A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
imprisoned in a Nazi penitentiary from 1935 to 1945. Horst Sindermann spent twelve years behind bars. Hermann Axen, responsible for foreign affairs, barely survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Albert Norden, also Jewish (his father, a rabbi, was killed in Theresienstadt), co-authored a famous Brown Book in 1933 in Paris, exposing the Nazis during the Reichstag fire trial, and was active as an exile in the United States. Heinrich Rau, Alfred Neumann, and Kurt Hager were volunteers in Spain, as was Heinz Hoffmann, who became defense minister and commander of the army.
15—Men in Uniform
After the war, German armies were not supposed to exist ever again. But this clear decision by the victorious powers was soon muddied, then derailed by the Cold War, as each side blamed the other for steps largely planned behind tightly closed doors in Washington and Moscow.
Konrad Adenauer was more than eager to please U.S. Occupation Force boss John J. McCloy by rebuilding a strong military. The reward: a speedy grant of sovereignty to his gestating republic and the easing of sentences against Hitler’s bloody generals. Their onetime buddies and most media demanded amnesty for all comrades-in-arms still imprisoned or due to be hanged for their mass murder sprees; otherwise they would refuse to cooperate. In most cases, they were successful.
By March 1949 Adenauer requested NATO membership for West Germany, and in October 1950 ten ex-officers met secretly to kick things off. Top dog was Adolf Heusinger. In 1923, he had called Hitler “the man sent by God to lead the Germans….” As Operations Department chief in the Wehrmacht he helped plan strategy for nearly every war front, meeting with Hitler 600–700 times and so close, literally, that the bomb that almost killed Der Führer on July 20, 1944, also wounded him. Hitler’s suspicions of nearly every top officer meant house arrest for Heusinger; he was freed after three months but this sufficed later as his anti-Nazi alibi. After working with the Organisation Gehlen until 1950, he became Adenauer’s main military adviser.
Another secret planner with a similar alibi, Hans Speidel, had been chief of staff in Occupied France and signed orders to deport Communists and Jews to the death camps. A third man had been commander at the bloody battle of Monte Cassino, a fourth had commanded tank units in the invasions of Poland, Yugoslavia, and Russia, then become supreme commander in Italy. They soon agreed to form new armed forces, the Bundeswehr, and to join NATO.
The new commanders with golden epaulet stars and access to ever more murderous weapons were quite a bunch. The first Inspector General—top boss—was that same Adolf Heusinger who blessed Hitler’s arrival on earth. He had coordinated the suppression of anti-Nazi partisans and sent out orders to all units on the Eastern Front: “Troops are entitled and obliged to use every method in the fight, including measures against women and children. Any form of reluctance would be a crime against the German people.” Such methods, he admitted at the Nuremberg trials, provided an opportunity for the “systematic diminishing of the Slavic and Jewish populations.”
But Bonn insisted: “General Heusinger has a stainless past and personality.” Here, from Greece, is one out of many samples of his stainlessness: “Operation Kalavrita continued without contact with the enemy. As reprisal measure 9 villages were destroyed, 142 male inhabitants shot. (signed) Heusinger,” December 1943. (Documents of American Prosecution for Nuremberg trial, Case 7, Vol. 8, 1948.)
After his term as Inspector General and after receiving the Grand Order of Merit with Star and Sash, Heusinger became chairman of NATO’s Permanent Military Committee in Washington. His successor was Friedrich Foertsch, convicted in the USSR for destroying the ancient cities of Pskov, Pushkin, Novgorod, and parts of Leningrad but released to West Germany in 1955 at the request of Adenauer. Within a year he was a Major General, then Bundeswehr boss.
His follower, Heinz Trettner, had been in the Legion Condor sent to help overthrow Spain’s elected government and was squadron captain of the unit that blasted the Basque town of Guernica, raining bombs on civilians for four hours in a rehearsal for the world war and inspiring Picasso’s Guernica, one of the greatest antiwar paintings of all time.
The last Wehrmacht vet in this job, Ulrich de Maizière, had been too young to make it to general but, as a General Staff member in the Reich Chancellery, he was praised by Hitler, who “admired his precise manner of expression” in his reports. He did finally reach the top—in 1967.
All but one top Bundeswehr officer had been a wartime general, admiral, or colonel in the Nazis’ Wehrmacht; three hundred had been officers in the Waffen-SS, condemned as a war criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials. When confronted with his re-polishing of pre-1945 brass, Adenauer responded tartly: “There has been no breach in the honor of the former German Wehrmacht…. No one may reproach the career soldiers on account of their earlier activities.” And, he quipped, “NATO would not accept any 18-year-old generals.” (Gunther Latsch und Klaus Wiegrefe,“Einsatz im Machtspiel,” Der Spiegel, November 12, 2001.)
WHAT ABOUT THE GDR? After the Korean War began in 1950 and the West rejected Stalin’s proposal of a united, democratic, and neutral Germany in 1952, the GDR saw to building its own armed forces and set up a “barracked” police force (Kasernierte Volkspolizei), an early step in that direction. In May 1955, the Western Bundeswehr was established and the Federal Republic joined NATO; five days later the Warsaw Pact was formed in the Eastern Bloc, with the GDR as member, and eight months later the National People’s Army (NVA) was founded in the East. Compulsory military service began in West Germany in July 1956; the GDR waited for that until 1961 when the building of the Berlin Wall hindered draft dodging.
In West Germany, four hundred top former officers took command. But where could the East’s NVA find experienced officers? It, too, could not “accept 18-year-old generals.” Those men, mostly Communists, who had fought in Spain, the resistance, or in an Allied army were usually in the ranks, firing a machine gun or driving a vehicle. About forty veterans of the International Brigades with higher levels of experience had already been scattered to build up a Nazi-free police force, transportation and border controls, and an “intelligence” structure, later known as the Stasi. The scarcity of experienced military men explains why the GDR resorted to using trained Wehrmacht officers.
Although it was a pity this was found necessary, it was hardly the same as in West Germany. Only nine former generals were taken on in the GDR armed forces; all nine, while prisoners in the Soviet Union, had rejected allegiance to Hitler, defying powerful peer pressure from fellow officers and repercussions against their families in Germany. They had joined the anti-fascist Association of German Officers, with about a hundred members, or the far larger National Committee for a Free Germany, founded near Moscow in July 1943 for all ranks, with an executive committee of twenty-eight POWs and ten exiled Communists, headed by a captured major, a lieutenant, and the popular poet Erich Weinert. It is never easy to see into people’s souls and judge motivations and beliefs; many had been shaken in their faith in Hitler after he ordered their abandonment at Stalingrad or after the Wehrmacht’s decisive defeat in the giant Battle of Kursk. Perhaps some simply hoped for earlier release. But all had taken the crucial step of rejecting the Nazis. If they agreed to help build up armed forces in the GDR and had the experience so rare among anti-Nazi resistance survivors, they were accepted.
Three of the nine former Wehrmacht generals were briefly in the GDR’s ruling command structure. One, after his capture, had actively engaged in teaching at an anti-fascist school to win over German prisoners of war. Another had become a Communist, taken part in fighting at the front, and was condemned to death in absentia by a Nazi court. The third had been a technician. Next to these three, commanding the new National People’s Army, were six men who had not served as Wehrmacht officers. Top man and later defense minister Heinz Hoffmann had been active in the anti-Nazi underground and was wounded fighting Franco. Friedrich Dickel had also fought in Spain. Walter Verner, an admiral, was active in the Danish resistance. Heinz Kessler, sent as a soldier to the USSR, had immediately deserted and helped found the National Committee for a Free Germany. Kurt Wagner was arrested by the Nazis in 1935 and kept in prison till the end of the war.
Within a year it was decided that the former Wehrmacht generals were no longer needed and should be retired as soon as possible; the last was pensioned off in February 1957.
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