The Trail of the Fox

by David Irving

  Speidel had conceived a technical method of surreptitiously contacting the Americans. The Americans had startled the Nazis by releasing eight German Red Cross nurses captured in Cherbourg and allowing them back through the lines. Perhaps, thought Speidel, one or more could return carrying a letter from Rommel? Speidel’s staff telephoned Paris: “Are we permitted to radio thanks to the Americans for treating the nurses so decently?”

  Kluge’s staff flatly forbade it: “Just because they observe international law for once, that’s no reason to go thanking them for it!”

  Still, Speidel evidently discussed his ideas with Rommel because after supper on that day, July 3, the field marshal cryptically said to Admiral Ruge, “I’m going to have to lend them my name. But my name alone isn’t going to be enough to see things through.”

  The next morning he set off early in drizzling rain for Rouen—where he was expecting “Patton’s army group” to start its invasion any day now. On the way he spoke in a low voice to Ruge about the need to make an armistice offer to the British and Americans.

  The question was, how would they react if Rommel made such an offer? “All the efforts of my troops have been for naught!” he said, and groaned. Ruge softly contradicted him. In 1918, too, everything had seemed helpless, but it was precisely the world’s vast respect for the qualities of the German soldier that had speeded Germany’s rebirth. “The same respect is there today, Herr Feldmarschall. And they particularly respect you.”

  Over the next days, Rommel very cautiously sounded out his commanders, while ostensibly discussing the Normandy operations. On July 5 he conferred with Geyr’s successor, General Hans Eberbach—a cheerful, plucky Swabian, whose Panzer Group West was the main defense force at Caen. Rommel admitted to Eberbach that there were a lot of factors still in their favor. Montgomery was proceeding with excessive caution, and his divisions still did not actually outnumber Rommel’s; moreover the new German tanks like the Panther and Tiger were much better than the enemy’s. “And,” said Rommel, “I’ve seen a lot of strange missile-launching sites that show we have more than just the V-1 up our sleeve.” But Montgomery had a huge materiel and air superiority, Rommel went on, that outweighed all these factors. So in Rommel’s view they could only keep fighting now “to obtain peace terms that are not too harsh.”

  In all his private talks, Rommel heaped blame for the plight of his forces upon the High Command and General Jodl. But ironically his own staff deserved far more blame, for they continued to lead him to expect a second invasion. All his decisions were hamstrung by this fear. “You’ve got to hold two panzer divisions to be switched north if there’s a new invasion, or to the Seventh Army if there’s a big breakthrough there,” he told Eberbach. Would Rommel have regarded a Nazi defeat in France as so inevitable if Speidel’s staff were not still exaggerating the enemy’s waiting divisions in England fivefold at this time? To Rommel, everything depended on smashing “Patton’s army group” when it landed.

  Meanwhile, across the foot of the Cherbourg peninsula American pressure had suddenly built up against Rommel’s troops, starting early on July 3. But the difficult terrain of valleys, alluvial swamps and thickly wooded hills, coupled with Hitler’s order to yield not an inch, made the going for the enemy very tough, and after a few days their offensive bogged down. Rommel sent Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr Division across to a new position northwest of Saint-Lô on July 7—this time heeding Seventh Army warnings that the American commanders were proving much more adept at mobile warfare than the British.

  Rommel still held the strong bridgehead west of the river Orne at Caen: one month after D day, the British had still not captured their “Poland.” But on the seventh they began a savage new attempt, opening with a heavy bombardment on the defensive positions. Ships’ guns and field artillery poured 80,000 shells into Rommel’s troops that night, and in a forty-minute raid starting at 9:50 P.M., at Montgomery’s personal request, the RAF’s strategic bombers thundered 2,560 tons of explosives into the medieval city. The Sixteenth Luftwaffe Field Division, holding the northern suburbs of Caen, was badly shaken and suffered severe officer casualties when the British ground assault began at 4:20 A.M. But Kurt Meyer’s young Twelfth SS Panzer Division—average age only eighteen and a half years—crawled out of the ruins, salvaged what guns and tanks it could, and fought a spectacular defensive battle in which no less than 103 British tanks were destroyed. They told Rommel that with their handful of Tigers they had sent the enemy “running for their lives.”

  The proud French city itself had been wiped out. Eberbach later described the scene: “Caen was just a heap of rubble and virtually impassable after that, with the citizens laboring to recover their dead and injured with admirable courage.” The craters and wreckage barred the British tanks for a whole day, and when they finally pushed on through to the river, the enemy found that Rommel’s troops had blown the bridges and were already reestablished in depth along the other bank.

  Rommel rightly claimed this as a tactical victory, but to repeat it he knew he would need far more ammunition transported to the front. As General Alfred Gause, Rommel’s old colleague from Africa and now Eberbach’s chief of staff at Panzer Group West, pointed out on July 10: “By a great effort we just managed to shoot off 4,500 shells. Our troops’ morale is high, but courage alone won’t be enough against the enemy’s sheer weight of metal. Even our First World War veterans say they’ve never known anything like it. The enemy make up for their own poor morale by shelling and bombing.”

  Rommel had the ammunition—but it was back in Germany. The railroads were crippled by bombing. The navy and Luftwaffe refused to lend him their trucks. He had ordered France’s neglected inland waterways restored at top speed, and barges were now chugging forward to Normandy with big loads of gasoline and ammunition; miraculously the enemy had still not spotted Rommel’s ruse. But the new Quartermaster West, Colonel Finckh, lacked any kind of initiative—he had just twiddled his thumbs for the last ten days, according to Ruge’s diary.

  A black comedy—which incidentally proves Rommel’s ignorance of Speidel’s plotting—ensued. On the eighth he had sent the veteran general Friedrich Dihm to find out what was snagging the new waterways system. When he heard Dihm’s pungent criticism of Finckh’s bungling and lethargy, Rommel “hit the roof” and, noted Ruge, the agitated Hans Speidel on July 11 “had his work cut out persuading Rommel not to take the whole matter up with Kluge,” Finckh’s superior. Speidel, of course, knew what Rommel did not—that the colonel had been sent to Paris only as a prop for the anti-Hitler plot. The assassin-elect, Stauffenberg, had briefed Finckh on June 23 before Finckh left for France. Stauffenberg had scathingly told him: “You know, Finckh, we don’t have any real field marshals left. Whatever the Führer orders, they all shit in their pants and nobody dares speak up against him.” (Finckh later admitted this to the Gestapo under interrogation.)

  Rommel had spent the Saturday evening of July 8 at the Caen battlefront. Twice he visited the Panzer Group’s headquarters, arranging with Gause and then Eberbach to haul out their heavy guns and regroup them in depth to choke off any enemy penetration. He drove back to the château, dead tired, toward midnight. Speidel had spent the day in Paris, plotting with the military governor of France, Stülpnagel. Together, Speidel and Stülpnagel decided that Rommel had to be won over—now or never. They therefore arranged a meeting for Rommel at the château the next day with Stülpnagel’s adjutant Caesar von Hofacker, the eloquent and debonair dynamo of the conspiracy in Paris. It was to prove a milestone in the field marshal’s life—or, perhaps, a tombstone.

  The mood at the château the next morning, Sunday, was grim. The breakfast table talk revolved around a new High Command request to Army Group B to suggest an operation capable of wiping out the enemy bridgehead in Normandy. Speidel, who in his latest report to the High Command still insisted that “over sixty” enemy divisions were standing by in Britain—against even Roenne’s fictitious estimate of forty-five and
a true figure of only twelve—guffawed. “Let’s draw up a brilliant plan with lots of arrows,” he said, “making them as pointed as possible. No need for it to be feasible!” He now openly dared to make such remarks in Rommel’s presence.

  The field marshal gloomily echoed this sarcasm. “If we plan to attack the British at the eastern end, then we’ll only be told to attack the Americans instead,” he said. “And as soon as we finish regrouping for that, they’ll change their minds all over again.” (Ruge wrote these remarks down in his shorthand diary.)

  The telephone calls logged that day, July 9, at the château spelled out the crisis at Caen. Rommel told General Blumentritt, Kluge’s chief of staff: “Leave the High Command in no doubt whatsoever that we won’t be able to hold the present lines if the enemy attack again in the same strength as yesterday.” At 11:40 A.M. Gause came on the line from the battlefield: “At this moment our positions are under saturation shelling.” At 3:15 P.M. he again telephoned: “The enemy are already claiming to have reached Caen city center.” At 7:35 P.M. Speidel phoned Gause back: “To prevent any enemy breakthrough across the Orne at Caen, you are to move forward the First SS Panzer Division [the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler] and commit it immediately.” (This also suited his political plan, namely to tie up all the loyal SS troops inextricably before the anti-Hitler coup.) Rommel took the phone, and spoke to General Eberbach in person: “We’ve got to stop the enemy breaking through at Caen at all costs. Use the First SS Panzer Division for this.”

  All this meant one thing: Rommel’s mind was elsewhere when Speidel ushered in a tall, handsome lieutenant colonel in Luftwaffe uniform, Caesar von Hofacker. Speidel tactfully left them alone. The field marshal brusquely inquired, “Now, what is it that you have to tell me?” and the fateful interview with Stülpnagel’s adjutant began.

  No one knows definitely what was said. Reconstructing their discussion is difficult, since the Gestapo interrogations of Hofacker are missing. Perhaps they were destroyed on Hitler’s orders, to preserve Rommel’s reputation; alternatively, they may have been removed as a part of a postwar American initiative to sanitize the Nazi files of key documents relating to senior NATO generals like Speidel before the files were given back to West Germany. A National Archives official in Washington indicated to me that certain collections of files were laundered like this in the 1950s. Also, unlike other People’s Court records, the trial of Hofacker in late August 1944 is not in the East German archives. In short, I have drawn blanks everywhere.

  Some conclusions, however, can be drawn from secondary sources. Hofacker did the talking while Rommel merely listened. The colonel made no reference to a specific opposition movement—let alone any assassination. They discussed the war’s progress in general terms.

  The secondary sources are these: Speidel related much of this to the Gestapo. His interrogations, like Hofacker’s, have vanished from the files, but the Gestapo’s chief inquisitor, Dr. Georg Kiessel, wrote about them when he himself was in a prison cell: “Hofacker spoke about half an hour with Rommel, explained that the situation called for swift action and that if the Führer refused to act then he must be coerced. There was no talk of an assassination.”

  Afterward, wrote Kiessel—who can have learned this only from Speidel—the field marshal took Speidel for a walk in the château grounds and dismissed any idea of coercing Hitler as quite out of the question. “I’ll go and see the Führer quite soon,” suggested Rommel, “and ask his permission for a meeting with Field Marshal Montgomery. I’m certain that Montgomery won’t deny me that—as one old rival to another. And then I’ll persuade him to agitate in Britain for a joint campaign with us against Russia.”

  The interview left Rommel unchanged and unimpressed—just as after Mayor Strölin’s approach in February 1944. He never saw the colonel again, and all the indications are that he forgot him. But Hofacker did not forget.

  He drove back to Paris, fast, dashed triumphantly into his rooms at the Hôtel Royal Monceau and said to his fellow conspirator Baron Gotthard von Falkenhausen, “I’ve just spent the most interesting hour of my life. I put all my cards on the table—I told the field marshal everything!”

  Hofacker was a romantic, an impetuous dreamer. Over the next hours, his recountings of the interview multiplied the scale of his achievement every time he described it. He told Baron Friedrich von Teuchert, another civil servant on Stülpnagel’s staff, “I was far more successful than I hoped. Rommel can scarcely be restrained, he wants to lash out at once. Even if the plot in the Reich fails!” And he told Stülpnagel: “Rommel has placed himself completely at our disposal.” Unwittingly, the field marshal was the toast of the Paris plotters that night. (Teuchert and Falkenhausen survived to write their recollections of all this just after the war ended.) Hofacker asked Teuchert that same night to draft a letter for Rommel to smuggle somehow through to Montgomery, offering surrender. Teuchert delegated the job to Stülpnagel’s legal adviser, Walter Bargatzky (who also wrote his recollections). Bargatzky had the letter ready before dawn. Rommel never saw it.

  The next morning Hofacker hurried off to Berlin. Dr. Elmar Michel, another of Stülpnagel’s legion of conspirators, has described how he drove the colonel from Paris to the railroad at Metz. Hofacker talked all the time about the plan to assassinate Hitler, Göring and Himmler at a war conference. “Stülpnagel has sent me to Berlin to ask them to act immediately,” Hofacker said in a furtive whisper—although they were quite alone in the car. “I’ve briefed Rommel. He’s placed himself wholly at our disposal and says he’s willing to lead the armistice talks with the Western powers.”

  Michel nodded vigorously, without taking his eyes off the road, and replied: “We need a personality like Rommel if our revolution is to succeed without splitting the whole nation!”

  These were significant utterances indeed. Hofacker had also spoken with Field Marshal von Kluge—and Kluge asked two days later for a word with one or another of the German nurses who had been in contact with the Americans in Cherbourg. (Blumentritt phoned Meyer-Detring to ask where the nurses were.) Obviously Kluge was exploring possible postal channels to the enemy.

  In Berlin, Hofacker met his cousin, Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg, on the eleventh and told him of his triumph at the château. Stauffenberg, a dashing man in his forties, had been chosen as the assassin, although he was scarcely agile; he had been severely maimed by a mine in Tunisia. Hofacker claimed that the western front would collapse within six weeks. He then saw Mayor Carl Goerdeler, the civilian head of the plot, and advised him that Rommel had been won. On July 16, Stauffenberg told his assembled conspirators that they now had the western commanders with them. “They will cease hostilities on their own initiative,” he said, “withdraw our troops to the West Wall, and take steps to launch a joint offensive by both the Western powers and Germany against the Soviet Union.” (The Gestapo learned all this from their inquiries.)

  Hofacker also sent a Luftwaffe general, Karl Barsewisch, to inform General Heinz Guderian in East Prussia that the “field marshals in the west” were planning to surrender and that a coup against Hitler was imminent. Guderian stayed well clear—he hated Kluge and was undecided about Rommel. In fact, he left discreetly for the country estate that the Führer had just given him, and waited to see what happened.

  Haunted by the specter of defeat, over the next few days Rommel remained undecided on how to act. He had his hands full with the continuing battle. He drove to the battlefields and met his commanders, but he hesitated to speak bluntly about the future.

  Now the Americans resumed their offensive southward out of the Cherbourg peninsula. On July 11 their artillery delivered an unprecedented weight of fire on the German paratroops defending the vital Saint-Lô crossroads, and this was followed by a big infantry attack. The Germans fought well but took heavy casualties—in some sectors all the defenders were either dead or injured. After supper that night Admiral Ruge wrote, “The field marshal came and joined us. After Speidel left, he spoke
very gravely about our situation. There’s a breakthrough threatening on our left flank—our divisions are just burning out.”

  At breakfast the next day Rommel said absently: “You can’t keep basing your actions on wishful thinking. Only on sober, harsh reality.” The reality that day was that the paratroops were down to only quarter strength, and the Americans had set up loudspeakers announcing that the attack on Saint-Lô was about to resume, inviting the paratroops to desert.

  Rommel could see no way out, conscious as he was of his oath of allegiance to the Führer. Since D day, he had lost 97,000 men, including 2,360 officers, but he had received only 6,000 replacements. He had lost 225 tanks, and had been given only seventeen. The raw infantry divisions now arriving were no match for the mass enemy attacks launched after hours of air and artillery bombardment. The enemy’s air attack on the transport system had reduced the supply of ammunition to a trickle. He dared not weaken the Fifteenth Army’s sector to transfer significant forces into Normandy; but the Seventh Army now holding off the American offensive urgently needed at least two fresh infantry divisions. Admiral Ruge challenged Rommel early on the twelfth as to when General Jodl of the High Command would actually come and see things for himself. Rommel replied, “I’ve been forbidden to telephone anybody anymore. Kluge will have to do it.”

  Kluge, Commander in Chief West and still Rommel’s superior, came to the château later that day. Gone was his dominating and arrogant manner. A bleak, hangdog air had replaced the cheerful confidence he had brought from Hitler’s Berghof a week before. He had deteriorated visibly. Rommel pointed to the breakout now threatening hourly at Saint-Lô. The Seventh Army had to get reinforcements from somewhere. Kluge evidently asked Rommel to furnish him with a written estimate of their prospects. After leaving the château, he telephoned Jodl: “I want to stress once again that I’m no pessimist—but in my view the situation couldn’t be grimmer.”