Tapping Hitler's Generals

His political convictions can be seen more clearly from earlier in his career. Of the murder of General Kurt von Schleicher in 1934 he wrote in 1958 that it remained for him ‘incomprehensible and always shameful that the senior generals of the time accepted this murder… on that day Hitler lost his respect for the Wehrmacht.’[106] He told Thoma in their first conversation at Trent Park that he had become resigned after the Röhm-Putsch. He had never been a supporter of the system and had not been able to emulate Blomberg’s fast turn-around to accommodate the Third Reich. Being unable to change anything, from then on he had attended to his military duties only.[107] His indignation at the murder of Schleicher did not lead to his adopting an attitude of reservation towards the Third Reich, however, nor to condemn Hitler as being responsible for injustices and murders.[108]

Crüwell remained constant in his loyalty to the regime. In his Trent Park notes his closeness to National Socialist thinking is often apparent. On 2 July 1942 he gave the following advice to his four children born in the 1930s:

Love for the Fatherland is to some extent the religion of our time. Love this Greater Germany so that the struggle continues to the end, never allow yourself to be alienated from this love by pacifist and weak talk. This love demands sacrifices which you must always feel obliged to make unconditionally. Never, under any circumstances, marry a foreigner. You were all born in the era of Germany’s greatest upheaval. Never forget that your father fought in two wars for Germany for your future, he served the Third Reich and Führer, fought for him and was highly decorated by him.[109]

He wrote of the philosopher Schopenhauer that his theory of the preservation of the sub-species inherited from nature had ‘very much in it’.

From here the leap to the world political view of the Third Reich is not a large one.[110] From Oswald Spengler’s Preussentum und Sozialismus (published in 1920), he noted that he had not been aware of the menace of Bolshevism, but ‘it fostered the grand idea of the Third Reich. The thinking is partly timeless, correct and definitely very interesting.’[111]

His positive attitude to National Socialist geopolitics and racial theory is also frequently evident in his entries. The smallness of the Reich was in his opinion responsible for the rise of National Socialism,[112] a high spiritual and cultural standard for Volk and family could only be attained through closeness to Nature, simplicity of life, adversity and struggle,[113] and racial equality was ‘not the right path’. He believed that it would come to ‘a definite battle of the races’.[114] Sacrifice had an especial significance for Crüwell: from the proclamation by the Führer of 9 November 1944 he jotted down ‘that life only acknowledges the highest worth in him who is willing and ready to sacrifice his life in order to preserve it’.[115]

The protocols confirm the sketch created by Crüwell’s notes. If anybody attempted to lambast the Führer, he would spring to his defence even though he admitted that ultimately Hitler was the man responsible for everything, including the military disasters.[116] Undoubtedly Crüwell had succumbed to Hitler’s aura, and he reported as if spellbound on his two meetings with him (Document 3). Even in 1958 he identified 1 September 1941, the day when he received from Hitler’s hand the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross, as the ‘culminating moment of my life as a soldier’.[117] He evaluated ‘the Führer as higher’ than Roosevelt. Hitler would be received by history in a different light, ‘there is no doubt about it’, he said in autumn 1942.[118] His thoughts while in the American camp for generals at Clinton prove that he never really understood Hitler’s intentions. On 3 September 1945 Crüwell wrote: