Tapping Hitler's Generals

Do you know, the Americans and English and the rest made a terrific bloomer that time, which we never could understand or forget: the war was over in 1918 and the ‘fourteen points’ had been laid down; first of all there were the armistice conditions, then came the reparations conditions; then, from a people which had suffered from a four years’ blockade, which had had to submit to having all its imports cut and possessed only ‘ersatz’ materials, with even those in terribly short supply, and which was already burdened with a catastrophically high mortality rate among old people and babies, from that people were filched during 1920 and 1921 two hundred thousand milking cows, and the blockade was kept up for three more years.[103] Those three years of blockade plus the handing-over of those two hundred thousand milking cows and of all the other things we urgently needed, especially railway wagons, to distribute at least what we had got and transfer the potato harvest quickly from the east to the west, all that cost our country five hundred thousand human lives.[104] That was the cold-blooded murder, sheer murder which wasn’t made public. But this is blazoned out to the whole world: ‘See how the Germans have treated the Jews! Look how they destroyed that village in CZECHOSLOVAKIA.’ When HEYDRICH was murdered:[105] ‘Look at those poor people!’ But not a word was said about how those five hundred thousand people were murdered in cold blood during the years of 1919–20.

Document 43

CSDIC (UK), GRGG 210

Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 11–12 Oct. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]

CHOLTITZ: I don’t put it past HITLER to introduce the plague into GERMANY. Just imagine it: he takes half-a-dozen or so SS men and makes them wander about somewhere at the back of AACHEN, spreading the plague around. If the English and Americans catch it and don’t know how or from where, I wonder whether they would stay?[106]

SCHLIEBEN: That’s the question.

CHOLTITZ: Admittedly it would hit the German people as well, of course. But he’s perfectly capable of it!

SCHLIEBEN: Yes.

CHOLTITZ: He has himself inoculated first, and the tiny quantity of lymph which is available, since he is the only one who has prepared for it, will go to the men in the party.

SCHLIEBEN: Yes, it’s really quite a good idea.

CHOLTITZ: (laughs).

SCHLIEBEN: To spring a trap on those fellows with it at the end, when everything is lost.

CHOLTITZ: A good idea?

SCHLIEBEN: Well, I mean as a last resort, before everything–or don’t you think so?

CHOLTITZ: The only thing is that our own people would be done in by it, too.

SCHLIEBEN: Yes, that’s the rotten thing about it. What one ought to have are weapons to which one is immune oneself and which hurt only the other fellow.

BASSENGE: What do you think of HIMMLER’s speech?[107]

WAHLE: It dates back to June. I didn’t know that this morning, and then I don’t understand how the man can make a speech to a ‘Division’ and give them tactical instructions.

BASSENGE: The whole idea is a bit of a puzzle to me too. In that respect I greatly regret that attempted ‘Putsch’, because the Party will once again use that to full advantage when the crash comes, the fact that the ‘Generals’ sabotaged and so on.

WAHLE: That’s why I am very glad that the attempted ‘Putsch’ failed.

BAO: Now HIMMLER says that the senior German officers are to blame for everything.