According to a new book by German historian Sönke Neitzel, senior German officers knew far more about the Holocaust than was previously thought:
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 Sönke 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.
This is significant stuff, given the centrality of the issue of who knew what about the fate of the Jews. What amazes me is that it’s taken sixty years for this material to surface. Where’s it been all this time?
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