Abstract
Much has been written about the 370,000 German POWs in the United States, but little attention has been paid to the VIPs among them. Between 1943 and 1946, 55 generals were imprisoned in US POW camps, and so far little has been known about the US policy towards these high-ranking Wehrmacht officers. Derek Mallett’s important book closes this gap. While the British intelligence service MI19 ran a sophisticated system to gather information from German generals, the American authorities soon lost interest in any intelligence operation of a similar kind. The first five high-ranking staff officers were interrogated and secretly recorded in Fort Tracy, north of San Francisco, in June 1943. The results must have been rather disappointing for the Americans, and the officers were soon transferred to other internment camps, first in Texas (Camp Mexia) and then in Mississippi (Camp Clinton). No other German generals were ever interrogated or clandestinely recorded in the USA until the end of the Second World War. Although the War Department intensively gathered information from ordinary German prisoners, they obviously had no interest in approaching generals as a potential source of key information. One explanation for this was that the British already did that job in their special camp north of London, Trent Park, and MI19 shared all information with the War Department. On the other hand, Mallett demonstrates in his book that ‘Washington lacked a clear idea of what it wanted from these men’ (p. 94). There was no concept of how these men could be useful. This changed dramatically at the end of the war. General Ulrich Kessler, who was captured on U-234 while on his way to Japan in May 1945, was intensively interrogated, as was Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the German intelligence service Foreign Armies East. Now the War Department recognized the usefulness of captured German generals: it wanted to learn from their experience to prepare the US Army for a possible war against the Soviet Union. In the so-called Hill project, 17 high-ranking German staff officers, together with some lower ranks, analysed captured German documents about the Wehrmacht’s structure, training, and tactics in general and the Eastern Front experience in particular. This was followed by the even larger US Army Historical Division German history programme, in which 328 German officers wrote hundreds of reports, mainly on Wehrmacht operations in the Mediterranean and the Soviet Union.
Derek Mallett approaches the topic from the US side but includes some German sources as well, e.g. the personal files of some generals. However, Mallett obviously has little or no knowledge of German himself and ignores important German literature on the topic (e.g. by Felix Römer). Furthermore, his understanding of German generals is rather superficial. More information could easily have been integrated about their war experience, about their perception of the US and their life in Camp Clinton, but unfortunately we hear nothing about this. Consequently, the personalities of these German generals remain a bit pale. Mallett believes that they knew that they were bugged and that the protocols of their conversations must be read accordingly. It would have been helpful to receive more evidence for this suggestion. Having analysed the private papers of many German generals in British and US captivity, this reviewer has arrived at the opposite conclusion. And yes, the British military was much more aristocratic in comparison to its US counterpart, but whether this was really the main reason why MI19 treated the German generals so well seems unlikely. The British realized from very early on that their POWs were a particularly good source of information. The fact that they put the generals up in a rather luxurious mansion tells us much more about the clever subtlety of their intelligence-gathering methods than about their aristocratic military structure. And the British approach turned out to be very right. While living in the grand atmosphere of Trent Park, the German generals delivered much useful information to the microphones of MI19. And a last, minor issue: it’s not Französen but Franzosen.
Derek Mallett’s book is a well-written piece of work on a long-neglected part of Second World War history. Although it has not realized its full potential and lacks precision in its analysis of the German side of this chapter in history, it is still an important contribution to the topic.