‘However highly we may esteem bravery and steadfastness in war, there is however a point beyond which holding-out in warfare can only be described as the madness of despair, and can therefore never be approved,’ Clausewitz wrote in Vom Kriege.[190] The German generals of World War II rejected the Prussian military theoretician in favour of Hitler.
Complicity? Thoughts on Politics, Ideology and Personal Responsibility
In the quiet and seclusion of Trent Park the captured generals also reflected on general political questions. Even if this theme was not central to their conversations, the differing attitudes to the Third Reich, the role of the military in the State and the problems of personal responsibility can be clearly seen in the protocols. In retrospect, Crüwell saw no negative side to Hitler’s political system. It had been the aim of the Führer to seize mastery of the independent states of Europe and so save Western culture (Document 2). The war had been necessary for Germany to recognise itself as the most important State on the continent. Crüwell was certain in addition that the Germans were the most human of the races, the few SS atrocities being only the ‘outpourings of the concerned’. These remarks from 1942 are obviously set against a quite different background to those expressed by other generals in 1944–45. Whether Crüwell changed his opinion following the military collapse and the reports about the death camps is not known, but during his stay at Trent Park until his departure in June 1944 he did not depart from his pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi position.[191]
Many others went through a purification process at Trent Park, however, and confessed their fault: ‘Of course, we let ourselves be taken in, too, there’s no doubt about that […] During the time that I was laying alone in hospital, a lot of things became clear to me,’ Oberst Kessler agreed (Document 28). Some prisoners admitted freely to having been pro-Nazi in the past or to have seen the system as ‘ideal’ (e.g. Ludwig Krug, Walter Köhn). It had, after all, ‘done some good, lifted us up out of the mud and also got rid of the scourge of unemployment. Moreover the State had made us officers what we are. Correspondingly, one had to remain loyal to it. Irregularities had been dismissed per the maxim “You cannot plane a plank without shavings falling.”’ ‘It had not been so bad in 1933–34,’ Oberst Müller-Römer said: after a decent beginning, however, the whole movement had degenerated. ‘It was rotten at the core, they had evil intentions,’ Oberst Reimann concluded (Document 28).
Hitler’s central role in the Nazi Movement had not always been recognised. Generalmajor Gerhard Franz, long active in the General Staff and assessed by the British as highly intelligent, saw injustice and crime as originating from within Hitler’s entourage rather than from Hitler himself (Document 79). The image of Hitler as the victim of his advisers was not shared by many at Trent Park. Thoma doubtless spoke the harshest words against Hitler: he was inwardly simply evil, a Mephistopheles who belonged in a padded cell. Johannes Bruhn admitted, ‘One must shake one’s head in disbelief that we all followed this madness’ (Document 73).[192]
Yet if Hitler was so transparently a criminal, as Generalleutnant von Schlieben thought, why did the Wehrmacht buckle under him? The High Command, so it is widely held, had failed completely, and its complacent dealings had led to the ‘inner slide’[193] of the Wehrmacht. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine C-in-Cs, the Army Groups and the Chief of the Army General Staff should have kept Hitler in check (Document 60).[194] Another widely held belief was that Hitler could have been controlled by warnings from a clear consensus of the senior generals challenging his war plans (Köhn, Müller-Römer). This merely goes to show how little about Hitler’s personality many officers were able to understand.
It is scarcely surprising that the responsibility for Germany’s military defeat should be blamed on the Party and the spineless OKW generals who had executed the Führer’s absurd orders. Thoma noted in his diary on 11 February 1945: ‘And what will history say of the immense cowardice of the accomplices and hangers-on?’.[195] Even if one distanced himself from the generals, there was still a united front to reject the accusation by Hitler and the National Socialist leaders, expressed ever more vehemently with time, that the generals had failed, and sabotaged the war (e.g. Documents 30, 148).[196]
In the open atmosphere of Trent Park, a few generals did admit to their personal responsibility. ‘There is not one of us, who is not to blame for this human tragedy. This time for thought which I have enjoyed here was very necessary for me. The Bible, Sophocles, Goethe, Shakespeare, they all helped. And nature, too’ wrote General Heinz Eberbach in a letter to his wife in July 1945 (TNA, DEFE 1/343). General von Choltitz even confessed, that he had misled his men into believing ‘this shit’ and had motivated people who still saw the officer corps as ‘something worthy’ to go along with the regime unthinkingly. ‘I feel thoroughly ashamed!’ he said, ‘Maybe we are far more to blame from those uneducated cattle who in any case never hear anything else at all.’ (Document 44). Of course, such self-criticism never found its way into a general’s memoirs, including Choltitz’s. Despite his remarkable statement, Choltitz did not go so far as to align himself with Thoma, whose verdict was that the German people and Army had lost their honour. Here Thoma was out on a limb.
Finis Germaniae? The Inmates of Trent Park Reflect on the Future
When the prisoners at Trent Park considered the future, their main concerns were about themselves and their families. Rumours about how long captivity would last, forcible transfer to the Soviet Union or the threat of war crimes tribunals featured prominently.[197] Others lamented the loss of property. General Holste complained: ‘I was a man who had three estates, all of that is now gone. I have nothing but the shirt I stand up in.’[198] Similar observations do not recur frequently in the protocols, and one assumes that it was preferred to confide them to diaries and letters.[199] All prisoners shared a primitive fear that Germany could turn Communist, either because the German people would take refuge in it willingly in the chaos and collapse of National Socialism, or because the Red Army would occupy the Reich before the Allies did so. Using the style of Nazi propaganda, Ramcke compared the ‘Red Peril’ to the threat to the West presented by Genghis Khan.[200] Even if all did not quite see it so bluntly, it was held unanimously that Communism would mean slavery, oppression and death. A few would have been happy to make common cause with Britain against Bolshevism.[201] Only Georg Neuffer, and to some extent Müller-Römer, thought about the Russians in a more positive way. Neuffer was the only inmate at Trent Park who could read and speak Russian and frequently remarked that the propaganda picture of the primitive, retarded Soviet was not a true one.[202]
Apparently little thought was given to the medium- or long-term future of Europe. The overwhelming events of recent years were too difficult for military minds to assimilate and so see a way forward for Europe and Germany in the future. One of the few exceptions was Eberhard Wildermuth, who had been active politically pre-war. At the end ‘of our Thirty Years’ War’ he said,
191
By contrast he did not react positively to Goebbels’s speech of 18.2.1943, see Document 7.
194
In the published protocols, remarks were made by Thoma, Neuffer, Felbert and Hennecke. There are similar expressions in the unpublished material, see e.g. GRGG 139, 3.6.1944 (Bassenge), GRGG 180, 25–26.8.1944 (Spang), TNA WO 208/4363.
195
On 23.10.1943 he wrote of the higher generals, ‘None of them served the Fatherland, but were the stooges of a sick man who could not think clearly. How bitter a thing that the Fatherland will be destroyed because of it.’ He criticised Hitler’s advisers and adjutants in similar vein in the 30.1.1944 entry. BA/MA N2/3.
197
In autumn 1944, Bassenge spread the rumour that all ranks from Oberst upwards would be put on trial after the war. GRGG 216.26, 28.10.1944, TNA WO 208/4363.
199
Thus Wildermuth’s worries about his family expressed in his diary take on a central importance. Wildermuth Diary, BA/MA NL 251/73.
200
For the general hatred of Communism see e.g. GRGG 25, GRGG 26, TNA WO 208/ 4363, SRX 1581 13.2.1943, TNA WO 208/4162.
201
See e.g. GRGG 178, 23.8.1944 (Aulock), GRGG 181, 25.8.1944 (Choltitz), TNA WO 208/4363.