Hitler's Generals in America

by Derek R. Mallett

  SS-Brigadeführer Anton Dunckern (Courtesy of the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum)

  Two weeks later and 250 miles away, members of the American Tenth Regiment, Fifth Division, captured SS Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Polizei (Brigadier General) Anton Dunckern, commanding Gestapo officer for Alsace-Lorraine, in the city of Metz, France. The Americans did not realize at first that Dunckern was such an important catch, as he “crawled out from behind a beer barrel” in a saloon where he had been hiding. Dunckern had been sent to Metz to organize the city’s defense after many of the German soldiers garrisoned there had abandoned it. He had apparently established himself as a small-time dictator in the city, regularly having people sent off to Germany, or threatening to do so if they did not cooperate. Indeed, using such threats, Dunckern appears to have both enlarged his personal art collection and indulged his taste for French women.80

  American soldiers reported that Dunckern was arrogant and rude upon his surrender and that he immediately began to complain about having to stand outside in the rain. As he then began walking to a nearby shelter without a word to anyone, American GI Leonard O’Reilly remembered, “We told him to stand still and he kept going, so we just slapped our rifles on him and he stopped.” American lieutenant Harry Colburn stated that “[Dunckern] looked like he could spit at me. We had to push him into line because he didn’t want to go with the other prisoners. He acted like he was insulted being taken by a bunch of guys as ratty-looking as us.” Finally, after Dunckern entered the prisoner-of-war enclosure, American major Edward Marsh realized whom the Americans had captured and asked for Dunckern’s pay book to confirm it. Upon establishing Dunckern’s identity and rank, one of the American officers chastised him by asking if Gestapo officers were allowed to surrender. Dunckern retorted that he surrendered only because he had had a gun in his back. The American officer sarcastically suggested that “maybe [he] should have resisted them” and given the Americans an excuse to shoot him.81

  Dunckern’s die-hard attitude did not soften once he arrived at Trent Park. The British officers respected him as “an officer of first class ability” with “exceptional powers of observation” and “a prodigious memory for detail.” But they stated that Dunckern “met his interrogators with steady recalcitrance and evasiveness which he sustained with a skill and determination fully in keeping with his experience and abilities.” Despite the difficulty in gathering information from the Gestapo general, he proved useful. Perhaps inadvertently—British records are not clear in this regard—he supplied the Allies with information about the command structure and personnel of both the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) units under his command, as well as the specific duties and organization of the units in the Alsace-Lorraine region.82

  The final group of German general officers who would later find themselves in American custody arrived in England in December 1944, having been captured in the latter part of November.83 Two days after the capture of Dunckern, when the Americans completed the sweep of Metz, they also captured Major General Heinrich Kittel, commander of the 462nd Volksgrenadier Division and commandant of the city.84 On the same day that Kittel fell into American hands in Metz, November 22, 1944, the Allies also captured Brigadier General Hans Bruhn, who commanded the 553rd Volksgrenadier Division, when he surrendered in Saverne, a French city located about a hundred miles southeast of Metz, near Strasbourg.85 On November 23, 1944, the French captured Brigadier General Wilhelm Ullersperger, commanding officer of fortress engineers in Vosges, France, a city about eighty miles west of Strasbourg. Finally, the Allies captured Brigadier General Franz Vaterrodt. General Vaterrodt had originally been assigned as commandant of Strasbourg in March 1941 because of ill health, but he remained in this position until his capture on November 25, 1944.86

  Generalmajor Wilhelm Ullersperger (Courtesy of the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum)

  Hundreds of additional Wehrmacht general officers arrived in England as prisoners of war before and after the German surrender in May 1945. And a number of generals captured prior to the end of November 1944 were eventually transferred to American custody—the last group departed in May 1945. Yet all the senior officer prisoners eventually transferred from Britain to the United States arrived in England prior to January 1945.

  Because of the continual turnover of prisoners between June 1944 and the end of the war in May 1945, the environment at Trent Park became somewhat of a carousel. Despite this obstacle, CSDIC and Mother continued their interrogations and eavesdropping on the senior Wehrmacht officers in their custody. In many respects, the same conflicts that the British observed among their prisoners prior to D-Day reemerged, albeit with different casts of characters. The first and most obvious of these was the animosity between those generals who continued to express their support for the Hitler regime and those who ostensibly now opposed it.

  Despite the political animosity and recurrent confrontations among the prisoners, the British gleaned a large volume of intelligence from the generals by continuing to eavesdrop on their private conversations. Obtaining information that could have a positive impact on the outcome of the war remained Britain’s primary intelligence goal in regard to the monitoring of its German generals. Between D-Day and the German surrender in May 1945, CSDIC gathered information about the German order of battle in the Balkans, German fortifications on the Eastern Front, strategic reserves in France, the staff and defense of Fortress Cherbourg, delayed-action mines in Cherbourg harbor, and the morale of German troops in various regions, to offer just a few examples.87 Given the amount of resources devoted to gathering this information and the fact that CSDIC consistently maintained its eavesdropping efforts at Trent Park from the arrival of its first prisoner in August 1942 until Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the British must have obtained some valuable intelligence.

  In spite of Britain’s interest in the generals’ conversations, particularly those involving discussions of war crimes, by April 1945 CSDIC could no longer house all of its general officer prisoners at Trent Park. London initially sent two more small groups of generals to the United States, including von Choltitz, Ullersperger, Eberding, Ramcke, and Dunckern in early April and von Heyking, Daser, Vaterrodt, Bruhn, and Kittel in May.88 The departure of these last five generals, coupled with the German surrender in early May, marked the end of British transfers to the United States. Instead, London began sending the German generals to other locations in Britain, including Camp No. 1, Grizedale Hall in Lancashire, where noted British military historian Basil Liddell Hart forged an amicable professional relationship with some of these men.

  The volume of prisoners arriving in England forced the British to choose these alternative accommodations. Of the 302 German generals held in Britain at some point during or immediately after the Second World War, 248 arrived after April 1945. Furthermore, the British lost interest in most of these men once the war in Europe had concluded. Within five months of the German surrender, CSDIC had ceased to monitor any of the German general officers in Britain. Its supplemental homes soon closed, Latimer House in August and Wilton Park in November, and CSDIC transferred all of the generals out of Trent Park and closed that camp on October 19, 1945. Many of the generals remained prisoners of war in Britain for almost three more years. Special Camp No. 11 at Bridgend in Wales became the home for German general officers on January 9, 1946, but since CSDIC did not operate this particular camp there were no interrogations or eavesdropping on the men who resided there.89

  With the war in Europe coming to a close, the British focus quickly shifted to simply gathering information about war crimes. The London District Cage became the official War Crimes Interrogation Unit and most senior German officers endured at least a few days of interrogation there for this purpose.90 This change in focus and the abrupt loss of interest in the German generals when the war ended suggests that the primary purpose of Britain’s accommodation of senior Wehrmacht officer POWs had been to gain operational and tactical intelligenc
e that could aid Allied victory in the war. Once Germany had been defeated, the generals were no longer of much value and were set aside until such time as they could be safely repatriated.

  Yet British intelligence did not lose interest in Wehrmacht generals entirely. The British and their American allies developed a different relationship with dozens of these officers after the war. By this time, however, the Anglo-American relationship itself had changed. The Americans now took the lead in fostering the Western Allied partnership with the German generals and the British appeared content to play a secondary role. Britain had achieved its all-important wartime goal and now let the Americans take center stage in the early years of the Cold War. It is to the evolution of U.S. policy regarding its general officer prisoners, driven by changing American national security interests, that we now turn.

  2

  Hitler’s Generals Come to America

  While the British hosted their Afrikaner generals at stately Trent Park, American authorities originally embarked on a similar process with the four generals sent to the United States in June 1943. Using what they had learned from the combined Anglo-American intelligence efforts in North Africa, U.S. officials initially attempted to emulate British practices. They placed the generals in a lavish environment enhanced with secret microphones and set about gathering information from the newly arrived prisoners.

  The first parcel of Wehrmacht generals to arrive in the United States consisted of Generals Gustav von Vaerst, Karl Bülowius, Willibald Borowietz, and Carl Peter Bernard Köchy. Colonel August Viktor von Quast accompanied General von Vaerst as his chief of staff. At the time of his capture, von Quast had notified both the British and American authorities that he was awaiting promotion to brigadier general. Indeed, within less than three months—on August 1, 1943—Berlin promoted von Quast to Generalmajor (brigadier general). However, due to the German military’s attempts to promote large numbers of its enlisted soldiers to noncommissioned officers (NCOs) both immediately prior to capture and during the course of their internment as prisoners of war in an effort to take advantage of the Geneva Convention’s prohibition against forcing NCOs to work, the U.S. War Department balked at most prisoners’ claims of last-minute promotion. These circumstances eventually resulted in the War Department’s issuance of Prisoner of War Circular No. 11 in December 1943, which stated that “no evidence of promotion of a prisoner which is received by the War Department after the prisoner has come into the custody of the United States or previous Allied detaining power, will be recognized by the United States as accomplishing the promotion of the prisoner of war.” Thus, while the German generals at Clinton repeatedly requested American recognition of “General” von Quast’s promotion and treated him as one of their own, American authorities did not consider him a general.1

  Generalmajor August V. von Quast (Courtesy of the Mississippi Armed Forces Museum)

  Upon notifying the Americans of their intent to transfer these men to American custody, British authorities emphasized that in their experience the prisoners took “time to settle down” and that interrogation did not produce optimum results until “full realization of captivity and incipient boredom settle in.” The British also expressed their delight that British and American authorities saw “eye-to-eye on all these interrogation matters,” indicating that the Americans either intended to follow the British model of treatment for German prisoner-of-war generals or had at least led British authorities to believe that they did.2

  Understandably, given the status of these high-ranking prisoners, American authorities utilized one of their top interrogators, Major Duncan Spencer, to supervise the exchange of prisoners and to assist in the initial formulation of American procedure in accommodating and interrogating these men. Spencer had been attached to MI19, the branch of British military intelligence responsible for prisoners of war, since March 1943. He was familiar with both the British “operational plan” and the prisoners’ “individual characteristics,” and the British lauded his “efficiency” and “thorough grip of interrogation organization.”3

  Besides utilizing their top personnel, U.S. officials also sought an appropriate location to place the generals once they arrived in America. In mid-1942 American authorities had anticipated the need for secluded locations to interrogate prisoners of war of special importance, such as U-boat officers and enlisted men with special technical skills. Ideally, they sought two locations, one on each coast. Washington decided to house the most important German military personnel at Fort Hunt, Virginia, a former Civilian Conservation Corps facility located near Mount Vernon in the Washington, D.C., area. Particularly valuable Japanese prisoners would be sent to a renovated resort hotel at Byron Hot Springs, California, about fifty miles from San Francisco near the small town of Tracy. Because of Japanese cultural taboos against surrendering, however, the Allies captured a much smaller number of Japanese soldiers. Consequently, Byron Hot Springs had few occupants in the early stages of American involvement in the war. So the U.S. War Department quickly opted to use this facility to interrogate German POWs as well, including this first parcel of Wehrmacht general officers.4

  Byron Hot Springs had been a popular playground for Hollywood celebrities in the years before the Second World War. Having served as a regular getaway for actors like Clark Gable, the opulent resort was tailor-made for a high-security, secret operation. The elite hotel complex could not be seen from the passing road and the 210-acre property’s relatively flat terrain allowed for easy construction of fencing and clear fields of fire for guards should any prisoners attempt to escape. The grounds also included a five-acre palm tree park, cement walkways connecting all the buildings, and a tennis court. Its finest feature, of course, was the hot springs. Byron Hot Springs had developed a reputation similar to that of a hot springs resort in Carlsbad, Germany, something that American authorities believed might be helpful in getting German prisoners to let down their guard and speak more freely.5

  In addition to its amenities and secluded location, the resort also came at the right price. The War Department originally estimated that it would cost over $300,000 to acquire and adequately renovate any potential interrogation center property. Mrs. Mae Reed, the owner of Byron Hot Springs in 1942, donated the resort complex to the U.S. Army for the duration of the war as a patriotic act in honor of her son, a medical corps officer who had been killed in the First World War. Consequently, the cost of renovating the resort, which included the construction of fences and guard towers as well as the installation of important technical equipment, totaled only $173,000.6

  The Byron Hot Springs interrogation center had been in operation for only five months at the time of the generals’ arrival in June 1943. The U.S. government had acquired the hotel and surrounding property from Mrs. Reed in June 1942 and then took six months preparing the complex to accommodate prisoners of war. For security reasons, the site’s official address was simply “Post Office Box 651, Tracy, California,” and its existence was kept from the American public until well after the end of the war. Camp authorities established the hotel manor as the center of operations, with prisoners’ quarters located on the third floor of the former resort. American officers’ quarters and interrogation rooms occupied the building’s lower stories, and the other buildings in the complex housed additional officers and military police, a dental clinic, laundry, barber shop, recreation room, and other necessities. The facilities accommodated 173 German and 71 Japanese POWs during 1943, but during the month of June the American staff devoted their sole attention to von Vaerst, Bülowius, Borowietz, Köchy, and von Quast. Indeed, the interrogation of German prisoners from U-203 had to be expedited to meet the War Department requirement that all other prisoners of war be removed before the generals arrived.7

  The generals first arrived in the United States at Fort George Meade, Maryland, on June 3, 1943, and almost immediately departed for Byron Hot Springs in a plush Pullman car. During their long train ride west, as well as throughout thei
r internment in American prisoner-of-war camps, they rigidly adhered to their military precedent and traditions. For instance, during meals, all the officers sat at the tables in order of rank. In the evenings the four generals routinely shared a bottle or two of scotch whiskey, occasionally including the colonel and other lower-ranking officers in their social gatherings. Each general had his own valet who had accompanied him since capture. One of the generals’ orderlies, Sergeant Albert Lauser, confided that “most of the generals [were] partial to their liquid refreshment.” He noted that most of the German generals under whom he had served were heavy drinkers, although they usually drank discreetly, typically in the late evening, and that the generals’ drinking was “often apparent the next morning in the savage humor with which they rise to meet the cares and responsibilities of a new day.”8

  Part of the preparation for the arrival of prisoners of war at Byron Hot Springs included the installation of twenty-five recording devices and one hundred microphones in the prisoners’ quarters, something the Americans had likely learned from their British allies.9 As with their fellow prisoners in England, it seems likely that the four general officers in California must have realized that their conversations were being recorded by microphones in their rooms. And again, the nature of the information the generals revealed in “private” raises questions about the generals’ motivations for sharing such information if they knew it was for American consumption.

  Curiously, the generals in American custody did not express the same optimism about the war that their counterparts in England did. For example, as Generals von Vaerst and Borowietz finished listening to a news broadcast one evening, both expressed pessimism about Germany’s chances in the war. Von Vaerst remarked that “[Germany needs] everything, everything is needed. It is going very badly for us—very badly.” The two men discussed the Allied bombings of Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and other German cities and speculated that the number of bombers that the United States could supply for the effort would only increase. Interestingly, when Major von Meyer entered the room, the pessimistic conversation between his two superior officers quickly changed.10 Clearly the generals thought it important to conceal their pessimistic views of the war from subordinates, either in an effort to sustain morale or because they feared that these types of statements might be reported to authorities in Berlin. Had these two men remained in England, these types of “defeatist” comments would have landed them in the “anti-Nazi” clique at Trent Park.