Trent Park and Candid German Generals

Watch Bugging Hitler's Soldiers on PBS. See more from Secrets of the Dead.

One of the most exciting things that a historian can have happen to them is to discover something that had been lost to history and adds to the understanding of an event. Such is the case with the discovery of 50,000 pages of transcripts from secretly recorded conversations between captured German generals about various aspects of the war.

As the episode of "Secrets of the Dead" describes, great trouble was expended to catch the German generals that the British had captured in giving away some morsel of important information in casual conversation that could change the course of the war. Such information included the confirmation of the existence of the V-2 rockets, the deep divide between the Germans loyal to Hitler and those who weren't, and tragically the deep extent of the Holocaust atrocities.

These files had been buried because the British did not want to reveal the effectiveness of their surveillance techniques in the atmosphere of the Cold War. They were recently rediscovered by accident by a German historian in the Royal Archives in London. This is what historians mean when we say that we aren't done making discoveries about the war, we haven't learned all there is to know about the war, and this is very exciting for us. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

Stars and Stripes Review: May 6, 1945

Scanned by Cody Lizotte.

This issue of The Stars and Stripes is interesting in that it was published two days before Germany's surrender, known as V-E Day (Victory in Europe). Of course, at that time they didn't know the exact day the Germans were going to surrender. After all, the Germans had been facing their ultimate defeat for the last two years, ever since the Germans lost their strategic offensive capability on the Eastern Front.

As shown in the headline, the Germans were still fighting like warriors right up to the end. Their last pocket of armed resistance was growing smaller and smaller. Elsewhere on the continent, the war was not over yet. German forces had captured Norway in 1940 and now that Germany was effectively in Allied hands this is where the leaders of German resistance were holed up, including Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the successor to Hitler after his April 30 suicide. In the article on Norway, it mentions that Swedish officials regarded rumors of German capitulation in Norway to be "premature". Little did they know...

Of course, the fighting was still far from over in the Pacific, where V-J Day wouldn't come until August of 1945. However, for a historian looking back on this issue, it's cool to see the reports of continued German resistance and to think that the people who wrote those articles had no idea that the war in Europe was that close to being over. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.