Most faced up to the reality of the situation after a few weeks. Rank, uniform, decorations lost their importance and from behind the former military structure the personality emerged more distinctly. Some found it difficult to adjust. General Ludwig Crüwell complained in a letter to his brother at the end of 1943: ‘This waiting and inactivity is sometimes scarcely bearable’.[252] A post-capture decoration or promotion was decisive for many to preserve their self-respect.
Soon after capture, the inmates of Trent Park began to reflect on their memoirs, the war and the future. They thought more freely than before: their bond to a Third Reich condemned to defeat had for many dissolved visibly, while others realised the nature of the war fully in captivity. A reorientation lay ahead but undiscovered. After the capitulation on 8 May 1945, the war crimes trials, public persecution and the worry about how one was to reintegrate into West German society bred in the generals a defensive attitude which overshadowed further reflections of their personal role in the Third Reich.[253] It is thus fortunate for the historian that the British documented the conversations of the generals in the singular interim phase of their captivity at Trent Park.
The protocols give an idea of their thought patterns in three major areas: the wide field of politics and strategy, war crimes and the 20 July plot. They showed clearly how diversely the generals reacted to extremely difficult political and military situations, and how wide was the cross-section of conclusions they drew from comparable experiences. At least some of the Trent Park inmates knew the criminal nature of the war and political system. The group centred around von Thoma referred repeatedly to the criminality of the National Socialist State, welcomed the assassination attempt on Hitler and were even ready to collaborate with the British under certain conditions. Even if only a few acknowledged their personal guilt, this circle was more disposed to self-criticism that the Crüwell clique, which refused stubbornly to recognise any substantially negative side to the system and its leadership, and harshly condemned the conspirators against Hitler.
Membership of either group bore no relationship to age, rank, arm of service, regional origins or religion. In both of these loose associations one finds a great breadth of military socialising from the young Oberstleutnant with several years’ front-line experience to the ‘old’ general in supply. Decisive for the group towards which the Trent Park prisoners revolved was the capacity for reflection on the part of the individual and his front-line experience. Immediate experience of military disaster played a central role in developing wide-ranging insight into politics, strategy and the nature of the Nazi system. The fighting in Normandy led Heinrich Eberbach to see the National Socialist state and its leaders in a more critical light than hitherto. With others the experiences at the front confirmed a pre-existing dubious outlook, as with von Thoma. The composition was decided individually in every case but always consisted of the two factors of ability to reflect and the front-line experience.
Although Trent Park inmates had different views of the Nazi state, its prospects in the war and its war crimes, the front-line officers at least were unanimous on one point: their concept of military honour prevented them from laying down their arms prematurely. Thus pro-Nazi paratroop General Ramcke and the former bank director and reserve officer Wildermuth, later a minister in the Adenauer Cabinet, were both similarly impregnated with the idea of fighting to the last bullet.[254]
Although Wildermuth in his summer 1944 notes considered that the July 1944 plot had been ‘our last chance’, he was still prepared, in September 1944, to offer resistance to the last at Le Havre. That the British could break this resistance down within two days is another matter. It was of great importance for him that he had fought ‘honourably’ and was not taken prisoner until wounded when British tanks encircled his command post.[255] In reality the vaunted ‘heroic struggle to the last shell’ was often a matter of interpreting ‘heroic’. Decisive was the officer’s belief that he had done his duty. The question arises here how men with higher levels of reflection would have acted if fighting on German soil in 1945. One assumes that both von Thoma and Wildermuth would have kept fighting to the war’s end and never have abandoned the fight prematurely, even though they called upon others to do so when at Trent Park.
The judgment upon the German generals is confirmed by the protocols. Irrespective of the differences in their military and political dealings it is unmistakable that – with a few exceptions – they lacked the courage to do justice to the special demands of the era, to abandon ideas of military honour and, for the sake of nation and people, weigh in against a criminal state leadership. This overall judgment does not replace a differentiated and considered analysis of the individual case, for which this volume presents a wealth of material.
THE DOCUMENTS
I. Politics, Strategy and the Different Camps at Trent Park
Document 1
CSDIC (UK), SRX 1140 [TNA, WO 208/4161]
LUDWIG CRÜWELL – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 29 May 42 in North Africa.
KRAUSE – Oberleutnant (fighter pilot Fw190) – Captured 2 Sept. 42.
CRÜWELL: If I were asked to meet HESS,[1] I should decline. Please remember, I am a man who was taken prisoner honourably and I would not (associate) with a man who – who – he is a traitor!
KRAUSE: Has the matter been clear up?
CRÜWELL: It’s quite clear to me. It was officially announced at the time ‘against the FÜHRER’; the adjutants were put under arrest because they allowed him to fly.
KRAUSE: Where I was it was always said that he was a hundred per cent true, that the good of the Fatherland was his sole consideration, and that he said: ‘I don’t believe in this Russian business; I must try to get to ENGLAND in order to save GERMANY by arranging a peace with the British in some way or other.’
CRÜWELL: I don’t deny HESS’s good faith in that respect but that is not my official point of view. No one but his superior officer, the FÜHRER, can decide about that. If the FÜHRER repudiates him, I also repudiate him. That’s that! I am convinced of his moral sincerity in that he wanted to do good, but that does not prevent my regarding him here, in enemy country, in war time, as a traitor. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.
252
See,
253
Oberst Aulock, commandant, St Malo fortifications, acknowledged that the surrender of the citadel was for him one of the most difficult decisions of his life and he was still asking himself if he could have kept fighting longer: GRGG 177, 22.8.1944, TNA WO 208/4363.
254
At the end of 1945 in PoW Camp 300, Wildermuth set down a comprehensive account of the battle for Le Havre based on notes he made at Trent Park between December 1944 and February 1945. The original is in his 1945 diary, BA/MA, NL 251/73.
255
The commandant of the Cherbourg fortifications, Generalleutnant Wilhelm von Schlieben, taken prisoner on 26.6.1944, wrote on 1.7.1944, ‘Purely from a military point of view I have nothing to reproach myself for, I say merely that it would have been a better outcome for me to die… Now I do not know if they wanted me to put myself in the path of a firing machine gun. That would have been an historical fact.’ SRGG 936, 1.7.1944, TNA WO 208/4168. Schlieben probably felt that the National Socialist leadership was annoyed at Allied press reports regarding the circumstances of the surrender. In fact Goebbels stated of Schlieben, whom he described as ‘a typical Schleicher-type Reichswehr creature’, that one could never speak of being taken prisoner in such a way that there was some kind of heroic aspect to it, while Hitler called Schlieben a ‘chatterbox’. Neitzel, ‘Kampf um die Atlantik- und Kanalfestungen’, p. 390f.
1
Rudolf Hess (26.4.1896–17.8.1987), from April 1933 Hitler’s deputy, flew to Scotland on 10.5.1941 on his own initiative and without Hitler’s knowledge with the intention of negotiating a peace deal with Britain before the attack on the Soviet Union. Schmidt, ‘Hess’.