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Hardy Perennial. For more than a century the General Staff Corps had survived victory and defeat, forever studying the last war, forever planning the next. As perfected by the Germans, the modern Corps represented and served all arms—the ground armies, the air force, the navy.
G.S.C.'s spiritual father was Frederick the Great, who began its tradition of endurance in adversity and gave the Corps its Prussian base. Napoleon and his defeat of the Prussians at Jena gave the G.S.C. its first great strategic concepts—the wielding of massive armies and the conscription needed to provide the uniformed mass. Two non-Prussians, calm, scholarly General Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, a Hanoverian, and impetuous, dashing August Wilhelm Anton von Gneisenau, coalesced these concepts. Scharnhorst founded the War Academy, from which Staff officers were chosen, and Gneisenau, as chief of staff of the Prussian army, put the new ideas to work. In Bismarck's time, non-Prussian Helmuth Karl von Moltke made the study of past wars a prime function of the Corps.
G.S.C. survived World War I with scarcely a bobble. The Allies considerately allowed a small (100,000) German army to guard Germany against internal disorder. G.S.C. smoothly converted this "police force" into a miniature Wehrmacht, complete with all the old organizational ideas and hospitable to new ones.
When Adolf Hitler came to power, he used the professional High Command, and its members used him. They had the same aim—war—and the story of their mutual enmity was largely a myth.
So was the idea, popular just now, that merely by imprisoning the ranking German commanders the Allies could kill the German High Command. Fundamentally, it would live as long as the German military spirit lived—and that spirit was far from dead last week.
Officers held by the Allies would probably be encouraged to review World War II, impart their experience and wisdom to their professional captors. In time, their studies would probably be available to the next generation of the G.S.C.