Tapping Hitler's Generals

The protocols prove that knowledge of the atrocities was widespread in the upper echelons of the military command structure and reached those who would have remained ignorant of them in their particular service occupations.[208] This is not to say that in the end everybody knew everything. In the summer of 1945, discounting the assertions of Broich and Neuffer that every senior German officer knew all about the concentration camps since 1935,[209] it seems probable that many knew the dimensions of the Holocaust, for example, at least by rumour (Document 125).[210] Watching a newsreel film of the death camps at the end of September 1945, most prisoners reacted with honest shock (Document 143),[211] although some rejected the reports as Allied propaganda[212] indicating that by no means all prisoners condemned discrimination against, and the murder of, the Jews. On the contrary, even those prisoners whom the British considered ‘anti-Nazi’ on the basis of their political attitude supported the Jewish policy of the Nazi State. Reimann declared: ‘The business with the Jews in Germany was quite right, only it should have been done quietly’ (Document 40). Eberbach could accept the extermination of ‘a million Jews, or as many as we have killed’, although he drew the line after adult males: with respect to Jewish women and children, ‘that (was) going too far’. To this his son replied, ‘Well, if you’re going to kill off the Jews, then kill the women and children too, or the children at least’ (Document 37).

Racial-political discourses appear only rarely in the transcripts. Occasionally key words would crop up in the conversations such as ‘Jewish Commissar’, ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ or condemning Jews as ‘the plague of the East’.[213] Crüwell used National Socialist racial terminology.[214] He was certain that the United States was motivated by ‘the Jewish poison’, and this poison was behind the devastating bombing raids on Hamburg in July 1943. He also had proof, so he said, ‘that it is the Jews, who want to destroy us down to the last man’ (Document 13). When Thoma objected that in World War I highly decorated Jewish soldiers had been deported, Crüwell replied, ‘Such things are of course appalling, but one should not […] forget how the Jews have plagued us […] have been a miserable rabble […] how they exploited us. Therefore it came to pass that no Berlin city hospital had an Aryan doctor in a leading role.’[215] He added that ‘the step against the Jews had to happen legally.’[216]

The Trent Park generals attempted to conceal their own involvement in war crimes for understandable reasons. Nearly always they would point to the SS as the perpetrators:[217] the culpability of the Wehrmacht–and therefore their own person–was only touched upon exceptionally. The demarcation line between Wehrmacht and SS became tangible when SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer was given an icy welcome by his fellow prisoners at Trent Park (Document 114).[218] Protests were also made against Anton Dunckern, former leader of SS and police at Metz, being brought to the centre (Document 115).[219]

On the day of his arrival at Trent Park, Graf Rothkirch hit the nail on the head by admitting that in everything he said, he made sure to put it in such a way that the officer corps came out clean.[220] Only very few generals admitted at Trent Park to their own war crimes, and where they did they provided the justification for it as well.[221] Generalleutnant Menny, for example, admitted the immediate court martial and execution of men on the Eastern Front after the Russians broke through a gap created by troops leaving positions without authority. The executions were performed ‘there and then’ as an example to the others (Document 103). Freiherr von der Heydte admitted once having shot dead Allied prisoners in Normandy when his Fallschirmjäger-Regt. 6 needed to cross a river and the prisoners would have hampered their progress.[222]

General Ramcke stated that he had completely demolished Brest (Document 112); General Spang was uncomfortable with having signed a number of death warrants during actions against partisans in Brittany (Document 101).[223] General von Choltitz told von Thoma that the heaviest burden which he had to discharge was ‘the liquidation of Jews’ (Document 106). His involvement was unknown to researchers before this protocol came to light. The executions must have taken place in the Crimea. Unfortunately nothing further is known due to the poor documentary source.