Tapping Hitler's Generals

Sönke Neitzel TAPPING HITLER’S GENERALS Transcripts of Secret Conversations 1942–45

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.