German officers 'knew of Holocaust'

Published on Sunday 11 December 2005 01:48

HIGH-ranking German officers knew much more about Adolf Hitler's plans to murder millions of Jews than previously thought, according to newly revealed transcripts of conversations between captured generals.

During the Second World War, British intelligence secretly bugged the cells occupied by some of the most senior German army, navy and air force commanders who had been captured by the Allies.

The transcripts have only recently been made available to researchers and show that:

• Senior Luftwaffe officers mused together at the end of 1943 that millions of Jews had already been killed.

• General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander who defied Hitler's orders by not allowing Paris to be destroyed, admitted that he had been involved in killing Jews;

• Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had been fully briefed about the 1944 attempt to kill the Nazi leader, and refused to betray the plotters.

The British bugging operation took place in the then country estate of Trent Park on the north-west outskirts of London, in a building now used by the University of Middlesex.

Senior German officers were lulled into a false sense of security by being allowed to live in relative luxury, even sometimes having their adjutants and batmen to attend to them.

However, all the time the British were bugging their cells in an effort to get the Germans to reveal vital military secrets about chains of commands, tactics and who made the decisions in the Nazi war machine.

The transcripts, which have been published in Germany by Snke Neitzel, professor of modern history at the University of Mainz, contradict the traditional image of senior German officers as having little or no knowledge of the mass-killings.

One of the most dramatic revelations concerns Choltitz, the German general in command of Paris in 1944 as the Allied armies closed in.

He became known as the "Unlikely Saviour of Paris" when he defied a direct order of Hitler who demanded that the city should be destroyed rather than fall to the Allies. He was captured and sent to Trent Park.

Speaking of an earlier episode in the war, Choltitz - who had previously been stationed on the Eastern Front - said: "The gravest task I ever undertook, and I did it at the time strictly, was the liquidation of the Jews."

Another clue to the Holocaust being common knowledge was a conversation involving Luftwaffe general Georg Neuffer, who was captured in North Africa in 1943, in which they discussed later that year how many Jews had been killed. Neuffer said: "It must be three million by now."

The transcripts also point to closer links between Rommel and the plotters who attempted to kill Hitler in 1944. It was previously known that the conspirators asked Rommel whether he would take over if Hitler were no longer alive to run the Nazi state, but never told him of their plans to bomb the Fhrer.

However, a conversation involving General Heinrich Eberbach, who worked closely with Rommel in 1944, suggests Rommel had been fully told about the plans and kept them to himself.

Neitzel, whose book has been hailed as an important development in studying the war, said: "This is further evidence that knowledge of the atrocities was much more widespread among senior officers than many wanted to admit after the war. They all wanted to say: 'I was just a simple soldier.' This evidence defies that."

Asked why the admissions had not been used to bring more officers to trial for war crimes, he said: "It is clear that the British wanted to protect their sources of information and the fact that they had bugged the conversations. It would have been difficult to use at the trials anyway because it was not precise enough. Having someone say that they 'killed Jews' would not be enough at a trial. If they had given a date and place it could have been linked to witnesses and charges brought."

Dr Christoph Dartmann, a lecturer in European History at Aberdeen University, said: "This is a blow against the sanitised Hollywood image of the German army as a clean army totally removed from the atrocities."