Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 138

us small-time soldiers to do more—for instance, by removing this unfortunate regime.” Even more inflammatory: “The man responsible for all the mistakes, Hitler
himself … should have been eliminated by his generals.”
Keeping a diary written in this form, or making any
of the statements that Major Müller-Hill claims he
made at the time, would be Landesverrat (treason) and
Wehrkraftzersetzung (undermining the war effort), both
punishable by death—particularly as Germany rapidly
deteriorated and defeat was all but certain. What motive, then, would the author have had to keep a running
tally of self-incriminatory evidence, whose only use
would be to hang the scribe? The short answer is that
he would not have done so. The author was evidentially
intelligent and critical, not a suicidal social renegade.
Major Müller-Hill spent most of the war in
Strasbourg with Division z.b.V. 405, later transferring
to Freiburg and Tübingen. In military law parlance, his
duties seem to have consisted mostly of administrative
law matters—although this is not certain due to his
reluctance to discuss his cases—and his principle source
of information about the wider war came from the radio, newspapers, and periodic letters he exchanged with
colleagues.
On balance, it seems more likely that the truth is
somewhere in between: Major Müller-Hill kept a wartime diary—but not the political and acerbic published
version—and then enhanced it after the war. He died in
1977. Accordingly, if it is not contemporary, its value as
a hist