Tapping Hitler's Generals

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.