Bribery of senior Wehrmacht officers

From 1933 to the end of the Second World War, high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany accepted vast bribes in the form of cash, estates, and tax exemptions in exchange for their loyalty to Nazism. Unlike corruption at lower ranks in the Wehrmacht, which was also widespread, these payments were regularized (though strictly illegal) and made with the full knowledge and consent of the leading Nazi figures.

Historical context
Historically, German and other European rulers commonly awarded titles, estates, and monetary rewards to diplomats and high ranking officers. This was generally done to form a bond between the ruler and important subjects. This historical practice, however, differed from the one applied by Hitler. While, in the Kingdom of Prussia, awards were usually given after successful campaigns or wars, and were made public, Hitler dispensed the rewards to his elites in secret during the war, rather than at its end.

Mechanism
In order to ensure the absolute loyalty of the Wehrmacht officers, and to console them over the loss of their "state within the state", Hitler had created what the American historian Gerhard Weinberg called a "...a vast secret program of bribery involving practically all at the highest levels of command". Hitler routinely presented his leading commanders with "gifts" of free estates, cars, cheques made out for large sums of cash, and lifetime exemptions from paying taxes. A typical example was a cheque made out for a half-million Reichsmarks presented to Field-Marshal Günther von Kluge in October 1942, together with the promise that he could bill the German treasury for any and all "improvements" he might wish to make to his estate.

Such was the success of Hitler's bribery system that, by 1942, many officers had come to expect the bestowing of "gifts" from Hitler, and were unwilling to bite the hand that fed them so generously. When Hitler sacked Field Marshal Fedor von Bock in December 1941, his first reaction was to contact Hitler's aide Rudolf Schmundt to ask if his sacking meant that he was no longer to receive bribes from Konto 5 (lit. "bank account 5") slush fund.

Konto 5 special fund
The Konto 5 slush fund, run by the chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers, and distributed by Hitler as personal presents, started with a budget of about 150,000 Reichsmark in 1933 and had grown to about 40 million Reichsmarks by 1945. Initially these funds came through his office as Reichskanzler and, after 1934, as Reichspräsident. The mandatory pre-1933 checks through parliament, and the countersigning of the payments by the German finance minister, were abolished by the Nazis. The money spent was at Hitler's discretion, and required no other approval.

Payments from Konto 5, known officially as Aufwandsentschädigungen (compensation for expenses), had been made to Cabinet ministers, and senior civil servants, since April 1936. As part of the reorganization of the military command structure following the Blomberg–Fritsch Affair in early 1938, it was declared that the service chiefs, namely Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) Chief Wilhelm Keitel, Army commander Walter von Brauchitsch, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring and, Kriegsmarine commander Erich Raeder were to have the same status as Cabinet ministers and, as such, they all started to receive publicly the same pay as a Cabinet member, and privately payments from Konto 5.

The basis of the corruption system was monthly, tax-free payments of 4,000 Reichsmarks deposited in the bank accounts of field marshals and grand admirals, and 2,000 Reichsmarks for all other senior officers. On top of the money from Konto 5, officers received cheques, usually made out for the sum of 250,000 Reichsmarks, as birthday presents; these were exempt from income taxes, though tax had to paid on interest earned from the money.

This money came in addition to the official salary of 26,000 Reichsmarks a year for field marshals and grand admirals and 24,000 Reichsmarks a year for colonel generals and general admirals, plus tax-exempt payments of 400 and 300 Reichsmarks a month, respectively, to help deal with rising, war-time living costs. In addition, senior officers were given a life-time exemption from paying income tax which was, in effect, a huge pay raise given Germany's high income tax rates (by 1939, there was a 65% tax rate for income over 2,400 Reichsmark), and they were also provided with spending allowances for food, medical care, clothing, and housing. In contrast, infantrymen who had the dangerous task of clearing landmines, were given a one Reichsmark a day danger pay supplement.

Nature of payments
Before any officer began to receive money, they met with Lammers who informed them that future payments would depend on how much loyalty they were willing to show Hitler. They were advised that what the Führer gave with one hand, could just as easily be taken away with the other. The illicit nature of these payments was emphasised by Lammers when he warned them not to speak about the payments to anyone, and to keep as few written records as possible.

The money from Konto 5 was deposited for the officer's life-time, and did not stop when he retired. In the last months of the war, Erich von Manstein, Wilhelm List, Georg von Küchler, and Maximilian von Weichs kept on changing the bank accounts into which Lammers had to deposit the money from Konto 5 in order to avoid the Allied advance. Much correspondence went back and forth between these officers and Lammers, as they kept writing anxiously to make certain that he was depositing their monthly bribes into the right accounts.

Payments from Konto 5 to the bank account of General Friedrich Paulus stopped in August 1943, not because he had lost the Battle of Stalingrad, but because he had gone on Soviet radio to blame Hitler for the defeat. In the same way, after the failure of 20 July plot of 1944, the families of Erwin Rommel (according to Peter Lieb, the current state of research does not indicate Rommel as a recipient of Hitler's donations), Franz Halder, Friedrich Fromm, and Günther von Kluge were punished by being cut off from the monthly payments from Konto 5. In the case of Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, his family was ordered to repay all of the bribe money he had received from Konto 5, since the money was given as a reward for loyalty to the Führer; Witzleben was evidently not loyal.

August von Mackensen
The first officer to be bribed for loyalty was the old World War I hero Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who criticized the Nazi regime for the murder of General Kurt von Schleicher in a speech before the General Staff Association in February 1935. To silence him, Hitler gave Mackensen a free estate of 1,250 hectares later that same year in exchange for a promise never to criticize the Nazi regime again, either publicly or privately. The agreement worked for the most part. Mackensen never criticized the Nazi regime in public again, though Hitler was very offended, in February 1940, when Mackensen mentioned to Walter von Brauchitsch his view that the army had disgraced itself by committing massacres during the recent campaign in Poland. Hitler felt that to be a violation of their agreement of 1935, though Mackensen was not punished by losing his estate.

Walter von Brauchitsch
In 1938, Brauchitsch decided to divorce his wife to marry a much younger woman who happened to be a "two hundred per cent rabid Nazi". The divorce court had a less kind view of Brauchitsch's decision to end his marriage than did his political master, and awarded the first Frau von Brauchitsch a substantial settlement. Hitler earned Brauchitsch's eternal gratitude by agreeing to use German tax-payers' money to pay his entire divorce settlement, said to have been between 80,000 and 250,000 Reichsmark. Brauchitsch had been promoted to army commander to replace Fritsch, who had resigned following false allegations of homosexuality, and was a compromise candidate as the army had refused to accept Hitler's first choice of Walther von Reichenau as Fritsch's successor.

Heinz Guderian
As well as money, in early 1943, General Heinz Guderian was informed that if he wanted an estate in Poland, to tell Hitler whose land he wanted, and he would get it. This resulted in him making several visits to Poland to find the right estate to steal. This caused some problems with the SS, which had designs on some of the estates that Guderian desired before a deal was worked out about which estate he could take. His bribe of a 937 hectares estate, confiscated from its Polish owner, was tax-free for his entire life-time. Historian Norman Goda wrote that after Guderian received his Polish estate, the doubts he had been expressing since late 1941 about Hitler's military leadership suddenly ceased, and he became one of Hitler's most ardent military supporters, or, as Joseph Goebbels described him in his diary, "a glowing and unqualified follower of the Führer".

Before receiving his "gift" of a Polish estate, Guderian, as Inspector General for the Panzers, had been opposed to the plans for Unternehmen Zitadelle, which was to lead to the Battle of Kursk, one of Germany's worst defeats of the war; after receiving the estate, Guderian did a 180° turn about as to the wisdom of the operation. Instead of criticizing Zitadelle openly, Guderian approached Goebbels to ask him if he could talk Hitler out of it, behavior that Goda described as very atypical. Guderian was well known for his brash, blunt, outspoken style, for his rudeness to those he disliked, (in a notorious incident later in 1943, Guderian refused to shake the hand of Field Marshal Kluge because as he told him to his face he was not worthy of shaking hands), and for using vulgar, profanity-ridden language to describe a plan if he believed it to be bad one.

During the 20 July plot of 1944, Guderian ordered Panzer units to Berlin to crush the putsch, and then sat on the Court of Honor that had the responsibility of expelling officers involved in it so that they could be tried before the Volksgerichtshof, a duty that he performed with zeal. It was only after January 1945, when Guderian's estate fell behind Soviet lines, that he began to disagree once more with Hitler. These disagreements were so intense that Hitler fired Guderian as Chief of the General Staff in March 1945.

Much of the fury that Guderian expressed in his 1950 memoir Erinnerungen eines Soldaten about what he regarded as unjust border changes after the war in Poland's favor, seemed to be related to his intensely held private view that the Poles had no right to take away the Polish estate that Hitler had given to him.

Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb
In 1943, retired Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb managed to have the German state buy him an entire district of prime forest land in Bavaria, valued at 638,000 Reichsmark, on which to build his estate. In late June-early July 1941 Leeb, as the commander of Army Group North, had witnessed first-hand the massacres committed by the Einsatzgruppen, Lithuanian auxiliaries, and the men of the 16th Army, outside Kaunas. Leeb was described as being "moderately disturbed" after seeing the killing fields, and sent in mildly critical reports about the massacres. Leeb approved of the killing of Lithuanian Jewish men, claiming that this was justified by the crimes that they were supposed to have committed during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania; but the killing of women and children might have been taking things too far. In response, Hitler's aide General Rudolf Schmundt told Leeb that he was completely out of line for criticizing the massacres at Kaunas, and should co-operate fully with the SS in "special tasks" in future.

Schmundt asked if Leeb really appreciated his monthly payments from Konto 5, and reminded him that his birthday was coming up in September; the Führer was planning to give him a 250,000 Reichsmark cheque as a present to reward his loyalty. Leeb never said a word in protest of the "Final Solution" again, and duly received a 250,000 Reichsmark cheque in September 1941. In September 1941, Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, in a report to Berlin, had nothing but praise for Leeb's Army Group North, which he reported had been exemplary in co-operating with his men in murdering Jews in the Baltic states. The historian Norman Goda used Leeb as an all-too typical example of a Wehrmacht officer whose greed overwhelmed any sort of moral revulsion that they might have felt about the Holocaust.

Other officers
In general, officers who were in some way critical of Hitler's military, if not necessarily political leadership, such as Leeb, Raeder, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt received (and accepted) larger bribes than officers who were well known to be convinced National Socialists such as General Walter Model, Admiral Karl Dönitz and Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. The success of Hitler's bribery system backfired in that some officers, such as Raeder, who had proven himself especially greedy, came to be regarded by Hitler as a serious annoyance because of his endless demands for more money, and more free land for his estates. Raeder's demand in 1942 that, on top of his life-time exemption from paying income taxes, Hitler also cancel taxes on the interest he earned from his 4,000 Reichsmarks a month payment from Konto 5, was viewed as outrageous. In 1944, Wolfram von Richthofen wrote to the OKW to argue that since he was stationed in Italy, at least 1,000 Reichsmarks of the 4,000 Reichsmarks deposited in his bank account every month should be in lire to compensate for the effects of rampant inflation in Italy. This demand was regarded as unreasonable even by Wilhelm Keitel who normally did not reject providing financial rewards for service to the Führer.

Post-war
The subject of the payments proved to be an embarrassing one for its recipients. Under oath at the Nuremberg trials, Walther von Brauchitsch committed perjury when he denied taking any bribes. Brauchitsch's bank records showed that he had been receiving 4,000 Reichsmark per month payments from Konto 5 from 1938 until the end of the war. At his trial in 1948, General Franz Halder perjured himself when he denied that he had taken bribes, and then had to maintain a stern silence when the American prosecutor James M. McHaney produced bank records showing otherwise. Erhard Milch admitted accepting money when under oath in 1947, but claimed that this was only compensation for the salary that he had been making as an executive at Lufthansa, a claim that Goda called "ridiculous". Weinberg commented that "the bribery system understandably does not figure prominently in the endless memoir literature of the recipients and has attracted little scholarly attention".

Known participants

 * Field Marshal Erich von Manstein
 * Wilhelm List
 * Georg von Küchler
 * Walther von Brauchitsch
 * General Franz Halder
 * Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb
 * Field Marshal Erhard Milch
 * Admiral Erich Raeder
 * Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen
 * Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt
 * Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs