The True German: The Diary of a World War II Military Judge

By Werner Otto Mueller-Hill

A recently discovered diary held by a German military judge from 1944 to 1945 sheds new light on anti-Hitler sentiments inside the German army.

Werner Otto Müller-Hill served as a military judge in the Werhmacht during World War II. From March 1944 to the summer of 1945, he kept a diary, recording his impressions of what transpired around him as Germany hurtled into destruction—what he thought about the fate of the Jewish people, the danger from the Bolshevik East once an Allied victory was imminent, his longing for his home and family and, throughout it, a relentless disdain and hatred for the man who dragged his beloved Germany into this cataclysm, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Müller-Hill calls himself a German nationalist, the true Prussian idealist who was there before Hitler and would be there after.

Published in Germany and France, Müller-Hill's diary The True German has been hailed as a unique document, praised for its singular candor and uncommon insight into what the German army was like on the inside. It is an extraordinary testament to a part of Germany's people that historians are only now starting to acknowledge and fills a gap in our knowledge of WWII.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781137365545

Werner Otto Mueller-Hill

Werner Otto Müller-Hill was a military judge in the Wehrmacht who began a diary in the last days of World War II. The diary was later discovered and published as The True German. He survived the war and went on to become a prosecutor. He died in 1977.

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The True German

The True German

The Diary of a

World War II

Military Judge

Werner Otto Müller-Hill

Introduction by

Benjamin Carter Hett

Translated and with Additional Editing by Jefferson Chase

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Contents

A Note on the Text

Translator’s Note

Introduction by Benjamin Carter Hett

Journal Entries: March 28, 1944–June 7, 1945

Notes

A Note on the Text

Werner Otto Müller-Hill’s diary is published with the kind permission of his son Benno Müller-Hill. Born in 1933, he can be seen at the age of four in the family photos in this volume. Not only is Benno Müller-Hill one of Germany’s leading biochemists and geneticists, but he has also made important contributions to the field of bioethics, in particular on the subject of the natural sciences under National Socialism. He lives in Cologne.

Translator’s Note

As I discovered while working on the diary kept by Werner Otto Müller-Hill in the final years of World War II, there is a big difference between translating a work of history and translating a historical source. With the former, the translator tries to remedy weak spots in the original and adapt the work so that it can have maximum impact on its new foreign audience. With the latter, the emphasis must be on staying close the original so the past can speak as directly—not as elegantly—as possible to the audience. In this spirit, my translation of Müller-Hill’s diary is very much warts and all.

Müller-Hill was a judge, not a professional author. Although he writes fairly clear prose for the time, his style reflects his era and is a bit long-winded, hair-splitting, even prissy by today’s standards. I’ve made no effort to smooth over stylistic infelicities, cut out repetitions, or tighten up arguments. If we take Müller-Hill at his word, he kept this diary as record of what he thought and felt for his son, not because he knew he was going to be published someday, and today’s readers should keep that in mind.

Nor should we expect the opinions he expresses in these pages to conform to our notions of consistency or acceptability. Müller-Hill realized the Third Reich was waging an ignominious and unwinnable war and exercised leniency as a judge in cases that a fervent ideologue would have treated harshly. However, his opposition to Nazism was born of his German patriotism. First and foremost, he despised Hitler and his henchmen for what they did to Germany, not for what they did to Europe or Europe’s Jews. He acknowledged that Germans had perpetrated an abominable injustice upon Jews without expressing the sort of empathy we would now demand for people treated so gruesomely. At one point he even raged at the thought of (presumably American) Negroes destroying the venerable, cultured city of Strasbourg. I haven’t sought to tone down such passages or make them acceptable to contemporary sensibilities. What’s striking about the historical figure and document we encounter here are precisely such contradictions. Müller-Hill was no Oskar Schindler or Claus von Stauffenberg, but I suspect that if we could ask even these undeniably courageous men what they thought about Jews, people of color, or the working classes today, we also would find some of their answers shocking.

One running theme I found interesting and somewhat unexpected is the importance placed on regional identity. Müller-Hill was a native and lifelong resident of Freiburg. Residents of the southwestern corner of Germany, where the country comes together with France and Switzerland, speak in strong dialect and pride themselves on Alemannic customs and an Alemannic mindset not found anywhere else in Germany. Together with rest of Alsace-Lorraine, the city of Strasbourg, where Müller-Hill was stationed as he began his diary, had been part of Germany from 1870 to 1918. Freiburg and Strasbourg are only 53 miles from one another. Thus, it’s perhaps understandable that Müller-Hill did not see himself as an occupying foreign invader. His sense of local Alemannic identity also led him to associate many aspects of Nazism he most detested with Prussia in northeastern Germany—which runs contrary to the historical facts that the Nazi movement began in southern Germany and initially had trouble bringing some segments of the Prussian bureaucracy into line. Again I felt it was my task as a translator to let Müller-Hill speak for himself, even when I thought he was wrong.

Unlike a work of history, a historical document doesn’t have to be right to be worth reading. In terms of perspicacity and analytic insight, Müller-Hill’s diary may not compare very well to those written by Victor Klemperer. Klemperer, though, was an academic forced into an extreme outsider position that encouraged an extraordinary clarity of vision. Müller-Hill was an upper-middle-class member of the social mainstream who internally rejected the positions of a government he came to abhor, and refused, where he felt he could, to put them into practice. Much has been written on the phenomenon of inner emigration in Nazi Germany and other dictatorships and totalitarian systems. Müller-Hill’s diary is an example of this idea, which is slippery and self-serving. After World War II, it was easy for Germans to claim that, in their heart of hearts, they’d opposed the Hitler regime. Such assertions could neither be proven nor disproven. Müller-Hill put his highly critical opinions down on paper, and for that reason alone, what he wrote merits attention.

Finally, I was also struck by the fact that, although Müller-Hill felt nothing but contempt for his Nazi superiors and performed his job contrary to the spirit of his instructions, he still tried to keep functioning within the system for as long as he could. One of the most difficult things to understand about Germans’ behavior in the final weeks and months of World War II is why so many carried on even though the battle was obviously lost, and continued resistance meant courting even greater disaster. It is very difficult to wish for or choose defeat for one’s own kind. Many Americans, for instance, opposed the Second Iraq War. But how many of them rooted for the United States to fail? Müller-Hill’s diary is shot through with a similar ambiguity, perhaps contradiction. By not resolving the inconsistencies, I’ve tried to give readers access not just to a bygone time, but to a fundamentally human disconnect between attitudes and behavior. Works of history are supposed to be logical, consistent and thoroughly reasoned out. Historical material—our most direct immediate source of how people acted in the past—is anything but those things.

Jefferson Chase

Berlin, April 2013

Introduction

Benjamin Carter Hett

In July 1944 the German General Ferdinand Schörner, commanding Army Group North in the Baltic (whose soldiers were by then in a desperate situation, surrounded and cut off from any retreat to Germany by the massive Soviet summer offensive) paid a call on one of his senior military judges. Schörner opened the conversation by asking the judge How many men have you hanged so far? Rather taken aback, the judge replied, The Military Penal Code provides only for executions by firing squad, Herr General.

So that means that you are still only shooting your men, said Schörner, with evident disgust. He proceeded to explain what he expected military judges under his command to do. We hang the men, and not just at any out-of-the-way place where no one will see them, but at the front control centers, at the hostels for soldiers on leave, at train stations. They stay hanging there for three days, until they stink. Whoever hasn’t seen them yet, smells them. That strengthens the men. I am telling you. Schörner finished with menace, My judges must learn how to be unjust.¹

Schörner was a demonstrable psychopath, but his outburst nonetheless captures the spirit of German military justice in World War II. While German military courts in World War I had sentenced 48 soldiers to death, their successors between 1933 and 1945 condemned at least 20,000, and by some accounts as many as 33,000 or more soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians subject to military justice to the same fate. The offenses ranged from those recognized by any army—desertion or attacks on a superior officer—to those with a distinctively Nazi flavor—corrosion of military morale or military treason. By the last phase of the war, drumhead courts were executing soldiers in huge numbers on the slightest pretext and with hardly a gesture in the direction of normal legal procedures.²

Nor was extraordinary harshness toward their own troops the only stain on the record of Nazi military jurists. It was military lawyers, for instance, who in the run-up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 drafted the infamous Commissar Order calling for mass shootings behind the lines—which historians recognize as a major step on the path to the Holocaust. They also prepared the Order for Conduct toward Russian Prisoners of War which cleared the way for the Germans to murder some 3 million Soviet captives, mostly through enclosing them behind barbed wire and leaving them to starve to death. In the words of one historian, the work of German military lawyers in World War II amounted to nothing less than the building of a facade behind which mass murder could appear as legal.³

Yet here, in the wartime diary of German military judge Werner Otto Müller-Hill, we have the remarkable record of a man who, from inside this murderous system, never sentenced a man to death and saw it as his mission to protect and defend the soldiers who came before him. More than that: Müller-Hill was an implacable opponent of the Nazis, who managed to avoid becoming a member of the Nazi Party or any of its affiliated organizations. He was a shrewd critic and analyst of Nazi propaganda, an unusually talented forecaster of coming political developments, and—not least—a thoughtful commentator on his own people and their response to the catastrophic events of World War II. At a time in which historians and general readers alike are as fascinated as ever by questions of what Germans in the Third Reich knew and when they knew it, what they believed and what they did, the appearance of this diary is both timely and important.

Müller-Hill was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, on the edge of the Black Forest, in 1885, the son of an engineer father and a pianist and singer mother. He received an education typical of upper-middle class young men in the Kaiser’s Germany, starting with studies at a Gymnasium, an academic high school which delivered a thorough and rigorous, if unimaginative, classical education, and going on between 1907 and 1912 to study law at the University of Freiburg. He was already practicing as a lawyer in Freiburg by 1913. The only unusual element of this education and training is Müller-Hill’s lack of mobility: German students of that time would typically move around and study at two or three different universities. Müller-Hill was wedded to his native Baden.

He served as a military judge even during the First World War, before returning in 1919 to private legal practice. At the beginning of 1940 he was again called up for service as a military judge. For most of the war he stayed not far from home—from February 1942 until October 1944 he was on the staff of the 158th (later renamed the 405th) replacement division in Stasbourg, until the worsening military situation forced the divisional staff to relocate to Oberkirch in southern Baden and then later to Tübingen.

At the end of the war he was already 60 years old, but he returned to his legal career, serving in the late 1940s as a senior prosecutor (Oberstaatsanwalt) in the small town of Offenburg in Baden. In 1950 he retired, but his retirement was long; Müller-Hill died in 1977.⁴

German military judges in World War II still administered the old Military Penal Code of 1872 and the Code of Military Judicial Procedure of 1898—but, as in other areas of Nazi law, with substantial amendments introduced piecemeal by decree, particularly through the Special Wartime Penal Decree (Kriegssonderstrafrechtsverordnung, KSSVO) and the Code of Wartime Criminal Procedure (Kriegsstrafverfahrensordnung, KStVO) both promulgated in August 1938 and repeatedly amended. The point of these laws was to avoid what the Nazis saw as the failure of German military courts in World War I to prevent erosion of morale and eventual defeat. Nazi military law, therefore, specified both harsh penalties and a speedy procedure, with few rights for defendants.

The nature of the courts in which Müller-Hill worked was outlined in the KStVO. A military court had three judges, of which only one was a trained lawyer, while the others were to be regular soldiers—if possible, one of them of the rank of the accused, the other a senior officer. To ensure that courts imposed the harsh justice the high command and the regime wanted, everything that a court did, from the assignment of lawyers and judges to the decisions they reached, was subject to the control and approval of the commanding officer of the formation the court served, usually the divisional commanding officer; in his judicial capacity the commanding officer was designated the lord of the court (Gerichtsherr). Judges often played different roles in different proceedings. The same official could be deployed as an investigator or prosecutor as well as in the role of a judge, depending on the flow of business and the whim of the lord of the court (hints in Müller-Hill’s diary suggest that he also played these various different roles). Defendants had the right to a defense counsel only in cases where the death penalty was possible, but the code allowed even this right to be neglected if the war of movement so required. Research has suggested that in fact defendants seldom had the benefit of a defense, even where they theoretically had a right to one.⁵

Of cases that resulted in a death penalty, by far the most common was deserting the colors, with corrosion of military morale a distant second. Corrosion could include such actions as inflicting a wound on oneself; seeking to undermine discipline; encouraging others to disobey orders, to desert, or to attack a superior officer; or refusing military service. A wide range of other and more minor offenses could also bring a soldier up on charges, of which the most common was the theft of packages or supplies. One of the leading scholars in this area has estimated that as many as 2.5 million German military personnel—of the 16 million mobilized for the war—had some experience of a case in a military court. And of these, perhaps 50 to 60 percent were convicted.⁶

Müller-Hill’s diary is especially important as a sign of what it was possible for an intelligent citizen to know, or at least to figure out, in Hitler’s Germany. He knew full well that keeping such a diary was dangerous: if it were discovered, he wrote in the document itself, It would mean death. I’d be dismissed from my post and handed over as a civilian to the Gestapo [the secret police] for reeducation. Why did he run this risk? No historical source is ever self-interpreting, and we can only speculate about his motives. It is striking that the diary begins in March 1944, by which time it was clear to any rational observer that Germany would lose the war. No doubt, like many diarists, Müller-Hill wanted to bear witness to great events. Perhaps his abundant critical faculties demanded an outlet otherwise unobtainable in Nazi Germany. But it is also possible, as Wolfram Wette writes in the introduction to the German edition, that he wanted to create a document for his own exculpation after a clearly foreseeable Allied victory. Though a critic of the regime, he was also still its uniformed servant, and he was more than far-sighted enough to understand the legal danger he might be in after defeat.⁷

In the early days of historical research on Nazi Germany, most scholars assumed that Hitler’s Reich had been a monolithic and totalitarian society, in which, through a combination of brutal terror and brilliantly orchestrated propaganda, Germans were reduced to the status of a helpless and unthinking mass. Had this been true it would be entirely idle to speak of public opinion in Nazi Germany. But research over the past couple of decades has pointed up many limitations in this model of Nazi society, and many old beliefs about the Third Reich have been overturned. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was by no means the sinister master of mass deception that he claimed to be and that many historians, themselves perhaps hypnotized by Goebbels’s extensive and important diaries, had earlier taken him for. Perhaps he did not need to be: the regime in any case enjoyed genuine, strong, and unforced support from a majority—though by no means all—of its citizens. But there were real limits on how far the Nazis could impose their views on Germans. They succeeded in winning popular compliance where their message went with the grain of

Reviews for The True German

[paulberauer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic view into the mind of a German during World War Two.

[2wondery_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A novel peek into a German official's mindset during WW2. Mueller-Hill kept a diary in order to communicate his distress about his country's actions to his son. He seemed to be a level-headed person who attempted to keep his small corner of the world on an even keel. His despair and sorrow voice his disgust at the propaganda machine and the waste of lives that the continuing hopeless conflict exacts towards the end of the war is palpable.Well worth reading.

[ronstarcher · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Werner Otto Mueller-Hill offers an insider's perspective of the Third Reich. As a military court judge, Mueller-Hill was spared the burdens of service on the front, but he was positioned to see the madness that surrounded the party leaders in Nazi Germany.The True German is a journal originally prepared to provide a record of Mueller-Hill's observations of Germany at war and of the Nazi leadership in general. In this journal, he comes across as a conflicted man. He is a loyal and patriotic German, but he shows the utmost contempt for the Nazi party. He displays no joy at the prospect of an allied victory over Germany. Yet, he desires the overthrow of Nazism for the sake of the German people.I was surprised by the amount of criticism and ridicule expressed in this diary. Certainly, given Nazi censorship, this could not have been published during the Third Reich. In fact, Mueller-Hill hid his journal, for its discovery would have likely sent him to a concentration camp.The True German reminds readers that there were many in Germany who opposed the policies of Hitler and his henchmen. Mueller-Hill has gone on record as one of those.

[tenutter-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

542 Nonfiction History Military History & Affairs World War II Werner Otto Mueller-Hill, The True German. The Diary of a World War II Military Judge. Palgrave Macmillan, September 2013.Publisher Contact: Lauren Dwyer-Janiec, Publicity Manager, 646.307.5698, [e-mail]/. Werner Otto Mueller-Hill served Germany during both the First and Second World War, on both occasions as an Army Military Judge. In 1944 his unit, 158th Reserve Division, was stationed in Alsace-Lorraine (Lothringen in German). Mueller-Hill was a native of Lothringen, and his billet in 1944 was in Strasbourg, an old and beautiful city, and a cultural center of western Germany.On or about March 28, 1944, Mueller-Hill began to keep a personal diary, an act which if not actually criminal on its face, had the potential for subjecting the diary’s author to the unwanted attention of the Gestapo if discovered. In spite of the diary’s inherent potential to create mischief for him, Mueller-Hill continued to make entries in it until June 7, 1945, a month following Germany’s surrender.In his diary, Mueller-Hill failed to accord Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party the level of respect, honor and gullibility demanded of any citizen of the Third Reich. And he openly expressed the view that Germany was on the verge of losing the Second World War. Mueller-Hill knew well that should his diary fall into the wrong hands, his own chances of surviving the war would diminish precipitously. The Mueller-Hill Diary is, if nothing else, mundane. Its entries generally deal with a short list of topics, among which the most persistent is the past, present and future course of the war. This is the common thread that ties the Diary together. It weaves its way through the text, at some points appearing almost daily, and at others more infrequently. Another persistent theme in the Mueller-Hill Diary is the author’s contempt for the callous perfidy of the Nazi party and the Fuehrer in their death throes. The author’s complaints in this area arise from the steady diet of claptrap being fed to Germans by the Nazi regime via a number of sources, including radio broadcasts, the party-controlled press, and imperial edicts, as well as orders issued and speeches given by National Socialist guidance officers (Natzionalsozialistische Fuehrungsoffiziere) assigned to nearly every unit in the German Army following the attempt on Hitler’s life of July 20, 1944. The general tenor of this “information” was that despite the evidence of their senses, Germans must have faith that victory and retribution were both at hand. From a literary point of view, the Mueller-Hill diary is just that---a diary. In spite of the nearly universal cynicism that infects modern society and culture, it is possible for someone to write a diary that is not self-exonerating, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and an outright lie. Werner Otto Mueller-Hill’s diary is that diary. This diarist was concerned with the here and now. He did not have in mind the question of how historians would interpret what he said, place it in its proper historical context, judge it against the work of other contemporary diarists. Mueller-Hill did not intend his diary to be didactic, to tell the future how it should or should not behave. More than likely, he sought to have a means for remembering what his former life was like, and to teach his children and grandchildren who their Papa and Opa was. And this is where the diary and the diarist, speaking to us from the Germany of the 1940’s, diverge from the historian and his historical analysis, speaking to us from a Germany and a world seventy years on. The historian in this case is Benjamin Carter Hett, currently Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of the Introduction to the diarist’s work. Hett’s scholarship, based solely upon my own reading of his excellent Burning the Reichstag, as well as his literary skills, are of the very highest order. Nevertheless, Professor Hett’s Introduction is not sacrosanct and thus beyond reproach. The principal issue here is that the Introduction is rife with the de rigueur criticisms directed at Germans who were adults in wartime Germany. And it is worth bearing in mind, when considering these criticisms, that with very few exceptions, many were first made, and all have been perpetuated, by people without the firsthand experience of living in a police state such as the Third Reich.Here we have, for example, Professor Hett’s condemnation of “Nazi” military jurists for their collective and extraordinary harshness to their own troops and others in condemning 20,000 to 33,000 (numbers often doubled by other supposed experts on the issue) “soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians subject to military justice” to death, and for drafting the Commissar Order calling for mass shootings behind the lines “which historians recognize as a major step on the path to the Holocaust.”Professor Hett would be remiss, of course, if he did not address that progenitor of all of the other hackneyed inquiries into the black souls of German survivors of the Second World War (and as other historians would have it, the black souls of the children, grandchildren and further descendants of such persons, ad infinitum), namely “what Germans in the Third Reich knew and when they knew it”. The “what” and the “when” in that sentence refer, need it be said, to the obvious complicity of all Germans in that work of works for the Third Reich, the Holocaust. The litany of crimes and other injustices committed or ratified by ordinary Germans during the Second World War and illuminated by Professor Hett in his Introduction to Herr Mueller-Hill’s diary is too long to be considered here. The Nazi regime “enjoyed genuine, strong, and unforced support from a majority” of its citizens; ordinary Germans were compliant with and nonresistant to “the regime’s worst crimes”. And, as if there were any doubt about it, Germans knew about the Holocaust. And to have known about the Holocaust is to have endorsed the Holocaust, to have exulted in it, to have enabled it, to have pulled the trigger or opened the gas valve to make it happen. There is one last bit of Professor Hett’s “analysis” of the Mueller-Hill diary that should be highlighted. In the Introduction, Hett embraces the view of historian Wolfram Wette, who has written that Mueller-Hill wrote his diary because “he wanted to create a document for his own exculpation after a clearly foreseeable Allied victory”.This sort of thing always reminds me of Luke: 18, 9-14. He (Jesus) also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

[kunikov_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps my expectations of what this diary would contain were too high. But with a subtitle that includes 'World War II Military Judge', I hoped that something about his actual work as a military judge would be included as he muses about the day-to-day activities he reads/hears about and participates in. Unfortunately, this 'diary' was mainly wasted space and time. There is close to nothing that discusses the cases or defendants this judge might have encountered, which could have given the reader an inside look at how they reflected on the Wehrmacht and the German war effort overall, etc. I found myself interested in maybe three or four pages, which contained some revealing information - the author's knowledge of the activities that became known as the Holocaust is the best example. The rest of the book is made up of meanderings based on propaganda articles in newspapers and speeches by Goebbels, Hitler, and Himmler. I found little here that will add to our overall knowledge of the Third Reich or what living in Nazi Germany was like, as the thoughts of this military judge are mostly superficial, being primarily based on rumor or hearsay.

[labfs39 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

By March of 1944, Otto Mueller-Hill knew that Germany would lose the war. A Nazi and military judge, Mueller was stationed in Strasbourg not far from his wife and son in Freiburg. A German patriot and fervent Badenite, Mueller decided to start a journal in which to record the last days of the war and his opinions on how Germany came to lose it.The journal is interesting because Mueller is intelligent and frank about the condition of the German military and the belligerence of the Nazi leadership in continuing to fight when the war was obviously lost. He includes references to propaganda speeches and newspaper articles that are well referenced in the notes. I was particularly intrigued by his casual references to the fate of the Jews in the concentration camps; obviously not all Germans were innocent of knowledge of their fate. In addition, I knew little about the role of military judges in furthering the Nazi line through their rulings on soldiers' crimes of speech or deed.However. I had a very hard time assessing whether I believed Mueller to be free of an ulterior motive in keeping the journal. His son, who allowed the journal to be published, obviously believes that his father kept the journal as a true sign of his loyalty to Germany but opposition to Nazism. To me it was less clear, and I couldn't help but feel that Mueller would have found the diary a convenient piece of evidence if and when he was charged with war crimes. To only start the journal when he knew the war was lost, and to be specific in his opposition to Hitler and the Nazi leadership, seemed a bit contrived. The movement was a bit slow in places, but the real detraction was the translation. Although I do not speak German, jaunty idioms such as "shoot the breeze", "put out to pasture", and the like, were distracting in their dissimilitude to the rest of Mueller's language. Although I hate to disregard any primary sources, and there are some interesting comments, such as those regarding the Allied strategy and the relative fighting prowess of the different armies, overall I was hard pressed to accept the diary at face value. How do we interpret something that may have been written to appease the coming conquerors?

[pjlambert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am going to write this without the benefit of looking at what my fellow reviewers have said about this book. Let me first say that I really don't know what to make of it. At first glance, this might be a remarkable book documenting a German officer's true outrage with the regime. That kind of documentation during the last phases of WWII would probably have resulted in the death penalty if divulged to the wrong person. However, I do find the timing of the diary somewhat interesting. By early 1944, the Germans were already meeting stiff resistance on the Russian Front, and the Allies were about to assemble the looming D-Day invasion, but were already achieving/achieved success in North Africa and up through Italy. So to me, I might think that the author was potentially setting the conditions for the post-war, but saying he was an objector to the regime. Hard to tell one way or another. I was somewhat sympathetic that he had to endure the pedantic propaganda from some of his fellow officers and judges. Likewise, both he and his family certainly endured hardships as the Reich retreated from France (through Strasbourg where he was) and lived a life of privation as the war came to an end.If he was a true dissenter, this is a remarkable book. I will leave it to the reader to decide.

[rp1543 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The True German is a diary kept by Werner Otto Müller-Hill, who was a military judge in the Werhmacht during World War II, stationed in Strassbourg. Starting in March 1944 until the end of the war, he described his thoughts and feelings about what he saw as the growing inevitability of Germany’s loss of the war, and expressed his anger and disdain at the self-deluded Nazis around him, who refused to admit what was apparent to him. This diary is a fascinating look into a corner of Nazi Germany and its ordinary people, though Muller-Hill is a judge and perhaps more privileged than the ordinary folk. Muller-Hill comments intelligently and presciently about the military state of the war. He is able to glean a great deal of accurate factual information from the daily newspapers. He is clearly being aware of the continued string of German military reverses, that no amount of Nazi ‘spin’ can fully hide. He anticipates the Allied invasion of France, and he knows when it occurs, and what it will mean to him. He is aware of the massive Russian offensive starting in June 1944. He feels the growing, overwhelming pressure on the German Army, and knows that Germany is headed for utter destruction, unless it surrenders or magically is able to negotiate some end to the war. He states this as a possibility, but clearly knows in his heart that the war will not end with Germany relatively undamaged, as in World War I. One can sense the palpably growing fear as he sees the war inevitably close in on Germany and on him, the fear of the future multiplying upon itself, just as terror grows in a seaside community watching a massive hurricane inexorably approaching, knowing that it cannot be avoided, and yet the people’s lives continuing on ‘as normal’ until it hits. There are disappointments and frustrations at the unanswered questions as one reads through the diary entries. How honest is the author being with the reader, and with himself for that matter? Are his expressions of disgust at the Nazi leadership self-serving? How common is his simultaneous acquiescence to, and anger at, the regime? Did this sort of attitude contribute to the terrible accomplishments of Nazi Germany? Did he feel this way prior to the reversal of the war’s fortunes? As one reads through the diary entries, which were initially made every other day or so, one anticipates with growing interest the entries to come recording when his location would be overrun and the time of the war inevitable catastrophic end. But, this is a diary of the events of the day, not a book with a cohesive theme and structure, so the entries became more and more sporadic just as the war overcomes the author and his family and his military unit. The entry of April 8, 1945, to illustrate, was followed by entries on April 21st, then April 30th, and then not until May 20th. One wishes to be able to read all the unwritten entries in between. In summary, in spite of some gaps and questions, The True German is a valuable addition to the library of anyone who is interesting in gaining some insight to the lives of ‘ordinary’ Germans, and their thoughts and fears as the war came home to them.

[lorimarie_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this diary of Mueller-Hill's to be utterly fascinating. If one is to believe that the diary is truly what he wrote at the time. I'm afraid I find it hard to imagine that Mueller-Hill was able to keep his diary of such obvious treason hidden with all his moving around. That being said, he was obviously a very astute and brilliant man. I loved reading his feelings about what was happening to his beloved country.I only have a few complaints, first off maps would have been so helpful. I actually ended up printing up some maps from the internet. Secondly I felt like there were several times the author mentioned an article or a speech that he included in the diary. Those would have been so great to have attached. Lastly, the footnotes were torture! Not that they weren't needed but having to go to the back of the book several times per page was rather tedious. I set up a serious of paper clips to make it easier to go to the footnotes which were very important and informative. I feel really lucky to be given the opportunity to read this very interesting and really gut wrenching accounting of living through the last years of World War II. To see what life was like for a German officer, one who clearly saw the writing on the wall, well it was remarkable. I think it's a major find for anyone who is interested in World War II.

[spqr2755 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting diary account of a German military judge stationed in France and western Germany during the last 18 month of WWII. Very critical of Hitler and the Nazis and especially of silly fellow officers who continued to believe in Hitler's promises of wonder weapons that would turn things around. It would have been better if the diary had been from 1940 when the Nazis were winning. By the time this account opens the war is obviously lost so there is always a question of how much of the author's sour attitude to the Nazis is due to the fact they were losing and taking Germany down with them The most important point that jumped out at me was that Mueller - Hill clearly knows a lot about the "Final Solution". If he, a minor official in a occupied backwater, knew about it to that level then it is very hard to say that it wasn't general knowledge in the German military as a whole. The translator keeps himself out of it other than the obligatory comment about the author's comments about Jews and so on being the author's and part of his times and so on. Footnotes are non-intrusive and helpful.

[kordo_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic view into the mind of a German during World War Two.

[hadden_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

An account of the last 18 months of World War II by a military judge in the Wehrmacht. A particularly open and honest account, written for his young son, it shows the increasing rage and frustration with the NAZI party and their influence and control over the German people. An interesting look at the last few months of the German Reich from the inside, and from a post in the Strasbourg and Freiburg areas. The author particularly rages against the many propaganda speeches, lies and distortions used to pacify the German Volk.The author and his family survived the war and he later became a prosecutor in West Germany.

[sahara20_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Müller-Hill started his diary in March 1944 in an attempt to leave a record for his son. The diary continues through to June 1945. Müller-Hill served as a military judge in World War I and found himself recalled to the role during World War II. The diary was used by Müller -Hill as a place to record his criticisms of the Nazi regime and his conviction that Germany was on a certain path to defeat. It was a crime in Nazi Germany to criticise the regime, thus Müller-Hill was taking a risk by keeping this diary. If it were discovered, it could result in him being sentenced to death. Müller-Hill felt he was one of the fairer judges. He felt that it was his role to protect those soldiers who had slipped up, rather than to punish them unfairly, and was one the few judges to have never pronounced a death sentence. He felt his tendency towards leniency was the reason he was never promoted. He is quite vocal in his criticisms of those in charge of the military operations and those who supported them. At times he tested his colleagues to see which of those agreed with his views and which of those he should avoid any sort of critical discussion with. He also extensively criticised the press, who supported the views of the commanders, and the public who swallowed these words, unquestioning of their lack of representation of the realities of the war. Müller-Hill highlights many aspects of the actions of the Nazi command that he disagrees with, including the use of 14 year old boys in the desperation not to lose in the last stages of the war. I found the book lacking two things that would be useful to the reader. Firstly, Müller-Hill mentions several times that he has included an article or speech in the diary, but these have not been included in the book. Secondly, I would also have liked a map highlighting the location of all places mentioned in the book. On several occasions I felt the need to look at the map to gain more understanding of the situations described in the text. Overall, this book is a thought-provoking read, and, as a primary source, is an important document for those who are interested in this period of history.

[wchagen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a remarkable book that purports to capture the thoughts of the “Average Otto” living through the agony of the German defeat in World War II. I use the word “purports” because there are sure to be cynics who will contend that it is a fabricated diary intended to re-invent the mindset of the German citizenry of that era who were not Nazis. The inclusion of a smattering of photo copied pages from the original document and errors of both form and substance that naturally occur in personal diaries is evidence of its authenticity. That, plus the fact that there is little need to publish such an apology some seventy or so years after the fact when a democratic Germany has re-established itself on the world stage as an economic leader. Nearly sixty years old, Müller-Hill served as a military judge in the German Army. As such, he, with two fellow panelists who were not legal professionals, presided over courts trying members of the army for mostly minor infractions. A major part of his duties were bureaucratic but, as an officer, he was privy to some inside information and insulated to degree from the scrutiny of informants. He started the diary March 28, 1944 and the last entry is dated June 7, 1945 although it was probably added later for reasons discussed below. A full appreciation of the book does require some general knowledge of WWII history although copious endnotes fill in details and give context to obscure passages.The diary entries are surreal. They evoked thoughts of The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass but more depressing and fatalistic. Topics include ridicule of Nazi propaganda, lamenting over casualty reports, apprehension over an impending colonoscopy, books being read, the inconvenience of carrying a typewriter into a bomb shelter and displeasure over trout getting cold when a bombing raid interrupted dinner. Amidst the chaos of a crumbling Reich, the Judge seemed obsessed with completing end of month statistical reports to higher headquarters. Sigmund Freud would probably explain it as an effort to maintain a semblance of order when all about was disorder of a lethal sort. Freud might have also relished the opportunity to analyze the diary as a stream of consciousness of the entire German populace revealing angst in its extreme. A recurring topic was the anticipation that Hitler and his minions would be able to maintain that the German defeat was because it was ‘stabbed in the back’ by disloyal internal elements. Müller-Hill himself seemed to use this ploy. He often seemed to blame Prussians for leading Germany on its path and one entry mentioned Jesuits in a pejorative way. In the final entry, the author (or editor?) described an encounter with several members of the French Occupation Force as he plodded toward the home of a kindly friend. It is of a completely different tenor. Supposedly, he filled his knapsack with stones for the purpose of physical exercise. When forced to reveal the contents, the French soldier muttered, “Completely crazy.” I believe the account was intended to summarize the preceding twenty-five years of German history as ‘the good Germans’ toted the burden of the Nazi regime. The ‘Average Otto’ or ‘True German’ was stabbed in the back.