Tapping Hitler's Generals

WILDERMUTH: In carrying out the mass executions the SS did things which were unworthy of an officer and which every German officer should have refused to do, but I know of cases where officers did not refuse, and did do them, those mass executions. I know of similar things which were done by the army, and by officers. I personally always adopted the attitude that I wouldn’t obey an order like that because it’s against my honour as an officer; I’m not an executioner, I’m an officer. The question arises; are the majority of us of the view that the SS did things which some people possibly consider necessary from a political point of view, but which we, as officers, would never have done and therefore purposely left to people who are not officers. I don’t know whether one could get away with that attitude. It would be a very good thing politically if the German officers’ corps were to say: ‘We dissociate ourselves in that way from these people,’ but they could immediately confront us and say: ‘But if you please, in this instance the German Hauptmann So-and-so, or the German Oberst So-and-so did exactly the same thing as the SS.’

Document 115

CSDIC (UK), GRGG 226

Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 20–1 Nov. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]

MEYER: Do you know that I had an NCO shot at CAEN because he raped a girl?

EBERBACH: No.

MEYER: The fellow did the following: He was drunk and then went… where there were several women; he picked out a girl and forced her to guide him to the next village. The girl ran away and he re-entered her house, locked the girl in and finally raped her. The girl died. Thank God we succeeded in establishing the… the following morning and I had the fellow shot; I ordered the mayor and several municipal councillors to attend the execution. They had to watch it. Whereupon the mayor sent me word that he thanked me on behalf of the local population for the expeditious way in which the case had been handled. He regarded it as an offence committed by a criminal, not by a German soldier. He repeated those words at the funeral so that relations with the population were on a perfect footing once more and that matter had been cleared up.[276]

EBERBACH: (laughing) That’s something speaking in your favour. But I believe that the FÜHRER issued an order for the East that the raping of women and girls should not be… as a criminal offence, but only as a disciplinary–as terror was part of the rules of war.

MEYER: I never heard that.

EBERBACH: You haven’t been in the East for a long time. I don’t know that order either as it is a long time since I was there, but officers who were there recently, said that such a FÜHRER-order existed.

MEYER: That is… by that we undermine all that is best in the troops.

EBERBACH: That order wasn’t issued for the West, merely for the East.

MEYER: On the other hand, I know several officers who had Ukrainian girls during the winter of 1941–42 at TAGANROG–there were marvellous girls down there. Those officers, after having been before a Court of Honour, haven’t been promoted until this day.[277]

EBERBACH: I can’t make HIMMLER out at all; on the one hand, because he decided to have all the Jews massacred, consciously…

MEYER: Do you know why? HIMMLER is the most faithful executor of the FÜHRER’s orders. The FÜHRER used to say: ‘Should the Jews succeed once again in involving EUROPE in a war, it will not mean the destruction of the German people, but the annihilation of the Jewish race.’[278]

WILDERMUTH: A leader of the SD and police officer is not a real officer. I refuse to have anything to do with the SD.

THOMA: It occurs to me, because it said in the newspaper today that that man (Generalmajor DUNCKERN (PW))[279] is from the SD–perhaps I should ask for him to be sent somewhere else. I refuse to associate with those swine.

WILDERMUTH: So do I.

THOMA: All those who occupied any position of authority in the SD are nothing but murderers.

WILDERMUTH: They are all murderers.

THOMA: Perhaps the Waffen-SS is a little better.

WILDERMUTH: In the Waffen-SS there are men who did nothing beyond fighting bravely. One never knows what a man may have been involved in. That is the reservation I feel with regard to MEYER (PW). How do I know what crimes he may have committed?

THOMA: He was in RUSSIA and was picked out by the ‘Leibstandarte’!

BROICH: Anyone who is CO of the ‘Hitler Youth Division’ in 1944 must be a Nazi, that’s obvious. That man would be the first to shoot our wives and us if he were given the order to do so, just like all the others, and he’d do it with glee. Just like RAMCKE (PW), he is pretending to know nothing about it all.[280]

WILCK: His whole expression–

BASSENGE: He behaved quite sensibly today–

BROICH: That man is clever and knows the lie of the land exactly: he is reticent and pretends not to know anything.

WILCK: Of course he’d like to become one of us now.