Tapping Hitler's Generals

It is the great merit of Professor Neitzel’s research that it opens up to us these previously untapped rich sources for exploring the mentality of representatives of Germany’s military elite in the phase when the war had turned irredeemably against the Third Reich, and down to the collapse of the Hitler regime. For this excellent edition, we are very much in his debt.

Ian Kershaw, 2007

PREFACE

The secret British transcripts of German prisoners of war have proven to be an extraordinarily rich source of research material on the Wehrmacht. These transcripts were presented to the public for the first time in a comprehensive manner in the German edition, Abgehört (2005). The study appeared initially in German and was then translated into five languages,[a] including the English edition, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, which was published in 2007.

In Germany, the book has been received with great interest by both scholars and the broad public, resulting in two hardcover and six paperback editions. The conversations about war crimes, the war of annihilation, and what soldiers knew about the Holocaust aroused particular interest: Spiegel’s headline was ‘Bestien beim Beichten’ (‘Beasts in the Confessional’), the Bildzeitung described them as ‘Abhörprotokollen des Grauens’ (‘secret transcripts of horror’), and in the Welt am Sonntag, the famous German literary critic Fritz Raddatz wrote about ‘Ansichten einiger Clowns’ (‘statements of various clowns’) and gave vent to all of his hatred for the generals of the Wehrmacht.

Statements from right-wing extremists represent the other end of the spectrum. The weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit contested the value of the transcripts, claiming that because the recorded discussions were facilitated by stool pigeons, and because the generals must have known without a doubt that they were being bugged, they intentionally gave false information. The original recordings no longer exist, making it impossible to confirm the authenticity of the transcripts, leading Junge Freiheit to claim that these transcripts are nearly worthless as a source. In internet forums, there have even been assertions that the transcripts are forgeries. Timo von Choltitz, the son of Dietrich von Choltitz, one of the generals mentioned in Tapping Hitler’s Generals, even had the Stuttgart state office of criminal investigation analyse the typefaces of the transcripts to confirm his suspicion that they were a fake. The examination of course did not reveal any irregularities–yet he continues to believe that the transcripts are forged.

Another commentator wrote on the internet: ‘Neitzel is one of those innumerable biased assembly-line scribes, of the kind that I met enough of at university, who unfortunately constitute the majority of Germany’s popular educators–that’s all you really need to know.’ Reactions of this kind illustrate that, despite the passing of the eyewitness generation, there is still an apologetic trend in Germany that finds its voice first and foremost in the new media. Of course the size of this scene cannot be estimated because it neither participates in scholarly discourse nor does it have access to the mainstream media. We certainly cannot disregard statements of this kind merely because they do not appear in the established media; nevertheless, we should also not overstate their impact. The myth of the clean Wehrmacht was destroyed long before the publication of Abgehört–a fact of which the international community is often not aware.

Reducing the Wehrmacht to crime and murder, or simply ignoring such topics, clearly does not contribute to the propagation of scholarly knowledge and often says more about the author than about the historical subject at hand. Such arguments do, however, emphasise once more how emotional debates in Germany are today, almost seventy years after the end of World War II, even if the controversy unleashed by the ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht’ (‘Crimes of the German Wehrmacht’) exhibition in the 1990s has calmed down in the meantime.

Scholars also received Abgehört with a great deal of interest, and the focus here was also on the chapter on crimes. The other aspects of the study–such as perceptions of Hitler and National Socialism in general, the 20 July attempt on Hitler’s life, or the question of whether and when the captured German generals wanted to collaborate with the British–received significantly less attention.