Three days later he wrote,
The spectre of this war must be exorcised from the world once and for all. The State-philosophy of the Axis Powers is based principally on contempt for the individual, freedom and free speech. If we ever make this philosophy our own, our victory would become a defeat for all people… I cannot predict when the war will end, but I can say one thing: the year 1943 will bring us a good way back along the road to Berlin, Rome and Tokyo.[103]
Crüwell’s military career began in the Prussian Army, and at first sight it is similar to that of von Thoma. Crüwell also ended World War I as an Oberleutnant, but from then until September 1939 ascended more speedily. Both in the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht it had been his ambition to become a Staff Officer, but he was only at OKH in 1936 and 1939, and then never more than a few months. From October 1939 he was Senior Quartermaster, 16 Armee, in August 1940 he took command of 11 Panzer Division, with which he experienced the conquest of Belgrade and penetrated deep into the Ukraine in the first seven weeks of the Russian campaign. He arrived in North Africa on 15 August 1941 and was captured there on 29 May 1942. Unlike Thoma he was never long a senior military commander. After fighting at the front in Russia only during the lightning advances of the opening weeks, he was then part of the North African ‘sideshow’ from August 1941. When captured, German and Italian troops were on the verge of overrunning the British defences at Gazala near Tobruk and ejecting the British 8th Army from Libya.
Crüwell’s war was a war of German victories, favourable promotions and high decorations (Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves). He had had no experiences resembling those of Thoma at OKH, neither the ‘Napoleon Winter’ at the gates of Moscow, nor the struggle for supplies at El Alamein. Although reports from the front gave him worries and doubts, he did not infer from them that the war was lost (Document 8).[104] Even after Stalingrad he believed in a German victory and comforted himself in the face of Thoma’s many complaints with observations such as ‘The German Army is still the best in the world.’[105]
His political convictions can be seen more clearly from earlier in his career. Of the murder of General Kurt von Schleicher in 1934 he wrote in 1958 that it remained for him ‘incomprehensible and always shameful that the senior generals of the time accepted this murder… on that day Hitler lost his respect for the Wehrmacht.’[106] He told Thoma in their first conversation at Trent Park that he had become resigned after the Röhm-Putsch. He had never been a supporter of the system and had not been able to emulate Blomberg’s fast turn-around to accommodate the Third Reich. Being unable to change anything, from then on he had attended to his military duties only.[107] His indignation at the murder of Schleicher did not lead to his adopting an attitude of reservation towards the Third Reich, however, nor to condemn Hitler as being responsible for injustices and murders.[108]
Crüwell remained constant in his loyalty to the regime. In his Trent Park notes his closeness to National Socialist thinking is often apparent. On 2 July 1942 he gave the following advice to his four children born in the 1930s:
Love for the Fatherland is to some extent the religion of our time. Love this Greater Germany so that the struggle continues to the end, never allow yourself to be alienated from this love by pacifist and weak talk. This love demands sacrifices which you must always feel obliged to make unconditionally. Never, under any circumstances, marry a foreigner. You were all born in the era of Germany’s greatest upheaval. Never forget that your father fought in two wars for Germany for your future, he served the Third Reich and Führer, fought for him and was highly decorated by him.[109]
He wrote of the philosopher Schopenhauer that his theory of the preservation of the sub-species inherited from nature had ‘very much in it’.
From here the leap to the world political view of the Third Reich is not a large one.[110] From Oswald Spengler’s Preussentum und Sozialismus (published in 1920), he noted that he had not been aware of the menace of Bolshevism, but ‘it fostered the grand idea of the Third Reich. The thinking is partly timeless, correct and definitely very interesting.’[111]
His positive attitude to National Socialist geopolitics and racial theory is also frequently evident in his entries. The smallness of the Reich was in his opinion responsible for the rise of National Socialism,[112] a high spiritual and cultural standard for Volk and family could only be attained through closeness to Nature, simplicity of life, adversity and struggle,[113] and racial equality was ‘not the right path’. He believed that it would come to ‘a definite battle of the races’.[114] Sacrifice had an especial significance for Crüwelclass="underline" from the proclamation by the Führer of 9 November 1944 he jotted down ‘that life only acknowledges the highest worth in him who is willing and ready to sacrifice his life in order to preserve it’.[115]
The protocols confirm the sketch created by Crüwell’s notes. If anybody attempted to lambast the Führer, he would spring to his defence even though he admitted that ultimately Hitler was the man responsible for everything, including the military disasters.[116] Undoubtedly Crüwell had succumbed to Hitler’s aura, and he reported as if spellbound on his two meetings with him (Document 3). Even in 1958 he identified 1 September 1941, the day when he received from Hitler’s hand the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross, as the ‘culminating moment of my life as a soldier’.[117] He evaluated ‘the Führer as higher’ than Roosevelt. Hitler would be received by history in a different light, ‘there is no doubt about it’, he said in autumn 1942.[118] His thoughts while in the American camp for generals at Clinton prove that he never really understood Hitler’s intentions. On 3 September 1945 Crüwell wrote:
Not until after his great foreign policy successes early on did he (Hitler) lose the right course and, disappointed that Britain would not go along with his proposals, then began slowly and gradually more swiftly to depart from his originally cherished plans for peace and finally jettisoned them on 1 September 1939. But even then he was determined and convinced that the war with Poland could be contained.[119]
By burying his head in the sand, Crüwell ignored the painful realities which would have called his world picture fundamentally into question. Crüwell kept up the attitude of not wanting to know during all his captivity in England and also later in the United States. His differences of opinion with Thoma, who considered him a good soldier but ‘not spiritually strong enough’ to remain independent, therefore never changed.[120] Since both, with the exception of a few other prisoners, were alone together at Trent Park until May 1943, Crüwell was apparently prepared to tolerate Thoma beyond normal limits even though he ‘hated’ him.[121] Occasionally the pair even discovered points of mutual agreement. Both considered Goebbels’s speech of 18 February 1943 at the Sportpalast as ‘negative’ (Document 6), and both were at a loss to understand why Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad. Crüwell remarked, ‘I would have put a bullet through my head. So, I am bitterly disappointed!’ Thoma concurred and said that it was a dreadful thing that so many generals had been captured at Stalingrad.[122]
104
Typical of his attitude was his spontaneous reaction to a ‘Daily Telegraph’ report on 5 November 1942 on the retreat from El Alamein, ‘It makes you sick, but actually I had expected it.’ He comforted himself with Goebbels’s assurance that the war would be decided in Europe: SRX 1212, 5.11.1942, TNA WO 208/4161. For Crüwell’s hopes that despite everything the war could be won by the determination of the central leadership see SRX 1218, 31.10.1942, TNA WO 208/4161; for his reflections on the war situation see SRX 1149, 9.10.1942, TNA WO 208/4161; SRX 1535, 26.1.1943, TNA WO 208/4162; SRGG 342, 12.8.1943, TNA WO 208/4166. He remained unwavering at Trent Park. On 8.4.1944 he provided Admiral Meixner with a written comparison of the respective situations in 1917 and 1944 from which it is clear that he underestimated the Allies’ resources, and overestimated those of the Axis. In view of German coastal fortification work he considered an invasion unlikely and doubted that a Russian summer offensive could succeed. ‘The thing does not look hopeless’, he concluded. SRGG 892, 8.4.1944, TNA WO 208/4168, see also SRGG 819, 4.2.1944, TNA WO 208/4168.