by David Irving
“Much work and worry,” the field marshal wrote home on March 27. “Things just aren’t going as I would like, and this means I’ve got to use my elbows, which really takes it out of me.” The fight for control of the panzer divisions was heating up. The High Command was refusing to honor Hitler’s oral promise of March 20—on the contrary, it constantly drew on the panzer divisions in France as a strategic reserve for the war in the east. Authoritative voices disputed the wisdom of Rommel’s plan to locate his tanks right behind the coastline—among them, General Guderian, now Hitler’s chief tank adviser, and the Seventh Army’s General Dollmann. The loudest in opposition to Rommel was Rundstedt’s expert on tanks, General Geyr von Schweppenburg. Small wonder, then, that when this tall, elegant, red-trousered panzer officer first appeared at La Roche-Guyon on March 29, the field marshal lost his temper after a very few minutes and snapped at Geyr in frustration: “Listen, I am an experienced tank commander. You and I do not see eye to eye on anything. I refuse to work with you anymore. I propose to draw the appropriate conclusions.” Geyr, every inch a cavalier, swung a smart salute at him, turned on his heel and marched out—determined never to expose himself to such rudeness from Rommel again. Rommel dictated to Lang a summary for the diary, ending: “Strong differences of opinion, with no positive result.”
The Silent Swabian
MID-APRIL, 1944. After weeks of dry weather the rains have come to France. Rommel stands at the windows of his château room and wonders how many more weeks he has left to prepare for the biggest battle of his life. All Germany depends on him. Hitler has said so.
Late on the fifteenth, an army car drives through the tall wrought iron gates and squelches to a halt at the main door. An unfamiliar officer climbs out into the rain. His bags are carried inside the château to the turret room that is to be his quarters, and he reports to the field marshal.
He is Lieutenant General Speidel, his new chief of staff. Rommel had made the difficult decision a month earlier to release Alfred Gause, who has shared so much of his destiny since July 1941. He values and trusts Gause, but during this furlough at Herrlingen the general and his wife fell out with Lucie in the blameless way that houseguests often do—Gause had once rebuked Hermann Aldinger for arriving late for work in the garden, and Lucie had found Frau Gause getting on her nerves.
Eventually Lucie actually demanded that Rommel replace Gause as his chief of staff, and the field marshal meekly complied, writing her on March 17: “Let’s draw a line underneath it all . . . I am going to. Perhaps G. will find another post. Of course, it’s a tough decision for me to have to change my chief at a time like this.” Rommel had now written privately to Schmundt asking him to give Gause the next available panzer division to command.
Gause’s successor is no ordinary general. At Hans Speidel’s throat Rommel glimpses the Knight’s Cross that Hitler has just personally given him for the Eighth Army’s heroic fighting retreat on the Russian front.
He probably remembers Speidel as the silent fellow Swabian he met in 1915 in the Argonnes forest, and again between the wars in the Thirteenth Württem-berg Infantry Regiment. Speidel was one of two replacements offered to him by the General Staff, with the highest recommendations. Rommel has, as usual, picked the Swabian.
At forty-six, the newcomer is six years younger than Rommel. The field marshal finds this owlish, bespectacled general, with his excellent history degree and polished manners, a congenial change—and a useful complement to his own one-track mind. He is academic, prudent, aesthetic and music loving. Rommel writes to his wife on April 16, “He makes a good, fresh impression. I think I’m going to get on well with him.”
Indirectly, Erwin and Lucie Rommel had between them signed the field marshal’s own death warrant in replacing Gause with Speidel.
By April 1944, Speidel was a general with a secret and with something of a “past” as well. He had been involved ever since Stalingrad in the plans of the opponents to Hitler. It is a fair guess that the anti-Hitler members of the General Staff had assigned him to Rommel only for this reason.
Only one day before his arrival here, he discussed with Strölin, the mayor of Stuttgart, the need to lure Rommel into the plot. Rommel suspected none of this. As he himself wrote in a remarkable private letter months later to Hitler, he trusted Speidel implicitly, frequently leaving him at the château to “mind the store” while he went forward to tour the coastal sectors.
Jodl had pleaded with Speidel at the Berghof to boost Rommel’s morale. “Do what you can to cure him of his bouts of pessimism. He’s suffered from them ever since Africa.” There is more than enough evidence—both in his own writings and in Rommel’s letters home—to prove that Speidel did quite the reverse. He brought immediate dark tidings about the disastrous situation on the Russian front, where the two southern army groups were in full retreat and the Crimea had been lost. The mood in Rommel’s diary changed from the very day of the general’s arrival: “What will later historians have to say about these retreats? And what will history say in passing its verdict on me? If I am successful here, then everybody else will claim all the glory—just as they are already claiming the credit for the defenses and the beach obstacles that I have erected. But if I fail here, then everybody will be after my blood.”
The flak eighty-eight was Rommel’s best hope against British tanks (HANS-ASMUS VON ESEBECK’S NEGATIVES.)
Rommel sits in the roof hatch of his Mammut as it rolls eastward along the Via Balbia (HANS-ASMUS VON ESEBECK’S NEGATIVES.)
’The Desert Fox. Rommel was renowned for his ability to sense the approach of the enemy. (HANS-ASMUS VON ESEBECK’S NEGATIVES.)
Ever since his youth, Rommel was fascinated by motor engines. (HANS-ASMUS VON ESEBECK’S NEGATIVES.)
After his recall to Germany in March 1943, Rommel feared his career was over. Here, uncomfortable in civilian clothes, he lives again with Lucie (center, with Rommel’s sister Helene and Baron von Neurath’s wife). (FROM BARON CONSTANTIN VON NEURATH.)
Rommel used his spare time that spring to review local Hitler Youth units. He was never happier than when working with young men, he once wrote. (FROM BARON CONSTANTIN VON NEURATH.)
Rommel moved into new headquarters in March 1944 at this château in La Roche-Guyon, France. The French owners left the splendid original furnishings in the château for Rommel’s staff to use.
Below, the Hall of Ancestors became the staff’s table tennis room. (FROM HELLMUTH LANG.)
Field Marshal von Rundstedt (right), the Commander in Chief West, visited the château in May 1944. Rommel welcomed him in his elegant study with his Chief of Staff Hans Speidel (facing Rundstedt). (FROM HELLMUTH LANG.)
Speidel had just received this Knight’s Cross from Hitler’s hands when he joined Rommel in April 1944. After the war, Speidel who played a key role in Rommel’s death, appeared with Rommel’s widow at a ceremony at Rommel’s grave; the year was 1949 and Speidel was by then commander of all NATO land forces in Europe (FROM HELLMUTH LANG; ASSOCIATED PRESS.)
Rommel inspects the defenses of France against invasion. Next to him in his powerful Horch automobile is his driver Corporal Daniel, later killed, and behind him are aide Hellmuth Lang and operations officer Hans-Georg von Tempelhoff.
General Feuchtinger shows Rommel his new invention – multiple rocket launchers. But the invasion came before many could be produced. (FROM THE ROMMEL PAPERS.)
Devices developed by Rommel to thwart the Overlord invaders: spikes, steel tetrahedra, and “can openers” to rip out the bottoms of landing craft, and mines to blow them up. Poles were planted in fields (BOTTOM CENTER) to prevent glider landings, but the gliders landed in Normandy (BOTTOM RIGHT) where Rommel’s pole planting had had not made much progress. (FROM HELLMUTH LANG AND U.S. ARMY; GLIDER PHOTO IS BRITISH OFFICIAL PHOTO.)
General Wilhelm Meise was Rommel’s expert in explosives and mines. General Hans von Salmuth (TOP RIGHT), commander of the fifteenth Army barked at Rommel at first, but came to respec
t him. General Erich Marcks (BOTTOM LEFT) , the one legged German corps commander in Normandy, had an ambition to die in battle. Field Marshal Hans von Kluge (BOTTOM RIGHT) replaced Rundstedt, full of an optimism that soon vanished; behind him, in the black Panzer uniform is General Hans Eberbach (ALL FROM HELLMUTH LANG.)
On June 4, 1944, Rommel arrived home from France to celebrate Lucie’s fiftieth birthday. Also present were Manfred, Rommel’s sister Helene and their house guest, Hildegard Kirchheim (in black). Two days later the phone rang: the invasion had begun. (FROM THE ROMMEL FAMILY PAPERS).
Back in France, on July 17, Rommel called on SS Panzer General Sepp Dietrich to discuss Germany’s future. Houses later Rommel’s terrible accident occurred. HELLMUTH LANG.)
Lieutenant Colonel Cesar von Hofacker was sent to enlist Rommel in the anti-Hitler conspiracy. His confession to the Gestapo sealed Rommel’s fate. (PHOTO IN THE AUTHOR’S POSSESSION).
Released from the hospital, his skull still dented and one eye shut, he convalesced with Lucie and Manfred at his villa in Herrlingen. This is one of the last photos of Rommel alive. (PHOTO IN THE AUTHOR’S POSSESSION).
To this house, the villa at Herrlingen, came emissaries on October 14, 1944, to bring to Rommel the edict of Adolf Hitler. General Wilhelm Burgdorf Hitler’s chief adjutant, was in charge of the grim mission; he had a phial of cyanide in his briefcase.’(PHOTO IN THE AUTHORS POSSESSION; U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES).
Rommel on his deathbed in the villa’s smoking room. (PHOTO IN THE AUTHORS POSSESSION).
The state funeral of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel took place as Hitler had promised. The secret of his death was kept until the war was over. (FROM BARON CONSTANTIN VON NEURATH.)
At his forest home, south of Munich, Eberhard Wolfram, a major on Rommel’s personal staff, graphically described to me Speidel’s gloomy influence on the field marshal’s communal mealtimes. “In Rommel’s absence, Speidel took over the table, and his whole conversation revolved only around ‘that asshole at the Berghof,’ meaning Hitler. When I arrived the mood of these table discussions was one of abject defeatism . . . except when Rommel came in. Then the tenor of the discussion changed; nobody dared go so far with their defeatist remarks.”
During these short months of their association, Speidel gained an intellectual grip on the simple, plain-speaking soldier. Rommel stood in obvious awe of him. Once he sent Hellmuth Lang to fetch Speidel, and the general told Lang, “I’ll come when I’m ready” (an attitude that Gause would never have dared adopt). Speidel became known at the château for his phlegm and tranquillity. In a private letter Lang described a further incident on June 18, 1944: “I had the radio on in my anteroom, playing Beethoven’s Ninth rather loud. The door was flung open, and Rommel asked me to switch off ‘that awful noise.’ I switched off—only to hear the same music coming even louder from Speidel’s room.” Rommel shrugged and went back to his study, to suffer Beethoven without further protest.”
A second factor, as unknown to Rommel as the disastrous Enigma leak had been, also dominated his fortunes from now on. An intricate and ingenious Allied deception plan, code-named “Fortitude,” had begun. Its objects were to suggest that the invasion was due as early as May, and that it would hit the Strait of Dover, in the Fifteenth Army’s sector. Even without Speidel, Rommel would have had little chance of seeing through the deception, for Hitler’s intelligence services were well infiltrated with anti-Hitler men. Rommel’s own intelligence officer was an honest, mild-mannered army colonel, Anton Staubwasser, assigned to Rommel because he was an intelligence expert on Britain. Staubwasser had some clerks and two interpreters, but no intelligence sources of his own. He had to rely on data furnished by the General Staff’s Foreign Armies West branch—whose chief was later hanged by the Nazis as a member of the anti-Hitler conspiracy—and by Rundstedt’s much bigger staff. There was virtually no air reconnaissance over England because of the Luftwaffe’s weakness.
Thus the Fortitude planners had a pushover. They fed false reports to Hitler’s intelligence networks that the invasion was imminent. Long before necessary, the British government began stopping or censoring mail, and prohibited even foreign diplomats from leaving (although one, a Swede, was allowed to “slip through”). Civilian travel was restricted. Public buildings were requisitioned as hospitals. A premature bombing offensive began against the German railroads. Nonexistent American forces were “moved” into southeastern England—facing Salmuth’s Fifteenth Army—by faking radio traffic and reports to German agents.
Only Adolf Hitler, “that asshole at the Berghof,” smelled a rat.
On April 6 he said to Jodl: “The whole way that the British are serving all this up to us, it looks phony. This latest news about the restrictions they are ordering, their security clampdown and so on—now you don’t normally go in for all that if you’re really up to something. . . . I can’t help feeling that the whole thing’s going to turn out to be a shameless charade.”
When Hitler was informed of the “troop movements” detected toward southeast England, he grunted: “Now what I ask myself is this: why make such a song and dance about it? We wouldn’t, I guarantee you! And they don’t need to either, do they? They could perfectly well marshal their forces over here [in the southeast], then load them on board and ship them over to here [Normandy]. We’ve no real way of finding out what they’re really up to over there.” A few minutes later, Hitler announced: “I’m in favor of pushing all our forces into here,” and he pointed to the Normandy coastline.
Rommel’s next inspection trip, however, from April 17 to 19, went not to Normandy but again to the Fifteenth Army. This time he took Speidel. Two other cars were filled with his staff, war reporters, and accordions to be handed out to the hardest workers.
He liked to drop in on the lower echelons unawares—one sentry was so flustered by the field marshal’s appearance that he stuttered, “Jawohl, Herr Major” to him. Everywhere the very landscape was changing shape according to Rommel’s orders.
The fields were heaped with stone cairns, or bristled with stakes and poles to keep gliders from landing. The beaches were jungles of barbed wire, wooden beams, concrete artifacts and mines. Everywhere were the skull and crossbone signs warning of minefields—whether fake or real even Rommel could not tell. Of course, there were still infuriating errors: junior officers had seen fit to countermand some of Rommel’s orders; cows were still permitted to graze in some of the dummy minefields; secret fortifications built in a green meadow were camouflaged with old black netting.
Rommel drafted a twenty-two-page manual for all his commanders summarizing all his practical hints. He sent a copy to Hitler, too, and Schmundt wrote back with the Führer’s congratulations—he too was “a practical man,” Schmundt said.
Because he paid them good money, French men and women also joined the labors, volunteering by the thousand to dig, lay bricks, pour concrete or weave rush matting needed to stop the beach obstacles from silting up. “Get the French countryfolk to help erect the obstacles,” he said in a speech to one division, near Le Havre. “Pay them well and promptly for it. Point out that the enemy is least likely to invade where the most obstacles have been erected! The French farmers will be only too glad to line their purses. Have them march out to work singing like the BDM [the League of German Maidens]! Convince them it’s in their own interests. The enemy is already going to have his work cut out to get out of the sea—so the time will come when he tries attacking us from the rear.” On his return he wrote to Lucie: “People here don’t think the enemy’s going to attack much before May. I want it to be as late as possible, because I’ve still got so much that’s of importance in the pipeline.” He was more confident than ever of victory now.
There was still one big flaw. The panzer controversy was still unresolved, and General Geyr’s views as commander of Panzer Group West still prevailed. From the commander of the paratroop corps Rommel had recently learned that the enemy had the capability to set down three divisions of
airborne troops in a space of only ten minutes, probably with large numbers of antitank guns. Geyr predicted that the enemy would attempt a paratroop landing deep inside France, and wanted to hold back all panzer forces to counterattack there. At a heated discussion in Paris on April 10, Rommel heaped scorn on him. “In my view,” he wrote to Jodl, “any strategic airborne landing by the enemy is doomed to disaster sooner or later, provided we succeed in sealing the coast.” He said the same to Schmundt, adding: “This is going to be the war’s most vital battle; the fate of the whole Reich is at stake.” If the panzer divisions reached the coast too late, a second Anzio-like battle of attrition would result: “the worst possible situation for us.” He asked Schmundt to arrange a new meeting for him with the Führer—but much would have happened before Rommel next saw Hitler.