Tapping Hitler's Generals

After World War II, the German generals largely rejected criticism of their role in the Third Reich and sought refuge in an alibi which said that they had fought an honourable war, had either scant or no knowledge of major atrocities, and that the military defeat was due mainly to Hitler’s meddling at High Command level. The extent to which publications by former generals[1] shaped the image of the Wehrmacht for German postwar society remained, until recently, unexplored empirically. It emerges now, however, that as early as the 1950s public opinion and individual officers held a view of the Third Reich generals which did not coincide with that of ‘an unblemished Wehrmacht’.[2]

The work of the Personnel Special Studies Committee of the Bundeswehr demonstrates that from the earliest days of the Federal Republic the military has been more critical of its past than have judges, doctors or government administrators, while avoiding any major autopsy on its ranks. This is hardly surprising in view of the wartime devastation and the prevailing unsympathetic attitude of the public towards the Wehrmacht generals.

The historical research of the 1950s and 1960s was obliged to rely on accounts, primarily memoirs and approximately 2,500 reports dating from 1946–48, the result of an invitation by the US Army Historical Division to high-ranking Wehrmacht officers to write about their experiences at the front.[3] Only when the official documentation was returned to West Germany in the 1970s[4] was an evaluation of the role of the Wehrmacht and its senior commanders during World War II possible. Despite the great bulk of files, no comprehensive picture of the generals emerged, for the papers related mainly to military operations. Insight into the commanders of an army, or into Army-Group Staff, is rarely to be gained from official war diaries, operational planning and situation analysis. Private opinions on directives from ‘above’, about political convictions or pretended ‘military necessities’ are not documented in official papers and thus remain hidden from the historian.[5]

To get round this impasse the historian must fall back on letters and diaries. Such material tends to be scanty and by reason of being in private hands is often of only limited accessibility.[6] The extent to which a military commander saw through the tangled web of politics and war crimes, what he knew, what he suspected, what he refused to face up to, these remain misty to the present day, and only in the odd individual case can one get to the truth of the matter.[7] Our knowledge of what senior military personalities thought and knew is thus restricted. Admiral Dönitz, for example, knew from naval officers’ reports about mass shootings on the Eastern Front but how he dealt with this information, how he interpreted it and what inferences he drew from it can only be surmised.[8]

The London Public Record Office (PRO), since recently home to the British National Archive, is the repository of a vast wealth of material on the Wehrmacht and Third Reich which awaits thorough research, the transcripts relating to the secret monitoring of private conversations between German senior officers in British captivity being a case in point. In contrast to the interrogation of prisoners of war, in which the truthfulness of the subject’s replies may be doubtful,[9] the private unguarded conversations of German prisoners provide a true insight into their world of thinking and experience, since their guard was down.

The reproduction of this fascinating source allows us to clarify many important questions. How did German generals judge the general war situation? From what date did they consider the war lost? How did they react to the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944? What knowledge did they have of atrocities, either through their own experience or based on the reports of others? What importance did these explosive themes have on camp life? Were there differences of opinion, or enmity between individuals, perhaps conflict between the generations? To what extent was rank or front-line experience important?