we have not only lost the war and our independence as a State, but our self-respect and honour. We will be under foreign masters for the foreseeable future. These masters will split Germany into several parts – but the worst is that for years the great dividing line between East and West will run through Germany. It may be a permanent division. Before these major questions there are others, more urgent, more in the present: how many millions will starve to death? How will it be possible to rebuild agriculture, industry and transport communications? How are we to rebuild a political structure with self-administration and accountability? Schools? Universities? It seems that the German administration will not be uniform under the various victors – it seems to me doubtful then that the problem can be solved at all.[203]
Thoma, too, was thinking in concrete terms about postwar Europe. Many of his ideas were nebulous and not well thought through, but on some points he saw developments astoundingly clearly: there would be no reparations, German industry would work for the Allies. He doubted if Britain would succeed in building a new Poland because the Soviet Union was leaning heavily towards the West. This antagonism ‘had the seeds of World War Three in it’. It could happen that, shoulder to shoulder with British and French forces, even German formations might be ‘let loose’ against the Russians.[204]
3.2 ‘We Have Tried to Exterminate Whole Communities’. War Crimes in Trent Park Conversations
The protocols document a number of German war crimes: the deportation and internment of Jews in ghettoes, the murder of Jews in concentration camps and by mass shootings in the East, euthanasia, the shooting of hostages in Belgium, Serbia and Greece, the mass deaths of Russian PoWs, the liquidation of the Political Commissars, the shooting of German soldiers after quick court martials at the front and very occasionally rape.[205] At first sight it may be surprising to find that atrocities were given such coverage in the conversations.
The prisoners at Trent Park had been captured by the Allies exclusively in North Africa, France and finally in Germany, therefore in the theatres of war where the fewest infringements of international law were committed and utterly different from the way things had been done in Poland, the Soviet Union and the Balkans. Most generals fought on most of the fronts, especially in the East. Their knowledge of the crimes of the Wehrmacht and the National Socialist regime were comprehensive – the relevant protocols prove it. Naturally one must differentiate here betweeen who knew what and who was personally involved in which crimes.
Several generals reported having borne personal witness to war crimes: in words which have lost nothing of their horror after sixty years, Walter Bruns and Heinrich Kittel described the mass shooting of Jews at Riga and Däugavapil (formerly Dvinsk) (Documents 119, 135). Thoma, Neuffer and von Broich had also seen similar massacres on the Eastern Front.[206] Others saw the deaths of multitudes of Soviet prisoners (Neuffer, Reimann). Of death camps equipped with gas chambers, Kittel, Rothkirch and Trach, von der Heydte and Thoma[207] knew from reliable sources. It is noticeable that many crimes had been made known by acquaintances or relatives. Oberst Reimann was told of the Berditschev massacre in Ukraine by a police officer (Document 93). Eberhard Wildermuth learned of the euthanasia programme from his brother, a doctor at an asylum.
The protocols prove that knowledge of the atrocities was widespread in the upper echelons of the military command structure and reached those who would have remained ignorant of them in their particular service occupations.[208] This is not to say that in the end everybody knew everything. In the summer of 1945, discounting the assertions of Broich and Neuffer that every senior German officer knew all about the concentration camps since 1935,[209] it seems probable that many knew the dimensions of the Holocaust, for example, at least by rumour (Document 125).[210] Watching a newsreel film of the death camps at the end of September 1945, most prisoners reacted with honest shock (Document 143),[211] although some rejected the reports as Allied propaganda[212] indicating that by no means all prisoners condemned discrimination against, and the murder of, the Jews. On the contrary, even those prisoners whom the British considered ‘anti-Nazi’ on the basis of their political attitude supported the Jewish policy of the Nazi State. Reimann declared: ‘The business with the Jews in Germany was quite right, only it should have been done quietly’ (Document 40). Eberbach could accept the extermination of ‘a million Jews, or as many as we have killed’, although he drew the line after adult males: with respect to Jewish women and children, ‘that (was) going too far’. To this his son replied, ‘Well, if you’re going to kill off the Jews, then kill the women and children too, or the children at least’ (Document 37).
Racial-political discourses appear only rarely in the transcripts. Occasionally key words would crop up in the conversations such as ‘Jewish Commissar’, ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ or condemning Jews as ‘the plague of the East’.[213] Crüwell used National Socialist racial terminology.[214] He was certain that the United States was motivated by ‘the Jewish poison’, and this poison was behind the devastating bombing raids on Hamburg in July 1943. He also had proof, so he said, ‘that it is the Jews, who want to destroy us down to the last man’ (Document 13). When Thoma objected that in World War I highly decorated Jewish soldiers had been deported, Crüwell replied, ‘Such things are of course appalling, but one should not […] forget how the Jews have plagued us […] have been a miserable rabble […] how they exploited us. Therefore it came to pass that no Berlin city hospital had an Aryan doctor in a leading role.’[215] He added that ‘the step against the Jews had to happen legally.’[216]
The Trent Park generals attempted to conceal their own involvement in war crimes for understandable reasons. Nearly always they would point to the SS as the perpetrators:[217] the culpability of the Wehrmacht – and therefore their own person – was only touched upon exceptionally. The demarcation line between Wehrmacht and SS became tangible when SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer was given an icy welcome by his fellow prisoners at Trent Park (Document 114).[218] Protests were also made against Anton Dunckern, former leader of SS and police at Metz, being brought to the centre (Document 115).[219]
On the day of his arrival at Trent Park, Graf Rothkirch hit the nail on the head by admitting that in everything he said, he made sure to put it in such a way that the officer corps came out clean.[220] Only very few generals admitted at Trent Park to their own war crimes, and where they did they provided the justification for it as well.[221] Generalleutnant Menny, for example, admitted the immediate court martial and execution of men on the Eastern Front after the Russians broke through a gap created by troops leaving positions without authority. The executions were performed ‘there and then’ as an example to the others (Document 103). Freiherr von der Heydte admitted once having shot dead Allied prisoners in Normandy when his Fallschirmjäger-Regt. 6 needed to cross a river and the prisoners would have hampered their progress.[222]
205
The protocols contain few details reports about anti-partisan operations in the East. Von Schlieben told Bassenge about a large operation on the Eastern Front in which 2,000 prisoners had been shot by Russian auxiliary troops. GRGG 231.2, 6–7.12.1944, TNA WO 208/4364.
207
On 3.5.1945 Thoma wrote that the ‘horrors of the concentration camps far exceeded what one could accept, since one only heard the occasional rumour.’ Diary, BA/MA N2/3. What he actually knew about the extermination of the Jews is unknown; the entry might have been written to cover his back.
208
Thus von Thoma talked about the mass graves of Jews at Odessa and Sevastopol, places where he had never been. SRX 1739, 7.4.1943, TNA WO 208/4163. Kreipe found ‘shameful’ those ‘measures which had been taken to transfer the Jews out’, GRGG 139, 3.6.1944, TNA WO 208/4363.
210
Generalmajor Sattler, captured at Cherbourg on 27.6.1944 and who had fought in France and Russia stated, ‘When I think back on the rumours I heard about the shootings in Poland, then the Hungarian Jews, the shootings in the Balkans. In France there was a lot of truth in it – the shootings and so on.’ GRGG 168, 31.7.1944–1.8.1944, TNA WO 208/4363. Although he had heard of the atrocities, apparently he did not know the scale.
211
Other protocols show the horror of some inmates at the crimes against the Jews, see e.g. GRGG 231, 6–7.12.1944, TNA WO 208/4363. Wildermuth noted on 20.4.1945 about the Allied reports on the concentration camps, ‘The impression is fearsome. Even here amongst the generals. It is the moral sentence of death on Germany.’ BA/MA NL 251/73.
212
See e.g. Franz and König in GRGG 297, 10.5.1945, TNA WO 208/4177 or Generalmajor Dornberger, GRGG 344.8, 13.8.1944, TNA WO 208/4179.
213
See also Köhn, 2.7.1944, the Soviets did not want peace because they had fallen too far under Jewish influence, GRGG 153, 3.7.1944, TNA WO 208/4363 and Oberst Aulock, ‘On balance the British have lost the war as much as we have. The American Jew has won it by the money he has made.’ GRGG 178, 23.8.1944, TNA WO 208/4363.
214
For Crüwell’s anti-Jewish utterances see also SRX 1221, 1.11.1942, TNA WO 208/4161: for racial discourses see also SRX 1094, 26.8.1942, TNA WO 208/4161; for Thoma’s remarks to a British officer about Jewish immigration into Germany in the inter-war period see SRGG 301, 28.7.1943, TNA WO 208/4166 and in similar vein to Burckhardt SRX 1536, 26.1.1943, TNA WO 208/4162. For Thoma’s, and particularly von Sponeck’s remarks on the inaccuracy of Nazi propaganda respecting Jews, GRGG 175.17, 18.8.1944, TNA WO 208/4363. For Ullersperger on the degenerative Jewish influence and the dangers of mixed marriages GRGG 262, 18–20.2.1945, TNA WO 208/4177.
217
Crüwell, for example, see SRX 1579, 12.2.1943, TNA WO 208/4162 or König, GRGG 302, 20–23.5.1945, TNA WO 208/4177.
218
Meyer visited Eberding in his room, to the latter’s disgust. Although they had long talks from time to time, Meyer mostly kept to his own quarters. GRGG 227, 22–23.11.1944, TNA WO 208/4364. Broich was concerned that the ‘100 per cent Nazi’ in the ranks would send secret reports to the Reich about everybody’s political opinions. GRGG 224, 17–18.11.1944, TNA WO 208/4364.
219
Dunckern never came to Trent Park. After long interrogations at Wilton Park he was sent to the USA.
221
As a precaution for possible charges by the Allies, the two lawyers at Trent Park, von der Hedte and Wildermuth, delivered talks describing what war crimes were and how one should act in proceedings as a witness or the accused. SRGG 1141, 3.4.1945, TNA WO 208/4177.