Among the twenty-seven German officers who had been assembled at Camp Bolbec in Le Havre, France, and made their way across the Atlantic Ocean were four general officers. The senior prisoner and nominal leader was Lieutenant General Walther Buhle, chief of the army staff within the OKW. Buhle had previously served under Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and had been present on July 20 when von Stauffenberg’s bomb had demolished the “wolf ’s lair” but left Hitler largely unharmed. Following the July Plot, Buhle had continued in the service of Hitler’s General Staff and had eventually earned promotion to lieutenant general for his “energetic” work.32
His fellow general officers included Hellmuth Laegeler, who taught tactics at the Kriegsakademie and held various staff positions before assuming the position of chief of staff for the German Replacement Army near the end of the war. As members of the OKW, he and Buhle appear to have been the more important of the first four general officers to join the project. Franz Kleberger, director of the OKH and chief quartermaster and finance officer for the German Field Army, and Rolf Menneking, a member of the OKH staff, served less important functions.33 Clearly, however, all of these men would have had intimate knowledge of the newly arrived General Staff documents and could offer valuable experience, having served in Hitler’s high command organizations.
Yet the Western Allies compromised to a degree in choosing these men for the project. These officers had attained high enough positions in the General Staff to have experience and expertise of value to the Hill Project. But they were lower-profile officers, selected in part because they were unlikely to be tried for any war crimes or seriously questioned by the other Allies after their work had concluded. Lieutenant General Adolf Heusinger illustrated this point. Heusinger, a high-profile Wehrmacht officer, served as chief of the operations branch of the OKW for most of the war. He was originally scheduled to join the Hill Project in November 1945 but Allied lawyers called him to testify at the Nuremberg trials and he never made it to Camp Ritchie.34 Thus Western Allied intelligence was compelled to choose perhaps less valuable officers in order to find men available for the operation.
Master Sergeant Gustav Blackett examines a document in the Armeeoberkommando (Army Corps) stacks of the Heeresarchiv. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
Eight colonels, eleven lieutenant colonels, two majors, and two captains, almost all of whom were General Staff officers, completed the first parcel of hillbillies coming to Camp Ritchie. A few days before their arrival “arrangements [had] been made for the prisoners of the Hill Project to have the same ration and laundry service as enlisted personnel of the [U.S. Army] to permit them to perform more effective intelligence research work.” Indeed, on September 27, 1945, the U.S. Provost Marshal General’s Office transferred twenty-two German POWs already interned in the United States to Camp Ritchie to serve as support staff for the Hill Project. These men assumed responsibilities as supply sergeants, canteen operators, latrine orderlies, firemen, painters, officer’s orderlies, and general clerks.35 Between October 1945 and April 1946, dozens of additional enlisted German POWs found themselves at Camp Ritchie serving the growing number of German officer prisoners working for the intelligence operation.
Prior to the prisoners’ arrival, Allied authorities also sought to ensure that any reports produced by the Hill Project and the GMDS would be of “maximum usefulness to the using agencies.” Officers from the U.S. War Department Personnel Division (G-1), Military Intelligence Division (G-2), Organization and Training Division (G-3), Supply Division (G-4), Special Projects Division, New Developments Division, Army Ground Forces, and Army Service Forces formed an informal panel of advisors “to give the research personnel at GMDS guidance in their effort.” This advisory panel planned to meet with the researchers at Camp Ritchie once every seven to ten days to discuss any new research questions they wished the operation to address and receive progress reports on existing research projects.36
Brigadier General R. C. Partridge, one of the panel members from Army Ground Forces, had studied at the Kriegsakademie in Berlin for almost a year, from November 1938 until August 1939, as part of an exchange with the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College. Partridge had completed only one year of the curriculum when the outbreak of the Second World War abruptly curtailed his studies. Yet his experience provided him unique expertise and made him “especially helpful in developing reports of value to the War Department and the Ground Forces.”37 Curiously, Partridge departed the Kriegsakademie only a few years before Laegeler began teaching at the German military school.
Following their arrival at Camp Ritchie on October 8, 1945, the prisoners, under the direction of Allied officers, quickly set to work. The organization of these earliest studies illustrated a remarkable level of collaboration between Allied officers and German prisoners of war as well as between the Allied officers themselves. The major research initiated in mid-October included a study of the German General Staff Corps led by American captain Robert C. Fitzgibbon. Canadian lieutenant colonel George Sprung and British lieutenant George Mowatt supervised a massive study of the German High Command involving General Buhle and twenty-five other German officers. Canadian captain Clarence Doerksen and American lieutenant Michael Tsouros also directed a study of German military personnel administration and German military training. Each report relied on the expertise of German officer prisoners as well as research in the GMDS documents by both German POWs and Allied officers and enlisted men.38
Lieutenant Colonel G. M. C. Sprung, a Canadian, chief of research at GMDS (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
Another intriguing feature of the Hill Project research was that some of the reports were prepared at the behest of one of a number of Allied government agencies. For example, the GMDS prepared the first two special reports, on “Officer Efficiency” and “Officer Candidate Selection and Training,” in response to queries from the U.S. Adjutant General’s Office, and the first translations of German documents were specifically prepared for study by the U.S. Army Staff. This arrangement, in which military or civilian agencies made requests for specific research to be conducted by German prisoner-of-war researchers and writers, later featured prominently in the U.S. Army Historical Division’s use of former Wehrmacht officers in Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s.39 With both the Hill Project and later the Historical Division, Allied agencies requested specific information that could be put to use immediately.
The high level of collaboration between captors and captives as well as between the representatives of the three Allied governments continued for the duration of the Hill Project. Work began on several more major studies in November, including a series of bibliographical reports charting the possibility for further GMDS research projects, led by British major Horton Smith and American captain Homer Schweppe. The Hill Project and the GMDS staff also initiated research projects on “German Manpower and Mobilization,” “Logistics on the High Command Level,” “German Fortifications and Defense,” “Organization and Methods of the German Army Archives,” “German Military Administration,” and “German Operational Intelligence,” directed by four American officers and two British officers.40
The rapid expansion of the Hill Project’s research agenda necessitated a restructuring of the program’s administration as well as a significant increase in the number of personnel involved, both Allied and German prisoners of war. As of January 1, 1946, a new command structure supervised the program’s activities. A new deputy chief of GMDS, British lieutenant colonel D. A. Prater, took over direct supervision of GMDS operations, and the coordination of all research projects now came under the direct supervision of the research chief, a new position awarded to Canadian lieutenant colonel George Sprung.41 This new command structure highlighted the multinational nature of the project, with a Canadian research chief reporting to a British director of GMDS, who in turn reported to Colonel Blunda, the American commanding officer.
<
br /> The structural reorganization of the project was accompanied by the continued expansion of its personnel. On December 20, 1945, eight German officers and nine enlisted men from the Pikesville, Maryland, prisoner-of-war camp joined the GMDS effort as translators. These men had been “screened for security and willingness to work and their translation ability [had] been checked by a written examination.” Less than three weeks later, on January 8, 1946, another eleven German officers and thirteen enlisted men from the prisoner-of-war camp at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, transferred to Camp Ritchie to serve as translators and lithographers.42 The Hill Project researchers prepared all of their reports in German, since this was the prisoners’ native language and the language of the documents in which they were conducting their research. Thus it fell to a large number of subordinate officers and enlisted men to translate these manuscripts into English, necessitating the transfer of dozens of qualified prisoners to Ritchie to serve in this capacity.
By January 1946, the number of German officer prisoners actively engaged in the research agenda of the Hill Project had grown to forty-one, including the arrival of two additional generals and twelve lower-ranking officers. The roster of hillbillies now included Brigadier General Herbert Gundelach, chief of staff for engineering and fortifications in the OKH. Gundelach brought additional expertise, having previously served as chief quartermaster of the First Army and chief of staff for the generals in Albania. In addition to Gundelach, Brigadier General Ivo-Thilo von Trotha, chief of the operations branch of the OKH, also was transferred to Camp Ritchie. Von Trotha had excelled in various General Staff positions. His experience in the Ukraine and later as chief of staff for Colonel General Gotthard Heinrici and Armee Gruppe Weichsel on the Eastern Front made him especially important to Western Allied intelligence.43
The final general officer to join the Hill Project did not arrive until March 16, 1946. Major General Wolfgang Thomale, one of the few hillbillies who was not a member of the General Staff, had extensive knowledge of panzer warfare. He served for the last two years of the war as chief of staff for Colonel General Heinz Guderian, after Guderian had been appointed inspector general of armored forces in 1943. Thomale, whom Guderian described as a “phenomenal panzer officer,” contributed significantly to the project’s research on panzer training and armored warfare.44
The final tally of hillbillies—the German prisoners directly involved with the work of the Hill Project—included 35 officers holding the rank of captain or above. All of these men had been chosen because they possessed “special knowledge.” The list also included 22 more officers, largely lieutenants and captains, who were “selected for English language qualifications,” 14 noncommissioned officers included because of their “familiarity with the available archives and records,” and 108 enlisted prisoners chosen for “technical and language qualifications.” Hundreds more German prisoners of war were transferred to Camp Ritchie to service the camp’s POW enclosure and the requirements of the Hill Project inhabitants but did not actually take part in the research. The number of support staff members grew from 646 prisoners after the GMDS reorganization in January 1946 to as high as 1,572 prisoners at the end of March 1946, when the project was nearing completion.45
The most important question surrounding the Hill Project, however, regards the program’s purpose. What were the main goals of this program and what kind of information did these research projects provide to Western Allied military intelligence? The Sinclair-Bissell Agreement’s project outline offered three stated purposes for the Hill Project and the German Military Document Section: (1) research on “subjects which will aid in preserving military security in Europe,” (2) research “in prosecuting the war against Japan,” and (3) research “in improving intelligence organization and techniques and to other selected matters on which important lessons can be gained from studying German methods in detail.”46
At the time the agreement was concluded in May 1945, obtaining information to aid the prosecution of the war against Japan had likely been paramount. But considering that the Wehrmacht POW officers who composed the Hill Project did not arrive in the United States until early October 1945, almost a month after the official Japanese surrender, this was obviously not one of the project’s goals by the time its work began. In weighing the other two options, it is important to evaluate how the Allied agreement might have defined “subjects which will aid in preserving military security in Europe.” Since no further definition was provided, one must suppose that preserving military security in Europe meant either the demilitarization of Germany to prevent the recurrence of yet another world war or, perhaps equally likely, preparation of an adequate defense against a potential invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Red Army, something about which German General Staff officers would have had considerable information to offer. Regardless, the documents produced by Hill Project researchers suggest that the third option was the primary focus: that of “improving intelligence organization and techniques and . . . other . . . matters on which important lessons can be gained from studying German methods in detail.”
Western Allied admiration for the prowess and efficiency of the German armed forces motivated the Allies to emulate the German military model. The Hill Project and the GMDS at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, produced, published, and distributed fifteen studies to numerous military schools and commands, including Headquarters, U.S. Forces European Theater (USFET); Headquarters, Mediterranean Theater of Operations, U.S. Army; the British Joint Staff Mission; the U.S. Military Academy; the U.S. Command and General Staff School; the U.S. Air War College; the U.S. Naval War College; and the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, among many others. The majority of these documents were procedural studies that evaluated various aspects of the World War II German Army and highlighted lessons learned and successful practices that might be adopted by the Western Allied armies.
Allied officers guiding the German General Staff Corps project in the fall and spring of 1945–1946. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
At least one of the studies found deficiencies in the German military system. The collection of publications included German Operational Intelligence, focused solely on the German intelligence effort against the Western Allies. This study detailed a variety of reasons for the “mediocre” performance of German intelligence in the Second World War. The authors concluded that “there [was] little the Allied intelligence services [could] learn from the Germans” but that “this general discussion of German methods [could] have at least the negative value to Allied intelligence of lessons in weaknesses.”47
Other publications continued to laud “the high military efficiency of the German Army as a whole” while observing some peculiarities in the German command system that Allied leadership should not attempt to reproduce. For example, The German General Staff Corps found both strengths and weaknesses in this command structure. The report found that the German General Staff Corps had emerged during the Napoleonic Era and developed over a century and a half but had no direct equivalent in Allied armies. Likewise, a publication titled The German Army Quartermaster and Finance Organization studied the Heeresverwaltung, or German Army Administration, which was responsible for all quartermaster and finance functions, including “all cash transactions, rations, quartering, barracks and office equipment” and other responsibilities. The authors of this publication concluded that the Army Administration was “remarkably successful,” despite the fact that it operated independently of the army command structure. Yet they again observed that “however well [the Army Administration] may have served in the German Army, [it] could not be imitated successfully by an Army with other traditions and habits.”48
The Hill Project documents also included two operational studies. The first, titled The German Operation at Anzio, examined German defenses against the Allied invasion of the Italian coast west of Rome from January to May 1944. The second operational study, Armored Breakthrough, was the only one of the d
ocuments that dealt specifically with the German war against the Soviet Union. It was a translation of the war diary of the First Armored Group, which later became the First Panzer Army, during the planning phase of Operation Barbarossa. It focused on the first eighteen days of the campaign, when the First Armored Group was responsible for “following up the initial breach of Russian frontier defenses and effecting the strategic breakthrough.”49
The main body of studies formally published and circulated by the Hill Project through the Military Intelligence Division in Washington, D.C., offered “important lessons” and a detailed view of German methods that the Western Allies might use to improve their own military organization and techniques. The “highly efficient mobilization of [German] forces in the summer of 1939” particularly impressed Allied researchers and their POW colleagues. German Army Mobilization detailed the development of German mobilization plans from 1921 through their implementation in 1939. The structure of the system, initially reminiscent of Frederick the Great’s cantonal arrangement for recruitment, featured the same number of corps as Wehrkreise (military districts), with corresponding territorial administration. This allowed Wehrkreis headquarters to “direct the mobilization of all parts of the wartime Army to be formed in their areas” and made them “responsible for notifying all troops and Army installations within their areas.”50
A special unit, the mobilization group, led by a General Staff officer took responsibility for the army mobilization plan. The group annually supplemented the existing plan with further detailed orders that “outlined the personnel and material plans for the current mobilization year.” The Wehrkreis headquarters transmitted periodic reports to the mobilization group to aid in developing these orders and to regulate the personnel and supply situation by arranging transfers of men or material from one Wehrkreis to another to “satisfy the requirements of the overall plan.” Timely briefing of personnel and regular mobilization exercises in which the essential elements of the process were rehearsed complemented the efficient planning and preparation. The only flaws in the German mobilization plan noted by the report—a lack of training in certain sectors of the field army and shortages of material—were not criticisms of the system itself but rather problems associated with the rapid activation of the army.51
Hitler's Generals in America Page 20