Tapping Hitler's Generals

The Geneva Convention allowed the prisoners to exchange correspondence regularly with relatives through the Swiss protecting power. The prisoners could send letters or postcards. These would take between two weeks and four months to arrive. Since they were censored, the old German script was not permitted. It was rare for any political or military information to be passed in them because the communications were read by the British and German controls. Georg Neuffer complained to his wife on 26 August 1943 that his letters ‘in the manner of things so lack content that they finish up always saying the same things’. Thus the generals wrote mainly about the camp’s lovely surroundings and their daily occupations. Only a few varied from this practice: on 10 July 1943 Generalleutnant Gotthard Franz wrote to his wife: ‘All will be well. The nation which produced Luther, Kant, Goethe and Beethoven, will never die’ (TNA, DEFE 1/339).

The longer the war went on, the worse the air raids on German cities became, the more did concern for the well-being of those at home tend to dominate the mails. Generalleutnant Friedrich von Broich wrote on 4 October 1944 to his wife: ‘We are now hanging around here, debarred from playing our parts as soldiers and husbands and you women have to suffer for it and experience the war in its most dreadful form. That is such a paradox. One can go off the deep end over it and can find no peace at nights on account of one’s thoughts’ (TNA, DEFE 1/339).

The British suspected generals Arnim, Crüwell and Hülsen, Konter-admiral Meixner and colonels Buhse and Wolters of passing military information to Germany by means of secret codes. It is certain that in a letter to his wife dated 15 July 1944 Konteradmiral Paul concealed a message in which he relayed his grave belief that ‘the enemy has all the codes’ (NA, RG 319, entry 745001, Box 10).

Trent Park offered many comforts which the generals sorely missed when they arrived at other camps in October 1945.[54] The contrast to the ghastly reality of the battlefields of Europe could scarcely have been greater: ‘Peace, beauty, life here–war, devastation, death [there]…’ The only reminders that a war was in progress at all were the German air raids on London in February and March 1944.[55] From June 1944 to March 1945 the inmates had the opportunity to experience the V-weapons offensive on London. In January 1945 a V-1 flew over Trent Park and exploded two miles away. A V-2 hit only a mile away from the main camp buildings. ‘It was depressing to see the daily departure of the powerful bomber formations, which returned, from our number counts, with hardly their plumage ruffled,’ Franz Lex noted (Franz Lex, diary, p. 22). These were, however, the only ‘occurrences’ in the tranquil life at Trent Park. ‘It is as if we were living in a quite unreal world,’ Generalleutnant Ferdinand Heim wrote of the atmosphere at the centre:

What we heard probably penetrated our consciousness, like the distant surf of a spring high tide, but our lives remained untouched by it. We took our meals each day when the gong sounded, every day we saw the same faces, the same English countryside, the same sky: we read, we played, we wrote, we meditated day after day as if there were nothing more natural in the world.[56]

The calm, peaceful atmosphere of the estate, combined with endless free time, allowed the generals time to reflect on the war and their experiences of it.[57] For the first time in their lives the majority were associating with many colleagues of equal rank who had shared much the same experiences and it was not humanly possible to remain silent on major subjects of common concern. How would the war turn out? How could the defeats be explained? Had the Germans brought upon themselves a special guilt?

Heim wrote of Trent Park: