Tapping Hitler's Generals

how few of the more than forty generals I have known in captivity personally fought to the end. It is of course simply right that every soldier and naturally a general should try everything, even the impossible. Even the impossible can be achieved by the general who has luck. How often have I escaped encirclements and other hopeless situations with my men after we had all long since abandoned hope of surviving.[176]

Not until the Allies had crossed the Rhine on a broad front did the majority think again about the ‘honourable’ struggle to the end. ‘I always used to consider it wrong to surrender, our people might have cracked badly and that might perhaps have proved disastrous in the future. But now we must give in, it’s simply madness,’ Ferdinand Heim acknowledged in March 1945 (Document 69). Two weeks previously he had received news that his wife and youngest son had been killed at Ulm on 17 December 1944 during a British air raid.[177] New arrivals provided the Trent Park community with ever-gloomier reports about the fighting, and reinforced the pessimists. ‘The bloody stupidity surrounding the German defeat is revealing itself as ever more grotesque and miserable,’ noted Eberhard Wildermuth in his diary on 18 May 1945 after listening to Generalleutnant Holste’s account of the fighting on the Elbe.[178]

General Kirchheim, who arrived in mid-March (Document 77), provided some interesting ideas on laying down arms. General Höhne had confided to him in the spring of 1945 that he considered all further resistance useless. Since the German people did not have a clear picture of the causes of the defeat, it was necessary to fight on to prevent another ‘stab in the back’ legend taking root–only in that way would the scale of the defeat and the failure of the National Socialist system become blatantly obvious to most Germans.[179]

Whatever insight they may have had into the approaching defeat, or lack of enthusiasm for a fight to the last, nevertheless the pro-Nazi generals maintained their morale. In mid-March 1945 several of them expressed indignation at a report by Oberstleutnant Kogler describing the devastating course of the air war and especially the defence of the Reich. As Wing Commander JG6, Kogler knew what he was talking about, but an Oberstleutnant did not have the competence to deliver such a wide-ranging criticism, or so Ramcke, Vaterrodt and Kittel believed.[180]

After listening to Goebbels’s speech on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1945, one of the officers rose to his feet halfway through the playing of the national anthem and switched off the radio. Generalleutnant Kittel was outraged: how could one sink so low as not to stand for the national anthem, and leave the room while it was playing? They were riff-raff and cowards, he told the assembly. It was better to fall at the front than finish up at Trent Park.[181] Eight days previously he had considered it essential to report to Germany by secret code ‘how these people such as Bassenge, Thoma and Co. behave. I think the admirals [Schirmer and Kähler] have done something like that already’ (Extract from SR Draft 3137/45 (GG), 12.4.1945, TNA WO 208/5622).

One of the valets was appalled to see the generals drinking wine on 8 May 1945 as if celebrating their own funerals. This was not the German spirit, it was a disgrace, and it merely proved, as General Bodenschatz remarked,[182] that the Führer was quite right when he described the generals as a ‘pack of filthy swine’.[183]