Tapping Hitler's Generals

Thoma commanded a panzer division from July 1941 and received the Knight’s Cross for his efforts during the Soviet winter offensive. At Rommel’s request he arrived in Egypt in September 1942 as CO, Deutsches Afrika Korps. Bachelor Thoma was a military man through and through, personally brave and always to be found in the front line.[91] Wounded on numerous occasions, he was undoubtedly an inspired soldier. British military theoretician Liddell Hart described him as a tough but loveable character, an enthusiast who loved battle for its own sake, who fought without hate and respected all his enemies. In middle age he had found contentment as a knight-errant. His critical mind enabled him to see beyond his own backyard and to analyse politics and strategy.[92] As a result of his analysis of tactical experiences during the Polish campaign, in November 1939 he warned that it had not yet been proved that panzer divisions could reach their objectives against a modern well-equipped and well-led enemy in the absence of air supremacy.[93]

At a commanders’ conference on the Eastern Front on 21 March 1942 when General Friedrich Materna reported Hitler as saying recently that Britian was taking giant strides towards its Bolshevisation, Thoma countered immediately, ‘We will be ripe for bolshevisation ten times sooner than the British.’[94]

The memoirs of Generalleutnant Theodor von Sponeck, CO, 90th Light Division in North Africa and an inmate at Trent Park with Thoma, mention a meeting on 2 October 1942 on the El Alamein front:

General Thoma, a typical Bavarian, engaged me at once in a long conversation from which I inferred that he took a very black view of the future. Clever and open-minded, but in many things blinkered, he was consumed by a raging hatred for the Hitler regime which he could barely conceal. At the time this was dangerous, but not in the African desert, surrounded by colleagues who thought highly of his personal bravery.[95]

Thoma’s front-line experience was forged not only from German victories, but also by the catastrophe before Moscow in the winter of 1941 and the oppressive material superiority of the British at El Alamein. Nevertheless his critical assessment of the war situation was based not only on these major reverses. When Thoma was captured on 4 November 1942 during the hard fighting for a hill in the Egyptian desert,[96] the Wehrmacht held most of the Caucasus and the Volga, while all of Libya and half of Egypt were in German hands. Very few Wehrmacht commanding generals of the time can have had such a pessimistic and–as we now know–realistic vision as Thoma who, according to his own admission while at OKH, was denounced as a defeatist.[97] He thus had the capability to analyse the general situation shrewdly, and this explains his efforts in August 1942 to resist his transfer to Egypt, where he considered the situation unpromising.[98]

From the time preceding his capture there is unfortunately little material on Thoma. A 16-page memorandum to Army C-in-C (ObdH) von Brauchitsch composed in October 1940 and in which he ‘foresaw the whole thing’ (Document 14) can be found neither in the rudimentary files of General der Schnellen Truppen nor those of the ObdH. Similarly, the two-page letter to OKW in which Thoma allegedly protested against the mass shootings in White Russia (Document 84) also appears not to have survived.[99]

In his pocket calendar, Thoma made notes daily. For 1941–42 one finds no entries about politics or the war situation. Most notes are about the weather and describe where he is.[100] Only in captivity did he become more expansive. Here he noted in his diary that he had ‘a bad feeling’ when the preparations for the Russian campaign began in October 1940–a sentiment in which he was not alone.