Hitler's Generals in America

by Derek R. Mallett

  Most revealing are Duin’s statements about the connections between the Hill Project and the American relationship with the Gehlen Organization. Duin described numerous links between the work of the Gehlen Organization at Fort Hunt and that of the Hill Project at Camp Ritchie. First, Captain Boker, who was so instrumental in coordinating the American relationship with Gehlen, had once served as a subordinate officer to Lieutenant Colonel Duin when the latter had been chief interrogator at Fort Hunt. Thus these two men, highly involved in the two respective projects, had at the very least a long-standing working relationship. In addition to Boker, the GMDS “Record of Visitors” lists both Lieutenant Eric Waldman, the American officer in charge of the Gehlen group at Fort Hunt, as well as his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dmitri Shimkin, as guests of the German Military Document Section at various times. Furthermore, the GMDS transferred numerous documents to Shimkin’s custody during the course of its operations.68

  Significantly, Duin revealed that the bulk of the German Eastern Front intelligence documents that Gehlen had spirited away at the end of the war and Boker had later retrieved and brought to the United States had been transferred directly to Camp Ritchie for use by the Hill Project. “Twenty packing cases of documents had accompanied [the Gehlen group] to the U.S.,” according to Duin. These documents included “daily Eastern Front operational reports, daily situation maps, G-1, G-2, G-4 estimates, orders and reports, etc.” While the “majority” of these documents went to Camp Ritchie, Duin related that “Colonel Gronich after some argument had permitted the group to keep certain documents which they considered the most important.” When the Hill Project completed its work, these documents, along with the entire German Military Document Section, were sent to the basement of the Pentagon, where a member of Gehlen’s group was allowed access to the documents and “permitted to select and take those documents which were of interest to 1142 [Fort Hunt interrogation personnel] for use by the Gehlen staff.”69

  During the Hill Project’s operation “a very strict security wall was maintained between the group at 1142 [Gehlen’s group] and the one at Camp Ritchie [Hill Project],” according to Duin. “It was specifically desired to keep the two groups from learning about the presence or work of each other, particularly the Ritchie group from knowing anything about the Gehlen [group] in order to prevent any information from reaching the Soviets in the event that any of the Germans elected to enter the Soviet zone after being returned to Germany.”70 American military intelligence viewed the hillbillies as the graver threat solely because of their numbers. Gehlen’s staff at Fort Hunt consisted of only a handful of men, whereas the Hill Project roster reached close to two hundred, plus the numerous supplemental POWs not directly part of the secret project.

  Further solidifying the ties between the Gehlen group and the Hill Project, Duin stated that on April 18, 1946, following the completion of the Hill Project operation and the closure of the POW camp, he personally escorted most of the prisoners from Camp Ritchie back to Germany. However, a few remained behind when the bulk of their colleagues were repatriated. These hillbillies were transferred to Fort Hunt for the purpose of continuing research in special areas of expertise. Upon his return to America in May, Duin assumed the position of chief of the interrogation and research unit at Fort Hunt, which included the Gehlen group. The prisoners of war under Duin’s supervision at Fort Hunt now included the former members of the Hill Project who had been “attached to the Gehlen group” on April 15, 1946.71

  The eleven prisoners obtained from Camp Ritchie included three general officers. General Thomale possessed special experience “in the field of training, organization, and development of equipment.” In this regard, U.S. War Department personnel viewed him as “probably the best qualified officer in the German Army.” They sought his expertise in writing several further reports, including a “German appreciation of United States armor.” General Laegeler, because of his previous experience teaching tactics at the German Kriegsakademie, was considered a “valuable consultant in matters of major tactics and staff procedure in the field army.” General von Trotha remained in the United States because of his “extremely wide experience in the field” as a staff officer and because the Americans viewed him as “without doubt one of the ablest young generals in the German Army.”72

  Accompanying these men were four colonels, two lieutenant colonels, a major, and a captain. Fort Hunt obtained these prisoners for various types of expertise. One man was described as having “knowledge of the German Staff College,” while others were characterized as the “most able and experienced staff intelligence officer available,” an “expert on all questions of the organization and methods of basic training,” a “specialist in chemical warfare weapons,” specialists in organization and personnel, and an “invaluable” consultant on “all questions of the constitutional status of the German Army.” Duin claimed that two of these men, Colonel Kurt Rittman and Major Walter Lobedanz, had been members of Gehlen’s organization prior to the end of the war in Europe and that one of the hillbillies, Colonel Johannes Haertel, had also been a member of Gehlen’s group but for unspecified reasons was repatriated rather than being retained at Fort Hunt.73

  The studies to be completed by these former members of the Hill Project now at Fort Hunt illustrate that the focus of the research now involved American preparation for a potential war against the Soviets. Thomale, seemingly the most important to the project of the men retained, prepared two papers titled “Panzer Warfare in the East.” The first studied the effect of the “special characteristics of war on the Eastern Front” on the organization, handling, tactics, design, armor, and technical demands of panzer units and formations. The second dealt with issues of supply for armored troops on the Eastern Front. Thomale also undertook a “German appraisal of U.S. armor” and a study on “panzer casualties,” while Laegeler analyzed the German “casualty reporting system” and von Trotha examined “tactics with an emphasis on the last phases of the war.”74

  The work of these men at Fort Hunt was kept secret, much as it had been at Camp Ritchie. When USFET cabled in late April to ascertain the names of any German general officer prisoners of war then interned in the United States, the Provost Marshal General’s Office concealed the work of the former hillbillies still in America. The PMGO responded by including Laegeler’s, Thomale’s, and von Trotha’s names on the roster it provided to USFET but listed them as being interned at Fort George Meade, Maryland, a common point of arrival and departure for German prisoners of war in the United States, rather than at the secret interrogation center at Fort Hunt, Virginia.75

  Eventually, in June 1946, the U.S. State Department demanded that all German prisoners of war in the United States be repatriated by the end of the month. Despite protests by the War Department Military Intelligence Division, which wished to retain the Gehlen Organization and the attached hillbilly researchers, incoming secretary of state James F. Byrnes would not budge, insisting on the original deadline. Consequently, the eleven former members of the Hill Project along with the members of the Gehlen Organization held at Fort Hunt were returned to Germany at the end of June 1946.76

  Following the Germans’ repatriation, American officials feared the former prisoners’ appearance before mandatory denazification and demilitarization courts in Germany. In November 1946 Lieutenant General Clarence R. Huebner, USFET chief of staff, informed Lieutenant General Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. military governor in Germany, that “possible disclosure of certain information by these people, which would be detrimental to United States interests, might be necessary should they have to appear before a German Court.” Huebner was also concerned that “these persons might or might not succeed in obtaining pardons” if they actually went to trial. Consequently, in the spring of the following year General Clay granted amnesty to the returning hillbillies for “service in the interests of [their] own people.”77

  The Americans’ primary concern in this circumstance was protecting
U.S. national security interests. Presumably, this meant keeping the Soviets from learning about a secret project designed to better prepare the U.S. Army to protect Western Europe from any potential invasion by the Red Army. It is also noteworthy that the official rationale for granting amnesty was service to the German people. Given that the nature of the Hill Project focused on opposition to the Soviet military, and that Europeans, especially Germans, feared a Soviet invasion in the immediate postwar years, the hillbillies’ work would have indeed been in the service of their own country.

  It is also curious, however, that American occupation authorities were unsure whether their recent prisoners would be acquitted in denazification or demilitarization proceedings. Apparently German courts applied stricter standards than did Western Allied military intelligence.

  This once again raises some interesting questions about American priorities and the Americans’ stated goals of denazification and demilitarization. American occupation authorities made an extensive effort for several years after the war to find former National Socialist Party members and remove them from positions of leadership in the U.S.-controlled zone of Germany. Moreover, they sought to punish those in the Nazi regime who had committed the most heinous crimes during the war. Yet Washington allowed a free pass to men like General Gehlen and others who could have provided Allied authorities with a great deal of information about German atrocities.

  Much as they allowed Nazi intimidation to undermine the reorientation effort at Camp Dermott, American authorities at times allowed national security concerns to eclipse their postwar denazification and demilitarization programs. German officers who could provide valuable information to American intelligence about Soviet capabilities had little to fear from postwar justice. Indeed, American authorities had seemingly little trouble reconceptualizing former Nazis as allies once they began to see their former Soviet colleagues in a different light.

  During its operation at Camp Ritchie, the Hill Project produced over thirty-seven hundred pages of documents for American, British, and Canadian military intelligence (see appendices B and C). Interestingly, when the American Captured Records Section compiled a “List of GMDS Studies” in January 1954, the titles previously listed as being prepared by the hillbillies at Fort Hunt from mid-April until the end of June 1946 were not included.78 These reports were either not satisfactorily completed or, more likely, were highly classified and not available for circulation at that time. Even without these documents, the studies prepared by the Hill Project at the German Military Document Section represent an impressive body of work, especially for prisoners of war employed by their recent enemies and completed within only six months.

  The published manuscripts circulated fairly widely throughout American and British military channels. Yet there is no evidence that these documents had any impact on American strategic or operational planning in the immediate postwar world. Indeed, the impact of these documents on American military policy cannot be demonstrated in the way that the influence of the German military history series on the U.S. Army in the 1950s can be. Moreover, despite the fact that several of the studies are still available in the libraries of places like the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the Joint Forces Staff College, U.S. Army Europe, the U.S. Army Field Artillery School, the U.S. Naval War College, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the Australian War Memorial, there is also no evidence that any of these documents ever appeared as part of the curriculum for the training of Western Allied military officers.

  Thus it appears that these documents had very little long-term impact. Yet the significance of the Hill Project and the German Military Document Section becomes clearer when considered in the context of the developing Cold War. That Western Allied military intelligence utilized former Wehrmacht officers, even General Staff officers, after the conclusion of the Second World War to gain information about the Soviet Union and how to prepare a potential war against the Red Army is not a revelation. Moreover, the Werner von Braun Center and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, stand as testaments to the American utilization of former Nazis to gain an advantage—in this case in the space race—against their former Soviet allies. The Hill Project was just one previously unknown component of the larger postwar American effort to protect U.S. national security interests.

  Following the termination of the project, Colonel Richard L. Hopkins, deputy chief of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Service, evaluated the German Military Document Section, which by then included not only captured German documents but also the studies prepared at both Camp Ritchie and Fort Hunt by the Hill Project and the Bolero Group, respectively. His assessment illustrates the collection’s importance to Western Allied intelligence. Hopkins’s evaluation stated that the GMDS documents were “our richest source of factual intelligence on the U.S.S.R.” and that “much of this information [could] never be secured from any other source.” He concluded that “if the U.S. were to be forced to conduct strategic air operations against the U.S.S.R. the German document collection would constitute the chief source of intelligence upon which to base such operation.”79

  The eleven former hillbillies at Fort Hunt and the members of the Gehlen Organization were returned to Germany at the end of June 1946.80 During its operation at Camp Ritchie, the Hill Project completed a body of work that studied German methods as a means to potentially improve the structure and procedures of the Western Allied armies. By contrast, the hillbillies and their counterparts in the Bolero Group at Fort Hunt assisted in preparing a defense of Western Europe against a potential invasion by the Soviet Army. In this fashion, two of the Anglo-American agreement’s goals for the German Military Document Section—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” and research on “subjects which will aid in preserving military security in Europe”—were met.

  Conclusion

  Following the end of the war, British and American authorities agreed to hold their highest-ranking Wehrmacht prisoners until some semblance of order could be restored to Germany. Although the U.S. War Department returned all of its German prisoners of war, including all of the general officers, to Europe by the end of June 1946, the prisoners were not allowed to return home. Washington turned some of the generals over to the British and placed the remainder in various hastily established POW camps in Western Europe. London, in turn, established a new camp for German general officers in January 1946 called Special Camp No. 11, or Island Farm, at Bridgend, Glamorganshire, in south Wales, where many senior Wehrmacht officers languished for over two more years until they were all finally released by the spring of 1948.

  The process of returning the generals from the United States to Europe was haphazard at best. There were no plush Pullman cars to transport the generals from camps in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana as there had been when they first arrived in America. The U.S. War Department decided to disallow the use of Pullman cars to transport prisoners of war after the war ended because the “period of redeployment and readjustment” severely taxed American rail facilities. Moreover, “first class accommodations [were] frequently not available for soldiers or American civilians,” and therefore, Washington feared an adverse public reaction if it used the railcars to transport POWs, even general officers.1

  “Squeezed together in trucks,” recalled General von Sponeck, the generals “rode through the country from camp to camp, always carrying [their] heavy luggage.” When he and his fellow prisoners arrived in New York City, they were “packed like sardines onto a liberty ship.” After their trip across the Atlantic, the senior officers from Dermott arrived at Camp Bolbec in Le Havre, France. “Bolbec was an awful camp,” von Sponeck remembered. It lacked protection from the icy winds and rain coming from the Atlantic and the prisoners’ only shelter was “a leaky old tent.” But even worse, camp officials provided very little food and turned a blind
eye to what von Sponeck described as the “German bastards who had basically taken over this camp,” referring to a group of hard-core Nazi sympathizers who intimidated and harassed their fellow prisoners.2

  Fortunately for the generals at Bolbec, they were quickly transferred again. The prisoners endured yet another truck ride, this time from northwestern France to southern Germany. “We had the impression,” recalled von Sponeck, “that the drivers had been instructed to kill us by driving as fast and reckless as possible.” They arrived at a transit camp in Ulm in southern Germany before moving a short distance away to Camp Dachau, the former notorious concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich. From there, some of the prisoners were called to testify at the Allied war crimes trials taking place in Nuremberg, about one hundred miles north of the camp. Eventually von Sponeck and his fellow prisoners were transferred again, this time to an old German Army barracks at Garmisch, a little over an hour’s drive southwest of Munich.3

  The American camp at Garmisch reflected a change in American priorities. The U.S. Army had begun to compile a history of American involvement in the war and sought information from the enemy side. The initial idea of interrogating German military leaders had originated with the U.S. War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, Historical Branch. Dr. George N. Shuster led a team of American military officers and academics to Control Council Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 32, code-named Ashcan, located at Bad Mondorf, a few miles outside Luxembourg. In July 1945 Ashcan held a large group of high-profile German prisoners, including Admiral Karl Dönitz, General Alfred Jodl, Field Marshals Albert Kesselring and Wilhelm Keitel, and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The Shuster Commission sought information from them to complement the American historical record of the war.4