Of War Crimes and Contrition: The Son of Hitler's Bodyguard Confronts His Father's Nazi Past

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Acknowledgments

Editor's note: This essay by John Rodden is the second of three reflective essays to be published in the Journal of Human Rights on contemporary German culture and history. The Journal of Human Rights is committed to publishing the highest quality scholarship in all areas of human rights and now includes essays of a more literary character as well. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit such essays directly to the Editor.

Notes

Kurt Meyer, Sr. was convicted specifically for murdering Canadian prisoners of war (POWs). Escaping witnesses testified that his soldiers tied the prisoners to trees and cut their throats. But as Geweint wird reports, no firm evidence could be produced that General Meyer had given such orders to his men. For that reason, his death sentence was commuted. By all accounts, General Meyer was an outspoken, defiant POW himself, ferociously loyal both to his Führer and to his fighting men. (The motto of the SS was: “My honor bears the name ‘Loyalty.”’) One of his interrogators reported that Meyer, Sr.'s first words to him were: “You will hear a lot against Adolf Hitler in this camp, but not from me. He was and still is the greatest thing that ever happened to Germany.” A true believer in Nazism, “Panzermeyer” reportedly added: “Germany fought this war for the preservation of Western civilization. Japan is as much of a menace as Russia. I would like the Allied authorities to allow me to recruit an SS division of about 23,000 men from among German prisoners of war. We will then show you how Germans can fight.” Quoted in Milton Shuman, “You Will Hear A Lot Against Adolf Hitler In This Camp, … But Not from Me,” Evening Standard (London), 5 May 1995.

Intelligent, handsome, and cosmopolitan, Adam von Trott (1909–1944) came from an aristocratic family and spoke English fluently because of an American mother and a Scottish nursemaid. After attending university at Göttingen, he received a grant to attend Balliol College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford in the mid-1930s, he befriended the dons R.G. Collingwood, Isaiah Berlin, A.L. Rowse, and Maurice Bowra, as well as the undergraduates David Astor, Richard Crossman, and Jo Grimmond, along with Sir Stafford Cripps, later a Socialist M.P. and War Cabinet member. During the late 1930s, before the outbreak of war, he had private audiences with such figures as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, during which he unsuccessfully attempted to persuade them to stand up to Hitler forcefully. During the war, Trott worked at the German Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. He chose participation in the German Resistance, rather than emigration, as the way to challenge Hitler's tyranny. He was close to anti-Nazi conspirators such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Helmut James Moltke, Julius Leber, and Claus von Stauffenberg. The failure of Stauffenberg's bomb to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944 led to Trott's arrest. After a show trial before the People's Court on August 15, he was executed on August 26, 1944. He died by hanging in a Gestapo prison after prolonged torture. See Giles MacDonogh, A Good German: Adam von Trott zu Solz (London, 1994).

Heinrich von Trott met secretly with Adam's British friends such as Geoffrey Wilson, secretary to Sir Stafford Cripps. Heinrich's chief role was to serve as a liaison with German exiles living in Switzerland. See MacDonogh, p. 126.

Herr Trott's symbolic role as a representative forgiver can also be seen as a response to a specific gesture by Kurt Meyer, Jr., who devoted a full chapter to the German Resistance in Geweint wird and dedicated the book to Major General Helmut Stieff (1901–1944), chief of the Organizational Section of the Army General Staff. Helmut Stieff was “representative,” writes Meyer, Jr., of all those “who despaired of Germany during the Third Reich.” Like Adam von Trott, General Stieff was a leading participant in the “July 20 Movement” and was also tried in a Nazi show trial and hanged in 1944.

Kurt Meyer, Jr., unpublished address delivered at the Adam Trott Memorial Day, 20 July 1995.

Hitler's young SS soldiers worshiped the tough, fierce, unbowed Meyer, Sr., who at age thirty was the most senior officer of the Hitlerjugend Division despite being only a few years older than most of his men.