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from these conversations, said he believed that Germany did not deserve victory any longer, ‘after the amount of human blood we’ve shed knowingly and as a result of our delusions and blood lust. We’ve deserved our fate.’8 In reply, Lieutenant-General Fritz von Broich said: ‘We shot women as if they had been cattle. There was a large quarry where 10,000 men, women and children were shot. They were still lying in the quarry. We drove out on purpose to see it. It was the most bestial thing I ever saw.’ It was then that Choltitz spoke of the time he was in the Crimea and was told by the CO of the airfield from where he was flying to Berlin, ‘Good Lord, I’m not supposed to tell, but they’ve been shooting Jews here for days now.’ Choltitz estimated that 36,000 Jews were shot in Sevastopol alone.

‘Let me tell you,’ General Count Edwin von Rothkirch und Trach told General Bernhard Ramcke on 13 March 1945, ‘the gassings are by no means the worst.’ ‘What happened?’ asked Ramcke. ‘To start with people dug their own graves, then the firing squad arrived with tommy-guns and shot them down. Many of them weren’t dead and a layer of earth was shovelled in between. They had packers there who packed the bodies in, because they fell in too soon. The SS did that. I knew an SS leader there quite well and he said: “Would you like to photograph a shooting? They are always shot in the morning, but if you like we still have some and we can shoot them in the afternoon some time.” ’ Three days later at Trent Park, Colonel Dr Friedrich von der Heydte told Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth about the Theresianstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia: ‘Half a million people have been put to death there for certain. I know that all the Jews from Bavaria were taken there. Yet the camp never became over-crowded. They gassed mental defectives too.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ replied Wildermuth. ‘I got to know that for a fact in the case of Nuremberg; my brother is a doctor at an institution there. The people knew where they were being taken.’9 ‘We must uphold the principle of only having carried out orders,’ suggested Lieutenant-General Ferdinand Heim on another occasion. ‘We must stick to that principle if we are to create a more or less effective defence.’

As the war progressed, the Trent Park internees divided between true Nazis, who still practised the Heil Hitler salute, and the anti- or at least non-Nazis. The Nazis’ fanaticism was undimmed by the way the war was going. ‘What do I care about Good Friday?’ asked Major-General Wilhelm Ullersperger, who had been captured during the Ardennes offensive. ‘Because a filthy Jew was hanged umpteen years ago?’ Major-General Walther Bruns recalled the attitude of the members of the firing squad who killed thousands of Jews in Riga: ‘All those cynical remarks! If only I had seen those tommy-gunners, who were relieved every hour because of over-exertion, carry out their task with distaste, but not with nasty remarks like: “Here comes a Jewish beauty!” I can still see it all in my memory; a pretty woman in a flame-coloured chemise. Talk about keeping the race pure. At Riga they first slept with them and then shot them to prevent them from talking.’ Meanwhile, Colonel Erwin Josting of the Luftwaffe recalled an Austrian friend being asked by a lieutenant: ‘ “Would you like to watch? An amusing show is going on down here; umpteen Jews are being killed off.” The barn was bunged full of women and children. Petrol was poured over them and they were burned alive. You can’t imagine what their screams were like.’10

Of course once in captivity in Nuremberg and subsequently in their autobiographies in the 1950s and 1960s, the generals both blamed Hitler for everything and used the now notorious excuse that they were only obeying orders. ‘It is interesting but it was tragic,’ Kleist told the US Army psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn in June 1946, in a statement typical of the entire officer corps. ‘If you receive a military order you must obey. That is where the big difference between a military and a political order comes in. One can sabotage