The need to depict one’s own conduct as honorable automatically led soldiers to differentiate their own behavior from that of others. Soldiers occasionally accused comrades from other branches of the military, or those of different ranks, of cowardice. One private, for instance, complained in July 1944: “The officers at CHERBOURG were a cowardly lot. One of them was to come before a court-martial of Naval Civilian officials because he intended deserting. They never even got as far as the proceedings because those officers were in their shelters and hadn’t the nerve to come out. The whole thing was dropped on that account. They had, however, the nerve to issue orders like: ‘We’ll fight to the last man!’”602 The private blamed the officers for his unit’s defeat: “At CHERBOURG our officers had packed their trunks days beforehand in readiness to be taken prisoner. If our officers hadn’t been such cowards, CHERBOURG would never have fallen the way it did.”603 Officers, of course, put things precisely the other way around. Colonel Köhn, for instance, complained, “When the CO and the officer were there the men held out, but the moment they had gone…”604 After the Wehrmacht rapidly lost Paris, some officers carped that they, the officers, had been the only ones who defended German control of the city. They, in the officers’ own accounts, could at least say with good conscience that they had fought to the last.605
The arguments used were similar throughout the ranks, but the surveillance protocols demonstrate that the need to portray one’s own conduct as conforming to military norms increased the higher ranked an individual was. As a POW, Witt even used letters to his wife to report in secret codes to Grand Admiral Dönitz about his battle on the breakwater at Cherbourg.606 Other high-ranking officers boasted that their troops had been the last ones to capitulate.607 Major General Erwin Menny, who was captured by Canadian troops in Falaise and sent to a U.S. POW camp, noted in his diary in November 1944:
MENNY: I am horrified at how few of the more than 40 generals I have met in captivity personally fought to the end. It goes without saying that every soldier and general, above all, tries everything, even things that seem hopeless. If you’re lucky, you can do the impossible. How often did my men and I escape being surrounded or other dire situations, although we had long reconciled ourselves to dying? The fact that I alone, with two other men, survived unwounded was pure chance or a miracle. I can do without being admired by the enemy, but I’d rather English newspapers wrote that I defended myself with bitter resolve and preferred death to capture. I will never understand how a general can “capitulate.”608
In Menny’s eyes, generals were subject to special rules of conduct. A general was supposed to fight to the last, preferably with a weapon in his hand, and seek out death rather than being captured. If he capitulated at all, then only after being wounded. Menny added with pride that he had refused to raise his hands when he surrendered.
Generals Thoma and Crüwell, despite being diametrically opposed in their politics, reacted with similar outrage when they read in Trent Park of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus allowing himself to be taken prisoner in Stalingrad. “I should have blown my brains out. I am bitterly disappointed, bitterly disappointed!” Crüwell fumed, before adding, “I think the fact that you and I were captured is a different matter and there is no comparison.”609 Both men stress that they battled to the end before falling into enemy hands. Thoma reported that gunfire had forced him out of his tank and that an enemy bullet had passed through his cap. But the fashion in which Paulus had surrendered had nothing heroic about it. In Thoma’s and Crüwell’s minds, Paulus had violated the norm in two respects. Thoma opined:
