Tapping Hitler's Generals

BROICH: Yes, a desire for revenge and fear of partisans of course.

EBERBACH: The ‘Sunday Times’ says that the Russians already report the use of hand grenades by civilians and therefore they are forced to wipe out everyone.[138] What they so bitterly resented when we did it is now being done by them as a matter of course.

BROICH: Besides they maintain that we wiped out great numbers too.

EBERBACH: Any day now you can expect someone to say of his own accord: ‘I won’t carry on any more, we must finish it.’ Any armistice would be better than this destruction.

BROICH: You must remember that, on the other hand, there are a lot of people who are very afraid they’ll be hanged immediately.

EBERBACH: That’s just it.

BROICH: They don’t listen to the news as much as we do, but nevertheless, if the German wireless broadcasts: ‘BEUTHEN has been evacuated, there is fighting to the north of BRESLAU’–if they announce that, everyone must realise what’s up.

EBERBACH: It is very difficult–

BROICH: To know where to start; it could be done by the ‘Korps’ if the divisional commander agrees; every divisional commander will need to have a regimental commander in his ‘Division’ who is utterly in agreement with him, so that he could do it by issuing false orders; it isn’t as difficult as all that.

EBERBACH: The English and Americans should be made to get a move on.

BROICH: If we don’t do anything else: either we must surrender or, as divisional commander, I should place my reserves at a wrong point and then when the Allies attack at that point I could always say I had made a mistake.

EBERBACH: RUNDSTEDT can do quite a lot on his own; he can say: ‘I can let you have twenty ‘Divisionen’ for the East–I’ll tie down the enemy in the West.’

BROICH: Yes. ‘I’ll guarantee to hold the front’, etc. All he has to do then is to move his troops to the wrong place and all is up. I can’t understand why they don’t set about it.

[…]

HEIM: It isn’t true that all our leaders are spineless.

EBERBACH: No!

HEIM: Who creep and crawl to him the moment they come before him, as one likes to picture it, but on the contrary he has a remarkable hypnotic power.

EBERBACH: Yes, that’s it. Incidentally it must have been similar with NAPOLEON and people like that.[139]

HEIM: Does he obtain this influence consciously or is it always there, or partly one, partly the other?

EBERBACH: Partly one, partly the other.

HEIM: He knows it and makes full use of it. He probably doesn’t quite know wherein it lies, but he is conscious of it and uses it. Do you think that there are some people who do not come under his hypnotic influence?

EBERBACH: Yes, there are.

HEIM: I didn’t actually take that man Thomale[140] particularly seriously, he is so extraordinarily obliging, but I only knew him at the school at DRESDEN.

EBERBACH: (Laughing) A man who has had the face to make jokes about the FÜHRER, all premeditated, in order to win him over on to his side. He has tremendous powers of deliberation, a free and independent man. In some respects they are perhaps similar. THOMALE is another of those people who won’t let anyone else get a word in, he’s enormously effervescent, of tremendous vitality and it is a question of vitality against hypnotic influence and a man like that is not easy to get the better of!

HEIM: But GUDERIAN is effervescent too.

EBERBACH: GUDERIAN is older, he is not a person who has that inner vitality.

HEIM: In my opinion, as soldiers and comrades of GUDERIAN,[141] there’s one thing we must keep saying: GUDERIAN is not spineless, GUDERIAN is no fool, on the contrary, there are other forces at work here.

EBERBACH: Well, I don’t think GUDERIAN should have agreed to the offensive in the West, which drew off quite considerable forces from his front.

HEIM: I don’t believe he was asked, he had the Eastern front, and it’s a principle of HITLER’s who saw this problem coming–of choosing either the East or the West–to say: “I won’t have anyone here who is to have any say beside me in these matters, so I shall send GUDERIAN to the East.”

EBERBACH: But GUDERIAN has the East and was bound to say: “I can’t spare one ‘Division’ here, on the contrary, I must have additional ‘Divisionen’, because the Russian offensive will start, and we know what that looks like.”

HEIM: Do you know for certain that he didn’t say that? We don’t know!

Document 63

CSDIC (UK), GRGG 259

Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 11–13 Feb. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]

CHOLTITZ: How do you picture your life in the future?

VATERRODT: I have no idea at all at the moment. After all, they can’t turn all the officers out on to the street! That’s impossible! Because the Americans–and the English–have at least an interest in seeing that they are not all idling on the streets.

CHOLTITZ: The civil service has to a large extent been Nazified. It must be replaced in some form or other. I should not be surprised at all if they used at least some of us for minor posts.