No fewer than 10,191 German and 567 Italian prisoners passed through Trent Park and its two related listening centres. Some of the conversations originally recorded on gramophone discs covered only half a page in transcribed length – the longest was twenty-one pages – but out of their own mouths these officers were condemned. Even Choltitz, who has had the reputation of being a ‘good’ German since refusing to carry out Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris, was implicated in killing Jews in the Crimea.4 A few generals come out acceptably well, though far from heroic. In January 1943 Thoma, who commanded a Panzer division in Russia before being captured in Africa, said to the pro-Nazi General Ludwig Crüwell, who had been shot down behind British lines, ‘I am actually ashamed to be an officer.’ He related how he had spoken to Franz Halder about the atrocities, only to be told, ‘That’s a political matter, that’s nothing to do with me.’ So he put it in writing to Army Commander-in-Chief General Walther von Brauchitsch, who said, ‘Do you want me to take it further? Listen, if you want me to take it further anything might happen.’ Thoma said of those who believed the Führer was ignorant of what was happening: ‘Of course he knows all about it. Secretly he’s delighted. Of course, people can’t make a row, they would simply be arrested and beaten if they did.’5 That would not have happened if they had simply resigned their commissions, however, which is not something Thoma or any of the others did.
The truth about what was happening to Poles, Russians and especially Jews was common currency in the ‘private’ conversations at Trent Park. In December 1944, to take one of any number of examples, Lieutenant-General Heinrich Kittel, the former commander of the 462nd Volksgrenadier Division, told Major-General Paul von Felbert, the former commandant of Feldkommandantur (military administration unit) 560: ‘The things I’ve experienced! In Latvia, near Dvinsk, there were mass executions of Jews carried out by the SS. There were about fifteen SS men and perhaps sixty Latvians, who are known to be the most brutal people in the world. I was lying in bed early one Sunday morning when I kept on hearing two salvoes followed by small arms fire.’ On investigating, Kittel found ‘men, women and children – they were counted off and stripped naked. The executioners first laid all the clothes in one pile. Then twenty women had to take up their position – naked – on the edge of the trench, they were shot and fell down into it.’ ‘How was it done?’ asked Felbert. ‘They faced the trench and then twenty Latvians came up behind and simply fired once through the back of their heads, and they fell down forwards into the trench like ninepins.’6
Kittel gave an order forbidding such executions ‘outside, where people can look on. If you shoot people in the wood or somewhere where no one can see,’ he told the SS, ‘that’s your own affair. But I absolutely forbid another day’s shooting here. We draw our drinking water from deep springs; we’re getting nothing but corpse water there.’ ‘What did they do to the children?’ asked Felbert. Kittel – who, the report states, sounded ‘very excited’ – answered: ‘They seized 3-year-old children by the hair, held them up and shot them with a pistol and then threw them in. I saw that for myself. One could watch it.’ Another general, Lieutenant-General Hans Schaefer, commander of the 244th Infantry Division, asked Kittel: ‘Did they weep? Have the people any idea what’s in store for them?’ ‘They know perfectly well,’ replied Kittel; ‘they are apathetic. I’m not sensitive myself, but such things turn my stomach.’ Later on, however, he mused: ‘If one were to destroy all the Jews of the world simultaneously there wouldn’t remain a single accuser,’ and ‘Those Jews are the pest of the east!’ ‘What happened to the young, pretty girls?’ asked Felbert when the conversation turned to the concentration camps. ‘Were they formed into a harem?’ ‘I didn’t bother about that,’ Kittel answered. ‘I only found that they did become more reasonable… The women question is a very shady chapter. You’ve no idea what mean and stupid things are done.’7 In another conversation later that same day, Kittel told Schaefer about Auschwitz: ‘In Upper Silesia they simply slaughtered the people systematically. They were gassed in a big hall. There’s the greatest secrecy about all those things.’ Later still he said: ‘I’m going to hold my tongue about what I do know of these things.’ He little suspected that his every word was in fact being recorded, transcribed and translated.
The following February, Major-General Johannes Bruhn, commander of the 533rd Volksgrenadier Division, discussed the Holocaust with Felbert, saying: ‘I must assume, after all I have read about the Führer, that he knew all about it.’ ‘Of course he knew all about it,’ replied Felbert. ‘He’s the man who is responsible. He even discussed it with Himmler.’ ‘Yes,’ said Bruhn, ‘that man doesn’t care a hoot if your relatives are annihilated.’ ‘That man doesn’t care a damn,’ agreed Felbert. They saw the Holocaust, therefore, primarily in terms of the retribution the Allies would visit on the Fatherland once it was uncovered. In March 1945 Bruhn, one of the very few generals to emerge with credit from these conversations, said he believed that Germany did not deserve victory any longer, ‘after the amount of human blood we’ve shed knowingly and as a result of our delusions and blood lust. We’ve deserved our fate.’8 In reply, Lieutenant-General Fritz von Broich said: ‘We shot women as if they had been cattle. There was a large quarry where 10,000 men, women and children were shot. They were still lying in the quarry. We drove out on purpose to see it. It was the most bestial thing I ever saw.’ It was then that Choltitz spoke of the time he was in the Crimea and was told by the CO of the airfield from where he was flying to Berlin, ‘Good Lord, I’m not supposed to tell, but they’ve been shooting Jews here for days now.’ Choltitz estimated that 36,000 Jews were shot in Sevastopol alone.
‘Let me tell you,’ General Count Edwin von Rothkirch und Trach told General Bernhard Ramcke on 13 March 1945, ‘the gassings are by no means the worst.’ ‘What happened?’ asked Ramcke. ‘To start with people dug their own graves, then the firing squad arrived with tommy-guns and shot them down. Many of them weren’t dead and a layer of earth was shovelled in between. They had packers there who packed the bodies in, because they fell in too soon. The SS did that. I knew an SS leader there quite well and he said: “Would you like to photograph a shooting? They are always shot in the morning, but if you like we still have some and we can shoot them in the afternoon some time.” ’ Three days later at Trent Park, Colonel Dr Friedrich von der Heydte told Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth about the Theresianstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia: ‘Half a million people have been put to death there for certain. I know that all the Jews from Bavaria were taken there. Yet the camp never became over-crowded. They gassed mental defectives too.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ replied Wildermuth. ‘I got to know that for a fact in the case of Nuremberg; my brother is a doctor at an institution there. The people knew where they were being taken.’9 ‘We must uphold the principle of only having carried out orders,’ suggested Lieutenant-General Ferdinand Heim on another occasion. ‘We must stick to that principle if we are to create a more or less effective defence.’
As the war progressed, the Trent Park internees divided between true Nazis, who still practised the Heil Hitler salute, and the anti- or at least non-Nazis. The Nazis’ fanaticism was undimmed by the way the war was going. ‘What do I care about Good Friday?’ asked Major-General Wilhelm Ullersperger, who had been captured during the Ardennes offensive. ‘Because a filthy Jew was hanged umpteen years ago?’ Major-General Walther Bruns recalled the attitude of the members of the firing squad who killed thousands of Jews in Riga: ‘All those cynical remarks! If only I had seen those tommy-gunners, who were relieved every hour because of over-exertion, carry out their task with distaste, but not with nasty remarks like: “Here comes a Jewish beauty!” I can still see it all in my memory; a pretty woman in a flame-coloured chemise. Talk about keeping the race pure. At Riga they first slept with them and then shot them to prevent them from talking.’ Meanwhile, Colonel Erwin Josting of the Luftwaffe recalled an Austrian friend being asked by a lieutenant: ‘ “Woul
d you like to watch? An amusing show is going on down here; umpteen Jews are being killed off.” The barn was bunged full of women and children. Petrol was poured over them and they were burned alive. You can’t imagine what their screams were like.’10
Of course once in captivity in Nuremberg and subsequently in their autobiographies in the 1950s and 1960s, the generals both blamed Hitler for everything and used the now notorious excuse that they were only obeying orders. ‘It is interesting but it was tragic,’ Kleist told the US Army psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn in June 1946, in a statement typical of the entire officer corps. ‘If you receive a military order you must obey. That is where the big difference between a military and a political order comes in. One can sabotage a political order but to disobey a military command is treason.’11 Kesselring put it equally succinctly when he told Goldensohn, ‘A soldier’s first duty is to obey, otherwise you might as well do away with soldiering… A military leader often faces a situation he has to deal with, but because it was his duty, no court can try him.’ The evidence from Trent Park suggests that the Wehrmacht officer corps fought on with such resilience even after the war seemed certainly lost not just out of the soldierly virtues of loyalty and obedience, but because they hoped against hope to escape judicial retribution afterwards.
On 1 September 1944, Eisenhower took over day-to-day control of all ground forces from Montgomery, much to the latter’s chagrin. Eisenhower’s plan was for a broad advance into Germany, whereas Montgomery wanted a narrow ‘single thrust’ into the heart of the Reich, spearheaded by his 21st Army Group. On the same day that Montgomery put forward this plan, Patton produced one in which his Third Army led the way instead, with characteristic immodesty calling it ‘the best strategicall [sic] idea I’ve ever had’.12 Writing twenty years after the war, General Günther Blumentritt, who was commander of the Fifteenth Army from December 1944 onwards, admitted, ‘We had the highest respect for General Patton! He was the American Guderian, an excellent and bold tank corps leader.’13 Omar Bradley, meanwhile, felt that his drive on Frankfurt ought to be the centre of operations. It is sadly impossible to believe that the best demands of grand strategy, rather than their own egos, actuated these soldiers, and Eisenhower had the difficult task of holding the ring between them and imposing his own view. His greatness – doubted by some, like Brooke and Montgomery – stems partly from his success in achieving that.
There were a number of major problems with Montgomery’s scheme, which would have needed flank protection from the largely undamaged German Fifteenth Army to the north, and would have required the Scheldt estuary to have been used as a direct supply route, though the Germans continued to hold it until long after the fall of Antwerp in September. Montgomery’s plan to strike off across the North German Plain towards Berlin, crossing important rivers such as the Weser and Elbe in the process, made little military sense considering the level of resistance that the Germans were still offering even comparatively late on in the war. The 1,500 bodies in the British Military Cemetery at Becklingen, between Bergen–Belsen and Soltau, are testament to how hard the fighting was between the Weser and the Elbe as late as April 1945. Moreover, it would have reduced the American forces, especially the Third Army, to the minor role of flank protection. Eisenhower had to ensure a rough equality of glory, in order to keep the Western alliance on track. It is likely that the plan to reduce Patton’s role to mere tactical support of himself was one of the reasons it commended itself to Montgomery, but Eisenhower was later gently to belittle the scheme as a mere ‘pencil thrust’ into Germany.14
Instead, the Supreme Commander adopted the less risky ‘broad front’ approach to the invasion of the Reich, which he believed would ‘bring all our strength against the enemy, all of it mobile, and all of it contributing directly to the complete annihilation of his field forces’.15 Partly because of the efficacy of the V-weapon flying-bomb and rocket campaign against Britain – which could be ended only by occupying the launching sites – the main part was still to be the 21st Army Group’s advance through Belgium north of the Ardennes forest and into the Ruhr, which would also close off Germany’s industrial-production heartland, and thus deny Hitler the wherewithal to carry on the fight.
The 12th Army Group, which had been commanded by Bradley since August and was the largest force ever headed by an American general, was split by Eisenhower. Most of Lieutenant-General Courtney Hodges’ First Army was sent north of the Ardennes to support Montgomery, leaving Patton’s Third Army to march on the Saar, covered to his south by Lieutenant-General Jacob Devers’ 6th Army Group which had made its way up from the Anvil landings in the south of France. Even though Patton had crossed the Marne by 30 August 1944 and was soon able to threaten Metz and the Siegfried Line, lack of petrol along his 400-mile supply lines to Cherbourg – he had only 32,000 gallons but needed 400,000 for his planned advance – held him back, to his intense frustration. Patton’s personality was immense, but his battlefield achievements matched it. ‘I want you men to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,’ he told his troops. ‘He won it by making the other dumb bastard die for his country… Thank God that, at least, thirty years from now, when you are sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won’t have to say, “I shovelled shit in Louisiana.” ’16 To the widow of Second Lieutenant Neil N. Clothier, who was shot through the heart at Morville on 16 November leading his platoon towards a German machine-gun position, Patton wrote: ‘I know that nothing I can do can assuage your grief except to point out to you that since all of us must die, there is comfort in the fact that your husband died gloriously doing his duty as a man and a soldier.’17
Brussels fell to the Canadians of the 21st Army Group on 3 September and Antwerp the next day, but here Montgomery made a significant error. Antwerp was next to useless to the Allies until the River Scheldt was free of Germans, but clearing its banks was to cost the Allies – mainly Crerar’s Canadian First Army – as many as 13,000 casualties, because it was not concentrated upon immediately. Allied ships did not reach Antwerp until 28 November 1944. Until that point supplies still had to reach the 21st Army Group via Normandy, an absurdly long route. (Dunkirk wasn’t liberated until 9 May 1945.) For Churchill, who had understood the vital importance of Antwerp in the Great War so clearly that he had led a mission there as first lord of the Admiralty in 1914, and for Brooke, Montgomery, Eisenhower and others so to underestimate the inland port’s strategic value is hard to understand even today.
Clearing the estuary was always going to be tough work; this is John Keegan’s description of a day in the life of Peter White’s platoon in the 4th Battalion, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, part of the 52nd Lowland Division whose job it was to open the mouth of the Scheldt in late 1944:
To get up each morning, after a day that had been itself an escape from death, to swallow tinned bacon, hard tack and chlorine-flavoured tea, to plod forward across soaked fields in which every footstep might set off a lethal explosive charge, to lie for hours in freezing water while shells raked the landscape, to rise as darkness fell in the hope of finding a dry spot to shelter for the night after a mouthful of bully beef and hard biscuit.18
By contrast with Antwerp, Churchill’s tardiness over liberating the Channel Islands was understandable – for, as he told the War Cabinet on 26 November, now that it had ‘Come to [the] crunch’ the issue was ‘food’. There were 28,000 Germans stationed there who ‘can’t get away’, whereas ‘if [they came] over here [we would] have to feed them.’19
The food situation in liberated Europe was dire, especially in Holland where the destruction of transport, flooding of several dykes and continued disorganization as a result of continuing operations created fears of mass starvation. As late as 12 March 1945 Churchill had to tell the War Cabinet that ‘Some of the inhabitants will need to take their food intravenously.’ When he had been read a report on how the Americans expected p
rimarily British food reserves to be used in saving Holland, the Prime Minister exploded in anger and launched this (hitherto unpublished) tirade:
The United States are battening on our reserves, accumulated by years of self-denial. I am resisting that: but for an acute emergency we can and should use our reserves… Now is the time to say firmly that the US soldier eats five times what ours does. US civilians are eating as never before. We will never be behindhand with them in sacrifices: but let them cut down themselves before presuming to address us.20
In September 1944 – two months after his sacking – Rundstedt was recalled as commander-in-chief west, a post he was to hold until March 1945 when his urging of Hitler to make peace earned him his third dismissal. Nicknamed der alte Herr (the old gentleman), he was sixty-eight at the time of his final appointment. Watching the Hitler Youth Division retreating over the River Meuse near Yvoir on 4 September, Rundstedt said what many German officers were thinking, but few dared state: ‘It is a pity that this faithful youth is sacrificed in a hopeless situation.’21 A week later, on 11 September, the Allies set foot on German soil for the first time, when American troops crossed the frontier near Trier, yet Hitler still had armies numbering several million men, albeit far too widely dispersed. His West Wall – also known as the Siegfried Line – seemed formidable, and his reappointment of Rundstedt as commander-in-chief west was good for the Wehrmacht’s morale, with Field Marshal Model remaining in charge of Army Group B, Rommel and Kluge both having committed suicide after being tangentially implicated in the Bomb Plot. Later that month, Churchill, by now convinced that Hitler was a hopeless strategist, ridiculed him in the House of Commons:
We must not forget that we owe a great debt to the blunders – the extraordinary blunders – of the Germans. I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler, as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to connect him in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher. But there is one respect in which I must draw a parallel. Both these men were temperamentally unable to give up the tiniest scrap of any territory to which the high-water mark of their hectic fortunes had carried them.22
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 60