Hitler's Generals & Admirals......

[Footslogger]

I heard once that von Bock hated Nazis...were there more?

[elxaime]

I would take post-war assessments of which German officers were, or were not, anti-Nazi with a huge grain of rock salt. Once the regime fell, people scrambled to say they were always against the Nazis. If they were captured by the Russians, some would also claim to have secretly been devoted Communists. But when Hitler was riding high many of these same folks at the very least kept their mouths shut. There are exceptions of course, since anti-Hitler plotting in the German Army never really ended and this included periods when things seemed to be going well.

We also need to separate out anti-Nazi feeling from the general power rivalry that was going on. Some of the July 1944 plotters, such as the Police Commandant of Paris, were virulent anti-Semites. But they hated the SS supplanting the traditional role of the army. Or they felt the war was lost and Hitler needed to be overthrown to avoid complete catastrophe. Sepp Dietrich, one of the top SS commanders, was allegedly among the latter. There were also some anti-Hitler German officers who were also complicit in atrocities. It gets rather complicated.

The truth is even harder to determine since there was a great deal of post-war airbrushing by the Western Allies and Soviets. As the Cold War began, each camp had numbers of former Nazis in their custody who could be quite useful if "rehabilitated." For the West, this includes German rocket scientists like Werner Von Braun, who helped get the US space program off the ground despite the record of the V2 plants at Peenemunde running on slave labor (with his knowledge and alleged acquiesence). You can still see Von Braun's name on the credits of old Walt Disney productions on space travel. The Soviets used ex-Nazis as well.

[janh]

A number of officers in the Wehrmacht, but also Luftwaffe.  Though over many, like Udet, Galland, Dönitz, Mannstein and even Rommel there later was dispute as to how far "hating", or "disagreeing" went.  As with so many things, it is easy to oversimplify, and even the most opposed may have had points they agreed with.  Or some followers points they didn't. Even some Waffen-SS officers, including Hausser, are reported to have disagreed with Nazi ideology, though probably this disagreement didn't go that far. I recall having read that Hausser, while in command of II. SS Pz.-Kps., countermanded Hitler's "acceptance of" (or order of) war crimes against surrendering russians, officially putting a stop to it -- yet in the end he did not really put an end to it by failing to punish subordinates who knew that they'd come through with it, or weren't to be stopped from the vicious revenge circle anyway.
Whether they were Nazi's and either "just held" or "pretended to hold" this opinion, or whether they in fact lived it, is much harder to distinguish from whether they were war criminals, or not (of which there surely were also such without weird ideology).  Fortunately the Allies took great care to sort this out at Nuernberg and not to miss the right ones.

[Footslogger]

Who was the first to plot agianst Hitler, that we know of? And what did Hitler do with him?

[Don77]

The first was a lawyer - who nearly got Hitler's fascist violence banned as ciminal, almost ending Hitlers career for the second time (as did occur in the Munich Putsch). The shame was the loss of German legal independance. See ''The Man who crossed Hitelr'.
'In 1931, not all that long before the Nazis came to power, the title character of The Man Who Crossed Hitler, a baptized Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten seized a chance to get Hitler into court and, by quoting his own violent writings at him, to debunk his current pretence of being a man of peace. Hitler would have been caught out if the judge had not caved in. http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/4/590.extract

[lastdingo]

Most old officers were national-conservatives or religious-conservatives instead of true nazis. Nazis were a handful of big figures (wartime heroes and such), some opportunists and a great mass of lower class losers. The old elites believed that nazis were useful idiots till they realised the nazis had thought the same of them and proved to be right.

Many high-ranking officers moved closer to nazis in part because of corruption; Hitler gave lots of gifts to high-ranking loyal generals - much money, great cars, sometimes even aristocratic villas with huge agricultural estates.
Plus the nazis achieved what the moderate governments had not achieved in their more friendly foreign policy; rearmament and grabbing of many at least partially German-speaking territories.

[Theng]

General Beck was the first high level dissenter as Chief of the General Staff. He refused to create the military plans to annex Austria and Czechoslovakia. After resigning his position on August 18, 1938, he helped organize the resistance against Hitler. He help plan two aborted assassination plans in 1943 and was supposed to become head of state if Hitler would have been killed on July 20, 1944. Instead Beck died that day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Beck

[warspite1]

I would agree with elxaime that post WWII the world and his wife declared they always hated Hitler blah blah. However, that said, who of us would have been brave enough to have done something about Hitler, knowing what it would mean for us and our families if caught.

I heard a quote once that tried to answer the question of why a modern, educated nation like Germany allowed "Hitler and the Nazis" to happen. The answer was that there were 5% evil Germans, 5% good (and brave) Germans and 90% who just went along with the flow. I think that is true of people and countries generally.

As for those with impeccable credentials at being anti-Nazi? Well Beck was one, and so, most certainly, was Admiral Canaris [&o].

[gargoil]

ORIGINAL: warspite1
I heard a quote once that tried to answer the question of why a modern, educated nation like Germany allowed "Hitler and the Nazis" to happen. The answer was that there were 5% evil Germans, 5% good (and brave) Germans and 90% who just went along with the flow. I think that is true of people and countries generally.

+1

Unfortunately, extremist, being a very small fraction of the population, but have inordinate power well beyond there numbers.

Currently, terrorists are the best example of this.

[janh]

It come down as to what you define the core-identifiers for being nazis, what makes them distinguishable and different from the conservatives of the 20-30's, or the royalists and prussians before.  Ideological beliefs were surely one core part of it, and clearly the most negative in retrospect.  Yet Hitler and his party also did a lot between 1933 and 1939 to win sympathies even with those, who did otherwise oppose or not care about the ideology that lastly just accelerated his undoing like nothing else.  At his beginnings, Germany was very demoralized, economically-broken nation of hurt national pride, high unemployment that was faced with basically not settle-able reparations after WWI (the Versaille treaty).  He basically restored the national pride by neutering the Versailles treaties, re-annexing former German territory, and reestablishing a real Army as well as economical measures (building all the "autobahnen", already with future in mind) that lowered unemployment and recovered the living standards.  Surely until 1940, even with those who did not agree with his aggressive politics or his ideological ideas, this must have scored sympathies, and I suppose anyone who would have been in that situation in Germany would probably have respected him for that -- for bad or worse.  The treaty of Versailles and its consequences basically only made his rise possible, and anything he did initially could hardly go wrong. The Marshall Plan after WW2 had learned from that.

One has also to keep in mind that for most Germans before 1940, his ideological ideas appeared to be at large rhetoric and appreared to lead to no more than detention of Jews and other minorities, much like the detention of Japanese in the US later.  Only after the murdering of these victims started out at the large scale (i.e. between the occupation of the foreign territories in late 1939 and the time after the "Wannsee conference" in early 42), the majority of the Germans must have realized that he meant to live his ideology.  So the whole question is surely quite complex, and not so easy as to divide between black and white.

[cherryfunk]

ORIGINAL: warspite1
As for those with impeccable credentials at being anti-Nazi? Well Beck was one, and so, most certainly, was Admiral Canaris [&o].

Canaris was a true hero -- one of the few higher ups who put his life on the line from the start.

[Footslogger]

Anyone heard of Dietrich BonHoeffer?

[WingedIncubus]

ORIGINAL: warspite1
I heard a quote once that tried to answer the question of why a modern, educated nation like Germany allowed "Hitler and the Nazis" to happen. The answer was that there were 5% evil Germans, 5% good (and brave) Germans and 90% who just went along with the flow. I think that is true of people and countries generally.

Bullshit, that whitewashes 90% of Germans, most of them who were readily supporting Hitler when he was invading and winning left and right and willfully ignoring that Jewish, Commie, and Homosexual neighbors were disappearing without a trace. When Moscow and London were poised to fall, who opposed Hitler aside the rabid anti-Nazis?

It's easy to oppose a nasty, tyrannical regime when it's failing, it's another to oppose it when it's at its zenith and winning it all.

We'd all like to believe we would do different, like we are better or more progressive than our forefathers, but had we been Germans in the 1930s we'd been Nazi supporters (if Aryan, we know what would happened to the Jewish ones among us), or at least proud German nationalists happy to shame France and England as they had shamed us. I won't believe even one of us here would have really resisted Hitler and the Nazis like the White Rose did (and lose their head for it, literally, under the blade of the Fallbeil). Some of us would have happily gone kill Reds and Partisans on the Eastern Front (and die horribly) or die by the lot in iron coffins in the Atlantic. We have the chance of having the benefit of hindsight, and lucky to be born in a time when serving a nasty, monstrous, evil regime wasn't thrusted upon our throat.

Besides, Milgram's Experiment showed that the "5% psychopaths doing all the nasties" belief, which was rampant in the fifties and sixties, is in fact false, as the protocol was created solely to see if that particular idea was true or not.

[WingedIncubus]

ORIGINAL: Footslogger

Anyone heard of Dietrich BonHoeffer?

A man who opposed Hitler with all his heart because he saw the Evil, and died a Martyr for it.

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: Drakken

ORIGINAL: warspite1
I heard a quote once that tried to answer the question of why a modern, educated nation like Germany allowed "Hitler and the Nazis" to happen. The answer was that there were 5% evil Germans, 5% good (and brave) Germans and 90% who just went along with the flow. I think that is true of people and countries generally.

Bullshit, that whitewashes 90% of Germans, most of them who were readily supporting Hitler when he was invading and winning left and right and willfully ignoring that Jewish, Commie, and Homosexual neighbors were disappearing without a trace. When Moscow and London were poised to fall, who opposed Hitler aside the rabid anti-Nazis?

It's easy to oppose a nasty, tyrannical regime when it's failing, it's another to oppose it when it's at its zenith and winning it all.

We'd all like to believe we would do different, like we are better or more progressive than our forefathers, but had we been Germans in the 1930s we'd been Nazi supporters (if Aryan, we know what would happened to the Jewish ones among us), or at least proud German nationalists happy to shame France and England as they had shamed us. I won't believe even one of us here would have really resisted Hitler and the Nazis like the White Rose did (and lose their head for it, literally, under the blade of the Fallbeil). Some of us would have happily gone kill Reds and Partisans on the Eastern Front (and die horribly) or die by the lot in iron coffins in the Atlantic. We have the chance of having the benefit of hindsight, and lucky to be born in a time when serving a nasty, monstrous, evil regime wasn't thrusted upon our throat.

Besides, Milgram's Experiment showed that the "5% psychopaths doing all the nasties" belief, which was rampant in the fifties and sixties, is in fact false, as the protocol was created solely to see if that particular idea was true or not.

Warspite1

Drakken, you began your response stating my post was BS and then proceeded to largely support what I said in your response! [&:]

My post was not an attempt to whitewash 90% of the German population for WWII, that is a ridiculous statement.

As Burke (Irish politican from the 18th century) said, "all you need for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing". The point is, and you yourself repeated my question; how difficult is it to actively oppose a government in power - and such an evil one as the Nazis?

Of course within the 90% there were many shades of grey, but for all of the Germans in that category, whatever their individual motivation or persuasion, they were not going to take on Hitler and the Nazi regime, and therefore went along with it. But are you trying to say that ANY German who wore a uniform in 1939-45 was a rabid Nazi? THAT would be BS. You are not allowing for the fact that many Germans were just doing as they were told - they put on a uniform to serve their country. To what extent they agreed with all Nazi policies would be different for each individual.

My post whitewashes NOTHING, it just points out an obvious fact; life is more complicated than Black and White......

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: Drakken

ORIGINAL: warspite1
I heard a quote once that tried to answer the question of why a modern, educated nation like Germany allowed "Hitler and the Nazis" to happen. The answer was that there were 5% evil Germans, 5% good (and brave) Germans and 90% who just went along with the flow. I think that is true of people and countries generally.

It's easy to oppose a nasty, tyrannical regime when it's failing

Warspite1

Really? - No Drakken it's easy once said regime has fallen.

[KenchiSulla]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

ORIGINAL: Drakken

ORIGINAL: warspite1
I heard a quote once that tried to answer the question of why a modern, educated nation like Germany allowed "Hitler and the Nazis" to happen. The answer was that there were 5% evil Germans, 5% good (and brave) Germans and 90% who just went along with the flow. I think that is true of people and countries generally.

It's easy to oppose a nasty, tyrannical regime when it's failing

Warspite1

Really? - No Drakken it's easy once said regime has fallen.

That "failing" regime killed a lot of people last 6 months of the war....

[misesfan]

I find it rather odd that people focus on the millions killed by Hitler but don't mention the tens of millions killed by Stalin. History, it seems, loves the winner.

Personally, I find both tyrants repugnant, as is war. I enjoy wargaming however - weird huh?

[Captain]

It has always been an open question the extent to which ordinary Germans participated in the Nazi crimes and whether it was a one-off thing.

Certainly the evidence shows that many more people were aware of the Holocaust than admitted after the war. You needed a huge organisation to manage/operate multiple extermination/slave labour camps, collect and round up all these people and ship them across europe.

Studies have also shown that Hitler was a hands-off, big-picture kind of manager who gave his subordinates wide latitude in implementing his policies. Cetainly he knew about and approved of the "Final solution", but he left the details to others. Yet there was no lack of zealous volunteers to carry out the Fuhrer's wishes. Their standard defence that they were "merely following orders" is very weak.

Contrast the German efficiency with what happened in Italy. Italy was Germany's main partner in WW2 and Mussolini tried to implement anti-jewish laws in Italy under pressure from Berlin, but they proved deeply unpopular. 80 % of Italy's jews survived the war (32,000 out of 40,000) and the 8,000 that were murdered were rounded up by the Germans after they invaded in 43.

[Horst Wessell]

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk

ORIGINAL: warspite1
As for those with impeccable credentials at being anti-Nazi? Well Beck was one, and so, most certainly, was Admiral Canaris [&o].

Canaris was a true hero -- one of the few higher ups who put his life on the line from the start.

Think I'm gonna be sick...........