Hitler's Generals in America

Book excerpt: The WWII historian offers “provocative analysis” of the US military’s evolving relationship with German officers held on American soil (Robert D. Billinger Jr., author of Nazi POWs in the Tar Heel State). In Hitler’s Generals in America, Derek R. Mallett examines the relationship between American officials and the Wehrmacht general officers they held as prisoners of war in the United States between 1943 and 1946. While the British pampered the German officers in their custody in order to obtain intelligence, Americans did not share the same sense of class privilege, and refused any special treatment to German prisoners of any rank. By the end of the war, however, the United States had begun to envision itself as a world power rather than one of several allies providing aid during wartime. Mallett demonstrates how a growing admiration for the German officers’ prowess and military traditions, coupled with postwar anxiety about Soviet intentions, drove Washington to collaborate with many Wehrmacht general officers. Drawing on newly available sources, this intriguing book shows how Americans undertook the complex process of reconceptualizing Germans—even Nazi generals—as allies against what they perceived as their new enemy, the Soviet Union.