The NJ Police Chief Magazine Volume 23, Number 6 | Page 30

The New Jersey Police Chief Magazine | June 2017
Leadership Lessons from The Battle of the Bulge (Day 2):
The Battle for Arnhem Bridge
Detective Chief Inspector David Annets (Ret.)
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For those that read Part One of this series, where a number of
leadership lessons came to the fore, not least of which were
strength of moral vision, and resilience in the face of adversity,
we will start by a little reflection (the best leaders reflect on
decisions they have made and what happened the day before, in
order to embed any learning, so it is today).
As we will be covering the Allied objectives of entering the
German heartland in September 1944 to attack the Ruhr Valley,
in order to end the Second World War by Christmas, the
delegation were taken to Arnhem Bridge, one of the objectives
en route to the final plan. We followed the route of the then
Siegfried line to learn leadership lessons around organisational
decision making, and other leadership issues which are equally
applicable to modern day leaders, including planning, failure,
communication, intelligence, and inertia.
As I say though, first some reflection from Day One, which
adds some context to what was happening at Arnhem. Putting
behind us the context of Anne Frank, for many the face of the
Holocaust, representing some 6 million Jews subjected to
German persecution during the war years based on their
racial ideology in which other than the Aryan race were
considered to be 'Untermensch' (inferior) and as such it is
easy to see how this radicalisation moved from simple
segregation to mass murder. Unusually, for police leaders and
those in government war bureaus, we often seek out the
'smoking gun', in this case some evidence that Adolf Hitler
said to Himmler to murder all the Jews, but nothing like that
existed as far as historians can find, if ever it has existed as
clearly as that, it has been destroyed. What we do know, though, is that a meeting held on 20th January 1942 in a
suburb of Berlin, called Wannsee, from which the name of the conference derives (WannseeKonferenz) which was
chaired by Himmler's top deputy General Reinhard Heydrich, and 15 high ranking Nazi party officials gathered to
discuss what they termed 'The Final Solution', and that he himself stated that his instructions carried the authority of
the fuehrer himself, Hitler.
From records, this meeting lasted only 45 minutes, in which they agreed to comb Europe from west to
east for the purpose of eliminating them as a race, imagine that, sitting for just 45 minutes to agree to this! From
that period on, the Germans created the death camps and start to gas people, mainly throughout Poland, but
throughout occupied Europe away from the prying eyes of the world.
Pat Schuber, our professor from Fairleigh Dickinson University, recounted that strange as it may seem to us today,
this aspect of the war appeared to take precedence over the rest of the war effort, we know that military trains had
to give way to those trains taking Jews to the death camps. Historians believe that this had its roots within the T4
euthanasia programme, started sometime in Hitler's Chancellory between late 30 early 40's, located within No.4
Tiergarten Strasse (an old german building at the time, but now demolished, replaced with a parking lot or similar,
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