Western Allied Intelligence and the German Military Document Section,1945-6

Abstract

In the year following the end of the second world war in Europe, various high-ranking Wehrmacht officers agreed to work for a co-ordinated US, British, and Canadian military intelligence operation called the ‘Hill Project’. This endeavor, which eventually expanded to almost 200 German prisoners of war, conducted research and analysis of the German Military Document Section at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and produced over 3600 pages of reports for the Western Allied governments. The Hill Project constitutes a little-known aspect of the interesting postwar relationship between the West and their former enemies.

This article examines the main goals of this program and the kind of information these research projects provided to Western Allied military intelligence. It contends that during its operation at Camp Ritchie, the main body of work completed by the Hill Project studied Wehrmacht methods as a means to potentially improve the structure and procedures of the Western Allied armies. Moreover, a select group of the Hill Project prisoners later transferred to Fort Hunt, Virginia, and assisted in preparing a defense of Western Europe against a potential invasion by the Soviet Army.