Tapping Hitler's Generals

FOREWORD

Long after 1945, what has been called ‘the legend of the “unblemished” Wehrmacht’, which claimed to have remained largely detached from the criminality of the Hitler regime and the atrocities attributable to the SS, still survived. This was to some extent an indication of the limited state of research (and a tendency to separate the military history of the war from the structural analysis of the Nazi state). The legend was shored up, too, by the postwar memoirs of leading military figures, who sought to uphold the honour of the Wehrmacht – and at the same time to exculpate themselves. But the sustenance of the legend also had political and social underpinnings. It fitted the interests of the young Federal Republic of Germany (especially when it acquired its new army, the Bundeswehr, in 1955), and of the Western Allies in the early years of the Cold War. And, not least, it accorded in part with a readiness (in some ways perhaps a necessity) among many ordinary people to believe that the deep stain of Nazism had not permeated absolutely everything, that the armed forces in which fathers, brothers, uncles and friends had served, had fought honourably for their country.

Over time, the legend was certainly eroded. Few specialist historians of the Third Reich had ever fully subscribed to it, and their work had at the latest since the 1960s started to implicate the Wehrmacht in the worst crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi regime. But little of this had penetrated far into public consciousness. In the 1990s, however, one of the heated and emotional public debates about the Nazi past that periodically punctuated the politics and culture of the Federal Republic exploded the myth completely. A major exhibition on the Wehrmacht, entitled ‘War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944’, which started its tour of major German cities in 1995, completely broke the image of an army which had kept its hands clean. Much in the exhibition was new, and shocking, to the wider public. The controversy that arose spawned a flood of publications, ranging from specialist research monographs to magazine articles, from written eyewitness accounts to television documentaries, which now made it impossible for a younger generation to hold on to notions of a blameless Wehrmacht that had fought a ‘normal’ war while Nazi organisations, above all the SS, had perpetrated the crimes. These younger Germans had to face up to the unpleasant fact that their grandfathers, serving in the regular army, not the SS, might well have been implicated in terrible barbarities.

Sparked in part by the ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’, a great deal of research in recent years has immensely extended and clarified an understanding of mentalities and patterns of behaviour within the Wehrmacht during the Nazi era, and especially during the World War II. How far the Wehrmacht accepted or rejected Nazi ideological aims has been at the centre of a good deal of the work. Much of the attention has focused on the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi regime’s gross crimes against humanity, notably in Eastern Europe and on the territory of the former Soviet Union, and quite especially in the genocide against the Jews. A central question has been how much guilt the Wehrmacht, from its commanders-in-chief down to ordinary soldiers, carried for these crimes. And, related to these themes, the question of the stance of the Wehrmacht in the dying phase of the Nazi regime, when it was obvious that the war was lost, has been a key issue. Why, even in these last terrible months of the war, which cost the lives of such a relatively high proportion of the total numbers of victims, did the Wehrmacht continue to fight so doggedly in a patently lost cause? What was the attitude within the armed forces towards Hitler and the Nazi leadership, and to those who tried to put an end to the regime (most notably in the bomb-plot of 20 July 1944)? These questions still invite no easy or black-and-white answers.

If anything, answers are even harder to come by with regard to those who held command positions in the armed forces, carrying a high share of responsibility for the Wehrmacht’s actions in the Third Reich, than they are for ordinary soldiers. German generals were in their postwar memoirs unsurprisingly anxious to distance themselves from Hitler and the Nazi leadership, to demonstrate their ‘unpolitical’ concern to carry out their duty as soldiers, and often to underline their own ‘resistance’ credentials (or at the very least criticism of the actions of the regime while emphasising their powerlessness to alter them). Personal papers, diaries and letters have, of course, often proved valuable, where they survive, in casting light on the contemporary attitudes of specific individuals. But in most cases they do not survive. And official military records for the most part betray little of the genuine political stance of those who compiled them. So it is probably true to say that fewer notable advances in research have been made into the mentality of higher officers of the Wehrmacht than in the case of rank-and-file soldiers.

This is why this impressive edition put together by Sönke Neitzel is so valuable. He has uncovered and examined an unusual, and most revealing, source: the transcriptions of the bugged private conversations of high-ranking German officers in British captivity made by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre at Trent Park, near Enfield in Middlesex, and now kept in the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) in London. Unlike the countless postwar interrogations, in which those being interrogated could conceal or distort a great deal in the answers they gave to specific questions by their captors, these were unstructured conversations freely held among Germans themselves, touching upon most sensitive issues relating to attitudes towards the German leadership and knowledge of war crimes. And, as Professor Neitzel demonstrates, the conversations were openly carried out without any awareness that they were being overheard and recorded. Moreover, the bugging of the German officers’ conversations dates back to 1942. That is, their recorded views derive not from a time when Hitler’s Germany already lay in ruins. They were not retrospective assessments of a fallen regime made with a careful eye on avoiding incriminating statements that could be used in a court, but were contemporary comments among more or less equals which offer a unique insight into the thinking of German generals and other officers of high rank long before the regime collapsed.

Professor Neitzel points out that the prisoners of war whose views he has assembled for us are not a representative sample of German officers. The first prisoners were taken in North Africa in 1942–43 and there was a continuing influx after the D-Day landings in June 1944 and the subsequent battles in Normandy, down to the push into the Reich itself. The experience of the Eastern Front, where of course the worst of the fighting and worst of the atrocities (including the slaughter of the Jews) took place, was limited for many of the prisoners whose words are recorded here. Even so, most of those captured had served on various fronts, often including the east, and some of them were ready and able to speak of terrible atrocities which they witnessed. If not representative in any scientific fashion, the German officers’ views reproduced in this volume are certainly indicative of a wide spectrum of opinion, ranging from diehard Nazi attitudes to long-held, outrightly oppositional stances.

The polarisation of attitudes towards Hitler and the Third Reich is most plainly demonstrated, as Professor Neitzel shows, in the strongly maintained views of the very first two prisoners, General Thoma (anti-Nazi) and General Crüwell (an ardent supporter of the regime). An interesting facet of the edition is the way these two became the focal points of cliques, dividing largely on political or ideological lines. Professor Neitzel’s findings indicate that no obvious sociological or denominational differences determined the shaping of Nazi or anti-Nazi stances, but that the crucial factor was the specific experience of the war, coupled with a varying readiness among the individual officers to reflect critically on the recent past.

The fact that, down to the very end of the Third Reich, such strong divisions between the captured German officers about their attitude towards the Nazi regime, and towards Hitler personally, could be sustained highlight the impossibility at crucial earlier stages, before the war, of building any reliable base of opposition within the Wehrmacht. The isolation of the then Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck, when he resigned during the Sudeten crisis of 1938, or the hesitancy and ambivalence of his successor, Franz Halder as the crisis brewed to its climax in the weeks before the Munich Conference, become all the easier to understand when we see the attitudes represented in this edition of the military elite several years later, and after all that had transpired in the meantime.

It was not just a matter of expressly Nazi opinion among the generals. Nazified officers were, in fact, in a minority at Trent Park, as they surely were generally by this phase of the war. Strong antipathy towards the regime was far more commonplace. But most strikingly prevalent is the evidence of strong German patriotic and Prussian values. These had been a characteristic feature of the officer corps throughout the Third Reich. Though distinct from fully-fledged pro-Nazi views or sympathy with the regime, they overlapped to the extent that they disabled, or at least hindered, moves to direct oppositional action. Reflections of this could still be registered among the prisoners of war in Trent Park. Though, for instance, some expressed regret that Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life had failed, others disapproved of the bomb-plot and saw it as irreconcilable with their sense of honour. Another indication was the lingering imprint of the oath taken to Hitler in 1934. And even when the generals in British captivity took the view that Hitler’s subsequent actions had relieved them from their oath, they still felt bound by a sense of Prussian honour to continue the fight. Almost all still took the view that it was an officer’s duty to fight to the last bullet (though few actually adhered in practice to their own prescribed code of ethics in this regard). So they not only for the most part strongly criticised General Paulus for his surrender in Stalingrad, but, even when claiming that it was madness to continue the war, rejected out of hand the notion that commanders on the Western Front should cease fighting and thereby open the way for the advance of the Anglo-Americans. Here, the plain implication was that the fight against the Soviets should not be given up, but would proceed with western help, another idea that had gained ground in leading Nazi circles in the latter part of the war. And the captured officers refused to contemplate taking part in BBC broadcasts or other anti-German propaganda, which they still regarded as treasonable. Even in the regime’s very last days, the generals struggled to reach agreement on a letter they eventually sent to Churchill only after Hitler’s death, offering (of course, in their own interest) to help bring about a ‘renewal’ in Germany ‘in the spirit of western Christianity’.

This edition also makes clear that knowledge of atrocities on the grand scale in Eastern Europe was extensive among Germany’s military elite – even those who found themselves in British captivity long before the end of the war. The transcripts of the bugged conversations include firsthand descriptions of the mass shooting of Jews (and no shortage of Nazified parlance betraying deep anti-Jewish sentiments). They also reveal recognition of the scale of the killing of Jews, and also of Poles, Russians and others. One account, and dating from as early as the end of 1943, indeed reckoned that three to five million Jews had already been wiped out. General von Choltitz, captured at the fall of Paris (where he had presided as city commander), even admitted, something not previously known, that he had systematically carried out orders for the liquidation of Jews in his area (probably the Crimea in 1941–42). For the most part, however, the blame was attached squarely to the Nazi leadership, and above all to the SS. The draft of the letter written to Churchill at the end of April 1945 acknowledged the need for punishment of those guilty of the regime’s crimes – atrocities, it was claimed, committed almost exclusively by the SS, crimes of which only a small portion of the German people were aware, and then merely through rumour. One general, when the draft letter was being discussed, accepted that that it was useful to put it that way and that they were looking for a scapegoat. It shows that the ‘legend of the “unblemished” Wehrmacht’ was also being created by German generals even in captivity, and even before the Third Reich fell.

It is the great merit of Professor Neitzel’s research that it opens up to us these previously untapped rich sources for exploring the mentality of representatives of Germany’s military elite in the phase when the war had turned irredeemably against the Third Reich, and down to the collapse of the Hitler regime. For this excellent edition, we are very much in his debt.