Hitler’s Generals in America
HITLER’S GENERALS IN AMERICA
Nazi POWs and Allied Military Intelligence
DEREK R. MALLETT
Copyright © 2013 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mallett, Derek R., 1969-
Hitler’s generals in America : Nazi POWs and allied military intelligence / Derek R. Mallett.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-4251-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4253-1 (pdf) —
ISBN 978-0-8131-4252-4 (epub)
1. World War, 1939-1945—Prisoners and prisons, American. 2. Prisoners of war—Germany—History—20th century. 3. Prisoners of war—United States—History—20th century. 4. Generals—Germany—History—20th century. 5. World War, 1939-1945—Military intelligence. 6. Cold War—Military intelligence. I. Title.
D805.U5M34 2013
940.54’7273—dc23
2013029397
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of American University Presses
For my mother’s quiet strength and subtle leadership;
for her solid, principled example;
and for her having always been there.
And for my father’s satirical view of the world;
for his firm, father’s hand;
and for his reminder that life is not always what it seems.
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Afrikaner and Französen
2. Hitler’s Generals Come to America
3. The Seeds of the American Transformation
4. Reeducating Hitler’s Generals?
5. Cold War Allies
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Wehrmacht General Officer Prisoners of War Held in the United States
Appendix B. German Military Document Section Studies (Published)
Appendix C. German Military Document Section Studies (Unpublished)
Appendix D. Wehrmacht Officer Prisoners of War in the Hill Project (“Hillbillies”)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Abbreviations
BA-MA
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg
CAD Civil Affairs Division, U.S. War Department
CSDIC Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre
GMDS German Military Document Section
MIRS Military Intelligence Research Section
MPEG Military Police Escort Guard
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
NCO noncommissioned officer
OKH Oberkommando des Heeres (German Army High Command)
OKW Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces High Command)
PMGO Provost Marshal General’s Office
SD Sicherheitsdienst
TNA National Archives of the United Kingdom
USFET U.S. Forces European Theater
Introduction
Discussions of World War II German generals often bring to mind names like Erwin Rommel or Heinz Guderian. Undoubtedly, these men and officers like them played significant roles in the conduct of the war. Scholars have paid less attention to the fates of hundreds of senior German officers taken prisoner by the Allies, with the exception of Wehrmacht officers in Soviet hands, those issuing anti-Nazi propaganda from Russian prisoner-of-war camps being of particular note.
What seem to have been of least interest are the general officers captured by the Western Allies who spent anywhere from a few months to a few years in England or North America. Indeed, little has been written about the fifty-five German general officers who were held as prisoners of war in the United States during World War II.1 Yet the collective story of these men’s experiences as prisoners of war reveals a great deal about the differences in American and British perceptions of these men, and even more about the differences in America’s national security concerns in the summer of 1943, when the army first brought Wehrmacht general officers to the United States, and the summer of 1946, when it repatriated the last of them.
From the earliest stages of the war, providing for captured enemy soldiers increasingly burdened Allied authorities. When General Hans Jürgen von Arnim surrendered the Axis’s North African forces in May 1943, 250,000 German and Italian soldiers became the responsibility of the British and American governments. This represented the first massive influx of prisoners of war into Allied custody. These prisoners included not only the usual German and Italian enlisted men and lower-ranking officers but seventeen German general officers as well, including General von Arnim himself. Washington and London engaged in a great deal of discussion regarding who should take responsibility for these select prisoners. The two Allies agreed that Britain’s Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), the agency charged with interrogating important prisoners of war in England, “should act as advanced echelon” for their collaborative effort. But the ultimate question of “ownership” of these prisoners was immaterial, as transfers of some of the generals to the United States could be easily effected. As if to demonstrate this, CSDIC sent four generals and a colonel awaiting promotion to the United States on the first of June, a little more than two weeks after their capture in North Africa, with more to follow as the war progressed.2
The U.S. War Department most likely deferred to the British in dealing with the general officer prisoners because London had far more experience handling prisoners of war. During the First World War, the British learned a great deal about caring for war prisoners, which provided a model for efficient and well-managed treatment of POWs during World War II. Britain graduated from temporarily housing the Kaiser’s men aboard ships in the winter of 1914–1915 to the establishment of land-based camps both in the British Isles and in France the following year. Prisoners of the British enjoyed a bountiful food allotment of forty-six hundred calories a day through most of the war, and even when Britons themselves struggled with food shortages in the spring of 1917, POWs still consumed three thousand calories a day.3
Other staples of World War II British POW policy developed out of the trials and errors of the Great War as well. The use of prisoner labor, while not practiced at all until the spring of 1916, quickly expanded until almost one-third of the German prisoners in Britain were working at various agricultural jobs by war’s end. And, not unlike their successors in the Second World War, World War I German officer prisoners found themselves in stately mansions like Donington Hall in Derby, enjoyed the use of adjacent acres of land for regular walks, and were aided by enlisted prisoners who acted as servants and orderlies.4
Historian Richard Speed contends that “British camps [during the Great
War] more nearly matched the prewar ideal of captivity than did those of any other European belligerent.” The British government heavily weighed the often vague requirements of the Hague Conventions that governed the treatment of war prisoners during World War I and sought to incorporate the spirit of this existing international law to provide humane treatment for all POWs. At the onset of the Second World War, twenty years later, the British simply had to reincarnate the system for accommodating prisoners of war that they had worked out during World War I.5
The American experience with prisoners, like the country’s experience with the First World War in general, was unique. Whereas the other belligerents began dealing with prisoners of war in 1914, the United States did not officially enter the war until 1917, and even then American troops did not see their first major engagement until Cantigny in May of the following year. Only then, almost four years after the start of World War I, did the Americans begin to establish some kind of apparatus to handle prisoners of war. Prior to becoming an active belligerent, however, the United States had served as the protecting power for the war prisoners of Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, and Russia. In this capacity, American officials inspected the camps of these respective nations to ensure humane treatment of prisoners. Thus, when U.S. authorities began to develop their own POW policy they at least possessed some well-formulated ideals if no practical experience.6
When the first American units arrived in France in 1917, they served under French command and, consequently, turned any captured prisoners over to French control. As the American Expeditionary Force fully mobilized in Europe and entered the war as an independent entity in 1918, the Americans insisted on handling their own war prisoners. This enabled them to better negotiate with the German government in regard to the treatment of American POWs. Near the end of the war, American authorities even demanded that the French transfer any prisoners captured by American forces back to U.S. control.7
The American experience with handling World War I POWs was also unique in that circumstances largely compelled U.S. authorities to intern the overwhelming majority of their prisoners on foreign soil. The U.S. Army established ten base camps and seventy-six smaller labor camps throughout France, placing the Department of the Provost Marshal General and its newly created Prisoner of War Division in charge of overseeing the entire operation. The Provost Marshal General’s Office (PMGO) initially considered sending captured German officers to the United States. But, after quickly being overwhelmed with prisoners before adequate arrangements could be made to transport them across the Atlantic, the Americans decided to keep the officers in France instead. They eventually established quarters for all of these men at the Chateau Vrillays at Richelieu in November 1918. The 85 highest-ranking officers, out of a total of 874 prisoners at Richelieu, were quartered in the chateau itself, while the remaining prisoners lived in barracks constructed on the chateau grounds. In scenes similar to those in World War II POW camps in the United States, almost all of the German officer prisoners occupied themselves by engaging in educational courses, many of them taken for credit at German universities.8
Washington established four internment camps in the United States during the First World War, but only one of these held prisoners of war. Fort McPherson, on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, housed 1,356 German naval officers and enlisted men. These prisoners, mostly U-boat crewmen, had all been captured near the Atlantic coast and thus could more easily be kept in the United States than shipped back to Europe for confinement.9
The Americans dealt with prisoners of war fairly well during World War I, considering the relatively short span of time they had to develop any kind of system and appropriate apparatus. Yet the Americans’ use of tents to house prisoners during a rainy French spring in 1918, when the other belligerents had long since established permanent facilities, and the deaths of dozens of prisoners employed in the disposal of munitions after the war marred the American effort. Furthermore, the hastily assembled American system of camps and logistics might well have been overwhelmed had the war not concluded only a few months after the American military took responsibility for its own prisoners.10
Given the U.S. military’s limited experience in dealing with prisoners of war during World War I, it is not surprising that the United States initially followed the British lead in handling POWs during the Second World War. Additionally, by the time America entered World War II, Great Britain had been dealing with prisoners of war in this conflict for more than two years. Also, British authorities already had experience in dealing with German generals, the first being Major General Hans Friemel, captured in the Netherlands in May 1940. Generals Hans von Ravenstein and Artur Schmitt soon joined Friemel, and London sent all three to POW camps in Canada, where they remained until 1946.11 The British also had established facilities in England for two other German generals, Ludwig Crüwell and Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, who had been in captivity for several months prior to the end of the North African campaign.
In addition to following British experience in establishing facilities for prisoners of war, the Americans sought to emulate British intelligence practices; consequently, the two Allies increasingly combined their intelligence operations as the war progressed. Initially, the United States and the United Kingdom operated prisoner-of-war interrogation teams independently in North Africa, with each attempting to gather information from its own captures. By February 1943, however, they had pooled their staff and resources to form the Allied Captured Intelligence Centre in Algiers. By the climax of the war in North Africa in May 1943, American authorities had replicated British methods, assigning interrogators to work with British personnel in London to gain “practical experience” under the guidance of British operatives.12
Despite the Americans’ initial willingness to learn from their British allies, the U.S.-British joint handling of POW matters proved cumbersome, if not contentious, at times. P. H. Gore-Booth, a senior official in the British Foreign Office, blamed the American State and War Departments’ administration of prisoner affairs for much of the problem. He characterized both as “bottle-neck departments,” observing that all American POW issues filtered through a small number of key personnel who were greatly overworked. He observed that J. H. Keeley, head of the State Department’s Special War Problems Division, “always [had] more special war problems on his desk than he [could] cope with,” and Bernard Gufler, who served as Keeley’s “No. 2,” was “in a similar situation.” The result, according to the British official, was that neither man could devote his attention to any particular matter.13
Gore-Booth stated that this was even more pronounced in the case of the principal War Department representative in the joint Anglo-American meetings. He described Lieutenant Colonel M. C. Bernays as “desperately overworked” and a man whose “superiors have paid no attention to his complaints on this score.” He praised Colonel Bernays as a “tiger for work” and a “demon for thoroughness” who considered everything in minute detail before approving it. Unfortunately, this meticulous approach often led to delays in the joint meetings, as compromises had to be reached regarding the wording of documents. The British official wryly noted that all drafts had to read “quaintly,” as he put it, “since they [were] written in that curious mongrel, the Anglo-American language.”14
In assessing the relationship between the two Allied nations, Gore-Booth ultimately concluded that the U.S.-British collaboration worked successfully, albeit slowly, thanks in part to the American personnel not sparing any effort to make the procedures a success. In particular, he lauded both Bernays and Gufler for doing “everything possible within the framework of the rather rigid American official procedure to keep things moving.” But even the Americans, Gore-Booth added, were “acutely conscious of the difficulties which their system sometimes presents.”15
If the observations of Gore-Booth are accurate, the American prisoner-of-war administration was dogged by a lack of necessary personnel and overwhelming wo
rkloads that bred inefficiency and delay. Yet despite the “machinery” of Washington, as the British official termed it, the two countries learned to work together. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, the two Allies established a fifty-fifty agreement for the disposal of prisoners of war. This meant that every few months the two nations would simply divide all newly captured prisoners of war into two equal halves, regardless of who captured whom, with each being responsible for the internment of its portion. This arrangement remained in effect until September 1944 when, after being inundated with prisoners of war in the months following D-Day, Britain could no longer properly house an equal share of the prisoners and asked the United States to abrogate the agreement. The Americans agreed to take responsibility for an additional 175,000 German prisoners of war on behalf of the British government. Consequently, the United States returned these men to British custody in 1946 rather than repatriating them directly to Germany, causing a great deal of resentment among the prisoners.16
Despite these postwar complications, the two Allies established a working relationship regarding POW matters during the war. They shared a great deal of information and regularly passed prisoners of war back and forth. Indeed, it appears that the British even provided American military intelligence with copies of the transcripts of the generals’ interrogations and the conversations recorded by CSDIC personnel, as the existing CSDIC reports regarding the German generals are stamped “Most Secret (British)—Secret (American).”17 That British intelligence staff offered their American counterparts access to these files may further explain American willingness to allow the British to take the lead in holding and interrogating the German generals. U.S. intelligence likely saw no need to expend precious American resources to operate eavesdropping machinery or conduct interrogations of those generals who were later transferred to U.S. custody when CSDIC had already done a capable job for them.
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