CHOLTITZ: Excuse me, but haven’t you yourself taken silver? Isn’t that also requisitioned privately owned silver?
RAMCKE: No!
CHOLTITZ: What is it then?
RAMCKE: I got it from a naval officers’ mess.
CHOLTITZ: But that’s private property, that has been pinched too!
RAMCKE (continues his story): The upholstery was slashed open, the pictures had been taken away or slashed and destroyed. There was nothing left in the whole house which could be used. And that happened not to one, but to 100,000 families all over the French-occupied RHINELAND.[146]
CHOLTITZ: I’m not talking about what gets smashed up, I’m saying that we steal! We collect the stuff up into stores, like proper robbers, in guarded stores, that’s the frightful part of it. This revolting business of engaging in organised robbery of private property.
RAMCKE: Where has that happened?
CHOLTITZ: Throughout the whole of FRANCE. The damned GAF has taken away whole train-loads, that man, that HIMMLER. Whole train-loads of the most beautiful antique furniture from private houses! It’s frightful; it’s an indescribable disgrace! Any people can lose a war; that’s no disgrace, it’s just political folly to lead a capable and brave people into such a situation. But to cover ourselves with the shame of carrying out organised robbery under the supervision and help and encouragement of the state, no, my dear fellow, that’s a different matter! It’s ridiculous for an army suddenly to drive away a train full of furniture in peace-time. You have seen the destruction wrought by the soldiers; they all do that. No, this stealing just because the other poor unfortunate people have been conquered; the so-called victorious state goes in and robs! No, my dear fellow, we are steeped in materialism, we have ceased to wage war as idealists.[147]
Document 67
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 270
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 9 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]
BASSENGE: The attitude of the troops to the officers is quite different from what it was in 1918, or has that changed, too?
ROTHKIRCH: In 1918 we experienced more open revolutionary tendencies. As the end drew near, the men were already behaving in a very insolent fashion.[148] They don’t do that now. On the other hand one must take into account the fact that the Party is carrying out terrific propaganda against us, especially against the Generals. The troops are not insubordinate but they carry out what you might term ‘sit down strikes’. They don’t act against the officers, as they used to in the last war, but, as commanders are now reporting, when one leaves them alone on sentry duty or on piquet one part will cross over to the other side, all 25 of them; or else they just sit there and do nothing when the Americans arrive.
THOMA: Yes, that is just a physical collapse.
ROTHKIRCH: Yes, but it’s not a revolution. But the civilians, they call us ‘strike-breakers’, ‘war prolongers’, etc. The civilians dig up the mines and cut the wires behind our backs. You see that in official reports. I read in a report which my ‘Armee’ passed on that the civilians yelled ‘prolongers of the war’ and dug up mines. The civilian population in the RHINELAND, west of the RHINE, is saying: ‘It’s all quite useless now, so why do they heap these additional unpleasantnesses on us, why blow up the bridges and dig tank traps and so on?’ They won’t lend a helping hand. And some of the bridges didn’t blow up either, the TREVES bridge didn’t blow up,[149] then there are RHINE bridges—
[…]
ROTHKIRCH: I’ve had practical experience of it. It was at TREVES and it simply turned tail and ran. And the men in the ‘Volkssturm’! I had some of them in my village. I was living with a priest. There were two members of the ‘Volkssturm’ there, they got up at 0800 or 0830 hours and shaved until 0930 hours. Then I asked them what they were going to do that day. They replied that they were going to chop wood for the priest. Then they were told to dig a few positions. They said no, they couldn’t do that. They had received different orders from their ‘Bataillonskommandeur’, they couldn’t do that.
Then I wanted to have some of the ‘Volkssturm’ on the KYLL.[150] There are very steep hills there and positions had been dug in them. I said: ‘Now let us put a ‘Volkssturmbataillon’ here. The Americans won’t notice whether it’s a member of the ‘Volkssturm’ there or not. The main thing is that they think that this stretch is manned.’ But that wasn’t possible either.
CHOLTITZ: Who gives the orders then?
ROTHKIRCH: The ‘Volkssturm’ come under the ‘Gauleiter’.
CHOLTITZ: Don’t they come under any military direction whatever?
ROTHKIRCH: You will never believe the funniest thing of alclass="underline" when I left BOLITHA(?) I was sent up to EAST PRUSSIA[151] and my orders were to guard against the possibility of a Russian break-through via TAURAGE. I got the orders from Gauleiter KOCH! That’s not an exaggeration, it’s absolute fact.
ROTHKIRCH (re guerrilla warfare): We will set it in motion. I know that for a fact, because I was in command of a guerrilla school in RUSSIA where men were trained by us in guerrilla warfare. They have been taken over now and they are now training partisans themselves. That is how I know.
HEIM: Do you think it will really help at all?
ROTHKIRCH: Yes, they are already staying behind now. There were some in my villages. They were SS men who, after the third cognac, told my intelligence officer exactly what they were supposed to do. Of course, they weren’t suppose to do that. But they told him just the same. They were there and were supposed to spy out everything. Most important of all, they were supposed to enlist other supporters. These SS men said that it was exceedingly difficult as there were no volunteers. Besides which – like us all – though they had explosives, they had no fuses. That was why they approached my intelligence officer.[152]
HEYDTE: So it was really more for purposes of sabotage?
ROTHKIRCH: Yes, just like the guerrillas do. But it’s a scourge for the civilian population.
HEIM: So these SS men were very pessimistic, were they?
ROTHKIRCH: The civilian population will hand them over at once.
HEIM: If they don’t hang them themselves.
BASSENGE: In addition to which every stranger in the locality is shadowed as soon as there’s an L of C commandant there, etc.
ROTHKIRCH: Your view is quite correct. But that again is overshadowed by yet another factor. There are the many badly bombed towns. Naturally enormous numbers of people have fled from the towns into the villages. Then, of course, they have to decide: who is a partisan? The evacuees blur the picture badly.
HEIM: Then there is also the question whether the population will participate.
ROTHKIRCH: I don’t think they will west of the RHINE. But I believe that there may perhaps be more wild, fanatical people east of the RHINE.
146
A connection between Ramcke and a Leutnant Hamm cannot be confirmed. Ramcke does not mention this officer in his memoirs.
147
For art theft by the Nazis see Heuss, ‘Kunst- und Kulturraub’, and Kurz, ‘Kunstraub in Europa’, where France is treated comprehensively (pp. 119–250).
148
After the spring and summer offensives of 1918 had brought no penetrative successes, morale in the Germany Western Army plunged perceptibly. Behind the front, thousands of soldiers milled around, lacking the will to gamble their lives for a lost cause. Wilhelm Deist has coined this as a ‘covert military strike’. Estimates range from 750,000 to a million ‘quitters’ in the last months of the war. Deist, ‘Verdeckter Militärstreik’.
149
The US 10th Armoured Division took Trier on 1–2.3.1945. Whereas the Neue Brücke over the Moselle was destroyed by explosives towards 1900hrs on 1 March, the Römer Brücke fell into American hands undamaged early the next morning. Christoffel, ‘Krieg am Westwall’, p. 478f.
150
The Kyll is a tributary of the Moselle. Its source is found on the Belgian frontier, it flows south through the Eifel and empties into the Moselle at Trier.
151
Rothkirch was acting commander of various corps from 1.1.1944 before he reformed 3.Armeekorps at Trier on 3.11.1944. There are no details of a deployment on the Eastern Front during 1944.
152
In his capacity as Cdr Ersatzheer from mid-September 1944, Himmler planned ‘the expansion of the Resistance in the border territories’. He first used the term ‘Werewolf’ in a speech on 28.10.1944. Chief of the planned Werewolf organisation, ‘Inspector-General for Special Defence at Reichsführer-SS’ was SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Waffen-SS Hans Prützmann (31.8.1901–21.5.1945), former HSSPF Ukraine/Russia South (November 1941 – September 1944). He supervised the training of small commando units to operate against Allied occupation forces on German territory. Their major achievement was the assassination of Oberbürgermeister Franz Oppenhoff (18.8.1902–25.3.1945) of Aachen. After this ‘success’, Goebbels set the organisation along a new path with his ‘Werewolf Proclamation’ at the beginning of April 1945 in which he exhorted the German population as a whole to take up arms against the invader. Even if the Werewolf never achieved the importance that the National Socialist leadership hoped for it, and had no influence on the course of the war or the postwar period, its potency should not be underestimated. Biddiscombe, ‘Werwolf!’; also Henke, ‘Besetzung Deutschlands’, pp. 160–8, 943–53.