Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (58 page)

The Americans adopted the British system of
interrogations and
surveillance, and the Allies soon established a network of secret cross-continental Interrogation Centers.
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Those on the
Mediterranean and in the United States were particularly significant. By summer 1941, the
War Department in Washington had already decided to build such centers, and over the course of 1942, two of them, run jointly by the
U.S. Navy and
Army, became operational.
Japanese POWs were sent to
Camp Tracy in California, while
Fort Hunt in Virginia housed German POWs.

Only a small percentage of the approximately one million German POWs captured by the British and the Americans were brought to these special facilities. After subjecting captives to a multipart interrogation process on the front lines and further behind them, Allied intelligence officers selected POWs who seemed to possess especially interesting information for additional surveillance. Nonetheless, their numbers were relatively large. From September 1939 to October 1945, 10,191 German POWs and 563
Italian ones were transferred through the three English surveillance camps. The length of time they stayed there varied from a few days to three years. The CSDIC (U.K.) made 16,960 protocols from the conversations of German POWs, and 1,943 from Italian prisoners.
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All in all, these documents totaled some
48,000 printed pages. From various locations near the
Mediterranean,
Cairo, Algiers, and Naples, 538 protocols were made covering conversations between 1,225 German soldiers.
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A large number of reports have also survived of conversations between 3,298 German POWs at
Fort Hunt.

The British material consists of word-by-word transcriptions in German varying in length from half a page to twenty-two pages, usually accompanied by English translations. For reasons of secrecy, the names of those conversing were omitted until 1944. They were usually identified only by their rank and official position. Nonetheless, it was possible to reconstruct most of their names. Unfortunately, the British documents contain no information about individual biographies. Those from Fort Hunt are more revealing, since American intelligence subjected German POWs not only to covert surveillance but to interrogations and questionnaires as well. This was in accordance with the innovative idea of using surveys to research Wehrmacht morale. In addition, so-called
Personal Record Sheets listed all the main data historians today need to reconstruct individual biographies. There are additional documents such as POWs’ own descriptions of their past and reports noting intelligence officers’ special observations. All the documents prepared by the personnel at Fort Hunt were collected in a file devoted to the individual POW so that interrogation officers could always refer to the data when questioning prisoners.
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Organized alphabetically according to the prisoners’ names, the so-called 201 files eventually encompassed more than 100,000 pages.
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The core of this material, the surveillance protocols, amounted to some 40,000 pages.

The scope of the British and American reports is indeed impressive. But two questions arose as to the quality of the information they contain:

Interestingly, the social makeup of the POWs was different in British and American
surveillance camps. The Allies were dividing up the work. The British mainly eavesdropped on high-ranking officers and
navy and
Luftwaffe men. Around one half of the POWs in
Fort Hunt, on the other hand, were simple foot soldiers from the
German army. A third were low-ranking officers, and only around a sixth, staff officers.
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The British thus concentrated on the Wehrmacht elite, while Americans focused on ordinary men.

Admittedly, this material does not come from a representative cross section of the Wehrmacht and the
Waffen SS. In order for that to have been the case, all of the 17 million members of the German armed forces would have to have had an equal statistical likelihood of being interned in one of the surveillance facilities. That was of course not the case. For example, there were no POWs who had fought exclusively on the
Eastern Front. Conversely, members of combat units, and in particular submarine and Luftwaffe crew members, were overrepresented.

Nonetheless, the soldiers subjected to surveillance covered a broad spectrum. Practically every type of military curriculum vita is represented, from navy frogmen to administrative generals. The men in question fought on all the fronts of the war, articulated a variety of political views, and were members of the most diverse sorts of units. Whereas letters sent home from the front usually skew our perspective toward better-educated soldiers, whose correspondence was more likely to be preserved, the protocols feature the voices of soldiers of whom no other documentary evidence has survived.

Naturally, the question arises of whether the POWs might have known they were being listened in on. That would cast doubt upon the authenticity of the information they provide. They must have at least suspected that the British and Americans would want to tap into what they knew, and they could have consciously spread disinformation. In fact, Allied methods of intelligence gathering were hardly unknown in Germany. A POW named
Franz von Werra, who had been briefly interned at
Trent Park, managed to escape British custody and reported back in detail about English interrogation techniques.
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On June 11, 1941, the
German Military Intelligence Service issued guidelines about how Wehrmacht soldiers were to behave if captured by the British. They included warnings about potential spies in German uniform and concealed microphones. The authors of the guidelines explicitly stressed that the enemy had repeatedly obtained valuable information via such channels.
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In November 1943, as part of the first exchange of POWs,
Lieutenant Commander Schilling returned to Germany and briefed his superiors about his and others’ experiences with British interrogation. In this way, the Wehrmacht supreme command learned the names of a number of spies who were working with the British. They also heard that the generals in Trent Park “were too open and cavalier in their mutual conversations, neglecting the
need for caution.” Again, it was stressed that German soldiers should beware of spies and covert
surveillance should they happen to be captured.
⁹⁰⁸

The protocols, however, strongly suggest that most German POWs forgot all about these warnings and prattled on heedlessly with their comrades about their military experiences. For instance, there are repeated references in conversations between NCOs and ordinary soldiers to the Nazi propaganda film
Warriors Behind Barbed Wire
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as well as cautionary remarks not to reveal information to the enemy. But in the same breath, the speakers would then discuss matters they had concealed during interrogations,
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dictating secrets directly into a waiting microphone. It never occurred to most soldiers that they could be under covert surveillance—a fact confirmed by the self-incriminating statements they made concerning atrocities.
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No doubt, some soldiers kept their mouths shut, perhaps because they suspected their quarters might be bugged.
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But most just threw caution to the wind after a short time. The need to share their thoughts with comrades was greater than the dictates of prudence.
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We must recall that the Allies used a number of clever tricks to tap the knowledge of their enemy. German exiles and cooperative POWs were used to steer conversations,
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and POWs of the same rank but different divisions and units were housed together. These methods proved very successful. Submarine navigators from various vessels swapped stories about what they had experienced, and
Luftwaffe officers recalled battles and compared notes about the technical details of their aircraft. Soldiers were often transferred to the camps only a few days after they had been captured, and many were still in a state of shock from the often dramatic circumstances in which they had been taken prisoner. That increased their need to talk. After all, many had narrowly escaped being killed. There was no difference in the behavior of officers and ordinary soldiers on this score.

The interrogation reports from
Fort Hunt demonstrate just how cooperative many POWs were. A surprising number of them simply told everything they knew in hope of getting better treatment or—far more rarely—to damage the Nazi regime.
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Some dictated data like exact measurements to the interrogating officers; others made sketches of military facilities in Germany or construction plans for weaponry. Most of the POWs hesitated to cooperate to that extent, but only censored themselves with reference to tactical and technical
specifics. On questions of politics, conditions in Germany, or morale in the Wehrmacht, they were entirely forthcoming. These men were equally open when conversing with one another. To the delight of Allied intelligence officers, the only taboo was talking about one’s own feelings.

British and American intelligence, of course, did not devote such enormous energy to collecting this information for the benefit of later generations of historians. So what sort of results did the
surveillance yield? Intelligence gathered during World War II was highly complex, and decisions were never made on the basis of a single source. Interrogation and eavesdropping on POWs was part of the Human Intelligence Division, which was only a part, if a key one, of a whole intelligence network. Over the course of the war, the Allies succeeded in gaining insights into all aspects of the Wehrmacht, including the condition, tactics, and morale of Germany’s fighting forces and the technical specifications of their weaponry. The enormous potential of human intelligence became obvious for the first time during the Battle of Britain, and after that it was unthinkable that it would not be part of the process of information gathering. The most spectacular success recorded by human intelligence was probably information that proved crucial to Britain’s successful defense against the V1 and V2 rockets. A conversation between Generals Thoma and Crüwell had given the decisive tip.
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There is no doubt that the energy invested in surveillance of POWs was worthwhile, and the Allies knew only too well that they had built up an effective system for gathering human intelligence. For that reason the surveillance files were not made available to prosecutors at the war crimes trials in Germany. The Allies’ own methods of gathering intelligence were, at all costs, to be kept secret.
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A book like this is the result of many people’s research and would not exist without the support of numerous colleagues.

Our most profound gratitude goes out to the Gerda Henkel and Fritz Thyssen Foundation for financing our research group. Dr. Michael Hanssler, Dr. Angela Kühnen, Dr. Frank Suder, and their teams were extremely committed in assisting us. They and their institutions are impressive examples of how research can be funded in a goal-oriented, efficient, uncomplicated, and cordial manner.

We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Michael Matheus, the director of German Historical Institute in Rome, for helping us with the grant application, supporting work on the project in Italy, and for organizing a conference in April 2008, where we were able to present some of our findings to our Italian colleagues. We are also very grateful to Dr. Lutz Klinkhammer for his work on the Italian part of the project. The Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen was not only a central research location, but a generous host for workshops, conferences, and lectures. That helped us make progress in an extremely inspiring, interdisciplinary atmosphere.

We would also like to acknowledge those who worked on the project—Dr. Christian Gudehus, Dr. Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, Dr. Felix Römer, Dr. Michaela Christ, Sebastian Gross, MA, and Tobias Seidl, MA—for three years of intense and constructive research. They formed an excellent team, and it was a joy to work with them. In June 2008, Dr. Richard Germann of Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Science in Vienna joined our ranks. To him we owe numerous bits of information about the socio-biographical background of the POWs who were put under surveillance as well as about Austrians in the Wehrmacht. Dr. Dietmar Rost provided us with a number of excellent pieces of advice concerning American soldiers.

We were very pleased that our work on this project spilled over into university instruction, and that a number of MA theses were written on this topic. With their work, Falko Bell, Nicole Bögli, Stephanie
Fuchs, Alexander Hoerkens, Frederik Müllers, Anette Neder, Katharina Straub, Martin Treutlein, Daniela Wellnitz, and Matthias Weusmann all made important contributions to the project, and we thank them sincerely for their commitment and interest.