Soldaten

Notes

1

The research group worked under the direction of Dr. Christian Gudehus and consisted of Dr. Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Dr. Felix Römer, Dr. Michaela Christ, Sebastian Groß, and Tobias Seidl. More detailed analyses can be found in Harald Welzer, Sönke Neitzel, and Christian Gudehus, eds., “Der Führer war wieder viel zu human, viel zu gefühlvoll!” (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2011).

2

SRA 2670, 20 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

3

SRA 3686, 20 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

4

A further influence on the concept of the frame of reference was the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He pointed out the formative influence of the social framework (“cadres sociaux”) in memory.

5

It is unclear precisely how many people panicked. The New York Times ran a story on 31 October 1938 entitled “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,” and reported on various incidents, in which an entire block’s worth of people fled their apartments. The article did not use the phrase “mass panic,” although a significant number of people certainly did mistake fiction for fact.

6

Gregory Bateson, Ökologie des Geistes (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999).

7

Alfred Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993).

8

Erving Goffman, Rahmenanalyse (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 99.

9

Kazimierz Sakowicz was a Polish journalist who began documenting the mass murder of Lithuanian Jews in 1941. Rachel Margolis and Jim Tobias, eds., Die geheimen Notizen des K. Sakowicz: Dokumente zur Judenvernichtung in Ponary, 1941–1943 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2005), p. 53.

10

Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 360.

11

Norbert Elias, Was ist Soziologie? (Munich: Juventa, 2004).

12

Cited in Rolf Schörken, Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich: Die Entstehung eines politischen Bewusstseins (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 1985), p. 144.

13

Raul Hilberg, Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer: Die Vernichtung der Juden, 1933–1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1992), p. 138.

14

Martin Heinzelmann, Göttingen im Luftkrieg (Gottingen: Die Werkstatt, 2003).

15

Norbert Elias, Studien über die Deutschen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989).

16

Michel Foucault, Überwachen und Strafen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994).

17

Erving Goffman, Asyle: Über die Situation psychiatrischer Patienten und anderer Insassen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973).

18

Rolf Schörken recalled of his experiences as a sixteen-year-old assistant antiaircraft gunner: “In the school classes of this age group, pupils who displayed a mixture of intelligence, sporting prowess and social skills normally had the most say…. Now, the antithetical type of pupil took control: those who had grown more quickly and were simply more physically powerful than the others. Intelligence of the sort promoted in school, to say nothing of being educated, almost became negative traits and were punished with ridicule and scorn. Anyone who dared read a serious book or listened to serious music was a lost cause…. These new shapers of opinion create a pressure, indeed a compulsion to conform that knew no corrective limits. The fact that we were all part of the Wehrmacht did little to counteract this. In reality, being connected to the Wehrmacht was what enabled people to completely let themselves go in battle.” See Schörken, Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich.

19

Harald Welzer, “Jeder die Gestapo des anderen: Über totale Gruppen,” in Stadt der Sklaven/Slave City, Museum Folkwang, ed. (Essen, 2008), pp. 177–90.

20

Room Conversation, Schlottig–Wertenbruch, 10 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 540.

21

Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1990), p. 1080.

22

Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Das Unerwartete managen: Wie Unternehmen aus Extremsituationen lernen (Stuttgart: Schaeffer-Poescher, 2003).

23

Gerhard Paul, Bilder des Krieges, Krieg der Bilder: Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2004), p. 236.

24

SRM 564, 17 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

25

Wolfram Wette, ed., Stille Helden—Judenretter im Dreiländereck während des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), pp. 215–32.

26

Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005), p. 183.

27

GRGG 217, 29–30 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4364.

28

There has been much written about the fact that more than 60 percent of the participants in the Milgram experiment were willing to subject what they believed was a fellow participant to a presumably lethal dose of electricity. The experiment was duplicated in more than ten other countries, and the results remained comparable. What has attracted less attention is the fact that the percentage of people who blindly obeyed instructions sank when the experiment was varied. This strongly suggested that social immediacy has a strong influence on obedience. If there was contact between the “learner” and the “teacher,” for instance, if they were in the same room or the “teacher” had to press the “learner’s” hand onto an electrified surface, the percentage of those who blindly followed instructions sank to 40 and 30 percent respectively. The significance of social proximity also emerges when “teachers” and “learners” were friends, acquaintances, or family members. In these cases, the percentage of blind obedience dropped to 15 percent, and “disobedient” subjects tended to break off the experiment significantly earlier than in other variations of the Milgram test.

29

Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12, no. 2 (Summer 1948).

30

Morton Hunt, Das Rätsel der Nächstenliebe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1988), p. 77.

31

Cited in ibid.

32

Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen. Erinnerungen, 1914–1933 (Munich: Der Hoerverlang GmbH, 2002), p. 105.

33

Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2002), p. 75.

34

Sebastian Haffner also wrote: “The strange and disheartening thing was admittedly that, beyond the initial shock, the first grand announcement of a new mood of murder in all of Germany occasioned a flood of discussions—but about the ‘Jewish question’ and not the anti-Semitic question. It was a trick the Nazis also used successfully in a number of other ‘questions.’ By publicly threatening someone else—a country, a population or a group of people—with death, they prompted a general discussion of the other’s right to existence instead of their own. Such discussions actively questioned the value of others’ lives. Suddenly, everyone felt competent and justified in having and spreading an opinion about Jews.” Haffner, Geschichte, p. 139ff.

35

Welzer, Täter, p. 161ff.

36

Peter Longerich, Davon haben wir nichts gewusst! Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006), p. 25ff.

37

Saul Friedländer, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Die Jahre der Verfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), p. 24.

38

Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz, 1919–1939 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007).

39

Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1998), p. 578.

40

Raphael Groß, Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2010); Welzer, Täter, p. 48ff.

41

Saul Friedländer, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Die Jahre der Verfolgung, 1933–1945 (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), p. 24.

42

The average age of the leaders within the party and the state was thirty-four and forty-four respectively. See Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005), p. 12ff.

43

Ibid. The quote is from the English translation, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 11.

44

See Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato, “Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten” (Bonn: Dietz Verlag J. H. W. Nachf, 1985); Harald Welzer, Robert Montau, and Christine Plaß, “Was wir für böse Menschen sind!” Der Nationalsozialismus im Gespräch zwischen den Generationen (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1997); Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall, Opa; Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (London: Basic Books, 2005), p. 341; Marc Philipp, Hitler ist tot, aber ich lebe noch: Zeitzeugenerinnerungen an den Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Bebra Verlag, 2010).

45

Aly, Volksstaat, p. 353ff.

46

Hans Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: Vom Dritten Reich bis zu den langen Fünfziger Jahren (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2009), p. 18.

47

Ibid., p. 12.

48

Wolfram Wette et al., eds., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1991), p. 123ff.

49

For an international comparison of militaristic discourse from the mid-eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War II, see Jörn Leonhard, Bellizismus und Nation: Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten, 1750–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008).

50

For a concise account, see Brian K. Feltman, “Death Before Dishonor: The Heldentod Ideal and the Dishonor of Surrender on the Western Front, 1914–1918,” lecture manuscript (University of Bern, 10 September 2010). See Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and the British Armies, 1914–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

51

Watson, Enduring, p. 3. The trope of fighting to the last bullet was very powerful throughout the nineteenth century. It is reflected in the 1873 painting Les Dernières Cartouches by Alphonse de Neuville, which heroically stylized the defense of the Bourgerie in Bazeilles near Sedan and was enthusiastically received all over France.

52

Rüdiger Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik: Wehrkonsens und “Wehrhaftmachung” in Deutschland, 1918–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010). For the international context, see Stig Förster, ed., An der Schwelle zum Totalen Krieg: Die militärische Debatte um den Krieg der Zukunft, 1919–1939 (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2002).

53

Jürgen Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung in Deutschland 1919 bis 1945,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 9/1, Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed. (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004), p. 472.

54

Sabine Behrenbeck, “Zwischen Trauer und Heroisierung: Vom Umgang mit Kriegstod und Niederlage nach 1918,” in Kriegsende 1918: Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung, Jörg Duppler and Gerhard P. Groß, eds. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), p. 336ff.

55

Karl Demeter, Das Deutsche Offizierskorps, 1650–1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Bernard & Graefe, 1965), p. 328.

56

See also Christian Kehrt, Moderne Kriege: Die Technikerfahrungen deutscher Militärpiloten, 1910–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2010), p. 228.

57

Sönke Neitzel, Abgehört: Deutsche Generäle in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft, 1942–1945, 4th edition (Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2009), pp. 452, 456, 435, 449, 440.

58

BA/MA, Pers 6/6670.

59

BA/MA, Pers 6/9017.

60

Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 457.

61

BA/MA, Pers 6/770. Freiherr von Adrian-Werburg received a similar evaluation; see 2 September 1943, BA/MA, Pers 6/10239.

62

Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 442.

63

Ibid., p. 468.

64

BA/MA, Pers 6/6410.

65

Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 462.

66

Cited in Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung im Deutschland 1919 bis 1945,” in Das Deutsche Reich, Vol. 9/1, p. 554. On Dönitz, see Dieter Hartwig, Großadmiral Karl Dönitz: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2010).

67

Report of Activity, Schmundt, 24–25 June 1943, p. 75.

68

See also the evaluations of Generals Friedrich von Broich and Walter Bruns in Neitzel, Abgehört, pp. 432, 434.

69

Heribert van Haupt, “Der Heldenkampf der deutschen Infanterie vor Moskau,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Berlin afternoon edition No. 28 (16 January 1942), p. 2.

70

Hubert Hohlweck, “Soldat und Politik,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Berlin edition No. 543 (13 November 1943), p. 1ff.

71

Erich Murawski, Der deutsche Wehrmachtbericht (Boppard: Boldt, 1962): 21 July 1944, p. 202; 3 August 1944, p. 219; 4 August 1944, p. 222; 19 August 1944, p. 241, 2 November 1944, p. 349; 3 November 1944, p. 351. On sacrifice, see 3 November 1944, p. 350; on the fanaticism of the Waffen SS, see 27 February 1945, p. 495; 30 March 1945, p. 544.

72

For example, Order No. 52 of 28 January 1944. See Walter Hubatsch, ed., Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegsführung, 1939–1945: Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (Uttingen: Doerfler im Nebel-Verlag, 2000), p. 242.

73

Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2006), p. 71.

74

In contrast to World War I, the Grand Cross was not used as a decoration for bravery. Although it was mentioned in a statute of decorations as an acknowledgment for decisive actions that changed the course of battles, Hermann Göring was the only person ever to receive one. That was to underscore his position as the Führer’s designated successor. There apparently were plans to award Heinrich Himmler one as well for his role as the commander of the Army Group Weichsel. But since he failed in that task, he was not decorated. Therefore, in World War II, the Grand Cross was a decoration for Nazi leaders who carried out military functions.

75

For exact statistics, see http://www.ritterkreuztraeger-1939–45.de/Sonstiges/Statistiken/Statistiken-Startseite.htm.

76

Manfred Dörr, Die Träger der Nahkampfspange in Gold. Heer: Luftwaffe. Waffen-SS (Osnabruck: Biblio Verlag, 1996), p. xviii.

77

Christoph Rass, “Menschenmaterial”: Deutsche Soldaten an der Ostfront: Innenansichten einer Infanteriedivision, 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2003), p. 259ff. See also Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg: Front und militärisches Hinterland, 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009), pp. 189–201.

78

For more information on cases that led to convictions, see Rass, “Menschenmaterial,” pp. 256–58.

79

René Schilling, “Kriegshelden”: Deutungsmuster heroischer Männlichkeit in Deutschland, 1813–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag 2002), pp. 316–72.

80

Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, p. 198.

81

See Ralph Winkle, Der Dank des Vaterlandes: Eine Symbolgeschichte des Eisernen Kreuzes, 1914 bis 1936 (Essen: Klartext, 2007), p. 345ff.

82

SRA 177, 17 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

83

This became especially clear in the discussions surrounding the ordinances. Felix Römer, “Im alten Deutschland wäre ein solcher Befehl nicht möglich gewesen: Rezeption, Adaption und Umsetzung des Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlasses im Ostheer, 1941/42,” VfZG 56 (2008), pp. 53–99.

84

James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

85

SRA 75, 30 April 1940, TNA, WO 208/4117. All subsequent quotations from this file.

86

See Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen, 1939 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2006).

87

Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Vertrauen und Gewalt: Versuch über eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2008).

88

Harald Welzer, Verweilen beim Grauen (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1998).

89

Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006); Herfried Münkler, Über den Krieg: Stationen der Kriegsgeschichte im Spiegel ihrer theoretischen Reflexion (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2003).

90

One of the most prominent and frequently read works of this sort is Johanna Haarer’s Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind (The German Mother and Her First Child). It was first published in 1934 and was reprinted after the war without the word “German” in the title.

91

SRA 3616, 31 January 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

92

Böhler, Auftakt, p. 181ff.

93

Ibid., p. 185.

94

See Kehrt, Moderne Krieger, pp. 403–7.

95

Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative Psychologie und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Beziehungen und Perspektiven,” in Erzählung, Identität und historisches Bewußtsein: Die psychologische Konstruktion von Zeit und Geschichte: Erinnerung, Geschichte, Identität, Jürgen Straub, ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), pp. 12–45. See also the excellent study by Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Krieg und Fliegen: Die Legion Condor im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2010), pp. 159–70, 176–80.

96

Svenja Goltermann, Die Gesellschaft der Überlebenden: Deutsche Kriegsheimkehrer und ihre Gewalterfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Dt. Verlag, 2009).

97

SRA 2642, 15 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

98

SRA 3536, 9 January 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

99

SRA 5538, 30 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134. The description refers to the “Vercors” mission from 21 July to early August 1944; cf. Peter Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg oder NS-Weltanschauungskrieg? Kriegführung und Partisanenbekämpfung in Frankreich, 1943/44 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), pp. 339–50.

100

SRA 1473, 1 April 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

101

SRA 180, 18 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118. This story refers to a false report made by a Stuka pilot, who claimed to have sunk a British battleship with a 250-kilogram bomb. It was common for soldiers to exaggerate their own successes. See Sönke Neitzel, Der Einsatz der deutschen Luftwaffe über dem Atlantik und der Nordsee, 1939–1945 (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1995), p. 40.

102

SRA 620, 26 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119.

103

SRA 3849, 18 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

104

SRA 623, 26 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119.

105

SRA 2600, 8 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

106

Klaus A. Maier et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag, 1979), p. 408.

107

SRA 2600, 8 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

108

Paul, Bilder des Krieges, Krieg der Bilder, p. 238.

109

SRA 2636, 15 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

110

Ibid.

111

SRA 2678, 19 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

112

SRA 3774, 6 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

113

Ibid.

114

SRA 3983, 6 May 1944, TNA, WO 208/4130.

115

SRA 828, 26 October 1940, TNA, WO 208/4120.

116

There were in fact cases on all war fronts of pilots being killed while parachuting to the ground. They were particularly frequent in the last phase of aerial warfare over Germany. American fighter pilots killed at least one hundred of their German counterparts in this fashion. Klaus Schmider, “The Last of the First: Veterans of the Jagdwaffe Tell Their Story,” Journal of Military History 73 (2009), pp. 246–50. See also SRA 450, 4 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119; SRA 5460, 16 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

117

SRX 1657, 17 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4162.

118

Ernst Jünger, Kriegstagebuch, 1914–1918, Helmuth Kiesel, ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2010), p. 222.

119

SRA 4212, 17 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

120

For background on the activities of German destroyers in the Bay of Biscay, which led to the death of Leslie Howard on 1 June 1943, see Neitzel, Einsatz der deutschen Luftwaffe, pp. 193–203.

121

SRX 2080, 7 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4164.

122

SRX 179, 13 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4158.

123

Room Conversation, Kneipp–Kerle, 22 October 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 498.

124

SRN 2023, 28 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4146. There is no way of reconstructing what the navy private is referring to.

125

SRN 1758, 6 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

126

SRN 322, 15 May 1941, TNA, WO 208/4142.

127

SRX 120, 23 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4158. Scheringer refers here to the attack on Convoy OA 175 on 1 July 1940. On his final mission, he hit four ships weighing some 16,000 gross tons.

128

Michael Salewski, Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung, Vol. 2 (Munich: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1975); Werner Rahn et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990).

129

SRN 626, 9 August 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143.

130

SRX 34, 10 February 1940, TNA, WO 208/4158.

131

KTB SKl, Teil A, 6 January 1940, S. 37, BA-MA, RM 7/8.

132

SRX 34, 10 February 1940, TNA, WO 208/4158.

133

Stephen W. Roskill, Royal Navy: Britische Seekriegsgeschichte, 1939–1945 (Hamburg: Stalling, 1961), p. 402ff.

134

See, e.g., Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, “Are We There Yet? World War II and the Theory of Total War,” in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945, Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–18.

135

For more information and an international comparison, see Stig Förster, ed., An der Schwelle zum Totalen Krieg: Die militärische Debatte über den Krieg der Zukunft, 1919–1939 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2002).

136

See also Adam Roberts, “Land Warfare: From Hague to Nuremberg,” in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, Michael Howard, George J. Andresopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 116–39.

137

Cited in Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 182.

138

SRGG 560, 14 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4167.

139

Directly after World War II, two American international law experts acknowledged that only “political and military, rather than legal, considerations” could have held back the German occupying forces. See Lester Nurick and Roger W. Barrett, “Legality of Guerrilla Forces Under the Laws of War,” American Journal of International Law 40 (1946), pp. 563–83. This statement is all the more telling since it came directly after the war from lawyers who were also members of the U.S. Army with little reason to sympathize with the Third Reich. We owe this reference to Klaus Schmider, Sandhurst.

140

On this discussion, see Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, pp. 253–57. See also Jörn Axel Kämmerer, “Kriegsrepressalie oder Kriegsverbrechen? Zur rechtlichen Beurteilung der Massenexekutionen von Zivilisten durch die deutsche Besatzungsmacht im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Archiv des Völkerrechts 37 (1999), pp. 283–317.

141

SRA 3444, 28 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

142

Harry Hoppe (11 February 1894–23 August 1969), commander of Infantry Regiment 424 of the 126th Infantry Division, received the Knight’s Cross on 12 September 1941 for the conquest of Schlüsselburg.

143

Room Conversation, Kneipp–Kehrle, 23 October 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 498. Franz Kneipp was apparently deployed in 1941 with the SS Police Division. Eberhard Kerle was a radio operator. We know little more about him.

144

Ibid.

145

SRA 818, 25 October 1940, TNA, WO 208/4120.

146

SRA 4758, 24 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132.

147

SRA 5643, 13 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4135.

148

Welzer, Täter, p. 161.

149

Herbert Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Gewaltkriminalität (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982).

150

SRX 2056, 14 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164.

151

SRA 5628, 28 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4135.

152

SRA 5454, 8 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

153

SRX 2072, 19 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164.

154

Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS und Polizei im Kampf gegen Partisanen und Zivilbevölkerung in Italien, 1943–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2011).

155

Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, p. 574.

156

SRA 5522, 25 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

157

SRA 5664, 30 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4135.

158

For example, Lieutenant William Calley, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the My Lai massacre (the sentence was commuted a short time later), is quoted as saying: “‘The old men, the women, the children—the babies—were all VC or would be VC in about three years,’ he asserted, continuing, ‘And inside of the VC women, I guess there were a thousand little VC now.’” See Bourke, Intimate History, p. 162.

159

SRA 2957, 9 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

160

Jochen Oltmer, ed., Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkrieges (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2006), p. 11.

161

Georg Wurzer, “Die Erfahrung der Extreme: Kriegsgefangene in Rußland 1914–1918,” in Oltmer, ed., Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkrieges, p. 108.

162

Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980); Alfred Streim, Sowjetische Gefangene in Hitlers Vernichtungskrieg: Berichte und Dokumente (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristicher Verlag, 1982); Rüdiger Overmans, “Die Kriegsgefangenenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches, 1939 bis 1945,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 9/2, Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed. (Munich, 2005), pp. 804–24.

163

Cited in Felix Römer, “‘Seid hart und unerbittlich …’ Gefangenenerschießung und Gewalteskalation im deutsch-sowjetischen Krieg, 1941/42,” in Kriegsgreuel: Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath, eds. (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2008), p. 327.

164

Ibid., p. 319.

165

SRM 599, 25 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. See also SRA 2671, 19 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126; SRA 2957, 29 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127; SRX 1122, 22 September 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

166

Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, pp. 542–49.

167

Johannes Hürter, Ein deutscher General an der Ostfront: Die Briefe und Tagebücher des Gotthard Heinrici, 1941/42 (Erfurt: Sutton Verlag, 2001).

168

SRM 1023, 15 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

169

Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1944 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008), p. 205; Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, pp. 523–26.

170

SRM 49, 24 February 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

171

On the execution of 180 Russian POWs because no means of transport were available, see SRA 2605, 10 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

172

SRX 2139, 28 April 1945, TNA, WO 208/4164. Walter Schreiber, born 15 July 1924 in Großaming/Steyr Land, joined the Waffen SS in 1942 and served in the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” in the area around Charkow in spring 1943. He is perhaps referring to an incident from this period. A passionate National Socialist, he joined a frogman commando unit in July 1944. On 7 March 1945 he was captured in fighting around the bridge at Remagen. Michael Jung, Sabotage unter Wasser: Die deutschen Kampfschwimmer im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Verlag E. S. Mittler & Sohn GmbH, 2004), p. 74.

173

SRA 4273, 14 August 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130; cf. Room Conversation, Müller–Reimbold, 22 March 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 530.

174

SRA 2957, 9 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127. See SRA 5681, 21 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4135.

175

SRA 5681, 21 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4135; SRA 4742, 20 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132; SRA 2618, 11 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

176

GRGG 169, 2 August-4 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4363.

177

Christian Hartmann, “Massensterben oder Massenvernichtung? Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’: Aus dem Tagebuch eines deutschen Lagerkommandanten,” VfZG 49 (2001), pp. 97–158; Hubert Orlowski, “Erschießen will ich nicht”: Als Offizier und Christ im Totalen Krieg. Das Kriegstagebuch des Dr. August Töpperwien (Dusseldorf: Gasterland Verlag, 2006); Richard Germann, “‘Österreichische’ Soldaten in Ost- und Südeuropa, 1941–1945: Deutsche Krieger—Nationalsozialistische Verbrecher—Österreichische Opfer?” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Vienna, 2006), pp. 186–99.

178

SRA 2672, 19 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

179

Ibid.

180

SRM 735, 1 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. See also SRA 5681, 21 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4135.

181

SRA 4791, 6 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132.

182

Room Conversation, Krug–Altvatter, 27 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 442.

183

Interrogation Report, Gefreiter Hans Breuer, 18 February 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 454.

184

See, e.g., SRA 2672, 19 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126; SRA 5502, 21 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134; SRGG 274, 22 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165; SRGG 577, 21 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4167; Room Conversation, Lehnertz-Langfeld, 14 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 507; Room Conversation, Gartz–Sitzle, 27 July 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 548.

185

SRGG 1203 (C), 6 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4170.

186

SRA 3966, 26 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

187

During the night of 26 July 1942, the Jewish residents of Przemýsl were collected from their houses by the SS. At around 5 a.m., the local commander, Max Liedtke, called SS Untersturmführer Adolf Benthin and insisted that those Jewish men who worked for the Wehrmacht be exempted from deportation. He threatened to file a complaint with the general staff, whom he had already informed by radio about what was going on. Without waiting for a response, Liedtke’s adjutant Albert Battel sealed off the only entrance to the Jewish ghetto. SS men were threatened with machine guns if they tried to pass. Battel’s justification was that a state of emergency had been declared in Przemýsl. This was legally correct, although the act was still a major humiliation and provocation of the SS. The SS then contacted a high-ranking officer in Cracow to get the state of emergency lifted. It being clear that the SS would soon prevail, Battel had some 90 workers and their families transferred from the ghetto to the commander’s headquarters. He also allowed 240 further people hide in the headquarters’ basement. Battel and Liedtke’s assessment of the situation was correct. The state of emergency was lifted, and on 27 July, the SS continued their so-called resettlement operation.

188

Wolfram Wette, Retter in Uniform: Handlungsspielräume im Vernichtungskrieg der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003).

189

Some 1,400 Jews were murdered in three phases—July, August, and November 1941—in Daugavpils. Israel Gutman, Eberhard Jäckel, Peter Longerich, and Julius H. Schoeps, eds., Enzyklopädie des Holocaust, Vol. 1, p. 375.

190

SRGG 1086, 28 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4169.

191

See Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis: Die Deutschen, die NS-Führung und die Alliierten (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2006); Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung, 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006); Harald Welzer, “Die Deutschen und ihr Drittes Reich,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 14–15 (2007).

192

SRGG 1086, 28 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4169.

193

Ibid.

194

See Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall, Opa, p. 35ff.; Angela Keppler, Tischgespräche (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), p. 173.

195

SRGG 1086, 28 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4169.

196

Ibid.

197

Ibid.

198

Ibid.

199

Ibid.

200

Surviving material and his numerous statements in the surveillance protocols allow us to reconstruct the biography of Hans Felbert in detail. As early as 3 June 1940, he was relieved of his regimental command for not leading his troops with the necessary “hardness” against the enemy. Starting in June 1942, as a field commander in Besançon, he clashed repeatedly with the SS Security Service. He was, however, unable to prevent the execution of forty-two partisans there. Felbert surrendered while retreating with his men in the face of French troops. For that, Hitler sentenced him, in absentia, to death. There were reprisals against his family. British intelligence agents considered him a dedicated opponent of National Socialism. Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 443. Bruhn was part of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. He and his men occupied the Berlin City Castle on 20 July 1944 and he was a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. See Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 434.

201

In 1942 Kracow-Plaszów was expanded into a forced labor camp, and in 1944 it became an extermination camp. In summer 1944, with Kittel present in the city, 22,000 to 24,000 were interned there. Some 8,000 people were murdered in the camp. Israel Gutman, ed., Enzyklopädie des Holocaust: Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1993), p. 118ff.

202

SRGG 1086, 28 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4169.

203

GRGG 265, 27 February–1 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

204

Frederic Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Harald Welzer, Das Kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (Munich: Beck, 2002).

205

SRGG 1158 (C), 25 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4169.

206

This account is in line with perpetrators’ testimony at postwar trials. See Welzer, Täter, p. 140.

207

Jürgen Matthäus, “Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust,” in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, Jürgen Matthäus and Christopher Browning, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 244–309.

208

See Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall, Opa, p. 57.

209

We owe this reference to Peter Klein.

210

See Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion, 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS Verlag, 2003); Andrej Angrick et al., eds., “‘Da hätte man schon ein Tagebuch führen müssen.’ Das Polizeibataillon 322 und die Judenmorde im Bereich der Heeresgruppe Mitte während des Sommers und Herbstes 1941,” in Die Normalität des Verbrechens: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung zu den nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen, Helge Grabitz et al., eds. (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994), pp. 325–85; Vincas Bartusevicius, Joachim Tauber, and Wolfram Wette, eds., Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration (Cologne: Boehlau Verlag, 2003); Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Höheren SS- und Polizeiführer: Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1986); Peter Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion, 1941/42: Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin: Hentrich, 1997); Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981); Konrad Kwiet, “Auftakt zum Holocaust. Ein Polizeibataillon im Osteinsatz,” in Der Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Ideologie und Herrschaft, Wolfgang Benz et al., eds. (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1995), pp. 191–208; Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die “Genesis der Endlösung” (Berlin: Metropol, 1994).

211

SRA 2961, 12 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

212

SRA 4583, 21 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4131.

213

SRN 2528, 19 Dcember 1943, TNA, WO 208/4148.

214

SRM 30, 27 January 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

215

SRA 3379, 8 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

216

At the end of his autobiographical writings, Höss took stock: “Today I can see that the extermination of Jews was fundamentally wrong. It was precisely in this act of genocide that Germany attracted the hatred of the entire world. It did not serve the cause of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it helped Jewry take a step toward its final goal.” Martin Broszat, ed., Rudolf Höß: Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen des Rudolf Höß (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1989), p. 153.

217

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen (Leipzig: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1986).

218

Christopher R. Browning, Ganz normale Männer: Das Reserve-Polizeibataillon 101 und die “Endlösung” in Polen (Reinbek: Rororo, 1996), p. 243.

219

Robert J. Lifton, Ärzte im Driten Reich (Stuttgart: Ullstein Tb. Auflag, 1999).

220

SRA 4604, 27 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4131.

221

Arendt, Eichmann, p. 104.

222

SRA 4604, 27 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

223

See Welzer, Täter, p. 266; and “Internationaler Militärgerichtshof,” ed., in Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher, Vol. 29 (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1948), p. 145.

224

In Odessa, some 99,000 Jews were murdered, most of them by Romanian soldiers. Enzyklopädie des Holocaust, Vol. 2, p. 1058ff.

225

On the Night of Broken Glass in Vienna, see Siegwald Ganglmair and Regina Forstner-Karner, eds., Der Novemberpogrom 1938: Die Reichskristallnacht in Wien (Vienna: Museen der Stadt Wien, 1988); Herbert Rosenkranz, Reichskristallnacht: 9. November 1938 in Österreich (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1968).

226

GRGG 281, 8 May–9 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

227

SRA 5444, 8 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

228

Room Conversation, Swoboda-Kahrad, 2 December 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 552.

229

SRA 4820, 13 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132.

230

Lvov was home to the Janowska concentration camp, which did not, however, have gas chambers. Estimates of the number of people murdered there range from tens of thousands to 200,000. Enzyklopädie des Holocaust, Vol. 2, p. 657ff. The nearest gas chambers were located at the Belzec concentration camp, some seventy kilometers to the northwest. From mid-March to December 1942, as many as 600,000 Jews, “gypsies,” and Poles were murdered there. On the murders of Jews in Galicia, see Thomas Sandkühler, “Endlösung” in Galizien (Bonn: Dietz, 1996).

231

We can no longer reconstruct how much Ramcke knew about the Holocaust. The fact that he only fought for around four weeks, in February and March 1944, on the Eastern Front in Ukraine would suggest his knowledge was limited.

232

GRGG 272, 13 March–16 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

233

Welzer, Täter, p.158ff.

234

Kutno was conquered by German troops on 15 September 1939. In June 1940, the Jewish population was confined to a ghetto, where they lived under terrible conditions. In March and April 1942, the ghetto was dissolved, and its inhabitants killed at the Kulmhof extermination camp. Evidence has yet to emerge of any mass executions of Jews in Kutno.

235

GRGG 272, 13 March–16 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

236

Ibid.

237

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt wrote of Eichmann’s complete inability to conceive of what he had done. It is possible, though, that her impression was mistaken, based as it was on Eichmann’s indolence and indifference during his trial. It’s more likely that the normative standards Eichmann followed in tirelessly carrying out his duties at the Main Office for Reich Security simply deviated from those that normally apply elsewhere. Eichmann was guided by National Socialist morality. Postwar conservative German politician Hans Karl Filbinger implicitly pointed to those standards as a justification for his own role as a navy judge in handing out death sentences, when he said: “What was just back then cannot be unjust today.”

238

SRM 33, 31 January 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

239

SRA 3313, 30 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

240

Taumberger is presumably talking here about the subterranean facility at Gusen, Austria, where the Messerschmitt 262 fighter jet was supposed to be produced.

241

SRA 5618, 24 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

242

Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall, Opa, p. 158.

243

Room Conversation, Müller–Reimbold, 22 March 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 530.

244

William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (London: Pantheon, 1972).

245

Broszat, ed., Rudolf Höß, p. 130.

246

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitlers willige Vollstrecker: Ganz gewöhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (Munich: Siedler, 1996), p. 462ff.; Browning, Ganz normale Männer, pp. 154, 332.

247

See Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall, Opa, p. 57.

248

Cited in Browning, Ganz normale Männer, p. 34.

249

Welzer, Täter, p. 132ff.

250

Hilberg, Die Vernichtung, p. 338ff.

251

Ibid., p. 339.

252

SRN 852, 11 March 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143; Heinz-Ludger Borgert, “Kriegsverbrechen der Kriegsmarine,” in Kriegsverbrechen im 20: Jahrhundert, Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär, eds. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlicher Burgergesellschaft, 2001), pp. 310–12; Enzyklopädie des Holocaust, Vol. 2, p. 859ff.

253

SRA 4759, 25 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132.

254

SRM 1163, 5 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

255

SRA 3948, 16 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

256

SRN 720, 25 December 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143.

257

SRCMF X 16, 29 May–2 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/5513; conversation between M 44/368 and M 44/374, cited in Anette Neder, “Kriegsschauplatz Mittelmeerraum: Wahrnehmungen und Deutungen deutscher Soldaten im Mittelmeerraum” (Master’s thesis, University of Mainz, 2010), p. 70.

258

SRA 554, 18 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119.

259

SRA 5264, 14 May 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

260

SRA 2947, 10 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

261

Room Conversation, Quick–Korte, 23 July 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 529.

262

GRGG 169, 2–4 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4363.

263

Room Conversation, Schulz–Voigt, 16 June 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 557.

264

SRA 554, 18 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119; Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, pp. 15–19.

265

SRA 3966, 26 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

266

SRM 410, 16 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4137.

267

SRM 423, 24 December 1943, TNA WO 208/4137.

268

SRM 892, 15 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

269

SRM 975, 20 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

270

SRA 5852, 3 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135.

271

Room Conversation, Goessele–Langer, 27 December 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 474.

272

Room Conversation, Drosdowski–Richter, 11 January 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 462.

273

SRM 659, 18 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

274

Room Conversation, Müller–Reimbold, 22 March 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 530.

275

Room Conversation, Hanelt–Breitlich, 3 April 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 447.

276

GRGG 232, 8–11 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4364. On euthanasia and earlier ideas of eugenics in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, see Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 1985).

277

SRGG 782, 21 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4167.

278

SRGG 495, 21 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4166.

279

For more detail, see Felix Römer, Kommissarbefehl: Wehrmacht und NS-Verbrechen an der Ostfront, 1941/42 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2008).

280

GRGG 271, 10–12 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

281

SRGG 679, 20 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4167.

282

SRM 877, 7 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

283

SRM 633, 11 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

284

Welzer, Täter, p. 218ff.; Groß, Anständig geblieben.

285

Broszat, ed., Rudolf Höß, p. 156.

286

SRA 3249, 9 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

287

SRA 4880, 27 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132.

288

SRA 5702, 6 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135.

289

Charlotte Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traumes (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).

290

Helmut Karl Ulshöfer, ed., Liebesbriefe an Adolf Hitler: Briefe in den Tod: Unveröffentlichte Dokumente aus der Reichskanzlei (Frankfurt/Main: VAS, 1994).

291

SRGG 1133 (C), 9 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4169.

292

GRGG 272, 13–16 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

293

Room Conversation, Meyer–Killmann, 17 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 516.

294

SRA 3468, 30 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

295

Ibid.

296

SRA 4174, 14 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

297

SRA 4232, 20 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

298

SRA 591, 23 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119.

299

SRA 179, 17 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

300

SRA 4652, 4 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132.

301

SRA 3259, 13 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

302

SRA 687, 4 October 1940, TNA, WO 208/4120.

303

SRA 3035, 24 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

304

SRA 3891, 28 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

305

SRA 3915, 29 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

306

Ulf Balke, Der Luftkrieg in Europa: Die operativen Einsätze des Kampfgeschwaders 2 im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Vol. 2 (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1990), p. 524.

307

SRA 5108, 27 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133. See also Ernst Stilla, “Die Luftwaffe im Kampf um die Luftherrschaft” (Ph.D. disseration, University of Bonn, 2005), pp. 236–43.

308

SRA 4663, 5 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132.

309

Stilla, Die Luftwaffe, pp. 232–36.

310

SRA 2570, 3 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

311

SRA 1503, 13 April 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

312

SRN 625, 9 August 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143.

313

SRA 4156, 10 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

314

SRA 1503, 13 April 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

315

Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Volker Rieß, and Wolfram Pyta, eds., Deutscher Osten, 1939–1945: Der Weltanschauungskrieg in Photos and Texten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaflticher Buchgesellschaft, 2003), p. 155.

316

Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010). On sexual violence, see also Birgit Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt: Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militärgerichten (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2004).

317

SRN 2528, 19 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4148.

318

Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord, p. 450.

319

Bernd Greiner, Krieg ohne Fronten: Die USA in Vietnam (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007).

320

Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord, p. 150.

321

Ibid., p. 448.

322

Willy Peter Reese, Mir selber seltsam fremd: Die Unmenschlichkeit des Krieges: Russland, 1941–44, Stefan Schmitz, ed. (Munich: Claassen Verlag, 2003).

323

Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord, p. 449.

324

SRA 1345, 21 February 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

325

Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, p. 186.

326

Ibid., p. 187.

327

USHMM, RG-31 002M, Rolle 11, 3676/4/105, Bl. 16 f. 25 February 1942, cited in ibid., p. 214.

328

SRA 753, 14 October 1940, TNA, WO 208/4120.

329

SRA 4819, 12 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132.

330

SRA 2871, 4 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

331

Room Conversation, Sauermann–Thomas, 5 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 554.

332

See Michaela Christ, “Kriegsverbrechen,”in Welzer, Neitzel, and Gudehus, eds., “Der Führer.”

333

Room Conversation, Kruk–Böhm, 12 June 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 504.

334

SRA 2386, 12 December 1941, TNA, WO 208/4126.

335

SRA 4903, 30 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132.

336

SRX 1937, 2 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4163.

337

SRN 809, 23 February 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143.

338

SRA 1227, 1 February 1941, TNA, WO 208/4122.

339

SRA 712, 8 October 1940, TNA, WO 208/4120.

340

Diziplinarbericht der 8. Zerstörerflottille “Narvik” für die Zeit vom 1. Juli 1942 bis 1. September 1943, BA/MA, RM 58/39.

341

Room Conversation, Müller–Reimbold, 22 March 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 530.

342

Room Conversation, Czosnowski–Schultka, 2 April 1945, NARA, Box 458, p. 438ff.

343

Mallmann, Deutscher Osten; Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen.

344

Room Conversation, Held–Langfeld, 13 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 506.

345

Room Conversation, Kokoschka–Saemmer, 15 June 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 500.

346

Philipps O’Brien, “East Versus West in the Defeat of Nazi Germany,” Journal of Strategic Studies 23 (2000), p. 93.

347

See the seminal study by Kehrt, Moderne Krieger.

348

SRA 172, 15 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

349

SRA 4130, 1 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

350

SRA 3748, 26 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

351

SRA 4135, 3 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

352

See Lutz Budraß, Flugzeugindustrie und Luftrüstung in Deutschland, 1918–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1998).

353

SRA 510, 11 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119.

354

SRA 496, 10 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119.

355

SRA 4063, 5 June 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

356

SRA 5467 15 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

357

SRA 5710, 11 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135; Josef Priller, Geschichte eines Jagdgeschwaders: Das J.G. 26 (Schlageter) 1937–1945 (Stuttgart: Motorbuch Verlag, 1956), pp. 265, 335.

358

Mäckle got lost while flying a Ju 88 on a mission over the North Sea and accidentally landed in the English town of Woolbridge. His mistake hand-delivered Germany’s latest nighttime fighter jet technology to the British. Gebhard Aders, Geschichte der deutschen Nachtjagd, 1917–1945 (Stuttgart: Motorbuch Verlag, 1978), p. 250.

359

What was meant was probably the Me 210, which the Luftwaffe planned to introduce in 1940. The schedule was continually put back because of technical problems, and the model was ultimately abandoned. Rüdiger Kosin, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Jagdflugzeuge (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1990), pp. 135–38.

360

SRA 117, 12 June 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

361

SRA 117, 12 June 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

362

SRA 3273, 16 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

363

SRA 3069, 30 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

364

SRA 4516, 11 September 1943, TNA, WO 208/4131. The stories refer to the He 219.

365

SRA 3069, 30 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

366

SRA 3307, 26 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

367

SRA 3943, 13 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130. In December 1941, a private spoke of having seen the He 177, the aircraft that was supposed to fly to America. SRA 2371, 6 December 1941, TNA/WO 208/4126. See also SRA 5545, 29 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134. See also Room Conversation, Krumkühler–Wolff, 26 August 1944, NARA, Entry 179, Box 566. The talk there is also of an aircraft supposedly to be used to drop propaganda leaflets on New York. Navy Lieutenant Josef Bröhl of U-432 spoke of a jet plane that would be used for the leaflet mission. SRN 1629, 11 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

368

See Karl Kössler and Günther Ott, Die großen Dessauer: Die Geschichte einer Flugzeugfamilie (Planegg: Aviatic-Verlag GmbH, 1993), pp. 103–5.

369

Peter Herde, Der Japanflug: Planungen und Verwirklichung einer Flugverbindung zwischen den Achsenmächten und Japan, 1942–1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000).

370

SRA 3950, 17 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

371

SRA 2992, 12 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

372

SRA 3465, 30 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128, mentions the principle behind the flying missile Me 163.

373

SRA 4235, 20 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

374

SRA 4709, 15 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132.

375

SRA 4880, 27 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132.

376

SRA 5114, 29 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

377

Ibid.

378

SRA 5531, 26 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

379

SRA 5456, 15 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

380

SRA 5732, 15 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135.

381

Jeffrey L. Ethell and Alfred Price, Deutsche Düsenflugzeuge im Kampfeinsatz, 1944/45 (Stuttgart: Motorbuch, 1981), p. 70ff.

382

Ralf Blank, “Kriegsalltag und Luftkrieg an der ‘Heimatfront,’” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 9/1, pp. 433–36. See also Heinz Dieter Hölsken, Die V-Waffen: Entstehung, Propaganda, Kriegseinsatz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1984); Ralf Schabel, Die Illusion der Wunderwaffen: Die Rolle der Düsenflugzeuge und Flugabwehrraketen in der Rüstungspolitik des Dritten Reiches (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1994).

383

SRN 1559, 25 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

384

SRN 1622, 11 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

385

SRN 1986, 25 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4146.

386

SRX 1532, 24 January 1943, TNA, WO 208/4162.

387

SRM 263, 27 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4137.

388

SRX 1617, 11 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4162.

389

SRN 2989, 3 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4149; SRN 3379, 20 April 1944, TNA, WO 208/4151.

390

SRM 601, 25 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138; SRM 655, 18 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

391

SRM 263, 27 October 1943; SRM 291, 9 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4137; SRN 2636, 4 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4148; SRM 499, 21 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138; SRM 680, 26 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138; SRA 5199, 27 April 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

392

SRM 639, 8 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

393

SRM 491, 14 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

394

SRN 2851, 25 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4149.

395

SRA 5196, 25 April 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

396

Hölsken, Die V-Waffen, p. 131ff.

397

Ibid., p. 103.

398

Ibid., p. 104ff.

399

Ibid., p. 109.

400

SRN 3922, 8 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4153.

401

For example, Otto Elfeldt (SRGG 988, 24 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168) and Erwin Menny, Tagebuchblätter aus der Gefangenschaft, BA/MA, N 267/4.

402

SRM 655, 18 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

403

SRM 847, 30 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139. See also SRM 960, 10 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139; SRM 1077, 29 November 1944, TNA WO 208/4139; SRX 2075, 29 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164.

404

SRN 4130, 16 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4155.

405

SRX 2048, 4 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164. See also SRN 4031, 4 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4154. A V2 had the explosive capacity of two to three thousand bombs.

406

Lieutenant Borbonus of SS Junkerschule in Bad Tölz refers to such a speech by Hitler. SRM 914, 20 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

407

SRGG 543, 9 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4167.

408

SRGG 596, 26 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4167. On criticism of the V weapons, see SRM 722, 30 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138; SRM 1094, 21 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

409

See Kehrt, Moderne Krieger, pp. 291–97.

410

SRA 5512, 23 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

411

SRA 5532, 25 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

412

SRA 2058, 2 August 1941, TNA, WO 208/4125.

413

SRA 2660, 18 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126. Zastrau was a member of 5/‌KG 2 and was shot down on 23 April 1942 over Exeter. Balke, Luftkrieg in Europa, p. 430.

414

SRA 4862, 23 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132. This description refers to the German bombardment of Bari during the night of 3 December 1943. German bombs and explosions aboard the ammunition carriers John E. Motley and Joseph Wheeler, as well as the tanker ship Aroostock, destroyed eighteen ships with a gross tonnage of 71,566. There were more than 1,000 dead and wounded. Firefighting and rescue attempts were hindered by the fact that the U.S. freighter John Harvey was carrying mustard gas. http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/seekrieg/43–12.htm (accessed 30 August 2010).

415

SRA 1557, 23 April 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

416

SRM 606, 27 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

417

Förster, in Das Deutsche Reich, Vol. 9/1, p. 469.

418

SRA 281, 4 August 1940, TNA, WO 208/4137.

419

SRA 453, 4 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4137.

420

SRA 450, 4 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4137.

421

SRA 549, 17 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4138.

422

Wilhelm von Thoma diary entry, 21 January 1942, BA/MA, N 2/2.

423

SRA 2655, 18 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126; see also SRA 2635, 15 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

424

Förster, in Das Deutsche Reich, Vol. 9/1, p. 540.

425

Hans Meier-Welcker, Aufzeichnungen eines Generalstabsoffiziers, 1919 bis 1942 (Freiburg: Rombach Druck- und Verlagshaus, 1982), p. 158 (23 August 1942).

426

SRN 129, 15 November 1940, TNA, WO 208/4141.

427

SRN 395, 8 June 1941, TNA, WO 208/4142.

428

SRN 183, 21 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4141.

429

SRN 370, 28 May 1941, TNA, WO 208/4142.

430

SRN 127, 16 November 1940, TNA, WO 208/4141.

431

SRN 720, 25 December 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143.

432

For the results of the questionnaires filled out by German POWs November 1941–March 1943, see TNA, WO 208/4180.

433

SRN 690, 7 November 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143.

434

SRN 933, 31 March 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143. Josef Przyklenk (born 10 January 1914) was machinist aboard U-93 and was captured on 15 January 1942.

435

SRN 731, 31 December 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143. The British listed him, in contrast to the crew registry, as Karl Wedekinn.

436

SRN 969, 22 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143; SRN 968, 22 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143. U-210 was sunk on her maiden patrol.

437

Bernhard R. Kroener, “‘Nun Volk steht auf…!’ Stalingrad und der totale Krieg, 1942–1943,” in Stalingrad: Ereignis, Wirkung, Symbol, Jurgen Förster, ed. (Munich: Piper, 1992), pp. 151–70; Martin Humbug, Das Gesicht des Krieges: Feldpostbriefe von Wehrmachtssoldaten aus der Sowjetunion, 1941–1944 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), p. 118ff.

438

SRA 3717, 2 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

439

SRA 3442, 28 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

440

SRA 3868, 22 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

441

SRA 4012, 18 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130; SRA 4222, 28 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130. There were opinions like this in the navy, but not in the army. See SRN 1643, 14 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

442

SRA 4791, 6 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132.

443

The reference is to the commander of the II/KG 2, Major Heinz Engel, who had joined the group in October 1941 and had led it since February 1943. Balke, Luftkrieg in Europa, p. 409.

444

SRA 5272, 16 May 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

445

Ibid.

446

SRA 4747, 22 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132.

447

SRN 2509, 27 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4148.

448

See SRN 2521, 11 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4148.

449

SRN 2768, 17 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4149. Even weapons of retribution seemed to hold out little hope in this regard. SRN 3613, 8 May 1944, TNA, WO 208/4152.

450

“Erlass gegen Kritiksucht und Meckerei,” 9 September 1943, cited in Salewski, Seekriegsleitung, p. 638ff.

451

The British forced some of the POWs in the surveillance camps to fill out standardized questionnaires. Between March 1943 and January 1944, they surveyed five groups of 35 to 71 men, 240 in total. The majority came from the German navy, a smaller percentage from the Luftwaffe. CSDIC (UK), Survey of German P/W Opinion, GRS 10, 24 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/5522.

452

Rafael A. Zagovec, “Gespräche mit der ‘Volksgemeinschaft’” in Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft, 1939 bis 1945—Ausbeutung, Deutungen, Ausgrenzung, Vol. 9/2, Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005), p. 327.

453

Jörg Echternkamp, “Im Kampf an der inneren und äußeren Front: Grundzüge der deutschen Gesellschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Das Deutsche Reich, Vol. 9/1, p. 47.

454

Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich (Munich: Pawlak Verlag Herrsching, 1968), p. 511.

455

Michael Salewski, “Die Abwehr der Invasion als Schlüssel zum ‘Endsieg’?” in Die Wehrmacht, Mythos und Realität, Rolf-Dieter Müller, and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds. (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1999), pp. 210–23.

456

SRM 519, 7 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

457

SRM 526, 9 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

458

SRM 547, 13 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

459

SRM 606, 27 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. Kuhle was the commander of III/IR 1050 of the 77th Infantry Division, while Saldern led the dramatically weakened Grenadier Regiment 1057 of the 91st Airborne Division. Major Bornhard, commander of the Feldersatzbataillon of the 77th Infantry Division, was captured on 18 June 1944 and was interned together with Kuhle at Wilton Park. From 1 February to 25 April 1944, Lieutenant General Walter Poppe commanded the 77th Infantry Division, in which Kuhle served. On 5 July, Poppe took over a new command. The basis for the rumors of treason is unclear.

460

SRM 610, 29 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

461

SRM 830, 24 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

462

SRM 849, 27 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

463

For a summary of current research, see Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 61ff.

464

SRM 639, 8 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

465

SRM 637, 7 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

466

We owe this analysis to Felix Römer in Mainz.

467

A Lieutenant Trettner, for example, asserted that eight paratrooper divisions would soon be deployed and that “there was much to be done.” SRM 813, 24 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

468

SRM 796, 19 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

469

This is based on an analysis of moral questionnaires carried out by Felix Römer in Mainz. On navy men, see SRN 3815, 9 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4153; SRN 3830, 12 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4153; SRN 3931, 11 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4154; SRN 4032, 3 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4154.

470

This conclusion was reached by an American study based on interrogations of German POWs shortly after they had been taken captive. M. I. Gurfein and Morris Janowitz, “Trends in Wehrmacht Morale,” Public Opinion Quarterly 10 (1946), p. 81.

471

NCO Brandt of the 11/NJG 3 told of a superior’s address to the troops shortly before the Ardennes Offensive: “He said that if we don’t regain aerial dominance soon, we will have lost the war. And the group commander said: ‘The offensive in the West right now will be all-decisive. If it’s halted, it will be the last offensive battle we can afford.’ That’s what the group commander said in public before all of his airmen, whom he had called together.” SRX 2091, 11 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4164. See also SRM 1133, 18 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4140; SRM 1168, 8 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

472

SRX 2030, 25 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164.

473

Zagovec, “Gespräche mit der ‘Volksgemeinschaft,’” p. 358.

474

Meldung des OB West v. 7. 2. 1945, KTB OKW, Vol. 4/2, p. 1364.

475

SRA 5829, 18 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135.

476

For example, General von Thoma. See Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 33.

477

SRM 79, 20 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

478

SRA 5835, 22 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135.

479

Cited in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945 (Munich: Pantheon Verlag, 2002), p. 15.

480

Ibid., p. 64ff.

481

SRGG 1125, 27 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4169.

482

W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Frankfurt/Main: Eichborn, 2001), p. 110.

483

Hans Mommsen, Zur Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert. Demokratie, Diktatur, Widerstand (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010), p. 159ff.

484

Saul K. Padover, Lügendetektor: Vernehmungen im besiegten Deutschland, 1944/45 (Frankfurt/Main: Eichborn Verlag, 1999).

485

SRA 123, 17 June 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

486

SRA 200, 22 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

487

SRA 495, 10 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119; SRA 554, 18 September 1940, TNA, WO 208/4119; SRA 1383, 5 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

488

SRX 154, 17 November 1940, TNA, WO 208/4158.

489

SRX 228, 29 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4158.

490

SRA 1619, 29 April 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

491

SRA 3807, 10 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

492

SRA. 4656, 23 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4132.

493

The story that Hitler got so angry he literally bit a carpet was spread after journalist William Shirer wrote an article about Hitler’s meeting with Neville Chamberlain on 22 September 1938. Shirer himself had only written that Hitler seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But the image of Hitler as “carpet chewer” proved persistent. See Kershaw, Hitler, p. 169.

494

Details like “the Führer’s beautiful hands” were part of his public image and were passed on by the media. See Kershaw, Hitler, p. 410. People who met him also tended to emphasize precisely those details that conformed to his public image.

495

SRX 1167, 15 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

496

Kershaw, Hitler, p. 407.

497

SRX 1167, 15 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

498

SRX 1802, 24 June 1943, TNA, WO 208/4163.

499

SRA 3430, 23 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

500

SRA 3452, 29 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

501

American sociologist Leon Festinger and colleagues illustrated their theory of cognitive dissonance with the example of an American religious sect, whose members sold all their possessions and assembled atop a mountain because they expected the end of the world and viewed themselves as the chosen ones. When the apocalypse did not happen, the sect members suffered cognitive dissonance. Festinger and his colleagues interviewed them and found that they did not doubt the correctness of their beliefs. Instead they interpreted their disappointed expectations as a further divine test of their faith. The theory proposes that people always try to square reality with their beliefs so as to minimize dissonance. This can happen in two ways. Either expectations can be made to fit the facts, or the facts can be interpreted so as to fit expectations. See Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: HarperTorchbooks, 1956).

502

SRA 4166, 7 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

503

SRA 3795, 12 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

504

SRGG 216, 12 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

505

SRA 3660, 9 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

506

SRA 3781, 7 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4129.

507

SRM 1090, 29 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

508

SRGG 250, 20 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

509

SRA 4246, 3 August 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

510

SRA 3620, 1 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

511

SRA 2702, 28 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

512

SRM 477, 14 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

513

Ibid.

514

SRA 5610, 7 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

515

SRM 672, 21 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

516

SRGG 1234 (C), 20 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4170.

517

SRGG 1176 (C), 2 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4169.

518

SRGG 408, 9 September 1943, TNA, WO 208/4166.

519

SRM 202, 20 June 1943, TNA, WO 208/4136.

520

SRGG 220, 12 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

521

SRA 5084, 20 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

522

SRM 612, 28 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

523

SRA 5127, 3 April 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

524

SRM 1262, 6 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

525

Nicole Bögli, “Als kriegsgefangener Soldat in Fort Hunt” (Master’s thesis, University of Bern, 2010); Stéphanie Fuchs, “‘Ich bin kein Nazi, aber Deutscher’” (Master’s thesis, University of Bern, 2010).

526

This would seem to support the conclusions in Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Germans do in fact seem to have loved their Führer, and a thorough reevaluation of the history of the Third Reich and its crimes would have required Germans to grieve for the lost object of their affections.

527

SRM 468, 2 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4137.

528

SRA 3963, 23 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130.

529

SRA 3540, 12 January 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

530

SRA 1008, 11 December 1940, TNA, WO 208/4122: “That is what I fail to understand. I, too, was in the Hitler Youth and fought. And it was a good idea too. No one can say anything against it. But there were things that were unnecessary like cutting off all the Jews.”

531

SRA 1259, 8 February 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123: “The Jews have systematically stirred people up against Germany. In Poland too. Anyway, who are the Poles? They’re at such a low level of culture. You can’t compare them with Germans at all.”

532

SRM 614, 1 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

533

SRN 2912, 10 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4149.

534

SRM 1061, 27 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

535

SRA 289, 6 August 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

536

Alexander Hoerkens, “Kämpfer des Dritten Reiches? Die nationalsozialistische Durchdringung der Wehrmacht” (Master’s thesis, University of Mainz, 2009).

537

SRA 5118, 28 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4133.

538

SRM 45, 10 February 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

539

Heinrich von Kleist, Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Sprechen (Frankfurt/Main: Dielmann, 2010).

540

SRN 151, 7 December 1940, TNA, WO 208/4141.

541

Room Conversation, Kotschi-Graupe-Schwartze-Boscheinen, 25 February 1945, NARA, RG 164, Entry 179, Box 475.

542

SRN 1767, 8 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

543

Hoerkens, “Kämpfer des Dritten Reiches?”

544

SRN 1715, 1 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

545

SRM 832, 26 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

546

SRM 560, 15 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

547

SRM 584, 22 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

548

SRA 1742, 19 May 1941, TNA, WO 208/4145.

549

SRM 914, 20 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

550

SRN 1505, 5 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

551

SRN 1617, 12 April 1943, TNA, WO 208/4145.

552

SRCMF X 61, 1 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/5513.

553

SRCMF X 15, 27 May 1944, TNA, WO 208/5513.

554

SRN 2471, 23 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4148.

555

SRM 523, 8 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

556

Gordon Allport, Die Natur des Vorurteils (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1971); Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, Etablierte und Außenseiter (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990); Henri Taijfel, Gruppenkonflikt und Vorurteil: Entstehung und Funktion sozialer Stereotypen (Bern: Verlag Hans Huber, 1982).

557

For example, Aly, Volksstaat; Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft.

558

SRGG 411, 10 September 1943, TNA, WO 208/4166.

559

SRGG 452, 2 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4166.

560

SRM 745, 4 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4238.

561

Interrogation Report, Wilimzig–Malner, 2 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 563. See also Wilimzig’s personal file, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 563; and Felix Römer, “Alfred Andersch abgehört: Kriegsgefangene ‘Anti-Nazi’ im amerikanischen Vernehmungslager Fort Hunt,” VfZG 58 (2010), p. 578.

562

Room Conversation, Mayer–Ahnelt, 5 July 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 441.

563

Room Conversation, Lange–Laemmel, 27 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 506.

564

SRM 711, 28 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

565

SRM 1215, 14 February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

566

See Martin Treutlein, “Paris im August 1944,” in Welzer, Neitzel, and Gudehus, eds., “Der Führer.”

567

Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), p. 197.

568

SRN 97, 2 November 1940, TNA, WO 208/4141.

569

SRN 624, 9 August 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143.

570

“Gedanken des Oberbefehlshabers der Kriegsmarine zum Kriegsausbruch 3 September 1939,” in Werner Rahn and Gerhard Schreiber, eds., Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung, 1939–1945, Teil A, Vol. 1 (Bonn: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1988), p. 16.

571

An especially impressive example of this attitude is Kriegstagebuch des “Führers der Zerstörer” aus dem Jahr 1944, BA/MA, RM 54/8.

572

On Hitler: Admiral/Führerhauptquartier GKdos 2877/44, 6 August 1944, BA-MA, RM 7/137; on Goebbels: Elke Fröhlich, ed., Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, Vols. 1–15 (28 February 1945) (London: Muenchen, 1987–98), p. 383.

573

Room Conversation, Neumann–Tschernett–Petzelmayer, 13 June 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 521.

574

HDv 2, Abschnitt 9, p. 53, cited in BA/MA, RS 4/1446. We owe this reference to Peter Lieb, Sandhurst.

575

“I swear by God this sacred oath that I will show absolute obedience to the leader of the German Empire and people, Adolf Hitler, the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, and am prepared as a courageous soldier to give my life at all times for this oath.”

576

Cited in Klaus Reinhardt, Die Wende vor Moskau: Das Scheitern der Strategie Hitlers im Winter 1941/42 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1972), p. 220.

577

OKW/WFSt, Abt. L, No. 442277/41 gKdos Chefs., 26 December 1941, cited in Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, p. 327, FN 243.

578

Ibid., p. 332.

579

Ibid., p. 344.

580

OKW/WFSt/Op No. 004059/42 g.K. v. 3 November 1942, BA/MA, RH 19 VIII/34, S. 171 f.

581

Karl-Günter Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2010), pp. 28–32.

582

KTB OKW, Vol. 3, p. 465.

583

POW officers Werner Heuer and Adolf Hempel agreed in conversation that the command to fight to the last man should not be taken literally. Room Conversation, Heuer–Hempel, 26 October 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 484.

584

SRGG 844, 24 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

585

SRX 1798, 1799, 23 June 1943; SRX 1806, 24 June 1943, TNA, WO 208/4163. See also SRGG 252, 18 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

586

Fröhlich, ed., Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, 29 June 1944, p. 567.

587

See Horst Boog, Gerhard Krebs, and Detlef Vogel, eds., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001), p. 463, FN 42. See also Nikolaus Meier, “Warum Krieg? Die Sinndeutung des Krieges in der deutschen Militärelite, 1871–1945” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Zurich, 2010), pp. 297–304.

588

Boog, Krebs, and Vogel, eds. Das Deutsche Reich, Vol. 7, p. 469.

589

Hans-Günther Kluge to Hitler, 21 July 1944, BA-MA, RH 19 IX/8.

590

John Zimmermann, Pflicht zum Untergang: Die deutsche Kriegführung im Westen des Reiches, 1944/45 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2009).

591

Ibid., esp. pp. 282–323.

592

SRX 1965, 9 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164.

593

The situation was the same on the Eastern and Western fronts. On 30 June 1941 some two hundred men from the Army Group South were captured and killed by Russian soldiers. Korpstagesbefehl KG III, AK, 3 July 1941; BA/MA, RH 27—14/2.

594

SRM 521, 8 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. Gundlach directed the combat academy of the 716th Infantry Division, which offered training for noncommissioned officers. Little is known about him, but he must have been an infantry officer with combat experience. An account of the battle from the perspective of Private Josef Häger is contained in Cornelius Ryan, Der längste Tag: Normandie: 6. Juni 1944 (Frankfurt/Main: Heyne, 1976), pp. 190–93.

595

SRM 716, 31 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

596

SRM 622, 6 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

597

Radio Message, 27 June 1944, B. No. 1/Skl 19633/44 GKdos, BA/MA, RM 7/148.

598

SRN 3925, 10 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4153.

599

SRM 639, 8 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

600

SRGG 1061, 24 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4169; Welf Botho Elster, Die Grenzen des Gehorsams: Das Leben des Generalmajors Botho Henning Elster in Briefen und Zeitzeugnissen (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005).

601

For example, Friedrich Paulus in Stalingrad, Hans Aulock in Saint-Malo, and Bernhard Ramcke in Brest. See Sönke Neitzel, “Der Kampf um die deutschen Atlantik- und Kanalfestungen und sein Einfluß auf den alliierten Nachschub während der Befreiung Frankreichs, 1944/45,” in MGM 55 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996), pp. 381–430.

602

SRN 3924, 8 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4153.

603

SRN 3932, 11 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4154.

604

SRGG 934, 1 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

605

Room Conversation, Bernzen-Almenröder, 11 February 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 448.

606

SRN 3935, 11 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4154.

607

Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 83.

608

BA/MA, N 267/4, 11 November 1944.

609

SRM 160, 4 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4136.

610

SRX 1548, 4 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4162.

611

SRM 71, 20 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

612

Murawski, Wehrmachtbericht, p. 180.

613

Zagovec, “Gespräche mit der ‘Volksgemeinschaft,’” in particular, p. 358.

614

GRGG 270, 9 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

615

Günter Wegmann, Das Kriegsende zwischen Weser und Ems (Osnabrück: Verlag Wenner, 2000), p. 102ff.; Sönke Neitzel, “Der Bedeutungswandel der Kriegsmarine im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, p. 263ff.

616

SRGG 1125, 27 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4169.

617

GRGG 276, 25–27 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

618

SRM 1158, 2 January 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

619

Room Conversation, Neher–Glar, 19 September 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 474.

620

SRGG 934, 1 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

621

SRGG 935, 2 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

622

SRM 539, 12 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

623

SRM 522, 9 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

624

SRGG 844, 24 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

625

See Room Conversation, Guetter-Tschitschko, 27 June 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 477.

626

See ibid.

627

Kurt Böhme, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in sowjetischer Hand: Eine Bilanz (Munich: Ernst & Werner GmbH, 1966), p. 49; Elke Scherstjanoi, Wege in die Kriegsgefangenschaft: Erinnerungen und Erfahrungen deutscher Soldaten (Berlin: Dietz, 2010) contains evidence of positive experiences from soldiers who fell into Soviet hands.

628

“Gedanken des Oberbefehlshabers der Kriegsmarine,” in Rahn and Schreiber, eds., Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung, Teil A, Vol. 1, p. 16.

629

See Michael Salewski, Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt/Main: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1970), p. 164.

630

1. Skl No. 18142/43 g., 17 June 1943, BA/MA, RM 7/98. See also KTB Skl, Teil A, 17 August 1944, S. 417.

631

See Holger Afflerbach, “‘Mit wehender Fahne untergehen’: Kapitulationsverweigerung in der deutschen Marine,” VfZG 49 (2001), pp. 593–612.

632

Andreas Leipold, “Die Deutsche Seekriegsführung im Pazifik in den Jahren 1914 und 1915” (Ph.D. disseration, University of Bayreuth, 2010).

633

Lagevorträge des Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine var Hitler 1939–1945 (26 March 1945), Gerhard Wagner, ed. (Munich: Lehmanns, 1972), p. 686.

634

Cited in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär, Kriegsende 1945: Die Zerstörung des Deutschen Reiches (Frankfurt/Main: Primu Verlag, 1994), p. 175.

635

“Die Invasion”: Erlebnisbericht und Betrachtungen eines T-Boot-Fahrers auf “Möwe,” BA/MA, RM 8/1875; Clay Blair, Der U-Boot-Krieg, Vol. 2 (Munich: Bechtermuenz, 2001), p. 679.

636

Address of the Japanese ambassador, General Hiroshi Oshima, during ceremonies at the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium, 25 November 1944, PAAA, R 61405.

637

Room Conversation, Grote–Wiljotti–Brinkmann, 12 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 476. Wiljotti’s interlocutor felt no need to expand on the fight that saw seventeen S-boats go down with their entire crews in the Baie de la Seine. In fact, there is no instance in World War II of an S-boat going down with all its crew. There were always survivors. This is a typical example of a storyteller exaggerating to make a narrative more interesting.

638

See the report of the Navy high command about tonnages, 19 October 1944, Neitzel, “Bedeutungswandel der Kriegsmarine,” p. 256.

639

SRA 2589, 5 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

640

Ernst Stilla, “Die Luftwaffe im Kampf um die Luftherrschaft” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bonn, 2005), p. 234ff.; Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 8 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt DVA, 2007), p. 859. Lieutenant Trettau of the 6/JG 27, for example, reported that, according to a command in March 1945, relatives of POWs who had been captured uninjured would be ineligible for government benefits. SRA 5840, 11 April 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135.

641

NARA, T-321, Reel 54, pp. 290–403; Günther W. Gellermann, Moskau ruft Heeresgruppe Mitte… Was nicht im Wehrmachtbericht stand—Die Einsätze des geheimen Kampfgeschwaders 200 im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe, 1988), pp. 42–60; Arno Rose, Radikaler Luftkampf: Die Geschichte der deutschen Rammjäger (Stuttgart: Motorbuch Verlag, 1979).

642

See, for example, SRA 5544, 29 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4134.

643

SRA 4776, 4 January 1944; SRA 4813, 13 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4132. In June 1942, a lieutenant described the command to ram enemy ships and planes as “idiocy.” SRA 2589, 5 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

644

SRGG 1248, 18 May 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135.

645

KTB OB West, 21 September 1944, BA/MA, RH 19 IV/56, S. 319.

646

SRX 349, 13 June 1941, TNA, WO 208/4159.

647

SRA 1575, 26 April 1941, TNA, WO 208/4123.

648

SRX 1240, 6 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

649

Ibid.

650

SRGG 779, 20 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4167.

651

SRX 703, 15 January 1942, TNA, WO 208/4160.

652

SRN 675, 29 October 1941, TNA, WO 208/4143.

653

SRX 1171, 16 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

654

SRA 2615, 9 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

655

SRX 1513, 20 January 1943, TNA, WO 208/4162.

656

SRA 3731, 3 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

657

SRGG 483, 14 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4166.

658

SRM 104, 22 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

659

SRX 1819, 8 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4163.

660

SRM 129, 26 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

661

SRGG 59, 24 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

662

SRM 129, 26 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

663

SRGG 650, 12 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4167.

664

SRN 2021, 28 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4146; SRN 2021, 28 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4146.

665

SRX 1125, 24 September 1942, TNA WO 208/4161.

666

SRM 136, 29 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

667

Ibid.

668

SRX 1181, 24 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

669

“Denkschrift über Gliederung, Bewaffnung und Ausrüstung einer Fallschirmjägerdivision sowie über die Grundsätze der Gefechtsführung im Rahmen einer Fallschirmjägerdivision,” 11 September 1944, BA/MA RH 11 I/24. We owe this reference to Adrian Wettstein, Bern.

670

SRGG 16, 16 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

671

SRGG 217, 11 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

672

SRX 1839, 16 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4163.

673

Room Conversation, Grote-Wiljotti-Brinkmann, 15 August 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 563.

674

Ibid.

675

SRGG 914, 4 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168. On soldiers’ experience of battles in Sicily and southern Italy, see BA/MA RH 11 I/27, 4 November 1943. We owe this reference to Adrian Wettstein, Bern.

676

SRX 1149, 9 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

677

SRM 22, 17 January 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

678

SRM 49, 24 February 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

679

SRGG 243, 17 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

680

SRX 1402, 19 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4162.

681

SRM 797, 19 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

682

SRM 469, 2 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4137.

683

SRM 863, 27 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

684

SRM 965, 16 Ocotber 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

685

SRM 613, 29 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

686

SRM 700, 27 July 1944, TNA WO 208/4138.

687

SRM 982, 26 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

688

SRCMF, X 113, 29 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/5516.

689

SRM 640, 10 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

690

See also SRCMF, X 110, 23 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/5516. There has been a lot of research on the topic of desertion. See especially Magnus Koch, Fahnenfluchten: Deserteure der Wehrmacht im Zweiten Weltkrieg—Lebenswege und Entscheidungen (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2008); Wolfram Wette, Das letzte Tabu: NS-Militärjustiz und “Kriegsverrat” (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2007); Benjamin Ziemann, “Fluchten aus dem Konsens zum Durchhalten: Ergebnisse, Probleme und Perspektiven der Erforschung soldatischer Verweigerungsformen in der Wehrmacht, 1939–1945,” in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Die Wehrmacht. Mythos und Realität, pp. 589–613; Wolfram Wette, Deserteure der Wehrmacht: Feiglinge—Opfer—Hoffnungsträger? Dokumentation eines Meinungswandels (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1995); Norbert Haase and Gerhard Paul, eds., Die anderen Soldaten: Wehrkraftzersetzung, Gehorsamsverweigerung, Fahnenflucht (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995).

691

Felix Römer, “Alfred Andersch abgehört,” p. 571ff.

692

Room Conversation, Templin—Erlwein—Friedl, 16 February 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 178, Box 553.

693

Manfred Messerschmitt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz, 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2005), p. 172.

694

SRM 419, 19 December 1943, TNA, WO 208/4137.

695

GRGG 182, 27–28 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4363.

696

SRGG 1021, 2 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

697

SRM 1148, 31 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4140.

698

SRM 536, 11 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

699

SRM 729, 29 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. See SRM 225, 8 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4136.

700

SRM 593, 25 June 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

701

SRX 1138, 3 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4161.

702

SRN 823, 1 March 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143.

703

SRN 181, 21 March 1941; SRN 184, 21 March 1941; SRN 193, 22 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4141.

704

René Schilling, “Die ‘Helden der Wehrmacht’—Konstruktion und Rezeption,” in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, pp. 552–56.

705

SRN 3732, 18 May 1944, TNA, WO 208/4152.

706

SRN 2606, 4 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4148.

707

SRN 2574, 4 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4148.

708

SRN 2636, 4 January 1944, TNA, WO 208/4148.

709

Christian Hartmann, Halder: Generalstabschef Hitlers, 1938–1942 (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2010), p. 331.

710

For more detail on Reichenau, see Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, 1941/42 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2006). See also Brendan Simms, “Walther von Reichenau—Der politische General,” in Die Militärelite des Dritten Reiches, Ronald Smesler and Enrico Syring, eds. (Berlin: Ullstein, 1995), pp. 423–45. Timm Richter is also writing a dissertation on Reichenau.

711

GRGG 161, TNA, WO 208/4363

712

SRGG 83, 29 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

713

SRGG 578, 21 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4167.

714

Neitzel, Abgehört, p. 446.

715

SRX 2029, 25 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164.

716

SRX 36, 14 February 1940, TNA, WO 208/4158.

717

SRA 224, 26 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

718

SRA 258, 1 August 1940, TNA, WO 208/4118.

719

SRM 149, 7 December 1942, TNA, WO 208/4136.

720

SRX 1955, 23 February1944, TNA, WO 208/4164. See also SRA 705, 8 October 1940, TNA, WO 208/4120.

721

Neitzel, Einsatz der deutschen Luftwaffe, p. 40.

722

Murawski, Wehrmachtbericht, p. 42.

723

Clay Blair, Der U-Boot-Krieg, Vol. 2 (Munich: Bechtermuenz, 1999), pp. 738, 778.

724

For example, Wochenschau, 21 October 1942.

725

Alberto Santoni, “The Italian Submarine Campaign,” in The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945, Stephen Howarth and Derel Law, eds. (London: Greenhill, 1994), pp. 329–32.

726

SRN 4797, 31 March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4157.

727

SRA 2996, 14 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4127.

728

SRN 129, 15 November 1940, TNA, WO 208/4141. See also SRA 2178, 1 October 1941, TNA, WO 208/4125.

729

SRA 5777, 1 February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4135. There were many variations on the joke about Göring’s fondness for decorations. See Hans-Jochen Gamm, Der Flüsterwitz im Dritten Reich: Mündliche Dokumente zur Lage der Deutschen während des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Piper, 1990), p. 165.

730

Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, “Noi non sappiamo odiare” L´esercito italiano tra fascismo e democrazia (Turin: UTET Libera, 2010), p. 166.

731

SRIG 329, 17 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4187. Ficalla was the commander of the 202nd Coastal Division and was captured on 21 July 1943 in Sicily. Salza was the chaplain of the 1st Italian Army and was captured on 1 May 1943 in Tunisia.

732

CSDIC Middle East No. 662(I), 5 January 1943, TNA, WO 208/5574.

733

SRIG 221, 11 August 1943, TNA, WO 208/4186.

734

CSDIC Middle East No. 626(I), 15 November 1942, TNA, WO 208/5574.

735

Italian soldiers were more interested in material rewards than decorations. A fighter pilot reported that he could earn 5,000 lire for every hit. CSDIC Middle East No. 488(I), 13 April 1942, TNA, WO 208/5518.

736

CSDIC Middle East No. 713(I), 23 March 1943, TNA, WO 208/5574.

737

See ISRM 49, 17 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4188.

738

Even members of Italian elite units showed more emotion than average German soldiers. See the description of a pursuit involving depth charges by an officer of the Italian submarine MS Glauco. I/SRN 76, 29 July 1941, TNA, WO 208/4189.

739

I/SRN 68, 24 July 1941, TNA, WO 208/4189.

740

CSDIC Middle East No. 489(I), 14 April 1942. See also CSDIC Middle East No. 471(I), 25 March 1942, TNA, WO 208/5518.

741

CSDIC AFHQ No. 58(I), 31 August 1943, TNA, WO 208/5508.

742

Ibid.

743

I/SRN 70, 24 July 1941; I/SRN 90, 18 August 1941, TNA, WO 208/4189.

744

I/SRN 65, 20 July 1941. See I/SRN 88, TNA, WO 208/4189.

745

See I/SRN 54, 15 January 1941; I/SRN 72, 25 July 1941; I/SRN 97, 25 August 1941, TNA, WO 208/4189.

746

SRIG 138, 17 July 1943, TNA, WO 208/4186.

747

Michael E. Stevens, Letters from the Front, 1898–1945 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1992), p. 135.

748

Ulrich Straus, The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POW’s of World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), p. 48ff.

749

Hirofumi Hayashi, “Japanese Deserters and Prisoners of War in the Battle of Okinawa,” in Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace: Captivity: Homecoming and Memory in World War II, Barbara Hately-Broad and Bob Moore, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 54. Findings in Burma are similar. See Takuma Melber, “Verhört: Alliierte Studien zu Moral und Psyche japanischer Soldaten im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Welzer, Neitzel, and Gudehus, eds., “Der Führer.”

750

Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999), p. 215.

751

SRM 1022, 15 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

752

For the most recent research on the Waffen SS, see Martin Cüppers, Wegbereiter der Shoah: Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung, 1939–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005); Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS und Polizei im Kampf gegen Partisanen und Zivilbevölkerung in Italien, 1943–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2011); Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg; René Rohrkamp, Weltanschaulich gefestigte Kämpfer: Die Soldaten der Waffen-SS, 1933–1945: Organisation—Personal—Sozialstruktur (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2010); and above all, Jean-Luc Leleu, La Waffen-SS: Soldats politiques en Guerre (Paris: Editions Perrin, 2007). See also Jochen Lehnhardt, “Die Waffen-SS in der NS-Propaganda” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Mainz, 2011).

753

SRM 8, 23 July 1940, TNA, WO 208/4136.

754

Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, pp. 106, 237.

755

KTB SS Infanterie Regiment 4 (mot.), 9 December 1941–29 April 1942.

756

Rohrkamp, Weltanschaulich gefestigte Kämpfer.

757

SRGG 429, 22 September 1943, TNA, WO 208/4166; see also SRM 786, 12 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

758

SRM 747, 3 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138; Kritik auch bei Lingner, SRM 1216, February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

759

SRM 1019, 14 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139; SRX 2055, 9 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164; SRGG 1024 (C), 2 September 1944, TNA WO 208/4168.

760

SRM 786, 12 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

761

SRGG 1034 (C), 8 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

762

KTB Division Großdeutschland, Aktennotiz Ia, 6–7 January 1943, S. 2, BA/MA, RH 26—1005/10.

763

SRM 786, 12 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

764

SRGG 971, 9 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168. On the similarities between the Waffen SS and the “Hermann Göring” Division, see SRGG 39, 16 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

765

SRA 2877, 5 August 1942, TNA, WO 208/4168; SRX 87, 9 June 1940, TNA, WO 208/4158; SRA 2621, 11 June 1942, TNA, WO 208/4126.

766

SRA 3236, 5 October 1942, TNA, WO 208/4128.

767

SRGG 39, 22 May 1943, TNA, WO 208/4165.

768

Ibid.

769

SRGG 971, 9 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4165.

770

Henry Dicks, The Psychological Foundations of the Wehrmacht, TNA, WO 241/1.

771

Cited in Karl-Günter Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, p. 209.

772

Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, p. 441.

773

SRM 956, 10 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

774

GRGG 262, 18–20 February 1945, p. 3, TNA, WO 208/4177.

775

SRGG, 19 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168. The interrogation of Kurt Meyer on 15 November 1944 makes it clear how much he hated the “Bolshevists from the steppes.” SRM 1022, 15 November 1944, p. 8, TNA, WO 208/4139.

776

SRM 1211, 12 February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

777

Room Conversation, Becker–Steiner, 14 February 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 447.

778

Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, pp. 257, 293–96.

779

Peter Lieb, “‘Rücksichtslos ohne Pause angreifen, dabei ritterlich bleiben’: Eskalation und Ermordung von Kriegsgefangenen an der Westfront 1944,” in Neitzel and Hohrath, eds., Kriegsgreuel, pp. 346–50. See also Antony Beevor, D-Day—Die Schlacht in der Normandie (Munich: C. Bertelsman Verlag, 2010).

780

Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, pp. 435–48. There are numerous Allied reports in which SS men are described as “preferring to die, rather to give in.” Charles P. Stacey, The Victory Campaign: The Operations in North-West Europe, 1944–1945 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1960), p. 249.

781

On the Eastern Front, SS troops inflicted heavy casualties on Soviet units without suffering disproportionate losses of their own. One example was Operation Zitadelle in summer 1943. See Roman Töppel, “Kursk—Mythen und Wirklichkeit einer Schlacht,” VfZG 57 (2009), pp. 349–84, esp. p. 373ff.; Karl-Heinz Frieser et al., Das Deutsche Reich, Vol. 8, pp. 104–38.

782

SRGG 513, 29 October 1943, TNA, WO 208/4166.

783

BA/MA, RH 20—8/95, 10 August 1943.

784

“Panzergruppe Eberbach bei Alençon und beim Durchbruch aus dem Kessel von Falaise,” BA-MA, RH 20/7/149. This document is based on notes Eberbach made in Trent Park in October 1944.

785

Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, p. 426. Major Heimann reported about a battalion of the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” fighting around Aachen in October 1944: “The Obersturmführer of the Leibstandarte—they were the remnants of Leibstandarte from Aachen—Obersturmführer Rink (?) served around the same battalion commander as I did. The battalion commander once came to me—three or four days before we surrendered—and said: ‘Tonight they’re taking off.’ And in fact, the SS intended to flee. We then cautioned them that there was a direct order from the Führer to defend the city to the last, and that this order applied to the SS as well.” SRM 982, 26 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

786

SRM 640, 10 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

787

SRM 968, 18 October 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

788

In April 1944, the commanding general of the XXXXVIII Armored Corps, Hermann Balck, bitterly complained about the 9th SS Tank Division, protesting that the mid-level leadership was not up to its jobs. His anger at the commander, Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich, was such that Balck petitioned for him to be relieved of command, even though he praised Bittrich’s personal bravery. See Gert Fricke, “Fester Platz” Tarnopol, 1944 (Freiburg: Rombach, 1969), pp. 107–11, 116–19. See also BA/MA, RH 19 IV/50.

789

SRA 4273, 14 August 1943, TNA, WO 208/4130. On 1 February 1943 Hitler met with Field Marshal Erich von Manstein in the headquarters of Army Group South in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, and gave the go-ahead for a counteroffensive. The SS division “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” was also deployed.

790

SRM 662, 19 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

791

Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, p. 428.

792

Letter from Eberbach to his wife, 8 July, 11 July 1944, BA/MA, MSG 1/1010.

793

SRA 3677, 18 February 1943, TNA, WO 208/4129.

794

SRX 201, 22 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4158.

795

SRX 201, 22 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4158. See also SRN 1013, 1 September 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143.

796

SRA 2378, 9 December 1941, TNA, WO 208/4126.

797

On war crimes committed in France, see Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, pp. 15–20; on the Totenkopf division, see Charles W. Sydnor, Soldaten des Todes: Die 3. SS-Division “Totenkopf,” 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2002), pp. 76–102; Jean-Luc Leleu, “La Division SS-Totenkopf face à la population civile du Nord de la France en mai 1940,” Revue du Nord 83 (2001), pp. 821–40. On the murder of soldiers from French colonies, see Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of French Black Soldiers, 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

798

See SRM 892, 15 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

799

SRM 705, 28 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

800

SRM 746, 3 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. Both units fought in the same division between October 1943 and January 1944.

801

SRM 746, 3 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

802

SRX 1978, 13 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4164.

803

SRM 726, 30 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

804

SRM 1150, 30 December 1944, TNA, WO 208/4140. The anti-Semitic commentary supposedly came from the division commander, SS brigade leader Heinz Lammerding.

805

SRM 899, 15 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139. On plunder, see SRM 772, 1 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

806

An NCO reported that ten English POWs had been shot in his unit. SRM 741, 4 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. NCO Kaun reported that a Canadian POW was killed with a pickax. The perpetrator could have been a member of the SS division “Hitler Youth” or a regular army soldier. SRM 737, 3 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

807

For a general overview, see Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg.

808

SRM 892, 15 September 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

809

SRM 855, 29 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139.

810

Room Conversation, Hanelt–Breitlich, 3 April 1945, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 479. The mention of tanks destroying the village makes it seem likely that this incident was part of the battle against “partisans,” carried out by Waffen SS units and not by a Security Service commando.

811

GRGG 225, 18–19 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4364.

812

See Neitzel, Abgehört, pp. 300–303, 572ff.

813

SRX 1799, 23 June 1943, TNA, WO 208/4162.

814

There is unfortunately only scant research on the topic of war crimes committed by the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front.

815

SRN 3929, 10 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4153.

816

SRM 1079, 24 November 1944, TNA, WO 208/4139. On massacres of civilians in Belarus, see the statement by Rottenführer Otto Gregor. PWIS (H)LDC/762, TNA, WO 208/4295. Lieutenant Colonel Müller-Rienzburg told as a POW of how Standartenführer Kurt Meyer had bragged at a training session of how he took Charkow with only two casualties and then destroyed the entire village, including “women, children and old people.” SRGG 832, 13 February 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

817

SRM 648, 15 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

818

SRM 643, 13 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. On the execution of POWs by the SS Division “The Reich,” see SRM 764, 8 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138. Untersturmführer Karl-Walter Becker from 12th SS Division “Hitler Youth” recalled comrades telling him about the invasion: “In Russia, the standard operating procedure was that only the POWs who seemed most important would be transported. All others were usually murdered.” TNA, WO 208/4295.

819

SRM 1205, 12 February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140. On the crimes of the 12th SS Armored Division in Normandy, see Howard Margolian, Conduct Unbecoming: The Story of the Murder of Canadian Prisoners of War in Normandy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg, pp. 158–66.

820

SRM 753, 3 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

821

Further crimes are mentioned in SRM 706, 28 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138; SRM 367, 9 November 1943, TNA, WO 208/4137 (the murder of hostages in Panevo, Serbia, in April 1941).

822

Leleu, La Waffen-SS, pp. 233–35; 420–41; Jürgen Matthäus, Konrad Kwiet, Jürgen Förster, and Richard Breitman, eds., Ausbildungsziel Judenmord? “Weltanschauliche Erziehung” von SS, Polizei und Waffen-SS im Rahmen der “Endlösung” (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003).

823

GRGG 262, 18–20 February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4177.

824

SRM 1214, 12 February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140.

825

SRM 1216, 16 February 1945, TNA, WO 208/4140. The wording of Himmler’s order of 20 February 1943 was nearly identical. See Matthäus et al., eds., Ausbildungsziel Judenmord?, p. 106.

826

Bernd Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten: Die Waffen-SS, 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2009), p. 189.

827

Matthäus et al., eds., Ausbildungsziel Judenmord?

828

SRM 649, 16 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

829

Leleu, La Waffen-SS, pp. 468–70.

830

Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten, p. 48ff.; Leleu, La Waffen-SS, pp. 456ff., 483ff.

831

SRM 649, 16 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

832

SRM 705, 28 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

833

SRM 649, 16 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

834

Carlo Gentile, “‘Politische Soldaten’: Die 16. SS-Panzer-Grenadier-Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’ in Italien 1944” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 81 (2001), pp. 529–61.

835

Peter Lieb, “‘Die Ausführung der Maßnahme hielt sich anscheinend nicht im Rahmen der gegebenen Weisung’: Die Suche nach Hergang, Tätern und Motiven des Massakers von Maillé am 25. August 1944,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 68 (2009), pp. 345–78.

836

SRM 766, 8 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

837

Leleu, La Waffen-SS, p. 794ff.

838

SRM 668, 21 July 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

839

See Matthias Weusmann, “Die Schlacht in der Normandie 1944: Wahrnehmungen und Deutungen deutscher Soldaten” (Master’s thesis, University of Mainz, 2009).

840

Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), pp. 609–22; Peter Lieb, “Die Judenmorde der 707: Infanterie division 1941/42,” VfZG 50 (2002), pp. 523–58, esp. 535–44.

841

Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg, pp. 469–788; Hermann Frank, Blutiges Edelweiss: Die 1. Gebirgsdivision im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2008); Peter Lieb, “Generalleutnant Harald von Hirschfeld: Eine nationalsozialistische Karriere in der Wehrmacht,” in Von Feldherrn und Gefreiten: Zur biographischen Dimension des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Christian Hartmann, ed., (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), pp. 45–56.

842

See Hans-Martin Stimpel, Die deutsche Fallschirmtruppe, 1936–1945: Innenansichten von Führung und Truppe (Hamburg: Mittler & Sohn, 2009).

843

The British concluded that the officer POWs of the 3rd Paratrooper Division consisted almost exclusively of Nazi true believers. Corps Intelligence Summary, No. 56, 8 September 1944, TNA, WO 171/287. We owe this reference to Peter Lieb, Sandhurst.

844

SRGG 971, 9 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4168.

845

That is the conclusion reached by a study that systematically compared the surveillance protocols of officers from the Waffen SS and paratrooper divisions. Frederik Müllers, “Des Teufels Soldaten? Denk- und Deutungsmuster von Soldaten der Waffen-SS” (Master’s thesis, University of Mainz, 2011).

846

This is the conclusion reached by Tobias Seidl in his dissertation, “Führerpersönlichkeiten”: Deutungen und Interpretationen deutscher Wehrmachtgeneräle in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Mainz, 2011).

847

See Richard Germann, “‘Österreichische’ Soldaten im deutschen Gleichschritt?” in Welzer, Neitzel, Gudehus, eds., “Der Führer.”

848

Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002); Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut.” Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003).

849

www.collateralmurder.com.

850

David L. Anderson, “What Really Happened?” in Facing My Lai: Beyond the Massacre, David L. Anderson, ed. (Kansas: Self-published, 1998), p. 2.

851

Greiner, Krieg ohne Fronten, p. 113.

852

Ibid., p. 407.

853

Der Spiegel, 16/2010, p. 21.

854

Harald Potempa, Die Perzeption des Kleinen Krieges im Spiegel der deutschen Militärpublizistik (1871 bis 1945) am Beispiel des Militärwochenblattes (Potsdam, 2009).

855

Der Spiegel, 16/2010, p. 20.

856

Walter Manoschek, “‘Wo der Partisan ist, ist der Jude, wo der Jude ist, ist der Partisan’: Die Wehrmacht und die Shoah,” in Täter der Shoah, Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche?, Gerhard Paul, ed. (Göttingen, 2002), pp. 167–86; Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, eds., Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), p. 248.

857

Alison Des Forges, Kein Zeuge darf überleben: Der Genozid in Ruanda (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), p. 94.

858

Bill Adler, ed., Letters from Vietnam (New York: Dutton, 1967), p. 22.

859

Jonathan Shay, Achill in Vietnam: Kampftrauma und Persönlichkeitsverlust (Hamburg: Dutton, 1998), p. 271.

860

Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1977), p. 231.

861

Stevens, Letters, p. 110.

862

Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, Vol. 1, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 108–10, 149–72.

863

Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin (2009), “Briefe von der Front,” available at: http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/31953, accessed on 27 August 2010.

864

The desire for revenge featured in many letters home written by Vietnam soldiers. Here is another example: “I lost quite a few buddies that day, and all I hope for now is the chance to get back at them and make them pay for it. I’m sorry for writing like this. I try not to write home about any action I’ve been in, but I just can’t help feeling bitter and vengeful toward them.” Bernard Edelman, ed., Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 79.

865

For a summary, see Overmans, in Das Deutsche Reich, Vol. 9/2, pp. 799, 820.

866

See Konrad Jarausch and Klaus-Jochen Arnold, “Das stille Sterben…” Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland (Paderborn: Schoeningh Verlag, 2008).

867

See Neitzel and Hohrath, eds., Kriegsgreuel, particularly Oswald Überegger, “‘Verbrannte Erde’ und ‘baumelnde Gehenkte’: Zur europäischen Dimension militärischer Normübertretungen im Ersten Weltkrieg,” pp. 241–78; Bourke, Intimate History, p. 182.

868

Lieb, “‘Rücksichtslos ohne Pause angreifen, dabei ritterlich bleiben’” pp. 337–52.

869

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten, 1914–1949, Vol. 4 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), p. 842.

870

Gerald F. Linderman, The World Within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 111.

871

On 14 July 1943, soldiers from the 45th U.S. Infantry Division killed seventy Italian and German POWs near the Sicilian village of Biscari. This happened after an order by General George Patton in which he implicitly sanctioned the murder of prisoners. Bourke, Intimate History, p. 184. Similar cases are known in the initial days after the Normandy invasion. See Lieb, Rücksichtslos.

872

Linderman, The World Within War, pp. 112–26.

873

Lieb, “Rücksichtslos,” p. 349ff.

874

Welzer, Täter, p. 256.

875

Jens Ebert, “Zwischen Mythos und Wirklichkeit: Die Schlacht um Stalingrad in deutschsprachigen authentischen und literarischen Texten” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Berlin, 1989), p. 38; Ute Daniel and Jürgen Reulecke, “Nachwort der deutschen Herausgeber,” in “Ich will raus aus diesem Wahnsinn”: Deutsche Briefe von der Ostfront, 1941–1945: Aus sowjetischen Archiven, Anatolij Golovanskij et al., eds. (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1991), p. 314. See also Linderman, The World Within War, pp. 48–55; and Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others’: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” Journal of Modern History 64 (1992), Special Issue, pp. 66–67.

876

Edelman, Dear America, p. 136.

877

Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, pp. 87–174.

878

Römer, “‘Seid hart und unerbittlich…’: Gefangenenerschießungen und Gewalteskalation im deutsch-sowjetischen Krieg 1941/42,” in Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath, eds., Kriegsgreuel: Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008), pp. 317–36.

879

On this topic, see Linderman, The World Within War, pp. 90ff., 169.

880

Stouffer et al., The American Soldier, p. 149.

881

Shils and Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration.”

882

See also Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939–1945 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1982); Welzer, Täter.

883

Erving Goffman, Stigma: Über Techniken der Bewältigung beschädigter Identität (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974).

884

Lifton, Ärzte, p. 58.

885

Greiner, Krieg ohne Fronten, p. 249.

886

Reese, Mir selber, Schmitz, ed., p. 136ff.

887

The formation of groups also occurs on a more general level in the creation of borders between combat soldiers and the rest of the world. Biehl and Keller have described this phenomenon with reference to modern-day German Bundeswehr soldiers serving abroad: “The dialectic of soldiers’ latent ideology and their anti-ideological reflexes leads them to identify to a high degree with their mission and its aims. At the same time, they maintain a distanced and even negative attitude toward the media, society at large and leading politicians. Soldiers adopt an anti-elitist stance, in which they play the stylized role of people of action who get things done and upon whom the ultimate success of the mission depends. This mechanism helps them to deal with the stress and danger of their situation. In the process, the soldiers establish a black-and-white distinction between ‘us on the front lines’ and ‘them back home.’ These determine categories of belonging and respect.” Heiko Biehl and Jörg Keller, “Hohe Identifikation und nüchterner Blick,” in Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr: Sozialwissenschaftliche Analysen, Diagnosen und Perspektiven, Sabine Jaberg, Heiko Biehl, Günter Mohrmann, and Maren Tomforde, eds. (Berlin: Dunker and Humboldt, 2009), pp. 121–41, pp. 134–35. Maren Tomforde has examined the creation of a special identity among Bundeswehr soldiers serving in Afghanistan. For example, their pale pink tropical uniforms serve as a sign of group membership and distinguish them from members of other contingents. This leads to the creation of allegiances beyond their Bundeswehr identity during foreign deployments. Maren Tomforder, “‘Meine rosa Uniform zeigt, dass ich dazu gehöre’: Soziokulturelle Dimensionen des Bundeswehr-Einsatzes in Afghanistan,” in Afghanistan—Land ohne Hoffnung? Kriegsfolgen und Perspektiven in einem verwundeten Land, Vol. 30 Horst Schuh and Siegfried Schwan, eds. (Brühl: Die Deutschen Bibliotek, 2007), pp. 134–59.

888

A minority of soldiers, of course, do view their mission in terms of political goals and ideology to which they remain committed. One example are the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a troop of U.S. volunteers for the Spanish Civil War who were motivated by strong antifascist convictions when fighting the Nazis in World War II. See Peter N. Carroll et al., eds., The Good Fight Continues: World War II Letters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: NYU Press, 2006).

889

Edelman, Dear America, p. 216.

890

Der Spiegel, 16/2010, p. 23.

891

Andrew Carroll, ed., War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (New York: Scribner, 2002), p. 474.

892

Aly, Volksstaat.

893

Loretana de Libero, Tradition im Zeichen der Transformation: Zum Traditionsverständnis der Bundeswehr im frühen 21. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2006).

894

See Benjamin Ziemann, Front und Heimat: Ländliche Kriegserfahrungen im südlichen Bayern 1914–1923 (Essen: Klartext, 1997).

895

Kühne, Kameradschaft, p. 197.

896

See Felix Römer, “Volksgemeinschaft in der Wehrmacht? Milieus, Mentalitäten und militärische Moral in den Streitkräften des NS-Staates,” in Welzer, Neitzel, and Gudehus, eds., “Der Führer.”

897

“The Story of M.I.19,” not dated, p. 1, TNA WO 208/4970; cf. Francis H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 283.

898

“The Story of M.I.19,” not dated, p. 6, TNA, WO 208/4970.

899

“The History of C.S.D.I.C. (U.K.),” not dated, p. 4, TNA WO 208/4970.

900

“Interrogation of Ps/W,” 17 May 1943, NARA, RG 38, OP-16-Z, Records of the Navy Unit, Tracy, Box 16: “Centres are, at present, established as follows: In England, 3 Centres for German & Italians, In North Africa, 2 Centres for German & Italians, In East Africa, 1 Centre (dismantled) for Japs, In India, 1 Centre for Japanese, In Australia, 1 Centre (A.T.I.S.) for Japanese, In U.S.A., 2 Centres for Germans, Italians and Japanese.”

901

For 3,838 German navy men, 4,826 surveillance protocols were made. The corresponding numbers for the Luftwaffe were 3,609 and 5,795; for the army (including the Waffen SS), 2,748 and 1,254. In addition, there are 2,076 protocols that record the words of members of different military branches. Protocols concerning army men were labeled S.R. The reports S.R.M. 1–1264 take up five files (TNA, WO 208/4136–4140); those concerning Luftwaffe men (S.R.A. 1–5836), nineteen; and those concerning navy men (S.R.N. 1–4857), seventeen. The mixed protocols S.R.X 1–2141 fill seven folders (TNA, WO 208/4158–4164); and those concerning staff officers and generals SRGG 1–1350; GRGG 1–363, eleven (WO 208/4165–4170, 4178, 4363–4366).

902

Neder, Kriegsschauplatz Mittelmeerraum, p. 12ff.

903

See Report of the Activities of Two Agencies of the CPM Branch, MIS, G-2, WDGS, o.D. (1945), NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 575.

904

On the scope and history of the files, see “Study on Peacetime Disposition of ‘X’ and ‘Y’ Files,” no date, in Memorandum of the WDGS, Intelligence Division, Exploitation Branch, 14 March 1947, NARA, RG 319, Entry 81, Box 3.

905

See Römer, “Volksgemeinschaft in der Wehrmacht?”.

906

See PAAA, R 41141.

907

OKW A Ausl./Abw.-Abt. Abw. III No. 4091/41 G vom 11 June 1941, BA/MA, RM 7/3137.

908

Generalstabsoffizier No. 1595/43 gKdos, 4 November 1943, BA/MA, RL 3/51. We owe this reference to Klaus Schmider, Sandhurst.

909

See SRN 4677, March 1945, TNA, WO 208/4157. On cautionary warnings not to reveal sensitive information, see extract from S. R. Draft No. 2142, TNA, WO 208/4200.

910

See SRN 185, 22 March 1941, TNA, WO 208/4141; SRN 418, 19 June 1941; SRN 462, 28 June 1941, TNA, WO 208/4142; SRN 741 10 January 1942, TNA, WO 208/4143.

911

See SRM 741, 4 August 1944, TNA, WO 208/4138.

912

There is only one verified case of POWs discovering a concealed microphone. Extract from Draft No. 2148, 5 March 1944, TNA, WO 208/4200.

913

On interrogation strategies, see Neitzel, Abgehört, pp. 16–18.

914

Forty-nine informants were used in British surveillance camps. They reported on 1,506 POWs. Hinsley, British Intelligence, Vol. 1, p. 282ff. See CSDIC (UK), p. 6, TNA, WO 208/4970.

915

See the interrogation reports on Lieutenant Max Coreth, 18 March–22 May 1944, NARA, RG 165, Entry 179, Box 458.

916

See Falko Bell, “Großbritannien und die deutschen Vergeltungswaffen: Die Bedeutung der Human Intelligence im Zweiten Weltkrieg” (Master’s thesis, University of Mainz, 2009); Falko Bell, “Informationsquelle Gefangene: Die Human Intelligence Großbritannien,” in Welzer, Neitzel, Gudehus, eds., “Der Führer.”

917

Stephen Tyas, “Allied Intelligence Agencies and the Holocaust: Information Acquired from German Prisoners of War,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 22 (2008), p. 16.