by David Irving
Speidel must have put some of these ideas to Rommel on this fateful day, June 11, perhaps as they were driving back from Paris, and he seems to have talked about the Nazi mass extermination atrocities as a powerful argument against Hitler. Later that day, agitatedly pacing the château grounds with Admiral Ruge, Rommel said he thought that unilateral surrender in the west was “the best solution in the present situation,” but he ruled it out. After a while, he tried to look on the bright side: “The strength of our position still lies in the rivalry there is between the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. Hitler has also frequently said that he doesn’t know either what will become of us—but he is absolutely convinced that everything will turn out all right in the end.” Rommel then hinted to the admiral that the Nazi leaders did not have clean hands. He spoke of “massacres” and commented: “I have always deliberately fought clean.”
Ruge responded, “You are the best man that Germany has.” Rommel probably did not grasp what the admiral was getting at.
The news from the bridgeheads was that German troops had just abandoned the city of Carentan—although it was the key to the whole Cherbourg peninsula. Marcks, bitterly disappointed at this setback, drove forward to the Carentan battlefield the next morning. An hour later he was a shattered corpse in a ditch—his wooden leg had kept him from scrambling out of his car fast enough to avoid an enemy air attack. Sick with worry, Rommel wrote to Lucie: “The battle’s not going at all well for us, mainly because of the enemy’s air superiority and the big naval guns. In the air we can only put up 300 to 500 sorties against their 27,000.” (This was an exaggeration.) “I reported to the Führer yesterday. Rundstedt is doing the same. It’s time for politics to come into play. We are expecting the next, perhaps even heavier invasion blow to fall on us somewhere else in a few days’ time. The long-husbanded strength of two world powers is now taking effect against us. It will all be over very quickly.”
On June 12, the day that General Marcks died, Geyr lunched at the château— still ashen-faced from his narrow escape. (Rommel was at the front, visiting General Gerhard von Schwerin’s 116th Panzer Division to warn it to expect a possible new invasion east of Dieppe on the Channel coast.) Geyr asked for a new command posting. Speidel waved the request aside: “I’ve got a special job lined up for you.”
It was not until 1947 that the former General Baron Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg deduced what Speidel had had in mind in June of 1944. By then Geyr was in American captivity and was directing a historical project on the Normandy fighting. One day the Americans brought him together with Speidel—who was by then long free again—at Oberursel, near Frankfurt. Speidel admitted to him, said Geyr, that he had caused two good panzer divisions, the Second and the 116th, to be deliberately withheld from the Normandy fighting on a pretext, in order to use them for the plot against Hitler. In 1947, that accomplishment spoke highly for Speidel and strengthened his credentials as an anti-Nazi. He repeated the boast in his various manuscripts— which I found in drafts in archives at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina, Washington, D.C., and Swabian Gmünd—and in his 1949 memoirs, Invasion 1944. But astonished fellow generals began to query the cryptic claim in the book, and Speidel was beginning to climb rapidly through theually accused—unjustly—of having been a saboteur to the battle on which the fate of his country depended, his influence and usefulness will suffer considerably.”
Count Gerhard von Schwerin, the commander of the 116th Panzer Division, was, like Speidel, an admirer of General Beck, the main anti-Hitler plotter in Berlin. Schwerin had been in Africa with Rommel from the beginning, until he had defied him and been sent packing.
When the enemy invasion of Normandy occurred, Schwerin and his panzer staff were relieved not to be transferred there—on D day, puzzlingly enough, they were shifted instead away from Normandy, to the Channel coast. On their way, as they drove past Rommel’s château, Schwerin halted in a forest nearby and dictated to his secretary, Master Sergeant Gerhard Lademann, a memorandum on Germany’s situation. He considered it hopeless and suggested a change of regime, and he hinted that his own 116th Panzer Division was loyal only to Speidel. Then he had his intelligence officer, Major Arthur Holtermann, take the one-page typed document—of which he had ordered that no copy be made—over to the château and deliver it to Speidel.
From then on Holtermann acted as secret courier between Speidel and Schwerin. Speidel informed Schwerin that the division was being held back as a reserve for use in the planned overthrow of the Hitler regime. Thus, while Rommel was desperately pulling in reinforcements from as far afield as the Russian front and southern France, Schwerin’s 116th Panzer Division remained idle until July 19. (No use could be made by the plotters of the other anti-Hitler panzer division, the Second; on June 12 the High Command intervened and moved it to the Normandy front.)
There seems little doubt as to the authenticity of this account of the 116th, and historians may well care to speculate how far Rommel could have tilted the battle in his favor had he had use of its panzers in Normandy from the start. Quite apart from Speidel’s own earliest writings, the facts are attested by Schwerin himself, by Geyr, by Holtermann—who kept a pocket diary—and by Lademann. All are unanimous on one significant point: they dealt only with Speidel, never with Rommel, on the secret reason for holding the division back.
Among the files of the anti-Hitler resistance I also found this note by Baron Friedrich von Teuchert, a top civil servant on Stülpnagel’s staff, describing a discussion between Speidel and another plotter, Lieutenant Colonel von Hofacker, of what should happen in Paris during an anti-Hitler putsch: “A particular worry was the presence of powerful Waffen SS units. It was arranged that these should be committed to such an extent on the big day that they could not disengage from battle. One reliable division (Schwerin’s panzer division) was being held back, ready to mask Paris.”
Today Count von Schwerin is an old man living in a large farmhouse on the shores of a Bavarian lake. Like Speidel, he did well for himself after the war—he became the architect of the new German army. What vexes him, he told me, is that Speidel will no longer admit that he had withheld the 116th. “No doubt he has his reasons,” said Schwerin darkly.
AT TEN A.M. on June 12, Rommel telephoned Field Marshal Keitel at the Berghof, referred to Rundstedt’s gloomy telegram of the day before and warned that his own views were equally grave. Keitel quieted him: “I’ve already briefed the Führer about it. You’re going to get two panzer divisions from the eastern front.” They were to be the highly-graded Ninth and Tenth SS Panzer divisions.
Meanwhile, Hitler ordered Rommel to counterattack the Normandy bridgehead’s eastern end and destroy the British forces there piecemeal. Rommel had to comply, although privately he saw the greater tactical risks developing at the western end, and he would have preferred to throw his panzer divisions at the ill-experienced American troops there before they could overrun the Cherbourg peninsula. But on June 13 German forces were unable to recapture the town of Carentan, the key to the peninsula, and thus Rommel was faced with a difficult choice: Should he commit his available forces at the western end of the Normandy front to defending the “Fortress Cherbourg,” or to preventing a major American breakthrough southward into France itself? He himself was in no doubt that the latter task was more urgent.
When he spoke to General Blumentritt the next afternoon, June 15, Rommel argued that while a dramatic fighting retreat northward up the peninsula might well delay the enemy’s advance on Cherbourg, it would erode the German forces to a point where not enough would be left to hold the port very long.
Speidel telephoned Max Pemsel at the Seventh Army the next morning, June 16, and told him to begin a partial withdrawal northward. Said Rommel: “It’s time for somebody to take a bold decision. If we try hanging on to everything, we are going to lose the lot.”
Some time later Speidel telephoned Pemsel again: Hitler had forbidden any retrograde movement up the peninsula. Speidel had sat on
this news for an hour, and by this time the retreat had already begun. The change of policy caused an unholy chaos at the Seventh Army’s headquarters. Rommel, on his own authority, allowed General Dollmann to pull some forces out of the peninsula to help block the resulting American breakthrough at Saint-Sauveur to the west.
“If we interpret the Führer’s order literally,” he told Rundstedt over the telephone, “and all our forces in the peninsula stay just where they are, then the enemy will roll northward along completely open roads behind our own troops and reach Cherbourg before the day is out. Our mobile troops must be given freedom of movement.”
To Rommel the crisis seemed to be coming to a head. “It appears dubious whether the gravity of the situation is realized up above,” he wrote to Lucie on June 14, “and whether the proper conclusions are being drawn.” He repeated his demand for the High Command to send somebody to Normandy to see the situation for himself. After a nerve-racking visit to the battlefield that day, he observed: “Was up front again, the situation’s not getting any better. We must be prepared for the worst. The troops—SS and army alike—are fighting with extreme courage but the balance of strength is remorselessly tilting against us every day.”
That night at the château, Ruge could see how depressed and thoughtful Rommel was. The admiral went for a stroll in the grounds with him, and repeated some of the things that Speidel had whispered to him during their table tennis game after dinner. A few hours later, Rommel wrote to Lucie a candid admission of defeat: “You can probably imagine the kind of difficult decisions we shall soon be facing—and you’ll recall what I told you in November 1942.” That was when he had hinted to her in Rome that he might have to approach the British for an armistice.
HOW EASY THE decisions would have been for Rommel and Rundstedt if they did not have to fear at any moment the imminent invasion of the Channel coast by “General Patton’s army group.” The Fifteenth Army could have been stripped of its infantry and those troops sent to the Normandy bridgehead. The panzer divisions could be pulled out of their purely defensive role and redeployed for a massive counterattack. But in Berlin Colonel von Roenne still refused to abandon the view that a killer left hook was about to be launched by Patton directly across the English Channel. The Luftwaffe strongly challenged this view, pointing out that the enemy were packing all their available tactical air force units into Normandy. Rundstedt’s intelligence officer, Meyer-Detring, also called Roenne’s attention to the fact that the enemy’s best combat divisions had all already turned up there. But Roenne remained adamant. On June 15 he assessed Patton’s force at twenty-five divisions.
Rundstedt’s operations officer, Bodo Zimmermann, phoned his intelligence officer and said anxiously, “We’ve got to face up to this question squarely and, if need be, pull out even more forces from sectors farther up.”
This brought a loud protest from the château. Staubwasser, Speidel’s intelligence man, phoned Meyer-Detring. “I hear that the view now gaining ground,” he said, “is that we must start ruthlessly bringing in all available forces as there’s unlikely to be a second invasion before August. Who says so?”
Meyer-Detring explained the logic: “The enemy have already committed their most experienced units. We’ve got to take our courage in both hands. We can’t keep on being led up the garden path by a theoretical risk until August!”
The next day, June 16, the skies over the château were obscured by low clouds and drizzle. Admiral Friedrich Ruge, Rommel’s naval aide, darkly reflected in his diary: “Every day one asks: how long can this go on?”
Hitler correctly guessed that Rommel was now in much the same mood as had prompted his retreat from El Alamein, and he decided to intervene in person. Rommel wanted someone from the High Command to come to see for himself? Hitler announced to his astounded staff that he would fly to France in person. Nine o’clock the next morning, June 17, therefore, found him awaiting Rundstedt, Rommel and their two chiefs of staff at the reserve Führer’s headquarters built near Soissons, 300 miles from Normandy. The cluster of carefully camouflaged bunkers had well-furnished and carpeted workrooms, in one of which the dramatic conference took place. The field marshals politely stood while Hitler sat on a low wooden stool, absently fingering his metal-rimmed spectacles or marking symbols on the map with a colored pencil selected from the bunch held in his left hand.
Rommel briefed Hitler first, concealing nothing. The infantry divisions were melting away like snow in a desert sun. Supplies and reinforcements were not getting through. He cited the debilitating effect of the enemy air attacks and naval bombardment, but insisted that every man who survived was fighting “like the devil”; his seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds were acting like veterans—“like young tigers.” But Montgomery, said Rommel, was using the same brute force in Normandy as he had in North Africa: saturation bombardments were followed up by a relentless onslaught of sophisticated weapons and armored vehicles.
Then Rundstedt spoke. He asked Hitler outright to abandon the costly rigid defense of the whole Cherbourg peninsula, and to allow an orderly withdrawal into the port and fortress instead. Hitler was in a mood to take realistic decisions, and agreed without further argument—knowing this would inevitably allow the Americans to sever the peninsula complete. But he ordered the northern battle group to fight for every inch as it fell back slowly northward into the fortress, and he directed Rommel to nominate a “particularly capable” commandant for Cherbourg. “The fortress is to hold out as long as possible—if possible until about mid-July.”
These few hours with Hitler cast a powerful new spell on Rommel. (Lang shrewdly observed in a letter home that the field marshal “cannot escape the Führer’s influence.”) It was no coincidence that Hitler had also invited the commander of the V-weapon corps to report to him in the field marshals’ presence at Soissons. For weeks Rommel had been demanding an early opening of the V weapon attack on London. Now he learned that 1,000 of the pilotless V-1 flying bombs, each with a devastating one-ton warhead, had been launched at London over the last few days. With a smirk, Hitler showed Rommel reports on the destruction from German agents in England. To cheer up General Dollmann back in Normandy, Rommel telephoned him from the bunker. “The effects of the V-1 bombardment,” he said, “are very considerable after all.”
Yet there was one brief remark by Rommel that showed that his nagging doubts persisted. After klaxons sounded an air raid warning, the officers had trooped into Hitler’s air raid shelter, and when Rommel noticed that the stenographers were temporarily missing, he ventured to put his cards on the table and hinted to Hitler—as Blumentritt, a neutral and reliable witness, recalled in January 1946—“that politics would soon have to come into play, otherwise the situation in the west would soon deteriorate too far for salvaging.” (Jodl and Speidel also remembered some such phrase.)
Hitler made a frosty retort: “That is a matter which is no concern of yours. You must leave that to me.” Rommel’s words must have nettled Hitler deeply, because he quoted them to the two generals who replaced Blumentritt and Speidel many weeks later. Hitler told them that his reply had been: “The time isn’t ripe for a political decision yet.” (In August 1944, he amplified this remark: “I believe that I’ve shown adequately enough in my time that I’m capable of making political capital too. But to hope for a favorable political opportunity to arise at a time of grave military setbacks is obviously infantile and naïve. Such opportunities may indeed occur—but not until you have achieved some renewed victory.”)
By the time the all clear sounded, the worst Normandy crisis had passed in any case. When Rommel phoned Dollmann again to instruct him to begin the fighting withdrawal into Cherbourg, the Seventh Army commander proudly announced that the Americans’ three-day attempt at smashing through to the road junction at Saint-Lô had been thwarted. They had been routed and had taken heavy casualties—the body count in one sector alone was 1,000 Americans, and there were hundreds of prisoners. Rommel instructed that the c
orpses at Saint-Lô were to be thoroughly searched for documents useful for propaganda purposes. On this battlefield, Rommel learned, American troops had begged the Nazis for doctors to tend their injured. The Germans had sent over medics, under white flags, and the Americans had released German prisoners out of gratitude.
IT WAS A NEW Rommel, buoyant and confident, who returned to the château. Speidel was grimly silent at his side. To Lucie, Rommel wrote: “I’m looking forward to the future with much less anxiety than one week ago. The V-weapon offensive has brought us a lot of relief. . . . A quick enemy breakthrough toward Paris is now barely possible. We’ve a lot of stuff coming up. The Führer was very cordial and in a good humor. He realizes the seriousness of the situation.”
In short, Rommel was in the familiar state of post-Hitler hypnosis. Admiral Ruge wrote in his secret diary: “Rommel is back again. Went for a stroll with me afterward. The ‘underwear’ inquiry has not been mentioned, there have been no reproaches, Rommel visibly relieved. Stacks of bonbons on account of our counteroffensive. Führer very optimistic, calm, sees situation differently from us. He must have downright magnetism.”
General Speidel was frustrated and bitter at the change in the field marshal, fearing that Rommel’s optimism would make him resistant to his overtures. To his plotter colleagues Speidel mockingly described the Führer at Soissons as “aging, stooping and increasingly incoherent”—a dictator whose lunch consisted of a huge mound of rice, three liqueur glasses of multicolored medicines, and a variety of pills. Speidel had noted down certain solecisms of Hitler’s, and read them out to his staff amid loud guffaws that evening. “Don’t speak of Normandy as ‘the enemy’s bridgehead,’ ” mimicked Speidel, “but as ‘the last piece of enemy-occupied France’!” And, “The enemy won’t last out the summer!”