The Germans Reappraise the War

EVERY fatal political disease brings its literary post-mortem; and if this post-mortem is not so much an examination of cause as a dispute about responsibility--a competition in disclaimer by doctors, nurses, relatives and the chambermaid--this does not make it, to the historian, less interesting. It may not establish historical truth, but it adds to historical evidence--evidence not of fact, but of motive, character and political climate. It is now seven years since the defeat of Germany, the overthrow of Nazism, the death of Hitler. In those seven years thousands of documents have come to light which can illustrate the history of Nazism; in the same time several books have been written to explain those documents and hundreds to explain them away. Almost every class of public figure under Nazism has published its apologia; and these apologias, having been addressed to a society which has itself undergone, in the same period, profound emotional alterations, have naturally been adapted to those changes. In this article I propose to consider the literature concerning Nazi Germany which has been published in or for post-Nazi Germany; and I wish to consider it not for its contribution towards historical truth (which is but slight), but for the evidence which it supplies of the changing political climate of Germany since Hitler's death.

I have said that, historically, its value is slight. There has indeed been very little objective, academic study of recent history in Germany. This is not only because German academic historiography is not yet objective, nor because German historians, by an understandable intellectual escapism, tend to flee to remoter periods in which their own lives have been less uncomfortably involved. There is also another reason. If the best historical studies of Nazi Germany have almost invariably been written in English, we should remember that the documents essential for such study are still, for the most part, in British or American, not German, hands. This removal from Germany of German documents has undoubtedly had some good effects. It has ensured the publication of some important material which German historians might well have been tempted, or obliged, to conceal, just as the historians of the Weimar Republic, in their great documentary compilation, "Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette,"[i] contrived to conceal the effective and aggressive policy of the German General Staff before 1914. Indeed, whatever the political and legal verdict upon the Nuremberg and other war trials may be, the historian must be glad of them: for they put on record and exposed to legal verification important documents which any German government would probably have suppressed. On the other hand, this seizure of archives has also had effects which German historians may justly deplore. The Allied victors have replaced the German Government as the arbiters of publications. But are they necessarily more liberal? The Russian Government has chosen to publish (not entirely out of disinterested historical zeal) certain papers from the German Foreign Office, including some of the papers of Herbert von Dirksen, German Ambassador in London between Munich and the war. The British and American governments have opened some archives and published others. But much remains hidden, and the complaints of German historians that they are denied the opportunity of studying their own recent history at first hand are understandable. It is probable that such books as Sir Lewis Namier's "Diplomatic Prelude"[ii] or Mr. J. W. Wheeler-Bennett's "Munich"[iii] could not anyway--if only on grounds of style--have been written by Germans. As it is, inaccessibility of sources prevents them even from trying, and the consequent ignorance among Germans, of their own true history, may well prove politically unfortunate in coming years.

Thus, while British and American writers have found it easier, as victors, to analyze Nazi history, German writers on recent events have almost necessarily been not objective or expository but autobiograpical, reminiscent, apologetic. Consequently their interest has been quite different: they provide evidence to the historian rather than conclusions to the student. What evidence do they provide? It is evidence both of continuous malaise and of clearly discernible shifts. At no time since the war have German writers shown themselves comfortable either in support of Nazism or in opposition to it. On the other hand, the mood which they represent has undergone, in seven years, significant change.

At first it was a mood of revulsion--hatred of Hitler, disillusion with all the broken promises of Nazism, disgust at its suddenly admitted brutality, indignation at its folly and frivolity, repudiation of its works; and, in consequence, dramatization of "the Resistance," apotheosis of the anti-Nazi conspirators, the men of July 20, 1944. This was the mood of the years 1946-7, represented in the books published in those years. Most of these books were published outside Germany, and this fact, although due to the temporary dislocation of the German publishing business, may of course have given an undue emphasis to anti-Nazi views. On the other hand, Swiss firms printed books for the German as well as the Swiss public and no doubt appealed to a German and not merely an Allied or neutral mood. The first of these books was the stout work of Hans Bernd Gisevius, "Bis zum bittern Ende"[iv]--a slapdash, undocumented glorification of the anti-Nazi opposition, published in Zurich in 1946. Himself a genuine member of that opposition, who had played a personal part in the conspiracy of July 20, 1944, Gisevius had worked for the American O.S.S. in Switzerland and given evidence for the prosecution at Nuremberg. He had thus had exceptional opportunities and he used them to quick advantage: his book hit the mood of the moment and had a large sale; but it was essentially a livre d'occasion. Far better--more moving, more restrained, and more careful of fact--were two other books which also appeared from Zurich in the same year: Fabian von Schlabrendorff's "Offiziere gegen Hitler"[v] and the posthumous diary of Ulrich von Hassell.[vi] Both these were conservative writers--Schlabrendorff a lawyer and historian, Hassell a diplomatist who had been ambassador in Rome, recalled by Ribbentrop in 1937, and murdered after the plot of July 20, 1944--of which, however, he had been unaware. Both these books enjoyed a wide circulation in Germany and were translated into English. Hassell's diary, in particular, which has the added clarity of pessimism and the added credit of contemporaneous, unedited comment, made a great impression: his hatred of Hitler's cruelty and vulgarity, his lament for the disappearance of European culture, his gloomy certainty that the future offered only the alternatives of victorious tyranny or ruinous defeat, his prophetic condemnation of Hitler's mad "plunge into the abyss"--all this mirrored perfectly the gloom and nostalgia of German sentiment in 1946. It was an appeal for decency, sanity, culture, in a mad, brutal world. And yet this philosophy, if it heightened, also limited the appeal of "the Resistance;" for it was, in the eyes of many, the philosophy of a class: a cultivated class indeed, and a class which Nazism had overthrown, but a class which the defeat of Nazism could not automatically reinvigorate--the old, cosmopolitan, conservative class which had once ruled in Europe, and now rules no more. In their mood of remorse the German people might listen to a voice from that class, but it was as the libertine listens, in a moment of misery, to a respected priest--not for long.

Throughout 1946 and 1947 accounts of "the Resistance" continued to be published in and for Germany. In 1947 Rudolf Pechel's pedestrian account of the German Resistance was published in Zurich.[vii] Altogether some 50 books or pamphlets on the subject appeared in German in those two years. But by the end of 1947 the myth of "the other Germany" was already wearing thin. Its appeal was too conservative, too cosmopolitan, and its heroes were either (like the anglophil Rhodes Scholar Adam von Trott or the half-English aristocrat Helmuth von Moltke) sympathizers with or (like Gisevius and Schlabrendorff) actual agents of the Western Powers. To many Germans the movement thus appeared not only anti-Nazi but also antinational. As long as the German people, still staggering from defeat, felt emotionally as well as politically and economically dependent on the West, such "antinational" figures were useful as spiritual ambassadors to the protecting Powers; but what if a time came when Germany felt able to resent such humiliating tutelage? In 1947-8 the honeymoon between Germany's eastern and western conquerors was broken off. Thereafter, with currency reform and the creation of the West Zone, Germans began to recover confidence. Further, the German printing-houses were at work again, and authors were no longer dependent on foreign publishers. Thus in 1948 the situation was radically altered. From that date on a new attitude towards "the Resistance" was given expression.

This new attitude was represented in public by the German generals, whose memoirs and retrospective vindications suddenly flooded the literary market in the year 1949. In the literature of "the other Germany," the German generals had consistently appeared as inglorious, backsliding figures whose hesitancy had ruined the more consistent civilian opposition. They alone had commanded the means effectively to overthrow Hitler from within, but whenever the moment for action had come, they had always found it either inconvenient to miss their share in Hitler's victory or disgraceful to desert him in the hour of defeat. Boastful but vacillating, at best unpolitical, at worst corruptible by presents or promotion, the generals--especially Halder and Brauchitsch--feature almost as the villains of Hassell's diary. Now, in 1949, they struck back. Imprisonment and interrogation had cleared their minds; military specialists like Captain Liddell Hart had flattered them by their attentive questions,[viii] and it was Halder himself, Hitler's Chief of Staff from 1938 to 1942, who, in a famous pamphlet, gave the signal for counterattack. This pamphlet, called "Hitler als Feldherr,"[ix] consisted of a violent attack on Hitler's generalship; and in a few weeks it is said to have sold 100,000 copies. Its publication heralded a flood of similar literature which, taken together, interpreted the entire history of the German General Staff in its relations with Hitler.

Behind the natural differences of prejudice and presentation, what, if any, is the common denominator of this military literature? Briefly, the German generals claimed that they, as leaders of the historic German army, the basis of the German state, represented throughout the true interest of the nation, and that Hitler, having outmanœuvred them by corrupt politics in 1937-8, was able, by a usurped control and lunatic strategy, to ruin from behind both the army and the nation. The generals were thus not "the Opposition:" they were the legitimate authorities seeking still to perform their functions and save Germany from the results of Hitler's criminal irresponsibility. In this grave task they were embarrassed only by what they asserted was the frivolous irresponsibility of "dilettante politicals" like Hassell who, not being entrusted with the lives and souls of millions of Germans, were often unaware of the magnitude of the problem. "The other Germany," these generals suggest, was disqualified by its "otherness" from handling German affairs: it was not, like the General Staff, a "responsible" organization. "Responsibility" is the keyword of the military apologists. "Of Military Responsibility"[x] is the title of one of its earliest manifestos.

Represented in sufficiently abstract terms, this thesis has a certain plausibility. Unfortunately, on closer examination, the apparent solidarity of the generals' front soon crumbles. Within it there is indeed one consistent group: the "Prussian" group which derived immediately from Seeckt and was represented by General Ludwig Beck. Beck's papers were published in 1949 by Wolfgang Foerster, under the title "Ein General kämpft gegen den Krieg,"[xi] and in the same year General Friedrich Hossbach, in his book "Zwischen Wehrmacht und Hitler,"[xii] paid further tribute to his views. The party of Beck was certainly an anti-Nazi party which had supported Nazism only so long as it had thought that it could use it. In 1937-8, when it became clear that Hitler was in control and would carry out a revolutionary and aggressive policy far beyond the limits of that conservative rearmament which he had envisaged, Beck had resigned his post as Chief of General Staff, and, quite logically, had organized conspiracy after conspiracy against Hitler. After the failure of the last, on July 20, 1944, he had committed suicide. Of him and his group it can fairly be said that they opposed Hitler not because he lost the war but because he made it. Like Hassell they regarded it from the start as a "plunge into the abyss."

But this "Prussian" group among the generals was a small minority only; if we examine the majority of the memoirs of 1949, we find a very different picture. Their authors did not resign in 1938--or later; and although most of them were in some way victims of Hitler's vengeance after July 20, 1944, and many of them had been involved in the plot, it is perfectly clear that their opposition was based entirely on grounds of strategy, not of principle. Halder's whole pamphlet is an attack on Hitler's wasteful and impulsive methods which lost the war when more professional methods could have won it; General Speidel, who had been Chief of Staff to Rommel, states clearly that it was military defeat and nothing else which turned Rommel into a somewhat ineffective conspirator;[xiii] and the burden of almost every other apologia is the same. Hitler's "irresponsibility," to these generals, appeared not in the making of war, or in the kind of war that he made, but in the unprofessional methods by which he threw away a possible victory.

The majority of the generals were not really anti-Nazi at all: they were fair-weather Nazis. This becomes apparent whenever they reach, in their memoirs, that crucial touchstone of politics, the plot of July 20, 1944. Theoretically, as the true opposition, they should boast of this attempt; in fact they were involved; but in retrospect they never approach it without uneasiness, and the fundamental questions which it raises are no sooner sighted than the authors shy away, leaving, like the cuttlefish, only a formless cloud of ink. Through that cloud one feature, however, remains visible: the writers recognize that whatever Prussian Junkers and cosmopolitan aristocrats may have thought, the broad masses of the German people, before whom they are now defending themselves, had still, in 1944, believed in Hitler and even now perhaps--in 1949--believed in the program which he had bungled. The war, in 1944, had still been a patriotic war; the Western Allies were still the enemies not merely of Hitler but of Germany; negotiations with them were still treachery; a Putsch, even if successful, would probably have foundered on the basic loyalty of the German people: in any case it would certainly be exploited by them afterwards as a stab in the back: a Dolchstoss of which not Hitler but the generals would be the villains.

This shift of emphasis from total anti-Nazism to modified Nazism, Nazism without Hitler, has its ironies, its accidental casualties. A good instance is provided by the literature concerning Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr or German secret service, who was executed in the last month of the Nazi era. It happens that Canaris was himself a singularly evasive, cloudy, impersonal character, so that his panegyrists can easily ascribe to him whatever virtues seem most convenient to them at the time. In 1951 there appeared two biographies of Canaris. The author of one, Ian Colvin, was an Englishman, naturally sympathetic to the cosmopolitan Westerners and still breathing the atmosphere of 1946: in his book "Master Spy,"[xiv] he represented Canaris not only as a consistent and well-intentioned opponent of Nazism (which he was), but also as a secret ally and informant of the British (which he was not). The other biographer, a German, Karl Heinz Abshagen,[xv] was more sensitive to the change of climate in Germany and never approached the subject of Canaris' anti-Nazism without elaborate and apprehensive apologies. He was particularly anxious that no German reader should suppose that Canaris ever served Allied interests. Canaris hated Hitler and dreaded the consequences of a German victory--yes; but let not the reader suppose that he was unpatriotic or failed in his German duty: "in spite of all these mental doubts, the Abwehr under Canaris did its duty in full"--it worked for victory. On this essential and significant point the two biographies neatly cancel each other out.[xvi]

Thus, by 1950, the literary barometers already showed a perceptible shift in the German attitude to Nazism. Nationalism, the anti-Russian nationalism of Hitler, had recovered some ground. Though Hitler remained a criminal, his policy was not entirely wrong: his crime was, at least in part, his failure. This recovery of German nationalism profited, of course, from events in the outer world. In the summer of 1950 Russia and the West carried their differences to war--in Korea; anti-Communism received ever more violent expression in America; and the ideological hatred of Communism in the West could easily be transformed, in Germany, into a nationalist hatred of Russia, a revival of Nazism. The new bargaining position of Germany between now-divided conquerors, like the question of German rearmament, each added its opportunities; and in 1951 General Otto Ernst Remer's Socialist Reich Party suddenly captured attention. Appropriately, Remer made his public appeal through a pamphlet--an apologia centering on that crucial subject, the dilemma of Nazis and anti-Nazis alike: the July 20, 1944, plot. For that famous date, which had sent Beck and Hassell to death and Halder to prison, had made Remer a Nazi hero: it was he, more than any other man, "the little major," as Hitler called him, "who made the great decision," who by his prompt disobedience had saved Berlin for Nazism. In his apologia, entitled simply "20 July 1944,"[xvii] and published in 1951, Remer denounced the July conspirators as criminals and traitors, men who would have surrendered the Fatherland, in the East, to the "cruelest enemies of Europe," the Russians, and, in the West, to "the Jew Morgenthau," and against them he exalted, as the type of the Happy Warrior, "the soldiers and workers who stood by their oath" to Adolf Hitler.

The apologia and the career of Remer must not be taken too seriously. Already, in the court at Brunswick, his attack on the July conspirators has been condemned as libelous; and the Bonn government, in a special issue of Das Parlament on July 20, 1952, has canonized the conspirators of 1944; Remer's party is now outlawed. His movement may yet prove to have been a mere flash in the pan. If we wish to gauge the German climate, we would do better to look at the memoirs of those more practised politicians who themselves have based their whole careers on a capacity to gauge it: the politicians who, having served and survived Hitler, are now cautiously emerging to justify even their careers.

For if 1946-8 were the years of the opposition, and 1949-50 the years of the generals, 1951-2 have been the years of the politicians. There have been earlier instances indeed, but they were exceptional: men like Schacht, who was prepared to resign and go to prison rather than accept responsibility for amateur financial policy, and whose book, "Abrechnung mit Hitler"[xviii]--refreshing through its unusual clarity and trenchancy--puts him rather among the opposition than among those more prudent politicians who lasted longer and are only now, after years of careful reconnaissance, circumspectly venturing into print. Now that the opposition have spent their artillery in a premature exhibition, now that the generals have opened a breach, now that "resistance" is no longer a necessary virtue and the service of Hitler has been distinguished from Nazism, the way at last seems open for the trimmers. When so practised a survivor as Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who served Hitler as minister from beginning to end, prefaces his recollections[xix] with the firm (but unnecessary) words, "I was not a member of the Resistance," we can be sure that it is safe to say so. Thus they emerge--the bureaucrats, the aristocratic neuters, the respectable "non-Nazis" who smoothed Hitler's way to power, blurred the ugly features of his rule, masked his intentions, anaesthetized his victims, and detaching themselves in time to avoid disaster, now remember their virtuous but unavailing efforts to civilize the regime. In vain! Each as he emerges is trapped by Sir Lewis Namier: his half-truths and evasions are exposed; and we wonder how educated men can ever have hoped to rehabilitate themselves by such methods. The answer is that they wrote not for us but for Germans, and the question we should ask concerns not the accuracy but the purpose of these former collaborators of Hitler who now think it worth while to appear before their compatriots sheeted not in white but in a curious, fugitive, variable tint of grey.

Once asked, the question answers itself with surprising clarity. Behind the multiplicity of excuses and evasion, and apart from their personal ambitions, the "non-Nazi" politicians of the Third Reich admit to a similar policy--a policy which was an essential part of Nazism and for which (we must assume) they reckon on a favorable reception in Germany today. That policy was, quite simply, eastern conquest. The extent of the conquest might vary --timid conservatives might not share Hitler's voracious appetite--but if some anticipated a longer banquet than others, all were agreed on the first few courses. Thus Baron von Weizsäcker,[xx] head of the Foreign Office, while perpetually describing the scruples which he had to overcome before clinging to office, openly vindicates his policy towards Czechoslovakia: a policy of "chemical dissolution" and quiet absorption which differs from Hitler's policy only in method, not in aim. What Weizsäcker recommended was Hitler's policy--the conquest of Eastern Europe --without Hitler's risk--European war. Consequently he regards Munich as a great victory, "a defeat for Hitler's war mentality," and the men who, by surrendering to Hitler, made it possible--Neville Chamberlain and Sir Nevile Henderson--as "great men." Thus Herbert von Dirksen, who as a "Prussian" would have preferred agreement with Russia, supported, as an earnest of such agreement, the first stage of conquest: conquest of Poland.[xxi] Behind the infinite evasions and duplicities of Franz von Papen's memoirs the same purpose, the same ultimate justification, is visible. In all his book[xxii] I can find only two positive aims consistently stated. They are "basic Christian principles" (which appear to mean social conservatism at home), and Germany's "historic mission" to defend Europe against the Slavs. Since, in historical fact, the Slavs have never in the past threatened Europe, while the Germans have persistently invaded and annexed Slav lands, this phrase can only mean, once again, the conquest of the East. This conviction even of non-Nazis that Germany was entitled to expand eastwards--if not, as Hitler hoped, to the Urals, at least, as Papen and Weizsäcker agreed, to Prague and Posen--was shared even by such anti-Nazi officials as Hassell and his friends, who in the draft peace terms which they offered to Lord Halifax in February 1940 through "Mr. X" (Josef Müller), stipulated that Austria and Bohemia must remain in the Reich and that the German-Polish frontier be reëstablished as in 1914. Now that Russia dominates equally all countries to the east of Germany, so that the distinction between a "Prussian" or anti-Polish policy and a nationalist or anti-Russian policy is again, as in 1938, blurred, while German cities like Königsberg and Breslau have become Russian or Polish, it is perhaps understandable that the Papens and the Weizsäckers should feel justified in reminding their compatriots that the part of Hitler's policy which they sought to further was not anti-Semitism or concentration camps but the Drang nach Osten.

Thus, however we examine it, the literature of Nazi history shows in the past seven years a gradual shift from anti-Nazism to revived nationalism. Intellectuals, aristocrats, cosmopolitans, Prussian traditionalists might preach total opposition to Hitler, and this waning minority among Germans might prove useful as ambassadors to the outer world in the days when Germany was crushed and her victors still united; but with the disunity of the conquerors and the recovery of German economy and confidence, that phase is over. German opinion is back to normal; and in spite of all the difference of circumstances, that normality seems to be the normality of the 1930's. The unappeased demands are for unity, independence, and not now conquest, but recovery of Eastern lands. This being so, the question naturally arises: Will the wheel turn full circle? Will nationalism without Hitler lead ultimately to nationalism with Hitler? Is there any evidence, in these publications, of a revival not merely of nationalism but of real Nazism?

In my opinion there is not. Whatever modifications of anti-Nazism have been made, there has been no sign, in these German memoirs, of any forgiveness towards Hitler. Even the politicians who served him to the last, and who now defend his aims, disown his person. Even Remer is careful to say nothing about him, and to deny any attempt to revive "the mistakes" of what he regards as a dead period. Of literature about Hitler, or about the other Nazi leaders, there has been in Germany so far surprisingly little, The most valuable German work on Hitler--Josef Greiner's "Das Ende des Hitler Mythos"[xxiii]--was published in Vienna in 1947, i.e. in the anti-Nazi years. The best German book on Goebbels, Wilfred von Oven's "Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende,"[xxiv] was published in Buenos Aires. Rudolf Semler's shorter but equally interesting diary of Goebbels' Table Talk was published in Copenhagen and London but not Germany.[xxv] Goering has had two biographies in English but none in German. Of Himmler there is total silence, and although his system of terror has been carefully documented in Eugen Kogon's "Der SS-Staat" (originally written for the Occupying Powers), the public edition of that book saw the light abroad, in Stockholm.[xxvi] In truth, the Germans seem to be uninterested in Hitler. For 12 years he filled their lives, dominated and drove and deafened them, and even if some parts of his policy now seem to them again respectable, he himself remains not only a liability, but something of a bore. In 1951 Dr. Henry Picker published in Germany the texts which he had personally retained of Hitler's table talk.[xxvii] Badly edited, arbitrarily arranged, and sometimes incorrectly quoted, these documents--of which a complete version is now appearing in France--are nevertheless of enormous historical value; never have the true aims, the personal program, the coarse but powerful mind of Hitler been so clearly and vividly expressed; and the news of their impending publication caused some stir among liberal Germans who apprehended that this authentic utterance of the Führer's philosophy might provide neo-Nazism with a new gospel. But in fact the prophets of woe were confounded. "Hitler's Tischgespräche," in spite of their great historical interest, and in spite of great publicity caused by a legal struggle over the copyright, have sold, in Germany, only 6,000 copies. In the same year the labored and implausible apologia of Weizsäcker had sold 20,000 copies. Even more significant is the success of the vast, literary self-defense of a former Nazi sympathizer, "Der Fragebogen," by Ernst von Salomon,[xxviii] which, in the same period, sold nearly 200,000 copies. Clearly, from such evidence, the Germans are not so much interested in Hitler as in themselves: every defense of collaboration, collusion, delusion, is indirectly a defense of themselves: the grey sheets in which Weizsäcker and so many others not too penitently stand are the penitential sheets of Germany, and what German wishes them to be too abjectly white? These books are not read in Germany for truth, but for comfort, and it is wrong, I suspect, to argue from the interest that some of them have aroused any great interest either in the history of National Socialism--that unhappy period which Germans would rather transform or forget than understand--or in the personality of Hitler whose "errors" are still more obvious than his undoubted nationalist virtue. I know that in saying this I run a serious risk, for even at this moment Thomas Orr's "Das war Hitler," "the first biography," is being serialized in the Munich periodical Revue, and Walter Görlitz's life of Hitler is due from the publishers; but whether these works will profoundly illuminate the subject or open a fourth stage in the history of Nazi historiography since the war, or will merely reillustrate the present division between Nazism and Nationalism, between truth and apologia, I must leave the later evidence to determine.

[i] "Die grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914," edited by Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Friedrich Thimme. Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1922-1927.

[ii] "Diplomatic Prelude, 1938-1939," by Lewis Bernstein Namier. London: Macmillan, 1948.

[iii] "Munich: Prologue to Tragedy," by John W. Wheeler-Bennett. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948.

[iv] "Bis zum bittern Ende," by Hans Bernd Gisevius. Zurich: Fretz and Wasmuth, 1946. ("To The Bitter End." Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.)

[v] "Offiziere gegen Hitler," by Fabian von Schlabrendorff. Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1946. ("They Almost Killed Hitler." New York: Macmillan, 1947.)

[vi] "Vom andern Deutschland, 1938-1944," by Ulrich von Hassell. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1946. ("The von Hassell Diaries, 1938-1944," Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1947.)

[vii] "Deutscher Widerstand," by Rudolf Pechel. Erlenbach-Zürich: E. Rentsch, 1947.

[viii] "German Generals Talk," by Basil Henry Liddell Hart. New York: Morrow, 1948.

[ix] "Hitler als Feldherr," by Franz Halder. Germany: Münchener Dom-Verlag, 1949. ("Hitler As War Lord." London: Putnam, 1950.)

[x] "Von der militärischen Verantwortlichkeit," by Friedrich Hossbach. Göttingen: 1948.

[xi] "Ein General kämpft gegen den Krieg," by Wolfgang Foerster. München: Münchener Dom-Verlag, 1949.

[xii] "Zwischen Wehrmacht und Hitler, 1934-1938," by Friedrich Hossbach. Wolfenbüttel: Wolfenbütteler Verlagsanstalt, 1949.

[xiii] "Invasion 1944," by Hans Speidel. Tübingen: R. Wunderlich, 1949. ("Invasion 1944." Chicago: Regnery, 1950.)

[xiv] "Master Spy," by Ian Goodhope Colvin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952.

[xv] "Canaris; Patriot und Weltbürger," by Karl Heinz Abshagen. Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1949.

[xvi] Apart from the titles quoted in the text, the following military memoirs should be mentioned: "Der Fritschprozess, 1938," by Johann Adolf Kielmansegg. Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1949. "Befehl im Widerstreit; Schicksalsstunden der deutschen Armee, 1923-1945," by Adolf Heusinger. Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1950. "Der Deutsche Generalstab; Geschichte und Gestalt, 1657-1945," by Walter Görlitz. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1950.

"Deutsche Schicksalsjahre," by Kurt Assmann. Wiesbaden: E. Brockhaus, 1950.

[xvii] "20 Juli 1944," by Otto Ernst Remer. Hamburg: Verlag Deutsche Opposition, 1951.

[xviii] "Account Settled," by Hjalmar Schacht. London: G. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1949.

[xix] "Es geschah in Deutschland," by Lutz von Schwerin-Krosigk. Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1951.

[xx] "Erinnerungen," by Ernst Heinrich von Weizsäcker. München: P. List, 1950. ("Memoirs." Chicago: Regnery, 1951.)

[xxi] "Moskau, Tokio, London," by Herbert von Dirksen. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1949. ("Moscow, Tokyo, London." Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952.)

[xxii] "Memoirs," by Franz von Papen. London: Deutsch, 1952.

[xxiii] "Das Ende des Hitler Mythos," by Josef Greiner. Wien: Amalthea-Verlag, 1947.

[xxiv] "Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende," by Wilfred von Oven. Buenos Aires: Dürer-Verlag, 1950.

[xxv] "Saadan var Goebbels," by Rudolf Semler. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1947.

[xxvi] "Der SS-Staat," by Eugen Kogon. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1949. ("The Theory and Practice of Hell." New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950.)

[xxvii] "Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier, 1941-42," by Adolf Hitler. Bonn: Athenäum-Verlag, 1951. Edited by Henry Picker.

[xxviii] "Der Fragebogen," by Ernst von Salomon. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1951.