In 1919, he was transferred to the Reichswehr, where he served in staff and training roles, including under Walther von Brauchitsch in the army training department. In 1931, he was appointed as chief of staff of a military district. After being promoted to generalmajor (general-major) in October 1934, Halder served as the commander of the 7th Infantry Division in Munich.
In August 1936, Halder was promoted to generalleutnant (lieutenant-general). He then became the director of the Manoeuvres Staff of the Wehrmacht. Between October 1937 and February 1938, Halder served as director of the Training Branch, on the General Staff of the Army, in Berlin. During the 1937 Wehrmacht manoeuvres, Halder met Adolf Hitler and became a loyal supporter. This personal contact also enabled him to progress through the ranks quickly.
On 1 February 1938, Halder was promoted to general of the Artillery. He was appointed chief of the General Staff of the Army High Command on 1 September. Within months of his appointment, Halder completed the first draft of a revised Handbook for General Staff Duty in War, which was issued in final form in August 1939. The revision removed the staff officer's traditional right to record formal written opposition to a commander's decision—a right that had existed primarily as a check on militarily unqualified royal appointees, and had already been fading from practice since the First World War.
Halder succeeded General Ludwig Beck who had resigned on 18 August amid the Sudetenland crisis. Halder was approached by conservative nationalist officers about heading the envisaged coup d'état should Hitler start a war, but he declined. Halder discussed the situation informally with US diplomat Raymond Geist and indicated that the Army feared that Hitler was about to start a war with the West. Despite the conspirators eventually foregoing a coup, Halder had in fact initiated contacts with them and at one point was committed seriously to the plot should Hitler instigate war, but this threshold was never met since the Munich Agreement averted the crisis, which left Halder on the verge of a breakdown. From that point forward, Halder accepted "a purely instrumental role for himself and the army, in his actions if perhaps not always in his heart."
Historian Geoffrey Megargee characterized Halder as a figure of conspicuous internal contradictions—calling him "an above-average military technician" whose grasp of global strategy and Germany's structural position in the international order was, by contrast, "correspondingly weak." Personally meticulous to the point of pedantry, with a public manner colleagues likened variously to a "university professor" or a schoolmaster depending on their estimation of him, Halder concealed behind that formal exterior an unusually sensitive temperament and a documented susceptibility to being overwhelmed by circumstance—his colleagues periodically observed him breaking into tears. His relationship with Hitler was structurally adversarial from the outset: where Halder prized technical expertise and logical process, Hitler's "instinctive, dilettantish approach to command" was precisely the mode of thinking Halder found most alien; Hitler, for his part, harbored the frontline soldier's habitual contempt for staff officers and found Halder's stiff bearing a perpetual irritant.
Invasions of Poland and Western Europe
Halder participated in the strategic planning for the Invasion of Poland. His plans authorised the SS to carry out security tasks on behalf of the army that included the imprisonment or execution of Polish citizens, whether Jewish or gentile. On 1 September 1939, the German offensive began, resulting in declarations of war by France and the British Empire. On 19 September, Halder noted in his diary that he had received information from Reinhard Heydrich. The SS were beginning their campaign to "clean house" in Poland of Jews, intelligentsia, Catholic clergy, and the aristocracy. Halder was aware of The Holocaust but did not object to the murders. He dismissed the crimes as aberrations and refused one general's request to pursue the SS and police perpetrators.
At the end of 1939, Halder oversaw the development of the invasion plans of France, the Low Countries and the Balkans. During a meeting with Hitler on 5 November Walther von Brauchitsch, the Army commander-in-chief, attempted to talk Hitler into putting off the invasion of France. Hitler refused and berated Brauchitsch for incompetence. As a consequence, Halder and Brauchitsch discussed overthrowing Hitler because they feared the invasion was doomed. They decided against the idea. On 23 November 1939 Carl Friedrich Goerdeler met with Halder to ask him to reconsider his decision. He refused, saying that Hitler was a great leader, and "one does not rebel when face to face with the enemy". Halder's contemplation of resistance to Hitler owed more to political turf battles than it did to disagreement over the regime's racism and antisemitism.
General Erich von Manstein's bold plan for invading France through the Ardennes Forest proved successful, and ultimately led to the fall of France. On 19 July 1940, Halder was promoted to generaloberst (colonel-general) and began to receive undisclosed monthly extralegal payments from Hitler that effectively doubled his already large wage.
On 30 March 1941 Halder attended the conference where Hitler described the planned invasion to about 200 senior Wehrmacht officers. He later wrote in his diary, summarising Hitler's remarks: