Only a small percentage of the approximately one million German POWs captured by the British and the Americans were brought to these special facilities. After subjecting captives to a multipart interrogation process on the front lines and further behind them, Allied intelligence officers selected POWs who seemed to possess especially interesting information for additional surveillance. Nonetheless, their numbers were relatively large. From September 1939 to October 1945, 10,191 German POWs and 563 Italian ones were transferred through the three English surveillance camps. The length of time they stayed there varied from a few days to three years. The CSDIC (U.K.) made 16,960 protocols from the conversations of German POWs, and 1,943 from Italian prisoners.901 All in all, these documents totaled some 48,000 printed pages. From various locations near the Mediterranean, Cairo, Algiers, and Naples, 538 protocols were made covering conversations between 1,225 German soldiers.902 A large number of reports have also survived of conversations between 3,298 German POWs at Fort Hunt.
The British material consists of word-by-word transcriptions in German varying in length from half a page to twenty-two pages, usually accompanied by English translations. For reasons of secrecy, the names of those conversing were omitted until 1944. They were usually identified only by their rank and official position. Nonetheless, it was possible to reconstruct most of their names. Unfortunately, the British documents contain no information about individual biographies. Those from Fort Hunt are more revealing, since American intelligence subjected German POWs not only to covert surveillance but to interrogations and questionnaires as well. This was in accordance with the innovative idea of using surveys to research Wehrmacht morale. In addition, so-called Personal Record Sheets listed all the main data historians today need to reconstruct individual biographies. There are additional documents such as POWs’ own descriptions of their past and reports noting intelligence officers’ special observations. All the documents prepared by the personnel at Fort Hunt were collected in a file devoted to the individual POW so that interrogation officers could always refer to the data when questioning prisoners.903 Organized alphabetically according to the prisoners’ names, the so-called 201 files eventually encompassed more than 100,000 pages.904 The core of this material, the surveillance protocols, amounted to some 40,000 pages.
The scope of the British and American reports is indeed impressive. But two questions arose as to the quality of the information they contain:
1. How representative was the group of soldiers whose words were recorded?
2. Did the POWs know they were being spied upon? How frank and unencumbered were the conversations contained in the protocols?
Interestingly, the social makeup of the POWs was different in British and American surveillance camps. The Allies were dividing up the work. The British mainly eavesdropped on high-ranking officers and navy and Luftwaffe men. Around one half of the POWs in Fort Hunt, on the other hand, were simple foot soldiers from the German army. A third were low-ranking officers, and only around a sixth, staff officers.905 The British thus concentrated on the Wehrmacht elite, while Americans focused on ordinary men.
Admittedly, this material does not come from a representative cross section of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS. In order for that to have been the case, all of the 17 million members of the German armed forces would have to have had an equal statistical likelihood of being interned in one of the surveillance facilities. That was of course not the case. For example, there were no POWs who had fought exclusively on the Eastern Front. Conversely, members of combat units, and in particular submarine and Luftwaffe crew members, were overrepresented.
Nonetheless, the soldiers subjected to surveillance covered a broad spectrum. Practically every type of military curriculum vita is represented, from navy frogmen to administrative generals. The men in question fought on all the fronts of the war, articulated a variety of political views, and were members of the most diverse sorts of units. Whereas letters sent home from the front usually skew our perspective toward better-educated soldiers, whose correspondence was more likely to be preserved, the protocols feature the voices of soldiers of whom no other documentary evidence has survived.
