Nonetheless, this seemingly one-way transfer of intelligence highlights a major difference in the manner in which the two Allies initially viewed the German POW generals. The British appear to have viewed these senior officers as potentially valuable from the start. In addition to interrogations and secretly recorded conversations, in mid-November 1943, only six months after the generals’ arrival in England, the Historical Branch of the British War Cabinet decided that there was “a wealth of valuable material . . . emanating from the German and Italian generals” and quickly assigned an officer to go through it in detail. The Americans, by contrast, interrogated only the first parcel of generals sent to the United States in June 1943. Once these men departed the U.S. interrogation center at Byron Hot Springs, California, American officers barely spoke to the German generals in their custody, much less actively interrogated them, and no attempts were ever made at Camp Mexia, Texas; Camp Clinton, Mississippi; Camp Dermott, Arkansas; or Camp Ruston, Louisiana, to secretly record any of the generals’ conversations. Even American interest in the generals for strictly historical purposes did not emerge until after the war ended in 1945. Whereas the British valued the generals as important “guests,” as they referred to them, the Americans largely viewed them much as they did any other German prisoners of war.18
This discrepancy between the two Allies’ views of the generals was reflected in their treatment of these prisoners. Unlike the British, the Americans did not feel compelled to provide these distinguished prisoners with the extra amenities that the generals thought appropriate to their rank and status. Consequently, a great deal of resentment developed early on among the German generals toward their American captors. At the heart of this resentment were some inherent cultural differences that may have initially made the British better suited than the Americans to accommodate German generals as prisoners of war, at least in the eyes of the generals themselves.
The German officer corps evolved from a feudal tradition in which gentlemen of noble birth commanded men in the field.19 While feudalism itself had long since declined in Germany by the time of the Second World War, a significant portion of the aristocracy still existed and a number of individual German officers descended from one of these aristocratic families. For example, sixteen men held the rank of Generalfeldmarschall (field marshal; equivalent to a U.S. five-star general) in the German Army as of May 1, 1944, of whom ten belonged to the aristocracy.20 Of these ten aristocratic generals, nine were descended from German generals or high-ranking officers. Thus, the elite heads of the Wehrmacht were not only aristocrats but members of an aristocracy who had also inherited a strong militaristic tradition.21
Similarly, one-third of the Generalobersten and Generalen der Infanterie (equivalent to U.S. four-star and three-star generals, respectively) could be counted as members of the German aristocracy or held aristocratic family connections through their wives or mothers. Moreover, these men were highly decorated, with 85 percent of them having been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Even the lower echelons of the cadre of German general officers, Generalleutnants and Generalmajore (equivalent to American two- and one-star generals, respectively) reflected German aristocratic traditions. Of the 470 Generalleutnants in the German Army in May 1944, 152, or 29 percent, descended from aristocratic families. Similarly, 176, or 31 percent, of the 565 Generalmajore held aristocratic family ties.22
As prisoners of the British, the aristocratic German generals found themselves in the hands of gentlemen similar to themselves. Prior to the First World War, professional military castes had influenced the development of both the German and the British officer corps to a great extent. At the turn of the twentieth century, over 80 percent of German and 40 percent of British generals and admirals were noblemen, demonstrating that the move toward more middle-class officers had only begun following World War I. Further illustrating the similarities between the two nations’ military leaders, British officers, like their German counterparts, often inherited their military tradition. From 1870 until the end of the 1950s, almost 40 percent of British generals and admirals had fathers who had been military officers themselves, most of them holding the rank of lieutenant colonel or above.23
Historian Correlli Barnett contends that during the 1940s and 1950s “the social gulf—the gulf in status—between the British officer and his noncommissioned officers and men . . . remained far wider than in European or North American armies.” Indeed, the British officer corps developed from much the same feudal military traditions as did the German. British general officers, like their German counterparts, came from the upper and uppermiddle classes. In the 1930s half of the general officers in the British Home Army still hailed from the aristocracy or landed gentry. Even after the Second World War, as late as 1952, the share of British general officers with aristocratic heritage remained at almost 40 percent, at a time when the rest of the officer corps had been professionalized and become almost entirely middle class in nature.24
Therefore, during World War II, German prisoner-of-war generals and their British captors had a great deal more in common, at least in terms of the social heritage of the military, than did either group with the Americans. Perhaps these men could understand each other on a social and cultural level that neither group shared with their Yankee counterparts. The British decision to devote significant resources and attention to German general officer prisoners and provide them with special privileges does not appear to have been controversial. It was simply assumed that British authorities would accommodate their social equals in a manner they thought befitting their own aristocratic general officers.
The Americans, by contrast, shared neither their enemy’s nor their ally’s aristocratic officer corps traditions. Thomas Jefferson founded the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on the basis of the “natural aristocracy,” military cadets ostensibly being chosen mostly by talent and natural intelligence rather than by wealth or social status. Dr. Andrew Goodpaster, former NATO commander and West Point commandant, once observed that “since [the founding of the U.S. Military Academy] America has never had a military caste, either social or political. The officer corps has been drawn from all corners and all levels of society. If the academy admitted enough sons of high officials, civil and military, to raise the hackles of a few, it always also included a significant number of lads whose fathers were cobblers, mechanics, and farmers.”25
During the American Civil War, many officers gained appointments for political reasons as well as out of necessity when both the Union and Confederacy created more military units than could be accommodated by graduates of the military academy. But the U.S. officer corps further professionalized in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an increasing percentage of peacetime army and marine corps officers obtained their commissions by graduating from a federal military school and not by political appointment. The social origins of the American officer corps during the U.S. war with Spain in 1898 reflected this more democratic composition. At a time when 40 percent of German military officers could tout their noble birth, more than half of U.S. Army officers in the Spanish-American War had been appointed from the ranks of enlisted men or as veterans of volunteer units. Four decades later, this democratic heritage prompted one U.S. Marine Corps major to brag that “the professional soldiers and sailors of this country are . . . connected in no way with any one region or caste, but constituting in fact a cross section of the whole population.”26
The perception has long existed, at least among members of the American military establishment, that the U.S. officer corps reflects the democratic ideals of the civilian population. Historian Russell Weigley describes America’s first army, Washington’s Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, as “a product of a middle-class society” and distinguishes it from contemporary European armies that “remained largely the products of a feudal age.” He argues that “this distinction made for profound differences of spirit, discipline, and organization.” In regard to offi
cers in particular, Weigley concludes that from its inception “the American officer corps came from the same general social strata as the American soldiery, while European officer corps were composed overwhelmingly of noblemen, or among the British at least of members of the gentry.”27
In addition to the unique social composition of the U.S. military officer corps, American perceptions of German generals during the Second World War may well have been influenced by America’s long-standing societal distrust of professional militaries in general. The American colonies inherited a citizen-soldier tradition from England in the form of popular militias. The militias fell out of favor in England after the English Civil War, much as they did in the rest of Europe, and by the early eighteenth century the European powers relied almost exclusively on professional armies. The United States, by contrast, continued to utilize short-service militia and volunteers who served only during wartime. These “citizen soldiers” proved useful time and again in American wars, whether fighting to win American independence, routing British troops under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, or defeating a Mexican army under Colonel Alexander Doniphan—a volunteer himself—during the U.S.-Mexican War.
American suspicions of professional militaries even affected the development of the U.S. Military Academy. Not only was admission to West Point structured to admit a cross-section of the American population, the school’s curriculum was designed as much for practical concerns as it was for strictly military ones. As Russell Weigley observes, “In a country not immediately imperiled by foreign enemies and jealous of standing armies, the academy had to justify itself by preparing officers who could do useful work in peace, so it became largely a school of civil engineering.”28
Despite going through a period of military professionalization in the late nineteenth century, the United States entered World War II with its belief in a small regular army and the virtues of citizen soldiers intact. This does not solely account for the differences between American and British treatment of German generals. It does, however, illustrate the potential for American military personnel to be reluctant to pay homage to what they saw as an unnecessarily aristocratic and professional German military hierarchy by providing these German officer prisoners with special privileges.
The cultural and intellectual climate of the two decades preceding U.S. entry into the Second World War may have further aggravated American skepticism of professional military institutions, the officer corps in particular. Widespread disillusionment following the First World War bred a generation of antiwar writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Erich Maria Remarque, Henri Barbusse, and Ernest Hemingway. During the 1920s and 1930s, the portrayal of U.S. military officers by American intellectuals and professional academics reflected this sense of disillusionment. Historian C. Robert Kemble argues that some American writers and filmmakers in the two decades leading up to the Second World War attacked the quality of West Point as an academic institution and thus the quality of officers it could produce. Yet, simultaneously, critics of American military officers expressed their fear of an “undemocratic military caste,” labeling the American officer as “a Prussianistic professional who had been trained to his autocratic ways . . . rather than the nineteenth-century ersatz aristocrat who was despotic by class instinct.”29
Kemble contends that John Dos Passos’s novel Three Soldiers, originally published in 1921, established the prototype that two decades of novelists followed. Dos Passos’s antimilitary formula, according to Kemble, portrayed “sensitive, humanitarian, intelligent” men of peace, frequently represented as Ivy League graduates, beaten down by cruel, military authoritarians, often portrayed as West Point graduates. Kemble notes that despite the later proliferation of American military heroes in World War II–era films and novels, the most preferred protagonist was a “patriotic but uncontaminated civilian at heart,” rather than a professional soldier. Indeed, a New York Times Book Review summation of American World War II novels written throughout the decade of the 1940s found the common assumption that “all officers are cads, or worse.” The analysis continued by observing that, in most of these novels, “the rule is that an officer’s capacity for evil is in direct ratio to his rank; the higher the rank, the greater the scope for villainy.” The reviewer concluded that “the officer caste in [American] World War II fiction [fulfilled] a symbolic function: In these antifascist novels the officer is the fascist, the authoritarian.”30
Consequently, Americans seemed predisposed to distrust professional military officers, whether their own or those of another nation. In the American mind, who best exemplified autocratic militarism if not an aristocratic, “Prussianistic professional” general? If Americans heavily criticized the “undemocratic military caste” of their own officer corps, one that had not developed from an aristocratic tradition, they would undoubtedly oppose providing German general officers with what they may have viewed as aristocratic treatment in the form of privileges that often exceeded the basic requirements of international law.
Nevertheless, the German generals arrived in Allied custody expecting to be treated like aristocrats. They encountered fellow gentlemen in England. The similarly aristocratic British officer corps provided the generals with extra amenities and paid the prisoners considerable respect and attention. The Americans, on the other hand, whether because they lacked an aristocratic tradition or were influenced by a long-standing suspicion of professional militaries, or simply because they allowed their anti-Nazi animosity to temper their judgment, initially refused to offer the generals anything more than that required by the Geneva Convention.
This discrepancy between British and American treatment of German general officer prisoners slowly began to change following the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The slow, steady advance of Allied troops across Western Europe brought thousands more prisoners of war into Allied hands, including dozens of German generals. Along with these prisoners came the realization that Allied victory was likely and that Britain and the United States would bear significant responsibility for the fate of Europe at the end of the war.
Allied authorities, aware of the prominent status of the prewar German military, believed that German prisoners of war might wield considerable influence in the postwar years. Thus it behooved the Allies to “re-educate” the well over half a million German men in their custody, some of whom undoubtedly still subscribed to the tenets of National Socialism. In the fall of 1944 the British War Office and the American Provost Marshal General’s Office initiated “intellectual diversion” programs designed to subtly introduce German prisoners of war to the merits of Western democracy.
If ordinary soldiers were being prepared for leadership roles in a new, democratic German society, how much more important and influential might the general officers be? In conjunction with the intellectual diversion program, a great deal of discussion ensued in the United States in the fall of 1944 regarding the potentially influential roles these men might be able to play in postwar Germany. For the first time, Allied perceptions of which general officer prisoners were “Nazis” and which “anti-Nazis,” something CSDIC had been eager to determine during the first two years of the generals’ stay in England, now became a paramount concern for American authorities.
One of the first tests of the political orientation of the generals had come in the form of the National Committee “Free Germany” and its affiliated organization, the League of German Officers, created in the Soviet Union during the late summer and early fall of 1943. After Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the Soviet Union sought to make use of the twenty-three general officers and the thousands of newly captured German POWs in its custody to undermine morale among German troops still fighting on the Eastern Front and to encourage active resistance to the Hitler regime among the German population. The National Committee and League of German Officers, collectively known as the Free Germany Committee, consi
sted of German political exiles, enlisted prisoners of war, and about a hundred Wehrmacht officers headed by General Walter von Seydlitz. The committee published a newspaper, Freies Deutschland, broadcast anti-Hitler appeals on the radio, worked to recruit German prisoners in the Soviet camps, and even broadcast to German troops at the front via loudspeakers.31
The committee’s overall effect on German troops, the German home front, and the outcome of the war was negligible. But British officials utilized their captive generals’ reactions to news of the committee’s activities to gauge each individual prisoner’s level of sympathy toward the Nazi regime, as well as to evaluate the possibility of creating a similar organization in Britain. While no such organization emerged among the prisoners of war in either Britain or the United States, the possibility provoked a great deal of discussion about the generals’ individual political views and potential value to Allied plans for postwar Germany.
This work examines those generals who were at some point prisoners of war in the United States and looks largely at American treatment of these men from initial capture in 1943 until the last of them departed American soil in mid-1946. The narrative largely focuses on those general officer prisoners who seemed to most capture the interest of American authorities. Because many of these general officers spent time in the respective camps of both Britain and the United States, their experiences serve as an interesting comparison between American and British treatment and perceptions of these prisoners of war. Furthermore, these prisoners best illustrate the dramatic American change of heart in the postwar era. Having been largely disregarded as POWs during the course of the war, these generals developed relationships with American authorities after the war that demonstrate the evolution of American national security interests in the immediate postwar years and how this evolution was reflected in U.S. POW policy.
Hitler's Generals in America Page 2