Neitzel Sönke Скачать все книги 2 Количество книг

Between 1939 and 1942, a division of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence created a number of PoW interrogation camps in and around London. Sophisticated tapping equipment was installed and secret gramophone recording were made of private conversations between senior German staff officers.

In this extraordinary work Professor Neitzel examines these transcripts in depth for the first time. His findings are truly revealing and address important questions regarding the officers’ attitudes towards the German leadership and Nazi policies: How did the German generals judge the overall war situation? From what date did they consider it lost? How did they react to the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944? What knowledge did they have of the atrocities?

By turns insightful and horrifying, this unprecedented research is a must for any serious scholar of the period and anyone interested in exploring the truth behind the image of an ‘unblemished Wehrmact’.

In 2001, spurred by a nagging curiosity over a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation he had come across in his research on the German U-boat wars, historian Sönke Neitzel paid a visit to the British national archives. He had heard of the existence of recorded interrogations of German POWs, but never about covert recordings taken within the confines of the holding cells, bedrooms, and camps that housed the prisoners. What Neitzel discovered, to his amazement, were reams of untouched, recently declassified transcripts totaling nearly eight hundred pages. Later, Neitzel would find another trove of protocols twice as extensive at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Though initially recorded by British intelligence with the intention of gaining information that might be useful for the Allied war effort, the matters discussed in these conversations ultimately proved to be limited in that regard. But for Neitzel and his collaborator, renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, they would supply a unique and profoundly important window into the mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general, almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war. It is a myth these transcripts unequivocally debunk.

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