by David Irving
Strölin gathered up his papers and left. His influence on Rommel was nil. The field marshal neither mentioned Strölin—outside of his family—nor saw him again until the last weeks of his life. From all the evidence, it is plain that Rommel was in truth, despite his occasional statements to the contrary, far from accepting that Hitler’s defeat was inevitable. When he met General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the aristocratic military governor of Belgium, in Brussels a few days later, he infuriated that elderly gentleman, an anti-Nazi, with his cheery confidence that he was going to inflict a big defeat on the enemy when they hit the beaches. Besides, field marshals whose whole military reputation is staked on forthcoming victory are unlikely to lend their names to a coup d’état.
He got back to Fontainebleau late on March 3 in driving snow. Ruge also noted in his diary that Rommel was “very cheerful.” Rommel put a call through to ask Lucie how the terrier was settling down. Afterward she wrote: “You’d have loved to see your Ajax when we went on walks these last two days. He comes to heel fabulously. . . . I don’t think he would ever have learned to obey without your drastic teaching methods.”
That was the key to Rommel’s character: in his household, as in his work, obedience was the first commandment. He wrote to Manfred now, “I was delighted to see your attitude to duty and everything else in life. Keep it up and do the name of Rommel proud. . . . Only the man who has learned how to obey-even against his better instincts and convictions—will make a capable officer, and learn how to master the supreme art of leading other men.”
He willingly signed any document proving his own obedience to his Supreme Commander. On March 4, Hitler’s adjutant Schmundt brought one such document to Fontainebleau for him to sign. It was a strange story. “The Führer is furious at the treachery of certain generals who have been captured by the enemy, or deserted to them, at Stalingrad,” explained Schmundt.
The generals had formed themselves into a pro-Soviet committee, Schmundt said, under General Walter von Seydlitz, bearer of one of the most illustrious names in Prussia’s military history, and they were smuggling out seditious letters to top German commanders, urging them to stop fighting, since the war was pointless. Dozens of Hitler’s top generals had already received such letters. Schmundt told Rommel: “Since the battle of Cherkassy we now have proof that Seydlitz’s signature on them is authentic. What matters now is for the Führer to be sure he can trust his field marshals—to know you all stand loyally behind him.” Rundstedt’s signature already embellished Schmundt’s draft manifesto of allegiance to Hitler, dissociating all the field marshals from these traitors. Rommel signed with his usual flourish; after him Kleist, Busch, Manstein and Weichs added their signatures.
Thus we can state with emphasis: at this date, Rommel was still loyal to his Führer. He would play by the rules. There was a small episode the next day, March 5, that showed that. He had gone on a hunt toward Melun, taking Admiral Ruge and General Meise with him. It was sunny, they left their topcoats behind and the thorny bushes dug painfully through their uniforms. After a while they sighted a wild boar, but it vanished before they could shoot; later, they spotted a pig, but that too got away. They stalked through the undergrowth for several hundred yards, and came out into a clearing at about the same time that a big stag strode into the open, majestic and scornful, long enough for them to count the twelve points on its antlers. Meise raised his gun; Ruge had his automatic rifle cocked; but Rommel stood up and waved his Wehrmacht hunting license at them. It ruled quite clearly that stags were not to be shot after February 1. He calmly called out to them, “It’s the closed season,” and left the fine beast to survive.
Closed Season
IF ROMMEL STILL ADMIRED Hitler in early 1944, it was because the Führer had so often proved right in the past and confounded his own generals. But in France Rommel first dared to mistrust Hitler’s judgment—on the crucial issue of precisely where the enemy invasion was to be expected.
Since mid-February Hitler had several times pronounced that the Anglo-American invasion, when it came, would be on the Normandy coast and perhaps in Brittany too, with the strategic objective of capturing Cherbourg harbor. According to Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, this fact was established by documents microfilmed by the SS agent code-named “Cicero,” working in the British embassy in Ankara. “Why on earth should the British have found it necessary to tell their ambassador in Turkey that?” Hitler exclaimed. But they had, and from another document he knew the invasion’s code name, too: Operation Overlord.
This fact was also recorded in Jodl’s diary—but neither Hitler nor the High Command trusted field marshals enough to reveal the source of their knowledge to Rommel. On March 4 Hitler merely repeated his “hunch” at his main war conference, setting the High Command’s teleprinter wires humming: “The Führer . . . considers Normandy and Brittany to be particularly threatened by invasion, because they are very suitable for the creation of beachheads.” He demanded an immediate review of Normandy’s defenses, causing Rommel to set out once again for the bleak and distant Bay of the Seine at eight A.M. on March 6.
To Rommel, the long drive seemed a fool’s errand. But he picked up General Marcks, the corps commander, and pounced on the two divisions holding the Normandy coast—the 711th and 716th Infantry divisions. “Nice meals afterward,” commented Admiral Ruge’s diary. “Omelettes, then coffee with whipped cream. After that we toured the coast and gun sites almost as far as the Orne estuary, and then to Trouville. Beach obstacles are now being built everywhere. Pile driving with water jets is working first class.”
Rommel dined in the officers’ mess, kicked up a fuss about an unfortunate unauthorized trial of his beach obstacles made a week earlier during his absence—a captured 120-ton British landing craft had just smashed through his stake obstacles as if they were matchwood!—and retired early to bed in his hotel room, while two sentries stood guard outside.
He rapidly visited the rest of the sector the next day. Southeast of the Vire, large areas of the country were already flooded. At Quineville he saw a five-mile-long barrier of roller-trestle obstacles blocking the beach. Rommel asked Marcks to pass on his congratulations to the troops. Marcks wrote afterward, “These visits are very strenuous because Rommel is a fanatic and it’s impossible to do too much on the schemes he’s thought up, like the gigantic minefields.” On April 5 the general added further impressions: “Rommel is cantankerous and frequently blows his top—he scares the daylights out of his commanders. The first one that reports to him each morning gets eaten for breakfast; the next ones after that get off lighter.” As Marcks explained to his mother in another letter, “If there’s something he doesn’t like, then all his Swabian pigheaded rudeness comes out.”
From Normandy, the Cherbourg peninsula and Brittany the field marshal’s inspection convoy returned to the permanent command post now built for Army Group B at La Roche-Guyon, an inland village picturesquely sited halfway down the Seine, where the river valley loops northward between Mantes and Vernon. Antiaircraft batteries guarded the surrounding slopes and cliffs, which rose from the valley floor “like tall organ pipes,” in one writer’s vivid descriptive phrase. A tank battalion was exercising in the valley.
As the convoy arrived late on March 9, it was still just light enough to make out the château’s fine outlines. It was the most opulent of all Rommel’s headquarters. It had been built with its back to a cliff face, topped by a half ruined, 900-year-old Norman round tower. His engineers had blasted extra tunnels into the cliff to house the twenty staff officers and eighty other men who now made up Rommel’s army group staff, so that air raids need not disturb them.
That château belonged to the venerable La Rochefoucauld family. Rommel insisted that the family stay. The duchess, a bustling little Danish princess, was always there, as were her daughter Charlotte, a pretty brunette of twenty-one, and her sons. From time to time the duke himself appeared, slightly built, about sixty-five, of unmi
stakable patrician breeding.
Rommel took an instant liking to him. The duke responded (and in consequence was executed by General de Gaulle for collaboration). Rommel lived in a small ground-floor apartment opening onto a rose garden. His study was a lofty ducal hall, draped with priceless tapestries and hung with oil paintings; it was redolent of musty books and centuries of wax polishing. Rommel sat at an inlaid Renaissance desk over which three centuries of historic documents had flowed. He found it all most suitable.
Twice during the coming week, Rommel drove over to General Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army on the Channel coast—the new headquarters was only eighty miles away. The Seventh Army, in Brittany, had now proposed that, since the wooden stakes alone were not going to sink the landing craft, antitank mines should be strapped to them. Rommel adopted the idea at once and issued the necessary orders to the Fifteenth Army too. Again he told everybody that they must expect the enemy invasion to come here, across the Channel. And this emphasis was expressed not only in the records of the units he visited but in his own conferences at his château as well.
On the trail of the Fox another rich documentary source on Rommel’s private beliefs now appeared by chance. The hunt had led to Captain Hellmuth Lang, who replaced Hammermann as Rommel’s personal aide in March 1944. (Rommel had specified to army personnel chief Rudolf Schmundt that the new aide was to be “a major, a panzer officer, highly decorated and a Swabian.” Lang filled the bill except for the rank; he had been promoted after he had won the Knight’s Cross as a tank commander in Russia.)
The mild, bespectacled Lang, now over sixty, greeted me in his four-centuries-old town house in Swabian Gmünd. After a while, Lang took me to see his mother, a lively old lady with as good a memory of events as his, and she displayed her own diary relating to Hellmuth Lang’s actions in 1944.
The seriousness of the search must have impressed itself on her, because an hour later she came back into the room carrying an old cardboard box, marked in pencil: “Hellmuth’s letters on his life and times with Rommel.” It was an invaluable find. But that was only the first find that day. Soon afterward, Hellmuth Lang discovered 100 or more loose sheets of the Rommel diary for 1944—which it had been his job each day to type. I pieced the pages together when I got back to London. Twenty pages were missing. Two months later I found them, 5,000 miles away, in afile box in the archives of The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina.
Outside, spring was rushing color into the Seine valley. Rommel often strolled with Ruge amid the cowslips or went on “armed promenades”—hunts. There was something about the château that made him think back over his career—as though he sensed that it was nearly over. Ruge’s diary is full of the anecdotes the field marshal related, strolling in the romantic gardens or contemplating his favorite view along the valley from a spot beneath two mighty cedars. He talked about Monte Mataiur, about the Maginot Line, and about the sweep forward to El Alamein and the very gates of Alexandria. “Yesterday the Chief again reminisced on his experiences with the Italians,” wrote Lang one day that March. “Now I understand why he always refers to them in such drastic language. Incredible, the difficulties he was up against and the way the treacherous clique around Mussolini tried pulling the rug out from under him while he was still in Africa!”
Here however there were no Italians. Rommel fired everybody with his professional enthusiasm for the coming battle. Lang wrote home his first impressions: “There are no cold feet around here when the field marshal’s around. Of course things do get tough on individuals, but here in the west we have realized that there must be no second thoughts about the coming showdown—even though it’s going to cost a lot of casualties. Even though the war will still be far from won, with the battle in the west the tide is going to turn in our favor.”
In three letters to Lucie and Manfred, the field marshal exuded the same confidence. “Provided we get just a few more weeks to reinforce the defenses,” he was going to win the battle and thus probably decide the outcome of the war. On March 17 he wrote to Lucie, a few hours before leaving to confer with Hitler at Berchtesgaden: “Here in the west we have every confidence that we can make it—but the east must hold out too.”
Hitler had sent a special train to Paris to fetch all the senior generals and admirals from the west to Bavaria. When Rommel reported to the Führer at the Berghof at two P.M. on March 19, he found the villa’s famous silhouette draped in camouflage netting and the mountainside dotted with smoke screen generators to shield Hitler from air raids. There was only a brief ceremony that day: Rundstedt read out the secret manifesto signed by the field marshals and handed it over to Hitler with a flourish. (On Hitler’s orders it was eventually read out to every division and fortress commander in the west, so that everybody knew just where the field marshals’ loyalties lay; and it was published in the Nazi press on October 18.) They were all Heinrich Himmler’s guests for dinner that night.
The next day the scene shifted to a baroque castle a few miles away, at Klessheim. Hitler arrived late, in a driving blizzard, at three P.M. General von Salmuth was appalled by his appearance: “It was an old, bent man with a pallid, unhealthy complexion who came into the room,” he wrote. “He looked weary, exhausted—downright ill.” But he still seemed to have his wits about him, because in his one-hour speech—delivered, according to Rommel’s diary, “with marvelous clarity and sovereign composure”—Hitler again took the view that the enemy would invade Normandy and Brittany, and not the much closer Channel coast.
“Obviously,” Hitler declaimed, “an Anglo-American invasion in the west is going to come. Just how and where nobody knows, and it isn’t possible to speculate. You can’t take shipping concentrations at face value for some kind of clue that their choice has fallen on any particular sector of our long western front from Norway down to the Bay of Biscay. . . . Such concentrations can always be moved or transferred at any time, under cover of bad visibility, and they will obviously be used to dupe us. The most suitable landing areas, and hence those that are in most danger, are the two west coast peninsulas of Cherbourg and Brest: they offer very tempting possibilities for the creation of bridgeheads, which could thereafter be systematically enlarged by the massive use of air power.”
Hitler warmed to his theme. “The enemy’s entire invasion operation must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to survive longer than hours, or at most days, taking Dieppe as an ideal example. Once defeated, the enemy will never again try to invade. Quite apart from their heavy losses, they would need months to organize a fresh attempt. And an invasion failure would also deliver a crushing blow to British and American morale. For one thing, it would prevent Roosevelt from being reelected in the United States—with any luck, he’d finish up in jail somewhere! For another, war weariness would grip Britain even faster and Churchill, already a sick old man with his influence waning, wouldn’t be able to carry through a new invasion operation.”
After that, Hitler showed why defeating the invasion would lead to a total Nazi victory. “The forty-five divisions that we now hold in Europe . . . are vital to the eastern front, and we shall then transfer them there to revolutionize the situation there as soon as we have forced the decision in the west. So the whole outcome of the war depends on each man fighting in the west, and that means the fate of the Reich as well!”
Rommel had not thought of it like that before, and he used this argument several times over the coming weeks. In a way, the entire future of Nazi Germany rested on whether he could win the coming battle. Privately he told Jodl and Hitler that he was confident of destroying the enemy attempt: by the end of April virtually the entire coastline would be saturated with enough obstacles to inflict severe losses on the landing craft. “In my view,” stated Rommel, “the enemy’s not going to succeed in setting foot on dry ground in these sectors.” It was a bold claim, but Rommel backed it with another demand for all the panzer and mechanized forces in the west to be placed under his command; Hitler confidentially a
greed to consider it. He also asked Rommel to inspect the coastal defense work of the Nineteenth and First armies on the Mediterranean and Biscay coasts—causing an outburst from Rundstedt that in that case it was pointless for him to remain Commander in Chief West, since Rommel’s powers were continually expanding.
Tea was served afterward. Hitler sent the stenographers out and summoned Rundstedt, who had not joined the group. The field marshal arrived in a sullen mood, emerged five minutes later and stormed down to the train in Berchtesgaden.
“What’s the point?” he complained—to anybody who would listen. “The Führer wouldn’t let me open my mouth, so I walked out on him.” Rommel got better treatment, and emerged half an hour later with a faint smile on his lips. Outside the door, Hitler’s doctor Theo Morell nudged Tempelhoff: “Congratulations! Evidently you’re now IA [operations officer] to the new C in C West. Rundstedt lasted only five minutes, and your boss managed thirty.” Rundstedt, however, stayed in office, which left the panzer problem unsolved.
For five days after that, Rommel toured the Netherlands and Belgium. The war diary of the Eighty-eighth Corps in Holland records the pith of his instructions at a conference on March 23: “All your forces have got to be committed to the defense of the coastline itself. You won’t be able to fight a mobile battle because of the enemy warships’ gunfire and their air supremacy. You’ve got to make enemy airborne landings inside our fortresses and clusters of strongpoints quite impossible. You must pulverize air-landed troops with your artillery. Bring in the local population to help build defense positions and obstacles.” He wanted everything ready by the end of April. “On no account,” exclaimed Rommel, “must the enemy be allowed to secure a beachhead on the western front.”
In Holland the dikes had been opened everywhere, and seawater was still flooding in. It would be ten years before the farmland would recover from the poisoning by salt water. But, Ruge noted, “The people are quite friendly, amazingly enough.” Almost paradoxically, these Nazi-occupied countries looked forward to the Liberation but hoped that—thanks to Rommel’s efforts—the devastating invasion battle would be shifted elsewhere, into someone else’s country. Besides, there was something magical about Rommel’s name. One war reporter accompanying him wrote this account: “A cool day. We leave the beach and drive back into the narrow streets of this coastal town, through minefields, tank traps—there is only one narrow lane. On the market square the ruins are a ghostly sight in the pale yellow sunlight. As everywhere else, a crowd of men stand idly around, looking curiously at our two cars. A voice exclaims, ‘C’est Rommel,’ and you feel excitement suddenly pulse through the crowd. ‘C’est Rommel!’—In every town that we pass through on our journeys we hear this shout.”