FELBERT: First of all you have to realise all that has been done. We had no idea of the dirty business, done by our people and others, the Security Service and SS. In two wars no prisoner was ever as much as beaten in my presence; I never saw a Russian prisoner of mine shot; I never once saw a child, woman or man shot.[131]
BAO: German propaganda made HITLER into a sort of God, and now the people expect a miracle.
FELBERT: That’s just the trouble.
BAO: They expected wonders from the V-1 and V-2 and now they’re expecting them from these atom bombs and all that. They believe all that sort of thing.
FELBERT: It’s all no good at all.
NEUFFER: If you judge the situation objectively and from a distance, it is as follows: they can do what they like, they are coming from the west and east as deliverers from the HITLER regime. They are the only ones who can rid us of the fellow.
THOMA: That’s the great tragedy in our history, that we need such a terrible, lost war as this, in order to throw out the gang at home.
NEUFFER: But that is really what always follows dictatorships.
Document 62
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 254
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 28–31 Jan. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4365]
BRUHN: The things he said! He more or less attacked our families this evening.[132]
FELBERT: Yes.
BRUHN: Do you know what that scandalous fellow said: he said that tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands are being wiped out, he found no expression other than ‘are being wiped out in the East at present’. But all that doesn’t count. Another forty million can be wiped out so long as he is still there at the end, and he will see to it all right that chaos follows.
FELBERT: He will certainly see to that.
BRUHN: The same class of people as those involved in 20 July will appear again. The man is crazy.
FELBERT: If his aim had been to build up a decent German state, then I could have understood it. But that wasn’t his aim. It has been built up by lying and cheating, that is the damnable part of it.
WAHLE: These are still the same old phrases, and apart from that, absolutely illogical. I could make exactly the same speech myself.
BASSENGE: So far as I can remember, this of all his speeches hangs together least, and everything is completely confused, and, apart from that, there was nothing in it.
WAHLE: It was perhaps the last.
BASSENGE: I hope so.
WAHLE: It is all just bluff, and also by this time he should leave prophesying alone – he has so often proved wrong. Now he is prophesying again about ENGLAND.
BASSENGE: ‘This plebeian Jewish plutocratic—’
WAHLE: The well-known phrases. They don’t become any more credible through everlasting repetition.
CHOLTITZ: I must say that speech is most significant for GERMANY. Those few who have any hope left at all can’t see any other hope except in him. Eighty per cent of GERMANY does not believe any longer; the other 20 per cent – and that includes the fighting youth – believes only in him, because it can’t see anything else. Of course he is crazy. We have known that for a long time now.
SCHLIEBEN: Fourteen years, one wouldn’t think it possible.
SCHLIEBEN: The speech said comparatively little. It began again with the fourteen years, and I must say, in such a situation a drowning man clutching at a straw. I think that it will have some effect only on those people who are still sitting in a safe place, but the masses who are now in flight will be furious. Those who are still in safety will say: ‘Well, it will turn out all right somehow.’ That’s how I judge the speech.
WAHLE: In my opinion, what you say about clutching at a straw is absolutely true. He believes that he has been chosen by Providence. That is his last hope, and I must admit that he really believes it honestly. That is the straw by which it all hangs, and all the others who can still raise any faith in this belief, clutch at it with him. The refugees from the East, they don’t believe in it any longer.
SCHLIEBEN: No, no, after all they have seen the whole mess-up, and then the cold – it all has its effect on them. He can’t imagine what it’s like because he’s never been with the troops.
ULLERSPERGER: The whole point of the speech was to show the people at home and foreign countries that we shall fight to the end. Moreover, one thing is clear, and he’s quite right over that. Whatever the outcome of the war, the English will be torn to pieces by the Bolshevists. It makes no odds whether it’s now or in the next ten years. They will come to grief over their social problems.
EBERBACH: I can just imagine that my wife will act in accordance with this speech and will give her last ounce of energy, and ruin herself for the rest of her life, and my fifteen-year old-boy—[133]
HEIM: Because those people just can’t see the sadness of it.
EBERBACH: Since the time of NORMANDY I’ve always tried to make it quite clear to her from here that HITLER has been completely mistaken in several things. I’ve tried to send hints to her by writing ‘I am of exactly the same opinion as General VON GEYR’;[134] she knows what I mean.
WILDERMUTH: The basis of it is honest this time. He says: ‘I have been chosen by Providence and therefore all I can do is to stick it’. On that basis the speech is honest, and for that reason will have a better effect than others of his.
EBERBACH: But only those can see it through with him who also believe that he is the instrument of Providence. Perhaps he is, but in quite a different sense.
WILDERMUTH: He is our retribution for SADOWA[135] (laughter).
BROICH: I’m convinced that as a result of this war we shall lose altogether fifteen or eighteen millions.[136] That would do away with our twenty million surplus inhabitants.
EBERBACH: I’m practically certain the Russians will wipe out all their prisoners beforehand, while they’re still on the roads.
BROICH: If the figures given are approximately correct, those two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand men, then they have – we have killed a great number too, and the people said they sometimes had orders to do so. Take our ‘Division’, ‘Gross Deutschland’ that time at KURSK – they murdered everyone wholesale.[137] We said: ‘That’s madness!’ ‘Well, what can we do with the PW,’ they said. ‘They only hinder our advance.’ It’s true, sometimes we didn’t bother much about them; we just said: ‘There, beat it!’ They went away quite calmly but then they – we said: ‘Guerrilla warfare is everywhere.’ They said: ‘Those we leave behind will become partisans in the Russian way, therefore the tank troops will shoot in the front line, all those we can’t transport away from here.’
131
Felbert served on the Eastern Front in WWI. It is known, however, that as Feldkommandant he had at least 17 insurgents executed. See note 354 below.
132
Hitler’s speech of 30.1.1945 is reproduced in Domarus, ‘Hitler’, Vol. 2, pp. 2195–8. The generals were concerned particularly at the following passages, ‘The horrifying fate unfolding today in the East, and which is killing tens and hundreds of thousands in village and province, in the countryside and in cities will, despite all setbacks and tribulations, be beaten back and overcome by us in the end… Providence had it in her hand on 20 July to extinguish my life and put an end to my life’s work by the bomb that exploded within a metre and a half of me. I see it as a confirmation of the mission entrusted to me that the Almighty protected me that day. In the coming years I will therefore pursue the path of uncompromising representation of the interests of my people, undeterred by any emergency and danger, and permeated by the holy conviction that ultimately the Almighty will not abandon him who in all his life never wanted anything but to save his people from a fate which, by its size and significance, it never deserved.’
134
General der Panzertruppen Leo Reichsfreiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg (2.3.1886–27.1.1974), 1.4.1933–12.10.1937 Military Attaché in London, then CO, 3.Pz.Div.; from 15.2.1940 Cmmdg Gen., XXIV.Pz.Korps; 26.6.1942 of XXXX.Pz.Korps and 1.10.1942 of LVIII.Pz.Korps, from which Pz.Gr. West was formed. On 3.7.1944 he was relieved for pessimistic assessment of situation, replaced by Eberbach; until the end of the war he was Inspekteur der Panzertruppen. Geyr was critical of the regime, and Hitler called him ‘defeatist’ and ‘pessimist’ frequently after his time as military attaché. He had therefore to take a back seat at the Army Personnel Bureau. Although a proven commander at the front, he was never promoted to Generaloberst. He was unwilling to commit himself to active resistance to the regime and declined Stauffenberg’s approach in September 1942. Ose, ‘Entscheidung im Westen’, pp. 55, 151ff.; Peter Hoffman, ‘Stauffenberg’, p. 253. For Geyr and his influence on German rearmament, see Searle, ‘Wehrmacht Generals’, esp. p. 32ff.
135
The ‘Revenge for Sadova’ was a contemporary expression of French sensitivity at the shift in the European balance of power following the Prussian victory on 3.7.1866 at Königgrätz – this battle being named by the French after the nearby town of Sadova. This victory not only decided the war, but as a result Prussia rose from being a junior power to a major power of equal status to the France of Napoleon III.
136
The exact number of all German war dead is unknown. To the 5.3 million Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS dead must be added 400,000 dead by Allied bombing and 500,000 dead in expulsions and deportations. To these must also be added the civilian victims of the Nazi regime and the final battles of 1945, so that the final tally must lie somewhere between seven and eight million. Overmans, ‘Verluste’.
137
The shooting of prisoners by