Then there is another matter. We are here in a former interrogation camp. None of us knows whether listening apparatus is not still installed. We must do nothing wittingly or unwittingly, whether it is justified or unjustified, true or false, which might give the enemy any weapon which he could use in the propaganda war, or the war of nerves, or in any other way to bolster up his own people and harm the moral powers of resistance at home.[27]
Gentlemen, I should like to make an urgent request – that you should cease those conversations if there is any possibility of their being listened to. That goes for the Mess here too. We should be ashamed of ourselves if we came home and people there were to say: ‘Everything went well and the only people who caused trouble were our old Generals who were PW.’ I would be the last person, gentlemen, not to sympathise with anyone who felt: ‘There is something I must get off my chest.’ In that case you should choose one of your comrades, whom you can trust, and say to him: ‘Come here, I must get something off my chest. Let’s go out into a corner of the garden where no one can listen to us and walk up and down there. I must speak to you.’ There is nothing against that, and, of course, apart from that we are grown men who have the right at any time to… You know perfectly well what difference I mean and how to deal with it, and therefore, gentlemen, I would ask you to desist from conversations which might in any way incriminate your comrades. You have every reason to look with confidence into the future. We see from the newspaper reports of the English and the Russians, how they exaggerate things. We know from our own experience in TUNIS how tremendously the aerial victories of the Americans were exaggerated and what the real position is. We are in the happy position of being able to listen to our own news, therefore we have a certain check.[28] I need not remind you, gentlemen, we are soldiers and soldiers we remain. I thank you.
Document 13
CSDIC (UK), SR REPORT, SRGG 342 [TNA, WO 208/4166]
LUDWIG CRÜWELL – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 29 May 42 in North Africa.
GOTTHART FRANTZ – Generalleutnant (GOC 19th Flak Division) – Captured 12 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 12 Aug. 43
CRÜWELL: If no decision has been reached next year – and I see in that our greatest hope – the Americans will get out of the European war. After all, what do they want here? What interest have they in ITALY? What has GERMANY done to them? They’ve made a mass of money as usual – they’ve no love for the English – and above all, they recognise the Jewish poison at work among their people and realise how they are blackmailing their leaders. We see the Jewish poison in this heavy attack on HAMBURG.[29] It is the Jews who want to destroy us down to the last man. They know that the National Socialist doctrine will spread all over the world and they want to save themselves by hook or by crook from their inevitable extinction. […]
Document 14
CSDIC (UK), SR REPORT, SRGG 399 [TNA, WO 208/4166]
WILHELM RITTER VON THOMA – General der Panzertruppe – Captured 4 Nov. 42 in North Africa.
RUDOLF BUHSE – Oberst (OC 47th Grenadier Regiment) – Captured 9 May 43 in Tunisia.
A 1237 – Oberst (OC Flak) [?][30] Captured 9 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 12 Sept. 43
THOMA: (re ITALY’s surrender): In October 1940 I handed over a report of sixteen pages to BRAUCHITSCH.[31] I foresaw the whole thing. I also said the same thing to General CRÜWELL (PW) on 20 November 1942 when I arrived in ENGLAND. For this reason I am regarded as a criminal by the others. I regret every bomb, every scrap of material and every human life that is still being wasted in this senseless war. The only gain that the war will bring us is the end of the ten years of gangster rule. In my opinion the collapse of GERMANY is inevitable. I have been expecting it and I only hope it will happen soon. I hope that the end will come this autumn.
BUHSE: I hope that the Russians will come to an understanding with us.
THOMA: That’s impossible. It’s too late now. It would have been possible last year, but our so-called leaders didn’t want it.[32] Every day the war continues constitutes a crime. The men at the top must realise that. KEITEL and DÖNITZ, for example, are the men. They must put ADOLF HITLER in a padded cell.[33] A gang of rogues can’t rule for ever. It would be a pity if any one of them was shot. They ought to be made to do heavy work until they drop down dead. You will now see the English and Americans occupying the Italian airfields. They will occupy SARDINIA and CORSICA and then they will invade FRANCE.
BUHSE: I believe that we shall clear out of ITALY according to plan.
A 1237: I think so too.
Document 15
CSDIC (UK), SR REPORT, SRGG 615 [TNA, WO 208/4167]
ULRICH BOES – Major (Staff Officer to Generalleutnant von SPONECK (PW)) – Captured 9 May 43 in Tunisia.
BÜHLER – Unteroffizier (Batman to Generalmajor von BROICH (PW)) – Captured 12 May 43 in Tunisia.
Information received: 4 Dec. 43
BOES: In spite of the fact that we have… total warfare, the resources of the German people have not nearly been exhausted yet. As long as we don’t use women as drivers at the front, we still haven’t got total war. If our homes are at stake, if our Fatherland is at stake and if we must fight on the ODER…. No quarter will be given…. If we capitulate now, then GERMANY will be wiped out once and for all and you will probably find yourself in SIBERIA with me on some fine job or other, unless we perish on the way. We shall never hear anything of our families again. You will never be able to marry and the German people will be finished for ever. Do you believe – it makes you laugh – that a people like the damned English, of forty-nine millions or whatever it is,[34] with their supercilious but completely slow and uncultured methods, should want to dominate the German people; that’s a piece of insolence which we simply cannot accept; our national pride won’t allow us to be ruled by such swine.
BÜHLER: That’s quite right.
BOES: We have all got to know them. We know what it looks like, the street’s… there are a few cities, which are perhaps not bad, but the rest of it is damned awful and the people are swine and if we compare our German towns with it, or our German railways and our German traffic system and all that, then we realise that ours is a really fine country, that everything there is first class. As GOEBBELS said yesterday: ‘Of course one ought to learn from the enemy, but one ought not to admire the enemy.’ I gave up admiring them long ago; I admire our people.[35]
27
Apparently the inmates were unaware that Trent Park had been converted from an interrogation centre for ‘normal’ prisoners into a bugged centre to eavesdrop on senior officers. Even after this rejoinder the prisoners exercised no especial caution in their conversations.
29
Between 24.7.1943 and 3.8.1943, Hamburg was bombed on four occasions by night and twice by day by British and American bombers; 41,500 persons lost their lives. ‘Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg’, Vol. 7, p. 40.
32
Stalin’s readiness for a diplomatic solution was signalled through various channels, but Hitler always rejected any idea of a compromise. Hildebrand, ‘Das vergangene Reich’, pp. 787–806.
33
It was a forlorn hope that Generalfeldmarschall Keitel (22.9.1892–16.10.1946), head of OKW, and the C-in-C Kriegsmarine, Grossadmiral Dönitz (16.9.1891–24.12.1980) would attempt to unseat the Führer. For Keitel see Mueller, ‘Keitel’. For Dönitz the latest literature is Schwendemann, ‘Deutsche Menschen vor der Vernichtung durch den Bolshevismus retten’, and Jörg Hillmann, ‘Die Reichsregierung in Flensburg’.
34
At the 1934 census, Great Britain had a population of 48,789,000. Butler, ‘British Political Facts’, p. 323.
35
The draft of Goebbels’s radio broadcast of 3.12.1943 appeared next day in the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’.