by David Irving
“Hitler listened to it all with downcast eyes,” Rommel told Lucie and Manfred shortly after. “Suddenly he looked up and said that he, too, was aware that there was very little chance left of winning the war. But the West would never conclude peace with him—at least not the statesmen who were at the helm now. He said that he had never wanted war with the West. But now the West would have its war—have it to the end.”
It was at about this time that Hitler in his own spidery handwriting amended the draft of a speech due to be delivered by Goebbels on June 5 to the munitions workers: he changed the phrase “when victory is ours” to the significantly different words, “after the struggle is over.”
ON JULY 1,1943, Hitler flew back to East Prussia, for his 2,000-tank attack in Russia, Operation Citadel, would shortly begin. Rommel flew to the Wolf’s Lair on the same day and listened to Hitler’s speech to his assembled field marshals and generals that evening. In a grave, clear and confident voice Hitler explained the background of the operation. “The blame for our misfortunes must be laid squarely on our allies,” he began. “The Italians let us down completely. If, as I repeatedly demanded, they had made timely use of their fleet to escort and transport their troops to Africa, Africa would not have been lost. Now their ships are being smashed to pieces in their harbors.” What was at stake now? “Germany needs the conquered territories or it will not exist for long. It must win hegemony over the rest of Europe. Where we are—we stay.” And so he went on, until 2:50 A.M.
Frequently during July 1943, Rommel’s stocky, alert figure was to be seen standing silently with the other Wehrmacht generals at Hitler’s conference table at the Wolf’s Lair.
The possible reason for his presence was widely discussed in the General Staff. An army captain, Hermann Kaiser, wrote in his diary: “They say Hitler is planning to appoint two chiefs of staff, with Rommel as acting commander in chief of the army.” Rommel witnessed the familiar initial euphoria as Operation Citadel began early on the fifth. Huge tank battles raged, far bigger even than El Alamein. Stalin had pitted 3,000 tanks against the 2,000 commanded by Manstein and Kluge, but on the ninth Rommel could note in his own diary after the midday conference: “Attack operations in the east are going well.”
Next day came the bombshell: the Allied invasion of Italy—indeed, of Hitler’s Europe—had begun. “Noon,” wrote Rommel. “War conference with Führer. The British and Americans have invaded Sicily with paratroops and landing craft.” From 9:30 P.M. on, he had a four-hour private session with Hitler—evidently urging him to intervene on the Italian mainland now. Hitler hesitated for some days. Kesselring and the diplomats in Rome were reassuring him that Mussolini’s position was safe, and Hitler was anxious to avoid any action that might destabilize the situation. On July 15, however, after discussing it with General Jodl, Hitler signed a document appointing Rommel commander of a new headquarters, “Army Group B,” with the job of organizing resistance in central Italy. The field marshal interpreted this as being the supreme command in Italy, when the time came.
Meanwhile, Stalin had begun a well-planned counterattack just north of Operation Citadel. Rommel listened with fascination as Hitler’s other field marshals and generals made their battle reports and dissected their strategy. Kluge and Manstein came, wringing their hands over their tank losses in Stalin’s minefields, but claiming to have inflicted crippling losses on the Soviet tanks too. Milch, deputy chief of the Luftwaffe, reported on his plans for revitalizing fighter aircraft production. Admiral Dönitz was frequently there, reporting on his impossible U-boat losses—attributed to some secret enemy radar system (but largely caused by the Enigma leak).
In the evenings, Rommel drove back through the barbed wire and sentries to the half-timbered house Hitler had placed at his disposal—it had been Brauchitsch’s when he was the army commander in chief—and digested these extraordinary and privileged experiences. He was full of ideas. He felt he had the answers to a lot of Hitler’s problems.
On July 17 he enthusiastically poured out his thoughts to his old North Africa comrade Bayerlein, now a general, who had been sent for by Hitler that day. (Rommel had secured the particularly shrewd appointment of a one-armed Stalingrad veteran, General Hans Hube, as German field commander in Sicily; he had now proposed Bayerlein as Hube’s chief of staff.) They sat in Rommel’s study. The field marshal began: “You know, Bayerlein, we’ve lost the initiative, there’s no doubt about it. We’ve just learned in Russia that dash and high hopes are not enough. What we need is a completely new approach. For the next few years there can be no thought of resuming the offensive either in the east or in the west. So we’ll have to make the most of the advantages that normally accrue to the defense. In the air we must build fighters and still more fighters, and give up all idea of doing any bombing. A few days ago the Führer told me that by the beginning of next year we’ll be turning out seven thousand aircraft and two thousand tanks a month. I no longer see things as blackly as I used to in Africa,” he concluded, “but total victory is now hardly possible, of course.”
Bayerlein inquired how Rommel envisaged his ground defense. Rommel replied, “You remember how difficult we used to find it to attack those British gun screens in Africa? Well, I’ve been making a thorough study of our experiences in Russia. The Russians just attack head on and try to batter through by sheer weight of numbers. But suppose we give our infantry divisions at first fifty, then one hundred and then two hundred 75-millimeter antitank guns each. We’ll be able to halt the Russians.” This was where Rommel’s strategy differed from panzer general Guderian’s. Ever since 1942, Guderian had called for more tank production. “We haven’t the slightest hope of keeping pace with the enemy’s tank production,” Rommel pointed out. “But we certainly can with their antitank gun production. Suppose the enemy attacks us in a heavily mined sector and we have built a gun screen, say, six miles deep. They’re going to get bogged down in it and have to gnaw their way ahead inch by inch. And meanwhile we’ll be installing more and more guns behind the screen at that point, faster than the enemy can gnaw his way through. Once our troops see that we are capable of holding our ground, morale will soar sky-high again.”
Three weeks later, Rommel formally asked for 400 antitank guns for each of his infantry divisions; the High Command had to refuse, because of material shortages.
Rommel’s constant presence at the Wolf’s Lair caused much jealousy, particularly from Göring. Apparently the opposition was effective. On July 18 Rommel noted: “The Führer has been advised not to make me C in C in Italy, since they say I’m anti-Italian. I assume the Luftwaffe’s behind this. Thus my employment in Italy recedes into the dim and distant future again.”
To his great disenchantment, Rommel was informed several days later that his Army Group B—currently setting up its headquarters in a castle in Austria—would move to Salonika, in northern Greece, to direct anti-invasion operations should the enemy land in Greece or Crete. “I am to be Supreme Commander in Greece for the time being,” wrote Rommel, “including the islands, so that I can pounce on Italy later.” He left Hitler’s headquarters on the twenty-third, after a further long private talk with the Führer. Hitler told him details of his own visit to Mussolini in northern Italy a few days earlier. “The Duce’s hands are tied,” he said at one point.
Perhaps Hitler also disclosed what agents in Italy had learned—that there was a plot to overthrow the Duce and replace him with Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a bumbling soldier whose sole job would be to speed Italy’s surrender to the enemy.
It was broiling hot when Rommel’s plane touched down at Salonika at eleven A.M. on July 25. With General Gause, he checked into the roomy Hotel Mediterranean and steeled himself for the dreary task Hitler had given him, the inspection of Greece’s defenses. (“The job is not at all to my liking,” he complained to Lucie.) Precisely twelve hours after his plane landed, the telephone rang in the hotel. It was General Warlimont, calling from the Wolf’s Lair. “The Duce has been a
rrested!” he exclaimed to Rommel. “You are to report back to the Führer’s headquarters at once. Nobody knows what’s happening in Italy.” At seven A.M. the next day Rommel’s plane took off again. That was the last he saw of Greece.
Confusion and uncertainty reigned at the Wolf’s Lair as Rommel’s plane landed at the airfield at noon, July 26. From all over the Reich the leading lights of the Nazi Party, the Wehrmacht and the state were flying in. Rommel drove through the sentries and minefields to Hitler’s conference barracks. Hitler was still shocked and outraged at the treatment meted out to his friend Mussolini. There was little hard news from Rome, but there were reports of anti-Fascist riots. The king and Marshal Badoglio had proclaimed Italy’s continued loyalty to the Axis, but Hitler did not believe them. “We can be clear on one score,” he declaimed to the thickening crowd around the oak conference table. “Traitors that they are, they will of course proclaim their intention of continuing the fight. Of course! But it will be a betrayal.” He smiled contemptuously. “We shall be playing the same game, leading them on, until we suddenly drop like lightning on the whole bag of them and round up the entire gang.”
Rommel could guess why Hitler had sent for him. In his private diary he wrote: “We assume that—despite the proclamations of the king and Badoglio— Italy is going to pull out of the war, or at the very least that the British will undertake further major landings in upper Italy.” That was the nightmare for Hitler: 1,000 miles of Italy separated 70,000 of Germany’s finest troops in Sicily from their home base in the Reich. A leading Fascist who had escaped that day from Rome reported that the new regime would probably announce an armistice with the enemy in eight or ten days, and that the British would probably land as far north as Genoa and Leghorn. That would doom General Hube’s troops in Sicily.
Hitler’s first instinct was to abandon the battlefield in Sicily at once and evacuate his troops to the mainland as the British had at Dunkirk in 1940. They could leave their tanks and heavy equipment behind. “Their pistols are all they need. . . they can make short work of the Italians with pistols too.” He was also strongly tempted to adopt rash expedients—the Third Panzer Division would move to Rome; he would arrest the government, kidnap the king, capture Badoglio, smoke out the Vatican and find out where Mussolini was being held. The situation was not so far lost that an energetic coup by the Nazis could not set things right again, in Hitler’s opinion.
Goebbels agreed, but his diary criticizes Rommel for taking a more moderate line. “Rommel as an experienced soldier is more reserved in his estimate of our possibilities. He would prefer our operation to be prepared at greater length, which would make it more likely to succeed. The Führer puts Rommel in charge of the first steps to be taken by the High Command in Italy. Keitel and Jodl fight tooth and nail against giving Rommel command over our troops in Sicily as well: they don’t want to see him getting too much power and too many troops— they are envious of him.”
Rommel wrote in his own diary, after the argument, “I’m hoping to be sent into Italy soon.”
On July 27 Rommel summarized Hitler’s noon conference thus: “Although there are two Italian armies in upper Italy and the Italians are obviously planning to betray us, it is not politically possible for us to invade yet. But we’re preparing everything, and I have been put in charge of the troop buildup.” Hitler still refused to give the word for German troops to roll southward into Italy. At the 8:30 P.M. conference the argument went on. The thick-skinned and rough-tongued Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen—commander of the Second Air Force in Italy—had now flown in from Rome. In his own secret diary he wrote: “Everybody is very rude about Kesselring. I counterattack. Some of his dispatches are admittedly psychologically tactless, but by and large they are objective and accurate. I identify myself with them. . . . Rommel knows nothing, thank God says nothing, and is just reveling in feelings of revenge against the Italians, whom he hates. Dönitz is moderate and sensible. Everybody else, especially Ribbentrop, just repeats whatever the Führer says.”
The next morning, when Rommel left the Wolf’s Lair for Munich, where he was to set up his operations headquarters, he had Hitler’s top secret instructions for the invasion of Italy in his pocket. His first task—when the High Command gave the word—would be to secure the mountain passes. If the Italians manned their defenses, they were to be blasted out. Rommel would have two infantry divisions (the Forty-fourth and 305th) and the troops of the mountain warfare school at Mittenwald for the job, and three battle groups of Tiger tanks on loan from training units. To avoid provoking the Italians into reaction, kid glove methods were to be used at first. Rommel was forbidden to show his face even in Austria, let alone in Italy; the same went for Alfred Gause and other famous names on Rommel’s staff. Rommel wisecracked that he had been “confined to barracks.” His headquarters was camouflaged under the name “High Command Rehabilitation Unit, Munich.”
That day Rommel was also proved right in urging caution. In Parliament, Winston Churchill announced that the Italians would have to “stew in their own juice.” Hitler relaxed: there would evidently not be an armistice for several days or even weeks. There would be no need for the more drastic expedients that he had prepared. Rommel would have time to infiltrate his troops into northern Italy at a deliberate pace until it would be too late for either the Italians or the British to realize what was happening. He had no sympathy for Italy at all: “Either way, the country’s going to become a battlefield. . . . Far better for us to do our fighting in Italy than at home.” His own initial intention was to occupy a line across northern Italy from Genoa to Rimini, and then flood all of Italy with reliable German units. He would then fight a long, drawn-out campaign, first in Sicily and then withdrawing northward up the “boot,” pausing to defend successive lines drawn across Italy from Cosenza to Taranto, at Salerno, at Cassino and finally along the Apennine mountains. This would give Hitler the respite he needed to restore Nazi Germany’s superiority in fighter aircraft and gun production.
On July 29 Hitler obtained from SS intelligence experts the final proof that the new Italian regime was secretly dealing with the enemy. A radiotelephone conversation across the Atlantic, between Churchill and Roosevelt, was intercepted. Churchill talked about the “imminent armistice.” So Hitler ordered Alarich, the stealthy Nazi invasion of Italy, to begin the next day. The first of Rommel’s units to move in would be the Twenty-sixth Panzer Division. Its secret orders were to occupy positions just north of Rome. Rommel himself briefed the leading battalion commander: “You are to be friendly and amiable toward the Italians. Avoid friction. Tell them we’re in good form, that the big battle in Russia is over and that the Reds took heavy losses. Tell them you’re in a hurry because you’re needed in Sicily!”
The army captain asked, “Suppose they resist?”
“Then negotiate,” said Rommel. “If they attack you, then hit back. Do not use Italian telephone lines. Defuse bridges and viaducts—the vibration of marching troops may set them off. Keep well closed up to the rear, so that Italians can’t push their own units in between.”
It was an unusual feeling for Rommel to send his troops into an operation and be “confined to headquarters” himself, not in the lead. But those were Hitler’s orders. He sweltered in his special train in a forest south of Munich, waiting for reports. He was alert and elated. “One way or another,” he said triumphantly to Lucie in a letter, “Kesselring has had his last fling in Italy!”
In full combat array, his troops marched along the tortuous heights that formed the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy, throwing out patrols ahead, with automatic weapons cocked and at the ready. As the thousands of troops and Tiger tanks of the Twenty-sixth Panzer Division approached, consternation seized the Italian officials on the frontier.
A phone call went to General Gloria, commanding their Thirty-fifth Corps at Bolzano, thirty-five miles away. Gloria phoned Rome, inquiring whether these German troops had permission to cross or not. Italian
railroad officials called up their headquarters in Rome. Italian censors in Venice intercepted the call and phoned the local navy office. The Italian admiralty warned the High Command in Rome—but by the time the news sank in, the panzer division was strung out all along the Brenner Pass and it was too late to react. Rommel’s troops began spending their “Occupation Reichsmarks” on Italian soil. At Bolzano, the largely German populace heard the clatter of tank tracks at one A.M. and turned out in their nightwear to cheer their “liberation” from Italian oppression! General Gloria’s reaction was less enthusiastic. Rommel observed in his diary, “We must be on guard for the Italian attitude to change for the worse at any moment.”
That day, July 31, Hitler’s chief of intelligence, Admiral Canaris, assured Rommel after visiting Italy: “There are no signs whatever that the Italians are plotting to defect. The authorities in Rome have only one desire—to continue the fight with our support.”
Rommel, wisely, did not believe Canaris. He visited General Valentin Feurstein that evening at the Mittenwald mountain warfare school. Feurstein, a stocky, black-moustached officer personally briefed by Hitler for the mission of opening up or securing the Alpine passes, had spent the day in Bolzano. He had talked to Gloria and the Italian officers. “Their barracks are jam-packed,” he exclaimed. “You could raise an entire army corps from those troops. The soldiers’ conduct toward German officers is better than toward their own. They’d be happy to fight on our side and end the war. My own view is that we could take them in on a fifty-fifty basis. Their intermediate officers are quite useless.”
“Because they’ve too little understanding of their own men,” Rommel interjected.
On August 1 the Bavarian and Austrian troops of the Forty-fourth Infantry Division began crossing the frontier. Known traditionally as the Reich grenadier division “Hoch und Deutschmeister,” the Forty-fourth had suppressed the 1848 uprising in Milan. On this new mission, almost a century later, there had been no bloodshed, so far, but now General Gloria violently objected to the unloading of this second German division at Bolzano too. According to Feurstein’s war diary, Rommel ordered him to use whatever force necessary to get his way. “Field Marshal Rommel expands on this as follows: Any resistance to German actions is to be broken by force of arms. The Italian officers, and particularly the corps command and his staff, are to be arrested and brought back northward over the frontier.” On August 3 the crack SS division, the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,” began crossing the Brenner too. Its commander, SS Gruppenführer [lieutenant general] Sepp Dietrich, made a dynamic impression on Rommel—he was full of the special powers bestowed on him by Hitler. Rommel noted with evident approval, “He’s fully prepared to play hell with the Italians to make them dance to his tune.”