by David Irving
Hitler knows what that means.
Rundstedt wants permission to retreat—permission to slink lamely out of range of the enemy naval guns at first, then out of range of the enemy bombers—and then to the West Wall, on the frontiers of Germany.
That is what embitters Hitler.
His commanders can never see beyond their own immediate theater of war.
They clamor for a “war of movement” although most of the infantry have no motor transport and will be overrun.
Hitler’s strategy is to fight his battles at extreme range from Germany’s cities—in the Balkans, in Russia, Italy and France.
He is trying to buy time, so that he can bring his new weapons into action, the rockets, electric submarines and jet aircraft that only Nazi Germany has yet developed. His commanders seem to know only ways of staving off defeat, of prolonging the agony. Hitler is asking for a chance to fight on to ultimate victory.
This is why he has ordered a new counterattack in Normandy. This is why, on Hitler’s personal orders, 600 British and American prisoners are now herded through streets of spitting, jeering, fist-shaking Parisians from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de l’Est—so the French can see Germany’s enemy in defeat.
Somewhere north of Paris, on the main highway to the frontier, Rommel’s car halts near another car, out of which Rundstedt himself wearily climbs. Rommel’s staff officer, Major Eberhard Wolfram, overhears snatches of their whispered conversation.
“Herr Rundstedt,” says Rommel, “you and I both believe that this war must be stopped now. I intend to make no bones about it when we see the Führer.”
After more whispered remarks, Rommel climbs back into his car and they drive on. The glass partition is up, so his driver cannot hear.
The field marshal begins thinking aloud, then abruptly turns to Major Wolfram. “Listen, this is what I’m going to tell the Führer tomorrow. As I stand here, I regard myself as responsible to the whole German people. I have a lot to answer for, not just as a military commander, and that tells me how I have to act. The political situation is crystal clear: we have the whole world ranged against us, and not the slightest chance of winning. Despite everything, the enemy have won a foothold in the west.” And so Rommel goes on, until they reach Ulm, where they part for the night.
When I visited Wolfram in his home in Bavaria, he told me what happened that night. “I stayed with my wife at the Deutscher Hof Hotel in Ulm,” he said. “I had the maps for the Führer conference with me, and I spread them on the bed, swore my wife to secrecy and told her what I had overheard. She was shocked and burst out: ‘But that’s mutiny!’ Of course she was quite right, and it rather took me aback because I of course was so totally immersed in the defeatist ‘breakfast mood’ at Speidel’s table.”
I had brought with me a copy of Wolfram’s lengthy report, written at the time, on Rommel’s meeting with Hitler, which is in the official records of Army Group B. Wolfram and I went over it, and he told me things he had not thought appropriate to include in that document.
Rommel spent the few night hours at Herrlingen with Lucie and Manfred, whom he had had released from his antiaircraft battery for the day.
They all drove down to Ulm to collect Wolfram in the early morning. Then Rommel bid his family a formal farewell—just in case his coming confrontation led to his arrest. “You may never see me again,” he told Manfred.
Lucie gripped Major Wolfram’s arm as she pleaded, “Herr Wolfram, make sure you bring back my husband safely.”
On the drive down to Berchtesgaden, Rommel said to Wolfram: “I think I ought to have a word first with Goebbels and Himmler.” When they arrived, he did in fact see Goebbels first. He told Goebbels his intentions and said, “I shall urgently need your support.” Goebbels listened shrewdly, nodded once or twice, but said nothing. Rommel was optimistic after that: “I think we’ve won a powerful ally,” he told Wolfram. The major was less sure.
Exactly the same happened with Himmler, the chief of the SS. Rommel was able to quote the harrowing reports and predictions of Himmler’s own SS generals in Normandy—Sepp Dietrich and Paul Hausser. Again Rommel was pleased with the outcome.
The main conference with Hitler began at six P.M. in the great hall of the villa. Hitler, Rommel, Rundstedt and the other military commanders stood on one side of the long table surfaced with red marble; it was covered with war maps. Facing them across the table were the Reich ministers, some diplomats and other officials. The Führer began by passing around air photographs of the damage being inflicted on London by the V-1 flying bombs. Thousands of buildings were being wrecked there every day. He then introduced two young officers from the V-1 catapult regiment in France and had them report to him, a typical theatrical master move—their eagerness could not fail to impress the audience. Rommel and Rundstedt were puzzled to find Field Marshal von Kluge present; he had had an automobile accident many months before and had not held an active command since that time.
Then the drama began. Hitler invited Rommel to speak.
The field marshal cleared his throat. “Mein Führer, I am here as commander of Army Group B. I think it is high time that I—on behalf of the German people to whom I am also answerable—tell you the situation in the west. I should like to begin with our political situation. The entire world is arrayed now against Germany, and this balance of strength—”
Hitler slammed his hand down on the map and interrupted. “Field Marshal, please stick to the military situation.”
Rommel stubbornly continued: “Mein Führer, history demands of me that I should deal first with our overall situation.”
Again Hitler sharply stopped him: “You will deal with your military situation, and nothing else.” Not even Rommel could ignore that, and he complied.
Hitler expressed his disappointment that Rommel and Rundstedt had not been able to counterattack the Americans in the Cherbourg peninsula. As Jodl noted in his private diary, “The Führer explained just what the advantages of such an attack on the Americans would have been. The Führer said it was very painful for him to have to forgo that attack on Cherbourg. Now there’s nothing to do but absorb the present British offensive [at Caen] and prepare our own counterattack there.” Hitler reminded them that victory on the ground would go to whichever army could sustain the highest rate of buildup. Montgomery’s seaborne supplies were far more vulnerable than Rommel’s; so the proper strategy would be to contain the enemy in Normandy, forcing them to waste gasoline and ammunition while at the same time strangling their supply lines.
Hitler turned to Rommel again. This time the field marshal appealed to the others present to state their own views, and looked particularly at Goebbels and Himmler. Both avoided his glance, and an icy silence followed. “Mein Führer,” said Rommel, “I must speak bluntly: I can’t leave here without speaking on the subject of Germany.”
At that Hitler’s voice rang out: “Field Marshal, be so good as to leave the room. I think it would be better that way.”
The conference continued without him. Hitler called in Admiral Dönitz and Reich Marshal Göring. He ordered Göring to use air mines, torpedoes and remote-controlled bombs against Montgomery’s supply routes. “We’ve got to lay mines and still more mines in the Seine bay, with the tenacity of a bulldog. It’s incomparably more effective to sink a ship’s whole cargo than to have to fight the unloaded personnel and materiel separately on land at a later date.” Dönitz was given similar orders. He was to use midget submarines, too, against the invasion fleet. Hitler ordered the Third Air Force commander Hugo Sperrle to sweep the enemy out of France’s skies as soon as his fighter squadrons had been replenished. In fact, Hitler ordered 1,000 brand new fighters sent to France immediately.
“We can nourish the battle only if we manage to get our own supplies through,” he continued. “And that means that the navy, air force and our own domestic economy must turn over every modern truck they have to the army transport convoys.” He also proposed a way of exorcisin
g the scourge of the enemy strafing planes. From Paris all the way forward to Normandy, the roads must be turned into deathtraps for the enemy planes by concealed nests of anti-aircraft guns. He concluded, “Then, if everything goes well, perhaps we can launch a counterattack on the Americans after all.”
Rommel left the Berghof at 9:15 that evening, June 29, 1944. He had seen his Führer for the last time.
It was late the next day before Rommel was back at the château—determined once more to execute Hitler’s will whatever the consequences. On his arrival the news was of bloody fighting for possession of Caen. Rommel had no intention of relinquishing the city yet. The next day he was to explain to General Geyr, once more in command of Panzer Group West, that the Führer’s instructions at the Berghof had been these: “The enemy has been forced to move because of our V weapon operations. What matters now is to wear them down by gunfire and by slinging rapid punches at every opportunity. Caen will be the main pivot of the enemy thrust toward Paris. So we’ve got to pack more and more forces into the line there.”
Sepp Dietrich’s panzer divisions had taken terrible punishment in Montgomery’s attack of June 29; meanwhile, the crucial counterattack had been delayed by enemy fighter-bombers and by artillery and naval gunfire. General Geyr ordered the attack continued during the night. “This is our one big chance,” he explained. By noon the next day the tanks were again taking an incredible punishment from the artillery and ships’ guns, and a depressed General Geyr indicated to the Seventh Army, his superiors, that “in the interests of the troops and of our cause” he intended to submit a candid report on the situation that evening. In the evening he revived the tank assault, but by midnight it had ground to its final halt, well short of its tactical objective. It was the last Nazi counteroffensive in Normandy.
Geyr’s report to his headquarters, when it came, was repeated to Speidel and Rundstedt. It recommended the immediate evacuation of the Caen bridgehead, to enable the Germans to hold a new front line out of range of the enemy ships’ lethal guns. By the time Rommel’s Mercedes drove up to the château steps, Speidel had already approved Geyr’s recommendation. “You are authorized herewith to begin systematic evacuation of Caen North and the bridgehead,” Speidel said, “as the situation demands.”
Rommel dramatically dissented—he was still unwilling to give up the city— and just after midnight on July 1, Speidel had to telephone Geyr that any evacuation of Caen was conditional on the approval of the High Command. When Rommel drove forward to Geyr’s command post at noon, he insisted that the panzer divisions stay where they were, close to the battlefront. The protocol in the Panzer Group’s files shows that the field marshal lectured the unhappy Geyr at some length, conveying to him everything the Führer had told him. In any event, Caen was held for a long time after this.
Rundstedt, to Geyr’s dismay, had forwarded Geyr’s report with his own endorsement to the Berghof. Hitler was enraged. When Rommel got back to the château that evening, July 1, Günther Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of staff, came on the line from Paris almost at once, telling Speidel, in great agitation: “The Führer has flatly forbidden any withdrawal from Caen. The present lines are to be held. All further enemy penetrations are to be stopped by determined defense, or by limited counterattacks.” Despite this admonition, Speidel still instructed Geyr to go ahead with his preparations for the panzer divisions’ withdrawal. From the Berghof, Jodl called Blumentritt and said Geyr’s report lacked the “ice-cold logic” and clarity of thought that the crisis called for. Obviously Geyr had become “infected”—as Jodl put it—by Field Marshals Rommel and von Rundstedt.
Rommel, however, had held firm on the matter of keeping Caen. At ten P.M. he repeated Hitler’s ruling to Geyr—that the line at Caen was to be held. Thus he survived the axe that now fell on the mutineers. At 11:30 P.M. Blumentritt telephoned: “The Führer has ordered the dismissal of General Geyr.” (Fearing that Geyr might defect to the British, Hitler also instructed that he was not to be told until his successor—Hans Eberbach, a Swabian like Rommel—actually took over the Panzer Group.) And later that troubled night Rommel’s fluttering staff learned that a Hitler messenger was already on the way to Paris with a high medal for Rundstedt, and a sealed letter in which the Führer expressed concern about the field marshal’s health. The elderly Rundstedt took the hint and resigned his command in France the next day.
THE TORRID, STUPEFYING heat of the French summer had momentarily broken, and a light drizzle fell after the evening meal on July 2. From the château’s Hall of Ancestors came the sound of Speidel’s staff playing table tennis. Rommel stood at the tall window of his room, talking in subdued tones with Admiral Ruge about the day’s events. The army’s supply situation was catastrophic. Rommel’s artillery expert had just returned with bad news about the ammunition shortages. He needed a minimum of 3,500 tons of supplies each day, but was not getting even one tenth of this. Rundstedt’s old quartermaster general had been sacked, but the newcomer—Colonel Eberhard Finckh—was quite incompetent at supply. (In fact, Finckh had gotten the job only because he was a member of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, but Rommel could not suspect that.) Rommel himself had no control over the other services in France, so although the Luftwaffe had 19,000 tons of truck space and the navy well over 10,000 tons, he was powerless to order them to make some available to the starving ground forces.
To cap it all, as Rommel complained to Ruge, Hitler did not trust him. Hitler doubted that ships’ guns could have sufficed to halt the counteroffensive, and he had asked the German navy to report on the range and ammunition stocks of the enemy ships’ guns in question. The Führer had even ordered Rommel’s generals to count the shell bursts in their vicinities. “We are supposed to believe what the High Command tells us,” Rommel told Ruge, “but they refuse to believe us.”
He had spent the morning in Paris with Rundstedt attending the funeral of General Dollmann. (On Rommel’s orders, the French newspapers described the general’s death as having been “in action.”) Rommel had expected to replace Rundstedt, but Hitler had sprung on him an unpalatable surprise: Field Marshal von Kluge, and not Rommel, would step into Rundstedt’s shoes. Rommel discussed this with Ruge, and after their conversation the admiral wrote in his secret diary: “Rommel is taking the pressure and the mistrust badly.” With Ruge, Rommel had evidently revived his old theme, of the urgent need for an armistice on at least one front. “Cut a deal with either the USSR or the Anglo-Americans,” Ruge’s notes read. “Rommel in favor of settling with the West. But it’s high time for our politicians to act while we have any trump cards at all left in our hands.” He added, “The field marshal says he only wishes the next four weeks were over.”
Soon after Rommel arrived back at the château from Normandy the next afternoon, July 3, Kluge visited him. Nine years older than Rommel and senior to him in rank, Hans von Kluge was a veteran of the Russian front—hard-bitten and uncompromising. He was Prussian, alert and of renowned sagacity. The rumor was that when enemy fighters strafed his car he stayed in it to prove he was no coward. And he was no coward. He was robust and aggressive, and his face radiated the confidence he had soaked up over the last week as Hitler’s guest at the Berghof. He had come to Normandy with a zealous determination to execute Hitler’s instructions to “hold fast at any price.” From Kluge’s smooth, iron-gray hair to his gleaming boots, Rommel took an instant dislike to him.
Kluge’s first words did not help. “The first thing is, you must get accustomed to obeying orders like the rest,” he snapped. Rommel saw a squall blowing up and sent Speidel and Tempelhoff out of the room. In an interrogating manner, Kluge demanded to see the pessimistic reports Rommel claimed to have had from his generals.
Rommel’s jaw sagged. “You seem to forget you are speaking to a field marshal,” he said.
“I’m perfectly well aware of it,” Kluge retorted. “But you have taken very independent positions up to now, and you always got your own way in defiance of your imm
ediate superiors by going over their heads to the Führer.”
“My job is quite clearly defined,” replied Rommel. “I have to defend the coast, and I demand that Commander in Chief West place all the necessary forces and means at my disposal to that end.” He added that on the supplies and logistics side, Kluge had a rich field for endeavor: “Just look at the bungling of your quartermaster!”
Kluge’s response was: “Up to now you haven’t ever really commanded any unit bigger than a division!”
Smarting under this insult, Rommel shouted back: “And you still have to meet the British in battle!”
Kluge told his staff afterward that he had scored more heavily than Rommel in this slandering match. He had certainly made clear to Rommel that he was not to bypass him and deal directly with the Führer. But the Fox still found ways of making his voice heard to Hitler. That same day he dictated a ten-page critique on the Normandy battle so far—claiming in detail that each of his demands both before and after D day had been turned down by Jodl and the High Command: demands for reinforcements in Normandy, for antiaircraft guns and for extensive sea mining along the coast. (It was in many ways a specious document, because the actual records of April and May show that he had placed a very different emphasis on these “demands.”) Rommel obviously saw it as a defense brief, should a court-martial ever be held into these catastrophic events. He addressed one copy to Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant. “I’ve sent it to ‘John the Apostle,’ ” he told Admiral Ruge, chuckling. “He always hands on everything to his boss.” And he sent a copy to Kluge, too, with a covering letter: “The rebuke you made at the beginning of your visit, ‘Now you too will have to learn to carry out orders,’ deeply hurt me. I request you to inform me of your reasons for this rebuke.” Kluge did not deign to reply.
Rundstedt’s unexpected replacement by Kluge had revived the Paris conspirators’ hopes of exploiting Rommel’s name in their coming revolution against Hitler. Kluge was believed to have expressed sympathy with their aims sometime after Stalingrad. Speidel at once informed General von Stülpnagel, linchpin of the conspiracy in Paris, of Rommel’s rough treatment at Hitler’s hands and his awakening interest in a separate peace with the Western powers.