Hitler's Generals in America

by Derek R. Mallett

  These initial interrogations quickly grew into a larger, more formal endeavor. By September 1945 the Historical Branch had been established as a special staff division of U.S. military intelligence, headquartered at St. Germain outside Paris and under the direction of the U.S. European theater historian. The new Historical Division, in turn, created the Operational History (German) Section in January 1946 to exploit the “sources of combat information still available in the theater,” and interrogate “German commanders and staff officers who actively opposed U.S. Army operations” for historical purposes. The German history program embarked on a full-fledged effort to locate and obtain information from as many German generals as possible, starting with the distribution of questionnaires to every general officer that could be located. By May 1946 over one thousand German officers had been contacted and almost three hundred had written historical accounts for the program.5

  The Historical Division quickly found its efforts hindered by the disparate geographic locations where German generals were held after the war. For instance, in June 1946 there were 328 German officers preparing operational reports in ten different locations in Germany, Britain, Belgium, Austria, France, and Italy. To make the program more efficient, the Historical Division obtained exclusive control of a U.S. Third Army prisoner-of-war camp in Allendorf, Germany, designated the Historical Division Interrogation Enclosure, and began transferring most of the general officers working for the German history program to this location.6

  In December 1946 the 7734th USFET Historical Detachment established a secondary German history program at the prisoner-of-war camp at Garmisch, where von Sponeck found himself in early 1947. This program focused on World War II German operations outside of the western European Theater, namely operations in the Mediterranean and the Soviet Union. In July 1947 the Historical Division combined the Garmisch and Allendorf operations and the new program, labeled Operation STAPLE, eventually relocated to Neustadt, Germany.7

  Von Sponeck had begun writing a history of the Battle of El Alamein while interned at Garmisch. Despite the proximity of his family and their periodic visits to the camp, American officials forced him to temporarily relocate to Allendorf to complete his work for the German history program. Von Sponeck was finally released and allowed to return home in November 1947 after finishing three reports totaling almost seventy pages.8

  General von Choltitz also eventually found himself at Allendorf writing for the U.S. Army Historical Division. His journey home had begun much like von Sponeck’s, with an initial arrival at Camp Bolbec followed by a transfer to New Ulm. But unlike von Sponeck, von Choltitz was transferred to a camp at Oberursel, which the general described as “one of the most bitter memories of imprisonment.” “The treatment was cruel and lacked any human dignity,” lamented von Choltitz. “We were spared no humiliation.” One of the embarrassments von Choltitz most vividly remembered was that the American guards confiscated the prisoners’ belts and suspenders and forced them to carry their meals and other items through the hallway. With both hands full, the prisoners often suffered the indignity of not being able to hold up their pants. After enduring this humiliation, von Choltitz was eventually transferred to Allendorf, where he authored two reports regarding his leadership of the Eighty-Fourth Corps in Normandy in June 1944. He completed his work and was released in April 1947.9

  Including von Sponeck and von Choltitz, twenty-one of the fifty-five German generals previously held as prisoners of war in the United States contributed to the U.S. Army Historical Division’s German history program.10 These twenty-one former officers contributed forty-four reports totaling over thirteen hundred pages. While this made up only a fraction of the program’s total output, over half of the reports written by the twenty-one former prisoners of the United States were prepared at Garmisch or Neustadt after the focus of the program had shifted to concerns about the Soviet Union. Curiously, American authorities had spent little if any time interrogating these men when they had been so readily accessible on American soil. For instance, Generals Gustav von Vaerst, Fritz Krause, and August Viktor von Quast spent almost three years in the United States and were interrogated for only about three weeks of that time. Following the war, when American priorities had changed, these men devoted considerably more than three weeks preparing the nine reports for which they were collectively responsible, suggesting that U.S. officials found these prisoners of war to be far more valuable in postwar Germany than they had been in wartime America.11

  Yet the general who played the most important role for American authorities in postwar Germany was Reinhard Gehlen. Upon arriving in Germany, members of the Gehlen Organization reestablished their intelligencegathering operation at Camp King, located just north of Frankfurt. Camp King consisted of three houses and some apartments in a secret compound surrounded by barbed wire. Gehlen and his subordinates worked under the supervision of the American intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel John Russell Deane Jr. and reported to the American chief of intelligence for the European Theater, General Edwin Sibert. Their main responsibility was gathering intelligence on activities within Soviet-occupied Germany and Eastern Europe.12

  American support for the Gehlen Organization directly reflected Washington’s growing level of concern during the early years of the Cold War. During the organization’s initial re-formation at Camp King, the majority of American officials had only begun to suspect Soviet intentions and consequently provided Gehlen so few resources that he and his staff had to obtain additional operational funds by selling some of the supplies they received from the U.S. Army on the German black market. Yet by December 1947, with U.S.-Soviet tensions escalating, American intelligence relocated the Gehlen Organization to Pullach, a small town located a short drive south of Munich, where the operation greatly expanded. Under the cover of being the headquarters for a large business, the Gehlen Organization turned Pullach into a “self-contained village,” including housing for Gehlen’s staff and their families, a kindergarten and school for the staff ’s children, and even a PX and infirmary.13 In Reinhard Gehlen, U.S. Army intelligence embraced not only a former prisoner of war but a previously high-level member of Hitler’s staff. By late 1947, denazification clearly took a backseat to anticommunism.

  American interest in Gehlen’s work only increased. As early as the fall of 1946, Colonel Deane requested to transfer responsibility for the Gehlen Organization from the U.S. Army to the infant Central Intelligence Group, soon to be the Central Intelligence Agency; the request was initially refused. By September 1948, however, in the midst of the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, CIA agent James Critchfield began studying Gehlen’s work. With the United States increasingly engaged in the Cold War, the CIA formally adopted the Gehlen Organization as an umbrella agency on July 1, 1949. The CIA continued its support and supervision of Gehlen until West Germany fully gained its sovereignty in May 1955. The Gehlen Organization was then transformed en masse into the Bundesnachrichtendienst, West Germany’s federal intelligence agency, on April 1, 1956, with Gehlen as its chief.14

  Reinhard Gehlen utilized the intelligence network he built as Hitler’s chief of Eastern Front intelligence during the Second World War to provide first the U.S. Army and then the Central Intelligence Agency with information about the Soviet Union during the early years of the Cold War. He parlayed his control of this organization, along with some powerful connections within the leadership of the new West German state, into the highest position in West German intelligence. In exchange for a decade of substantial support, Gehlen provided the U.S. military and CIA with information, as well as offering the United States intimate knowledge and contacts within the new West German intelligence apparatus.15

  While lacking the same level of achievement as Gehlen in his rise from POW to West German intelligence director, two other Wehrmacht generals and former prisoners of war in the United States, Kurt Freiherr von Liebenstein and Hellmuth Laegeler, also assumed positions of leadership in the emerging Federal R
epublic of Germany. Von Liebenstein found himself back in Europe in the summer of 1946, where, like a number of his fellow prisoners, he was co-opted by the U.S. Army Historical Division to work on the German history program. He joined the Historical Division Interrogation Enclosure at Allendorf, where he wrote four historical reports on German operations against American forces in North Africa. He relocated with the program to Neustadt, where he contributed one more report, this one belonging to the “NONET” group, which dealt with operations against the Soviet Union. He finally obtained his release in October 1947.16

  Von Liebenstein returned home and served for over five years as director of the city transportation office in Göppingen, east of Stuttgart, before applying for a position in the newly created West German military. Von Liebenstein received his commission in the Bundeswehr in May 1956 and reentered the German military holding the same rank, brigadier general, that he had departed with in 1947. The reincarnated general served the Federal Republic of Germany for five years as commanding officer of Military District V, headquartered at Böblingen, also near Stuttgart. He retired in April 1960.17

  Laegeler also returned to Germany in the summer of 1946, after his service to the Hill Project at Camp Ritchie and the Bolero Group at Fort Hunt, and was released three months later. He spent over five years as a sales representative for Zweckform, a stationery and office supplies corporation, before being admitted into the Bundeswehr in November 1955. Like von Liebenstein, he obtained the rank he had held as an officer in the Wehrmacht, also brigadier general. Laegeler capitalized on his previous military teaching experience and, in 1959, he obtained a position as commandant of the Führungsakademie in Hamburg-Blankenese. He served in this capacity for three years before retiring in 1962.18

  Like von Liebenstein and Laegeler, Hermann Ramcke and Ludwig Crüwell also rose to prominence in the newly established West German state, although as political figures rather than reincarnated military officers. Ramcke emerged as one of the leading anti-Western voices in West Germany and Crüwell his most vocal opponent. Shortly after his New Year’s escape from Camp Clinton, U.S. War Department officials sent Ramcke to Camp Shanks, New York, where they placed the general on a transport ship to be returned to Europe. Believing that he was being repatriated to Germany, Ramcke was quite disappointed when he arrived in the port city of Antwerp and was promptly sent to Camp 2226 in Belgium on March 17, 1946. After only four days in Belgium, Ramcke was then transferred to the London District Cage and interrogated about alleged German atrocities on the island of Crete. British authorities temporarily placed him in Special Camp No. 11 at Bridgend before then forwarding him to Lüneberg, a short drive southeast of Hamburg, to testify in the war crimes trial of General Kurt Student.19

  Following Student’s conviction, which incensed Ramcke, and his brief stay in the British transit camp outside Münster, Germany, British officials extradited Ramcke to France to stand trial himself for war crimes committed during his defense of the city of Brest in the summer of 1944. The German general endured fifty-seven months in a French prison awaiting his formal hearing. Exasperated, Ramcke finally escaped to Germany in an effort to see his family. He returned to France voluntarily, however, in early March 1951 in order to finally stand trial. A French military court convicted Ramcke of “war crimes against the civilian populace of Brest” on March 21, 1951, and sentenced him to five years of hard labor. But because he had already served almost five years in custody before the trial, French law allowed him to be released early. He returned to his hometown of Schleswig in mid-1951 after completing the final three months of his sentence in France. Ramcke claimed that upon his return he was greeted by some of his fellow paratroopers, the local band, residents offering him flowers and gifts, and the adoration of what he estimated to be ten thousand people!20

  Quickly, the “fanatical defender of Brest” emerged on the West German political stage, espousing his anti-Western views. At a meeting of the Fallschirmjägerverband, the German paratrooper veterans association, held in Braunschweig in July 1951, some of Ramcke’s soldiers carried him into the convention on their shoulders. The former general then addressed the five thousand men in attendance by condemning what he saw as Western Allied defamation of both former German soldiers and the German people in general. He also made a plea for the release of German officers still imprisoned for war crimes, referring to these men as the “so-called war criminals.” Not surprisingly, Ramcke’s remarks prompted a negative reaction from the leftist press in Germany, France, and Switzerland and marked him as a potentially troublesome political figure among many officials in Bonn.21

  Over a year later, he fully established himself as a thorn in Bonn’s side by adopting a much more controversial public stance. On October 26, 1952, veterans of Hitler’s Waffen-SS held their first postwar rally in the city of Verden, located about thirty minutes southeast of Bremen. As one of the more popular Wehrmacht general officers and the newly elected president of the Fallschirmjägerverband, “Papa” Ramcke was invited to offer a brief talk. The rally organizers asked him to simply offer greetings from the paratrooper veterans’ organization and to limit his remarks to no more than three minutes. Upon taking the stage, however, the old general launched into a lengthy anti-Allied diatribe. “Who are the real war criminals?” he asked. “Those who by themselves made the fatal peace, who destroyed entire cities without tactical ground for doing so, who hurled atomic bombs on Hiroshima and now make new atomic bombs.” Despite repeated written pleas passed to him by the organizers asking him first to curb his language and eventually to stop altogether, Ramcke pontificated for twenty-five minutes. He finally concluded by remarking that it was “an honor for us to have been on the black list of the enemy. Time will show that this list can again be a roll of honor.” At this, to the horror of the rally’s organizers, most of the four thousand SS veterans assembled in Verden erupted with chants of “Eisenhower schweinehund!”22

  Following the scandalous speech, the former SS general Felix Steiner, who served as head of the veterans’ organization, disassociated the organization from Ramcke’s remarks. But he made no attempt to explain why virtually the entire assemblage had cheered and chanted at the conclusion of the controversial speech. Of graver concern for Bonn were the pointed responses from Washington, London, and Paris. In an effort to defuse the situation, numerous representatives of the West German government denounced Ramcke’s position. Konrad Adenauer offered what Time magazine called the “understatement of the week” when he observed that Ramcke “should realize that his remarks cannot bolster Germany’s reputation in the world.” And the soon-to-be West German minister of defense, Theodor Blank, later stated in regard to the composition of the Bundeswehr that “the Ramckes . . . will not return. This is the type of National Socialist general whom the German people . . . do not want their sons to be entrusted with.”23

  Ludwig Crüwell’s postwar political career took a decidedly different path from Ramcke’s Nazi rabble rousing. The newly formed Afrikakorps-Verband, or Africa Korps veterans association, which dedicated itself to “the principles of moderation and democracy,” elected Crüwell president in July 1951. Crüwell cooperated with the Bonn government in planning the group’s first reunion in September 1951 and even sought contact with the veterans’ former World War II enemies, namely veterans of the British Eighth Army, whom they had fought all across North Africa. Much to the delight of the new West German government and the Western Allies alike, Crüwell stated his hopes that the Afrika Korps reunion in Iserlohn, outside Düsseldorf, would “take the wind out of the sails of Bernhard Ramcke . . . and other sponsors of nationalist veterans’ organizations.”24

  When West German rearmament became a reality and plans were underway for the establishment of the new Bundeswehr, Crüwell was considered for the position of commander in chief. While he never returned to the German military, likely because of his successful postwar business career, Bonn’s consideration of him for the post speaks volumes. When the New
York Times profiled Crüwell as part of a discussion about German rearmament in December 1954, it observed that the former general “personifies respectability,” that he had a “spotless record,” and that “he is conscious of the need to instill in the mind of the next generation of German soldiery a respect and understanding for the law.” This characterization of Crüwell and his consideration for the highest military position in the new West German state was a far cry from the wartime British assessment of him as an idiotic Nazi.25

  The experiences of Gehlen, von Liebenstein, Laegeler, Ramcke, and Crüwell are exceptional. The stories of most of the generals who returned from the United States are more pedestrian, largely involving the former prisoners simply returning home and attempting to rebuild a life for themselves and their families. In order to do this, however, they first had to navigate the Allied camp system in Europe for anywhere from a few months to a few years.

  The most striking thing about both the American and British camps in Europe for returning POWs after the war is the level of disorganization and poor communication. This is perhaps understandable given the enormous tasks confronting the Allies at this time. With responsibility for providing food, shelter, and protection for millions of Europeans on a war-ravaged continent, organizing efficient camps and processes for returning prisoners of war was not their top priority. At times, however, it created some curious circumstances.

  First, prisoners, even senior officers, could often be lost in the shuffle. The Allies often did not know which prisoners were in each other’s custody. In fact, in many cases, one U.S. Army unit did not know which prisoners were in the custody of another. Frequently USFET, particularly the Historical Division, initiated searches in European camps for prisoner-of-war generals who were still held in the United States. At various times between November 1945 and March 1946, for instance, the U.S. Army Historical Division sought Generals von Aulock, Bieringer, von Choltitz, Elster, Neuling, Ramcke, Richter, Eberding, Daser, Rauch, Spang, Schuberth, and Badinski when most of these men could still be found at either Camp Clinton, Mississippi, or Camp Dermott, Arkansas, and Schuberth was deceased.26