Notes supplied by the Publisher, except where specified otherwise
1. It is inexplicable why the British historian David Irving should assert in the Foreword to his book Hitler and his Generals (1975) that my diaries are ‘probably in Moscow’. Another statement by Irving astonishes me: I am supposed to have put at his disposal ‘unpublished contemporaneous manuscripts and letters’ and ‘subsequently took the trouble—together with others—to read through many pages of the text based upon them’. I do remember several visits by Irving, when I answered some questions; but the rest is untrue.—Author
2. Published as Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, 1970.
3. Restpolen was the remainder of Poland. The purpose of Germany’s war with Poland was to resolve the questions of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. The Polish surrender would be negotiated on the basis of how the remainder of Poland would be treated.—Translator
4. Churchill, who was still First Lord of the Admiralty at this time, had long been ‘seen in Berlin as the leading western warmonger’ (Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis, 2000, p. 230).
5. At the time, the Soviets were developing a brand of pan-Slavism aimed at Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in particular.—Translator
6. Presumably the figure of two million includes prisoners-of-war from Belgium, the Netherlands and France, since the whole Belgian Army in 1940 was only 600,000 strong.
7. Gürtner (1881–1941) was the high official in the Bavarian Justice Ministry appointed to solve the political murders in revolutionary Munich in 1919. In February 1924., as Minister of Justice, he worked behind the scenes to influence the judges in favour of Hitler at his trial and put through his release from prison contrary to law. As Minister of Justice in the National Socialist Government he introduced the law proclaiming the Röhm putsch of 30 June 1934 to be justified as ‘the means of State defence’.—Translator
8. Rommel only had the 5th Light (later 21st Panzer) Division in Libya at the time (late March) and would not receive the 15th Panzer Division until May. He had, however, been ordered not to make any aggressive moves until the latter had arrived.
9. The problem with the Ju 88 A-4 series was the delivery of the more powerful Jumo 211 engines, which were intended for the summer of 1940 but were not available until early 1941.—Translator
10. Nevertheless the heavy cruiser Lützow sailed with orders to break out into the Atlantic in June 1941 and in December 1942. On the first occasion she was torpedoed off Egersund by aircraft and on the second returned to her Norwegian anchorage after the ‘Regenbogen’ fiasco.—Translator
11. Kesselring was not just C-in-C Luftwaffe but also, as C-in-C South, the overall German theatre commander in the Mediterranean.
12. The Royal Air Force had been bombing Germany from the summer of 1940, but the raids had not constituted a serious threat to the German war effort. What began in March 1942 was something different—a true second front. The French factory bombed on 3 March was the Billancourt Renault factory and the actual deaths numbered 367.
13. The Heinkel He 177 was one of the most trouble-plagued and accident-prone aircraft ever built.
14. There were also American landings at Casablanca. Oran is further away from Sicily than Algiers, and it is not clear how the Allied landings at Algiers could have been repelled with no Axis forces present at the time in French North-West Africa—and the fact that Hitler ordered something did not mean that the Wehrmacht had the wherewithal to comply.
15. In fact it was Manstein rather than Hitler who oversaw the operation.
16. The Germans capitulated at Stalingrad on 1 February 1943.
17. In fact it was the PzKpfw V (Panther) and PkKpfw VI (Tiger) that interested Hitler for ‘Zitadelle’.
18. In fact only four were seriously wounded. See Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, 1995., p. 441.
19. According to Igor Witkowski in his book Supertanje Bronie Hitlera describing his excavations into the remains of this FHQ, the development was a series of very long, vast galleries burrowed into a mountainside. Work was said to have been done here on six or seven projects, including the V-2 and A9/10 rockets, the Ursel anti-ship rocket for Type XXI U-boats and the Rheinbote.—Translator
20. The ‘Areopag’ was a tribunal with unlimited powers to inquire into the subject matter of its reference.
21. Dietrich’s Army was just the Sixth Panzer for the Ardennes offensive; it was re titled Sixth SS when it moved to Hungary for the Lake Balaton offensive, to distinguish it from the Sixth Army, with which it would be operating.—Translator
22. According to the German authors Harald Fäth and Dieter Meinig, the FHQ at Ohrdruf, commenced in 1938, was a deep, vast underground facility descending through at least five levels.—Translator
23. For a detailed review of the figures for the death toll at Dresden see The Irving Judgment: David Irving v. Penguin Books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt (Penguin, London, 2000). Mr Justice Gray (at p. 334) concludes: ‘The true death toll was within the bracket of 25-30,000.’
24. According to the noted German historian Günther Gellermann in his book Der Krieg der nicht stattfand, 1986, Hitler ordered an attack against New York in which six U-boats would fire off rockets and shells filled with sarin nerve gas in reprisal for Dresden, but Jodl talked him out of this plan.—Translator
25. With the help of a Hitlerjugend battalion, von Below and Mathiesing crossed the Havel river to Havelberg where, after obtaining civilian clothes from a farmer, they registered with the civilian authorities under false names on 4 May, and each obtained an identity pass and ration book. They lived by odd jobs for a month until parting at the beginning of June. Von Below now worked his way towards his inlaws’ property at Wanzleben near Magdeburg. He arrived there on 20 June and was reunited at Nienhagen with his pregnant wife and three children. At the Wernigerode clinic—where his fourth child Christa was born on 28 July—von Below was recognised from his photograph in the 3 September 1939 issue of the Völkischer Beobachter and forced to flee. He found shelter with friends in Bonn and decided to use the time studying economics at the University. He was betrayed to the British authorities on 7 January 1946 and arrested. He took exception to the treatment meted out in the British interrogation centres where he was lodged and took his revenge by inventing a nonsensical tale about ‘the special mission I was given by Hitler to bring secret orders to Keitel’, which appeared subsequently, to his great satisfaction, in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s book The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Von Below was given the highest security classification and was transferred to Nuremberg prison on the basis of being a material witness in the spring of 1947. He volunteered for catering duties to pass the time and spoke with many accused or convicted members of the former SS and Wehrmacht. Von Below was granted his final discharge on 14 May 1948.