In addition to the new information about Choltitz, Rommel and Rundstedt, the great value of the protocols is that from a cross-section of generals meeting again more or less by chance in a British PoW institution, it is possible to glean more about their private attitudes to the Resistance Movement, an area of interest which has suffered to date from a poor documentary source.
The events of 20 July 1944 took the British Government by surprise and at first no exact picture of the occurrence could be formed. CSDIC (UK) therefore presented the generals at Trent Park with news of the bomb plot immediately and paid careful attention to their reactions to radio and press reports. Most generals had come up through the Reichswehr officer corps, a relatively small elite circle where everybody knew everybody else well.[245] Useful targets for the British eavesdroppers were Broich and von Thoma in particular, who knew Stauffenberg personally. Broich revealed his exchange of ideas with Stauffenberg in Tunisia in 1943: the latter had been unsuccessful in winning over senior generals for a coup; in particular, Manstein had refused (Document 146).
Naturally the Trent Park generals had no knowledge of the events in East Prussia and Berlin, and all the more interesting is it therefore to see how they received the few reports which got through to the London centre. Thoma, Broich, Graf von Sponeck and others showed a positive reaction and regretted Stauffenberg’s failure. Broich brooded: ‘I cannot understand it. Stauffenberg was always such a reliable man. To have used such a small bomb.’ The more they thought it over, the more they doubted it had been a straightforward bomb attempt. The generals could not understand how the majority of those attending the situation conference could have escaped without injury, and finally many concluded that the attempt had been rigged by the Nazi leadership. Probably, they reasoned, the Gestapo had discovered that Stauffenberg belonged to the Opposition and, as before with the Röhm Putsch, had planned a refined plot: a bogus bomb attempt, aimed at the publicity value of the Mussolini visit, would now serve as the pretext for the elimination of all undesirables and to demolish the last Army bastion of power.
No doubt mishearing a word in a radio broadcast, they thought that Himmler had taken over as C-in-C, Army and Guderian was his Chief of Staff. (Hitler had announced in a radio speech that he was appointing Himmler commander of the Heimat (i.e. Homeland) Army. For the generals, the idea that a man like Himmler should now lead them was almost unbearable, and they found it hard to accept that Guderian should have accepted the post of his Chief of Staff (Document 145).
The generals were deeply shocked to learn of the trials before the People’s Court and the first executions, particularly that of Feldmarschall Erwin von Witzleben. That he would be sentenced to death had been clear to the majority, but many could not come to terms with his being hanged and not shot by firing squad as their concepts of military honour demanded. ‘Whoever continues to defend this Nazi system is either stupid, a coward or a characterless person with ambition,’ Thoma wrote in his diary on 8 August 1944.[246]
Unfortunately not all the reactions expressed by the Trent Park generals regarding the events of 20 July 1944 are available,[247] so that the breadth of reactions is based on relatively few documents. Heinrich Eberbach considered that Stauffenberg and Olbricht acted from idealism but belittled the apparent amateurishness of the conspirators’ plan. Generalleutnant Spang criticised the plotters for acting too late. It had long been clear that nothing more could be achieved and all that remained was for the fronts to collapse. Spang emphasised that the attempt had had no effect on his own unit – 266.Inf.Div. (Document 149).[248]
In December 1944 General Elfeldt criticised the attempt because if successful Germany would have given up the war. The Allies were not fighting the Nazi Party, however, but the German people, and therefore any such conspiracy was senseless. Two junior Staff officers, Major Rudolf Beck, a cousin of Ludwig Beck, and Major Hasso Viebig, were appalled by the plot. ‘I could not reconcile it with my honour,’ Viebig remarked (Document 152). The violent fighting in Normandy in which both had taken part had not led them to reconsider.
The question as to whether the attempt was genuine or staged was determined at the end of August 1944 when General Choltitz arrived at Trent Park. The last Wehrmacht Commandant of Greater Paris reported to the prisoners in astonishing detail about the upheaval and subsequent events in the Bendler-Strasse, information which he had probably picked up from one of his Staff officers in Paris. Now the British were also in the picture. Whether the original scepticism of some generals that the assassination attempt was genuine influenced the British Government in any way, and strengthened their reservations about the German Resistance Movement, is not known.
4. Concluding Observations
The CSDIC (UK) transcripts are an important resource for researching the Wehrmacht and Third Reich. They allow us to enter the mind of the German soldier in a way that service files and private documents such as diaries and letters seldom can do so comprehensively. The documents published here provide a more colourful and detailed picture of the generals. The protocols do not only add to our knowledge of the Wehrmacht elite, but provide new information: a bridge stretching from the involvement of Choltitz in the mass murder of Jews, to his contacts with the 20 July conspirators, to the experience of General Pfuhlstein under Gestapo arrest in Berlin.
This edition shows for the first time the extent of British military eavesdropping practice. At enormous expense CSDIC (UK) succeeded in tapping the knowledge of their German captives. Despite all warnings, neither the Staff officers nor their NCOs and men were aware that their conversations were being overheard systematically. Involuntarily for the most part they became one of the most important sources of information for the British secret service: the lower ranks mainly for tactical and technical details, the generals above all for their political and strategic assessments of military situations.
The sources in this volume are 64 generals and 14 colonels who attained their respective ranks primarily between 1939 and 1943. Even if the conversations of this group are not representative of all the generals, they provide a broad and convincing spectrum of opinion for the intermediate layer of the Wehrmacht elite, embracing front-line and administration officers as well as men of general rank and equivalent of the Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine and Waffen-SS.
The transcripts reproduced here originate almost exclusively from the Special Camp at Trent Park for high-ranking German prisoners. They felt themselves to be ‘as if in an enchanted mountain cut off from real life’, wrote Eberhard Wildermuth.[249] While the war raged on the continent, the generals took walks through the old woods of the park, chatted with their comrades and had plenty of time to relax with a book or newspaper. They found themselves in the unique situation of spending a long period of time with many men of equal rank and similar experience of life. Many of the senior Staff officers at first had difficulty in coming to terms with the circumstances of their captivity. General Hans Cramer wrote defiantly in the first letter from Trent Park to his mother: ‘I left Africa erect and proud, for there is nothing else you can do with the sea at your back.’[250] But to many, their military careers were destroyed: ‘Not only had we lost our freedom for a long time,’ Generalleutnant Menny noted in his diary at the end of August 1944, two days after his capture, ‘but one’s own future was lost for ever too. All hopes – the imminent appointment to Commanding General, the Oak Leaves – vanished like soap bubbles. At least I can look forward to the life of a pensioned-off general after the war, providing nothing worse comes.’[251]
247
Some prisoners spoke on this theme only incidentally. Hennecke remarked on 21.7.1944 that he feared the attempt might lead to civil war. If Germany were defeated, Communism might then hold the balance. SRGG 963, 21.7.1944, TNA WO 208/4168. Menny, captured 21.8.1944, condemned the attempt four days later at Trent Park, saying that a regime cannot be toppled by the murder of its leader. GRGG 180, 25–26.8.1944, TNA WO 208/4363.
251
Ludwig Crüwell to his brother Werner, 28.12.1943 (Crüwell Correspondence). similarly in his letter of 27.3.1944 to Waltraud, Graefin von Schweinitz, ibid.