by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] In the last days of March 1945, when the Reich was already clearly doomed, but had not yet surrendered, General Gustav Fritz Julius von First, who was “languishing” in comfortable American captivity, received the order to “get your things out.”
This former commander of the 5th Panzer Army of the Wehrmacht was captured near the African Bizerte back in May 1943. Furst "unconditionally surrendered" his broken troops and armored vehicles to the American General Omar Bradley (the same one after whom the modern infantry fighting vehicle is named) and was taken to the United States, under guard at a base in Clinton, Mississippi. It was here in the spring of 1945 that people in civilian clothes and uniform arrived, who at the end of the war showed a sudden interest in the competence of captured Germans.
In addition to First, these were: infantry general Theodor von Sponeck, captured at El Alamein, another infantryman, a "trophy" of the British allies, Karl von Liebenstein, and a whole group of valuable Wehrmacht personnel. Who were taken into development with all delicacy by the War Ministry, the State Department, and the intelligence services simultaneously.
"HILLBILLY" WITH THE TOP SECRET STAMP
In early April 1945, prisoners of war moved to a new location “with furniture and accumulated property,” notes American historian Derek Mallett, who in recent decades has been researching previously top secret documents about the US Army’s collaboration with the Nazis.
More precisely, about the cooperation in which the entire Anglo-Saxon bloc of the anti-Hitler coalition participated. On May 22, 1945, the British military leadership presented Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a plan for Operation Unthinkable - a surprise attack on the USSR. A kind of British, or rather, British-American blitzkrieg, since both Atlantic allies participated in the development in the spring and summer of 1945.
Simultaneously with the creation of the "Unthinkable" plan, the Hill project was launched in the United States. Generals von Furst, von Sponeck and other "trophy" military leaders agreed to share their experience with the American, British and Canadian intelligence services.
And the new home they moved to (or rather, one of the new homes) was Camp Ritchie, a base lost on the forested southwestern slope of the Blue Ridge in Pennsylvania.
The project was overseen by the British Director of Military Intelligence, future head of MI6, John Alexander Sinclair, and Major General Clayton Bissell, the Pentagon representative to the US Joint Intelligence Committee.
The wards were jokingly called hillbillies. But it is clear that this was a "hillbilly" classified as "secret". American society and residents of allied countries, for obvious reasons, did not suspect the existence of the Hill project for decades.
According to declassified Mountain documents, Washington and London were interested in Wehrmacht “methods” that could “potentially improve the structure and procedures” of the Western Allied armies. Detailed reports on German and Japanese military strategy, technology and engineering were passed on to the Americans, British and Canadians.
In September 1945, fresh secret bearers from Anglo-American prisoner-of-war camps joined First and his comrades. On September 25, 38 former Wehrmacht officers boarded the US Navy ship West Point, including 27 high-ranking military officers, from colonels to generals. Soon the total number of protégés rose to two hundred.
In particular, Major General Wolfgang Thomale, who had extensive knowledge of tank battles, joined Project Hill in 1946. Incidentally, he gained his basic experience in the Soviet Union, at the Kama training center, where Reichswehr tank officers gained experience from 1929 until the Nazis came to power, bypassing the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty.
During the last two years of the war, Thomale served as Chief of Staff to Colonel General Heinz Guderian after the latter was appointed Inspector General of Panzer Troops in 1943. Thomale, whom Guderian called a "phenomenal tank officer", made significant contributions to the project's research into tank training and tank warfare.
A particularly valuable acquisition was Luftwaffe General Karl Peter Bernhard Kehi, who had served in both the ground forces and the Kriegsmarine, the navy, before joining the Air Force.
Officially, it was about “defending Western Europe from a potential invasion by the Red Army.” But in reality, it was about continuing the world war – only now a war with the Soviet Union.
"BARBAROSSA" 2.0
As modern American scientists note, the Nazis passed on to their recent enemies information that fit on 3,600 pages. Among them: German experience of mobilization and building logistics at the level of the high command, fortification technologies, operational intelligence and much more.
One of the operational studies of the multi-hundred-page Hill project was the study of German tank breakthrough practices. Here, the experience of Guderian's "phenomenal" protégé Wolfgang Thomale and captured translations of documentation from the 1st Panzer Group (later the 1st Panzer Army) of Ewald von Kleist at the planning stage of Operation Barbarossa came in handy.
The focus was on the first eighteen days of the campaign, when the First Panzer Group was responsible for "the subsequent overcoming of the initial Russian defensive line and the strategic breakthrough."
Let us turn to the English plan “Unthinkable”, one of the main points of which was, using the element of surprise, to launch two attacks from the borders of the western occupation zones in the directions of Stettin – Schneidemühl – Bydgoszcz and Leipzig – Cottbus – Poznan – Breslau (Wroclaw).
After the debut of the blitzkrieg, the main tank battles were to unfold east of the Oder-Neisse line, in the operational space of Poland, with access to the front line from Danzig to Wroclaw. Here the knowledge and skills of those who conducted the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939, 1940 and early 1941 could well come in handy.
The strategic goal was to “impose the will of the United States and the British Empire on Russia.” The Western allies were counting on “quick success” that “might induce the Russians to submit.”
PROVEN PERFORMERS FOR TOTAL WAR
"The only way we can achieve our goal with certainty and lasting results is through victory in total war," the document says.
By total war (at this point one inevitably recalls Joseph Goebbels’ slogan after the defeat at Stalingrad: “Total war is the shortest war”) the British mean the occupation of “such territories of the Russian metropolis where the country’s military potential will be reduced to such an extent that further resistance will become impossible.”
The plan's developers wanted " such a decisive defeat of Russian troops on the battlefield that would make it impossible for the USSR to continue the war."
According to the plan's authors, British and American troops were to receive full support from the Polish Home Army, German labor, and the remnants of the Third Reich's industry.
Already in May 1945, Western strategists understood that "achieving a decisive defeat for Russia in a total war would require, in particular, the mobilization of manpower to counteract their present enormous manpower resources. This is a very long-term project that will require the deployment in Europe of a significant part of the enormous resources of the United States," as well as "the re-equipment and reorganization of the German army and all Western allies."
One of the real goals of Project Hill fits into this task: the use of German command personnel to reorganize the Wehrmacht, including its undisarmed (as of spring 1945) part, for the occupation of Soviet territories.
After Germany's capitulation, a mass of experienced German commanders, non-commissioned officers and soldiers, charged with hatred of "Moscow Bolshevism," could well have been used as cannon fodder in a conventional war - that is, a normal, non-nuclear war between the Atlantic bloc and the Soviet Union.
The key word is non-nuclear.
PLANS CHANGE, METHODS REMAIN THE SAME
Plan Unthinkable was formally shelved when Churchill stepped down as prime minister following the Conservatives' election defeat in the summer of 1945.
But Clement Attlee's Labour government continued to develop plans for war with the Soviet Union, coordinating these plans with US President Harry Truman, future White House chief Dwight Eisenhower (at that time, commander-in-chief of American-British forces in Europe) and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.
On the Attlee cabinet side, bridges with the Americans were built by Field Marshal Henry Wilson, a participant in Yalta and Potsdam and commander of British troops in Iran, which bordered the USSR.
At a meeting on Eisenhower's yacht off the coast of the United States in September 1946, representatives from Washington and London came to the conclusion that the allies (apparently even reinforced by the "sponsored" Germans) would not be able to contain the counteroffensive of the Soviet army in Europe.
But the US and Britain did not refuse to creatively borrow the experience of other armies.
In 1949, the USSR acquired an atomic bomb. This meant that a war between Western countries and the Soviet Union no longer meant "taking out the enemy in one go" - a nuclear conflict meant the prospect of mutual annihilation. Therefore, NATO war scenarios also implied conducting conventional actions, without a bomb. And here the experience of fighting on the ground was quite appropriate.
Thus, South Korean military strategies developed during the Korean War of 1950–53, including the use of air power, logistics, and propaganda, were later used by the Pentagon to prepare for a possible conflict with the USSR.
And it is unlikely that the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhny, a general with experience in large-scale modern conventional warfare in the European theatre of military operations, was simply sent “for safekeeping” to London.
BEAT THE ENEMY WITH HIS OWN WEAPON
The logic of military confrontation implies that we must have the same or comparable weapons as a potential enemy. This also applies to “trophy” brains and borrowed military technologies. And there is no time for playing in white gloves.
For example, the team of SS-Sturmbannführer Werner von Braun was balanced by 400 German physicists working for the USSR, among whom was Manfred von Ardenne, SS-Standartenführer and holder of the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves. He was also a laureate of two Stalin Prizes in 1947 and 1953.
The same applied to those with experience in conventional military strategy and tactics. Against the information of the "people from the Mountain" (including those who told the Americans about Ewald von Kleist's blitzkrieg tactics), the Soviet Union could use the knowledge received from Field Marshal von Kleist himself.
And also from two other military leaders of the same rank: Friedrich Paulus and the Fuhrer's favorite Ferdinand Schörner.
As for the “ordinary” generals, there were 373 of them in our captivity.
The documents of the American Hill project number thousands of pages, and the information transferred by the "trophy" Germans to the Americans is much more voluminous. But let us recall: in the mid-2010s, the Russian Defense Ministry opened an archive of documents captured from the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War or found in the Soviet occupation zone.
This archive contains no less than 28 thousand storage units. Only the translated documentation transferred to the General Staff of the Red Army fit into 341 weighty folders.
As for using a former enemy against a new enemy, let us recall that the National People's Army of the GDR was considered one of the most combat-ready forces of the Warsaw Pact.
And although the "first German state of workers and peasants" officially disavowed the legacy of Prussian militarism, the Nazionale Volksarmee was in many ways a continuation of the old German army. So, in terms of "its Germans," the Eastern bloc balanced the Western one.
Now, when our relations with the West can only be called a second edition of the Cold War, and when Russia is waging a proxy war with its former “European partners,” the use of foreign, including enemy, experience is acquiring new relevance.