[…]
RAMCKE: I mean to say that, however bad things looked, and however little I might have been in sympathy with the Nazi system, in this case I was a soldier and had to fight; there was nothing for me but to by all means to defend the town of BREST until the last shot had been fired and only to surrender BREST to the Americans after it had been reduced to ruins. That is a fortress commander’s duty. I did it until the last, according to my oath and duty and in order to uphold the honour of German arms. Whether this was right or of any advantage in view of the general political situation, no one can judge.[37]
Document 40
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 204
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 27–9 Oct. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]
REIMANN: The business with the Jews in GERMANY was quite right, only it should have been done quietly. Anyway, I’m very pleased that the English suffered a real blow at ARNHEM.[98]
[…]
CHOLTITZ: Have you read CHURCHILL’s speech? Appalling, beyond all words! A Jewish brigade to go to GERMANY! Then the French will take the West and the Poles the East. The hate in that speech! I am completely shattered.[99]
NEUFFER: Don’t forget that the man was probably still somewhat worked up about the ARNHEM business.
SCHLIEBEN: Well, we’ve known for a long time that the enemy won’t present us with any bouquets.
Document 41
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 204
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 27–9 Oct. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]
SCHLIEBEN: Yes, but look, BROICH, KÄHLER (P/W), for instance, is quite sure that we shall win. KÄHLER is as firmly convinced that we shall win as you and I are that we can’t.
ELFELDT: But the Navy has no insight into Army matters.
BROICH: In the first place they’ve no insight into the Army and, second, they form the wrong impression of tactics and war potential.
Document 42
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 209
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 7–10 Oct. 44 [TNA, WO 208/4364]
TRESCKOW: At LE HAVRE I had a Kapitän PALMGREEN[100] who was in command of some flotilla. He had got the Oak Leaves about 15 June, but he wasn’t summoned to the FÜHRER’s Headquarters until much later, in August I believe. He was one of the last to get back again from there. He arrived there and got the Oak Leaves and saw the FÜHRER in person. He said there were eight of them and they had sat at a table having tea with him for three-quarters of an hour. The FÜHRER had described the general situation in the most glowing colours. He said to them that the new weapons were just nearing completion, it could only be a matter of seconds before things got going with a swing. We were all glad to hear that and rejoiced over it. One is always ready to believe.
WÜLFINGEN: Yes, one always hopes against hope. I still do now. I can’t believe that all this should come to nothing.
TRESCKOW: In my opinion, it’s a question of sticking everything on one throw.
WUELFINGEN: Only I don’t know on what the people are staking everything now. They are causing the German people to be completely wiped out.
TRESCKOW: Probably they are building up to a grand finale of the ‘Twilight of the Gods’.
BAO: We believe we are faced with two serious problems: first, with an underground movement of the Party and secondly with an underground movement of the Armed Forces, similar to the secret ‘Black Reichswehr’ after the last war.
RAMCKE: I’ll tell you something: imagine the tables turned, and ENGLAND had had all her towns destroyed in the same way as we have in GERMANY today; then the Germans had come over and occupied the country, for five, ten or fifteen years maybe. Imagine the country faced with great economical difficulties, etc. The German occupation authorities are in charge. What would the English do? They’d look on every single German in the occupation force as an arch-enemy; they’d create stumbling blocks for every German coming their way and either stick a knife in his ribs, poison him or bump him off in some way or another. You may rest assured of it that if the English and Americans occupy the country and even if they take French or Czechs, etc., to do it, they won’t be able to annihilate a population of eighty million; they can’t kill the lot of us.
You can take it from me that the German people have been convinced since the 1914–18 period to the very bedrock of their beliefs that it’s the Germans who are always the victims of attack. This time RUSSIA attacked us (sic), ENGLAND attacked us and AMERICA, whom we have never harmed at all, also attacked us. War is being waged against us from all quarters.[101] It has created a feeling of utter enmity against all these powers in the entire German people. The Germans will say: ‘Well, what do you want? Our towns are in ruins anyhow; you’re welcome to come with your air force and smash them up still more, but we’ll do in your men on the ground!’
BAO: No one has anything left to lose.
RAMCKE: Yes, they will say: ‘We have nothing to lose! We’ll stab this fat American in the back and take his coat; then at least I’ll have a coat!’ The Americans thought they’d enter GERMANY and penetrate up to the SIEGFRIED LINE – then they’d plaster us with bombs and a revolution would break out in GERMANY; the Germans would kow-tow and the Americans would say: ‘We only wanted to fight the Nazis and not the German people; therefore we shall be welcomed as harbingers of peace. We’ll throw the Nazis out and then we’ll establish peace in no time.’ That is a sadly mistaken conclusion. Just think what kind of people are in the SS. From an honest soldier’s point of view, I personally utterly condemn Gestapo measures and those of the SS police organisations. It isn’t German. But nowadays the SS, the ‘Waffen’ SS, not those few police organisations, contains the flower of German youth. It contains Counts So-and-so, the sons of Baron So-and-so, sons of the old German, Prussian nobility,[102] real good thoroughbreds, the best youth GERMANY has, the flower of her yeomanry, etc., Anglo-Saxons, Schleswig-Holsteiners, Lower Saxons, etc., lads from STYRIA and peasants’ sons from the mountains; they’re all in the SS. And then you keep saying: ‘The SS, always the SS!’ Who is it you’re hitting at? The best stock in GERMANY!
Do you know, the Americans and English and the rest made a terrific bloomer that time, which we never could understand or forget: the war was over in 1918 and the ‘fourteen points’ had been laid down; first of all there were the armistice conditions, then came the reparations conditions; then, from a people which had suffered from a four years’ blockade, which had had to submit to having all its imports cut and possessed only ‘ersatz’ materials, with even those in terribly short supply, and which was already burdened with a catastrophically high mortality rate among old people and babies, from that people were filched during 1920 and 1921 two hundred thousand milking cows, and the blockade was kept up for three more years.[103] Those three years of blockade plus the handing-over of those two hundred thousand milking cows and of all the other things we urgently needed, especially railway wagons, to distribute at least what we had got and transfer the potato harvest quickly from the east to the west, all that cost our country five hundred thousand human lives.[104] That was the cold-blooded murder, sheer murder which wasn’t made public. But this is blazoned out to the whole world: ‘See how the Germans have treated the Jews! Look how they destroyed that village in CZECHOSLOVAKIA.’ When HEYDRICH was murdered:[105] ‘Look at those poor people!’ But not a word was said about how those five hundred thousand people were murdered in cold blood during the years of 1919–20.
97
The defence of Brest tied down three US divisions and denied the Allies access to a large natural harbour. The Allied advance, though delayed, was not decisively hampered. Neitzel, ‘Kampf um die deutschen Atlantik- und Kanalfestungen’, pp. 397–405.
98
Operation ‘Market Garden’ was begun on 17.9.1944 with the objective of clearing the way into Germany. Three parachute divisions were dropped behind the German lines to capture the bridges at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem. The British First Airborne Division failed to take the bridge at Arnhem crucial to the advance and sustained heavy losses. Detlev Vogel, ‘Deutsche und Aliierte Kriegführung im Westen’, pp. 606–11.
99
Choltitz is referring here to Churchill’s speech of 28.9.1944 in the House of Commons, reproduced in Churchill, ‘Speeches’, pp. 6990–7007. Churchill, who barely mentioned the Arnhem debacle, mentioned in his address the Jewish Brigade fighting the Germans in Italy and which was to take part in the eventual occupation of Germany; one cannot say of the speech that it was especially hate-filled. The Jewish Brigade was formed in September 1944 from Palestinian Jews and fought only in Italy. It was disbanded in 1946. Beckman, ‘The Jewish Brigade’.
100
Fregattenkapitän Karl Palmgreen (2.9.1891–16.9.1970) CO, 38.Minesweeping Flotilla, was awarded the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross on 11.7.1944. He was not at Le Havre between 31.7.1944 and 14.8.1944 to receive the decoration. On 24 August the flotilla returned to the Baltic via Dieppe, Boulogne and Dunkirk, and so Palmgreen avoided capture. War Diary, 38.Minesw.Flot., 16.7.1944–28.2.1945, BA/MA, RM69/236.
101
This is the classic conservative doctrine of the intent to encircle Germany. It is interesting to note that Ramcke refrains from expounding this theory in his 1943 book ‘Vom Schiffsjungen zum Fallschirmjäger-General’, in which the basically non-political text presents him as a very brave soldier originating from humble circumstances. At the end of October 1944 he said, ‘Whatever is said about Hitler and the Kaiser before him, the fact remains that all the wars in Europe in the last 300 years were engineered exclusively by Great Britain and simply for their notorious
102
The idea espoused here by Ramcke that the Waffen-SS recruited extensively from within the nobility – an opinion also occasionally put forward after the war – has no basis in fact. Only 10 per cent of Waffen-SS generals were nobles, and the proportion amongst the Sturmbannführer grades was only 1.9 per cent, both clearly less than the Army officer corps (1943 all active officers 6.5 per cent; May 1944, all generals, about 20 per cent), Wegner, ‘Hitler’s Politische Soldaten’, p. 224.
103
The blockade remained in force until 12.7.1919. The Allies used this as an additional instrument to pressurise the Germans into signing the Treaty of Versailles.
104
The number of people who starved to death as the result of the blockade after the Armistice is unknown. Berger, ‘Germany after the Armistice’, p. 207 puts the figure of deaths per day at 800. There are no official statistics. See Vincent, ‘The Politics of Hunger’, p. 145. Berger’s figure for the first half of 1919 is clearly an overestimate. The latest research on the subject had provided no fresh data. Osborne, ‘Britain’s Economic Blockade of Germany’.
105
After the death of Heydrich in early June 1942, as a reprisal for his assassination 198 persons were executed at the village of Lidice west of Prague on 9.6.1942, and the locality razed to the ground. Karl Vogel, ‘Lidice’.