Tapping Hitler's Generals

It is therefore all the more pleasing that the transcripts were able to inspire a broad debate about Erwin Rommel and the resistance against Hitler. A new feature film on Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was aired on German television (ARD) on 1 November 2011. This led to a larger discussion of the question of whether Rommel knew about the attempt on Hitler’s life and had endorsed it, making him a resistance fighter at the last minute. In Trent Park, General Heinrich Eberbach spoke several times of his conversation with Rommel on 17 July 1944, when Rommel revealed to Eberbach that Hitler had to be killed. This conversation is particularly valuable because Eberbach was the last person to speak with Rommel before he was severely wounded in the late afternoon of 17 July 1944, and Eberbach related his impressions just seven weeks later in Trent Park. Even if we cannot prove with ultimate certainty that Rommel was aware of the assassination plot, these transcripts provide strong evidence that he was one of the insiders in July 1944.

This example shows yet again that the transcripts are a quite ambivalent source that is not completely without its problems. With careful contextualisation and comparison with other documents, however, they can lead to far-reaching new findings and the reevaluation of interpretations that have become all too cherished. The transcripts published in Tapping Hitler’s Generals have thus demonstrated with a clarity that has to date not been surpassed, to return once again to the study’s core aspect, that German generals perceived the war in very different ways. Although they were all part of the same functional elite, had gone through very similar careers, hailed from a similar social environment and had had very similar experiences on the front, they had widely divergent views on National Socialism, Hitler, the course of the war and the crimes committed in it.

This fragmentation of perceptions is epitomised by the dispute between the generals Ludwig Crüwell and Wilhlem Ritter von Thoma, who fought with one another for more than one and a half years in Trent Park. Both were born in the early 1890s, fought as young infantry officers in World War I, commanded Panzer divisions on the Eastern Front in 1941, and rose to become commanders-in-chief of the German Africa Corps. And yet they had completely different interpretations of their experiences. While Crüwell staunchly believed in National Socialism, Thoma was violently anti-Nazi. Tobias Seidl, in his PhD thesis at the University of Mainz, has conducted a comprehensive examination of the heterogeneity of the generals in Trent Park and further differentiated them from one another. His study confirms the main finding that one may speak of homogeneity in terms of the actions taken by German generals, yet not with regard to their perceptions and interpretations.[b]

In comparison to Germany, reactions to Tapping Hitler’s Generals in Great Britain and the USA were significantly more objective among the broader public. There were no accusations of revisionism from these quarters, nor any suspicion that the sources could have been forged. The generally more sober response may have to do with the fact that the book was received, especially in Great Britain, by an audience interested in scholarship.

The publication of a selected number of transcripts of German generals was, of course, merely the first step in the evaluation of a total inventory of about 50,000 pages of secret transcripts of German and Italian soldiers held by the British. In 2006, I also discovered an even larger archive of surveillance documents of American provenance. The US intelligence services eavesdropped on 3,000 German soldiers held in Fort Hunt near Washington D.C., from 1942 to 1945. A total of 102,000 pages of interrogation reports, CVs and secret transcripts have been handed down. In order to assess the British and American material, the social psychologist Harald Welzer and I started a project (‘Reference frames of war’) funded by the Gerda Henkel and Fritz Thyssen Foundations. By the end of 2011, four post-docs, three PhD candidates and eleven masters’ students had researched the material systematically and from different perspectives. The project has resulted thus far in six monographs, an anthology and numerous scholarly articles.[c] Furthermore, we are cooperating with a similarly situated research project at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Sciences in Vienna, which is performing research on the attitudes of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers. There is also a dissertation that illuminates the role of British human intelligence in World War II, which will determine the value of the bugged holding facility in the overall system of Allied intelligence architecture.[d]