Secret tapes of top Nazis

Richard Overy reviews Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942-45 ed by Sönke Neitzel

From 1942 onwards the British kept a number of captured German staff officers, most of them from the army, at Trent Park house in the north London suburb of Cockfosters. Here they lived a boring but relatively free-and-easy existence, chatting, exercising, enjoying an occasional ramble.

What they did not know, though several seem to have guessed at it, was that a dozen of the rooms were bugged so that their private conversations (there was nothing strictly 'secret' about them) could be overheard by British Intelligence officers and, if useful, employed for Allied operations.

The conversations were, as it turned out, of very limited help to the conduct of the war, though they did supply a wealth of evidence on the nature of the National Socialist system which seems to have been largely ignored or poorly exploited when it later came to putting German generals on trial for war crimes.

Sönke Neitzel, a professor at the University of Mainz, has edited a volume of key extracts from the tape-recorded discussions and there is no doubt that they are of much more service to the historian than they ever were to British Intelligence.

After a brief introduction, where Neitzel explains with great clarity and detachment why the conversations matter, the book deals first with the officers' views of German politics and strategy, then their discussions of war crimes and atrocities and finally a shorter section on their reaction to the July Plot, the failed attempt in 1944 by a small coterie of army officers to assassinate Hitler.

Not surprisingly there is no clear unity on any of these issues. Some of the officers were inclined to dismiss atrocity stories as Allied propaganda until confronted by a fellow-general whose detailed description of some of the terrible horrors he had witnessed made the stark truth all too clear ('18,000 Jews killed in one morning', one Eastern Front commander told a doubter).

Some thought the July Plot a trick of Hitler's, to secure popular support for a last-ditch war effort. On politics the group remained divided: some unambiguously blamed the German people and their blind loyalty to the dictator, others thought Hitler a good thing, but badly advised. All detested Heinrich Himmler and the SS, and in that repugnance lay the root of the post-war myth that atrocities were the work of the black-shirted security corps and not of the army.

The 167 extracts, though well supported with extensive notes and a helpful 'who's who', will be hard going for anyone not already familiar with the territory. For the wider public the most revealing and accessible of the documents concern the issue of war crimes.

Although some of the officers found it hard to imagine that regular soldiers had committed crimes, there are simply too many instances exchanged between them for the idea of a 'clean' war to hold up. Over the three years during which the recordings were made, the whole panoply of crimes (the mass murder of Jews, the shooting of hostages, burning down churches filled with victims, and so on) is acknowledged and described.

Some of the nastier generals clearly disliked the Jews, although few would admit that murdering them en masse was a good thing. But at least one thought that killing 100 hostages for the death of a single German was quite justified - 'that's military law'.

At one point one of the prisoners remarks to a confidant that when it came to crime, the Allies had no idea of 'what really happened'. Little did he know that the British knew exactly, because they listened in to every confession. The question that remains is why so few of the officers were ever tried afterwards - despite the things to which they privately admitted - or why, on reading accounts from as early as 1942 and 1943, the British did not expose more fully the horror of what was going on on the Eastern Front.

To their credit a number of the prisoners were simply aghast at what they heard, and thought German defeat a punishment from God. But others hoped for German victory, or at the least the idea that even in defeat the German armed forces had fought a 'war with honour'. After 1945 it was this view that prevailed. By the 1960s the idea of the 'clean war' undermined by party fanatics was dominant.

These extracts exert a grim fascination. They represent a unique and unmediated window into the minds of a military elite, brutalised by the First World War, embittered by what they saw as Germany's unjust treatment, and finally ensnared in the seductive coils of Hitler's radical nationalism. The strange blend revealed here of resentment, racism, political innocence and professional arrogance is a cocktail that leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Telegraph