by David Irving
TO ROMMEL, the blackness seemed to last an eternity. He felt only pain, jolting and heat. He was lying on a stretcher, covered with rough bandages. He could not see, but he could feel blood trickling out of his mouth and ears. Soon, half conscious, half dead, he was lifted off the stretcher and bedded down on cushions in a Mercedes with its front seat folded flat.
Somebody, a medical orderly, was holding his bandaged head on his lap. Rommel drifted in and out of consciousness, heard the engine start, felt the car move, caught bits of sentences like “Luftwaffe hospital at Bernay” and “thirty miles yet.” He heard the engine note whine higher and Lang screaming again and again, “Spitfires coming in left!”
“Dive bomber coming in right!”
Again and again the driver braked and swerved off the highway—was it still Corporal Daniel? Rommel lifted his head each time he heard Lang shout and he tried to get up, while the orderly gently held him down. The head pain stabbed him with sudden spasms, his legs kicked at the instrument panel, but then the car halted and urgent hands lifted him onto a stretcher to carry him to the operating room.
Several times he groaned out loud, “My head, my head.” He was being Xrayed, he could feel the cold table and hear hospital sounds. He heard Corporal Daniel’s voice, soft and young, as scissors cut away his blood-soaked tunic: “I must know how my field marshal is. What happened to my car? Don’t cut my clothes. . . . Make sure you don’t cut up my money.” After that, Daniel’s voice trailed into silence, into a coma from which he would never awake.
WHEN ROMMEL HIMSELF recovered consciousness the next day, July 18, he was in a second-floor room of the Luftwaffe hospital at Bernay and Lang was sitting patiently at his master’s bedside. Lang told him that local Frenchmen had swathed his gashed and battered head in strips of cloth, and that Monsieur Marcel Lescene, the pharmacist at Livarot, had injected two ampules of camphorated oil which had probably saved Rommel’s life: it was an old-fashioned but workable way of preventing sudden heart failure.
That same day Rommel won another battle too. His troops defeated Montgomery’s last attempt to stage a strategic breakout from Caen. In the red light of dawn 2,000 British and American bombers had come in from the sea, spread out in a great fan and hurled nearly 8,000 tons of bombs at the French city, including deadly fragmentation devices designed to kill or maim anyone in their blast radius. Two thousand French civilians had died and 1,300 more had been injured, and their city had sunk in ruins. The Sixteenth Luftwaffe and 272nd Infantry divisions had been blotted out in Rommel’s first line, and at 7:45 A.M. Allied tanks had begun to plunge southward into the smoke and settling dust clouds left by the bombardment. These were the vanguard of over 700 tanks assembled by Montgomery to pour through the breach that he was confident of tearing in Rommel’s battle lines.
But this was no ordinary front line. After the first there were a second, a third, a fourth and a fifth line. In the second, some eighty-eights and several of the formidable Tiger tanks had survived. The bombing had not eliminated the third line—infantry-held villages—either. It was late afternoon before the enemy’s boldest tank crews even came near the fourth line—massed guns, high up on Bourguébus ridge south of the shattered city. Here Rommel had emplaced nearly eighty eighty-eights, a dozen even bigger antiaircraft guns, 194 field guns and 272 of the terrifying Nebelwerfer six-barreled rocket launchers—making a total of 1,632 barrels—commanding the battlefield. Montgomery’s intelligence officers had told him nothing about these lines. Behind the ridge the villages were also strongly held by SS infantry. In reserve five miles farther back Rommel had stationed forty-five Panzer Vs and the remnants of the Hitler Jugend Division in two strong battle groups, each with forty tanks.
By evening, with 126 enemy tanks destroyed, the offensive had been halted—far short of its objective at Falaise, short even of the Bourguébus ridge. As the offensive began, Montgomery had issued an exultant announcement to the world’s press; now he had to face the chagrin of withdrawing the Eleventh Armored Division to the river and calling off the attack. Advised by General Omar Bradley to grin and bear it, the British commander snapped: “I’m finding it increasingly difficult to grin.” Since D day, the British had now lost 6,010 killed and the Americans 10,641, and they had fallen weeks behind their battle planning.
Thus, despite the enemy’s crushing use of strategic bombing forces and despite the damaging Enigma leak, Rommel had gained a real victory. It was his last, and it was fitting that it was over his nemesis, Montgomery. At the time, admittedly, the victory was unrecognized. Kluge expected the attack at Caen to be renewed immediately and—without consulting General Speidel—he telephoned the High Command at midnight to insist on the transfer of Schwerin’s 116th Panzer Division to Caen. It had lain fallow on the Channel coast since the spring, preserved by the anti-Hitler plotters for their forthcoming coup d’état. Kluge refused to be blinded by Speidel’s warnings that despite the enemy reinforcements sent to Normandy there were still “fifty-six divisions” waiting in England to launch a second invasion. Thus the specter of “Patton’s army group” had finally been laid. General Jodl approved Kluge’s request a few minutes later, and the Fifteenth Army’s reserves began rolling toward Normandy.
I had been worried during my research about a certain puzzle—the omission of important telephone conversations from Rommel’s army group diary. Speidel himself warned me to use the diary cautiously—he recalled the field marshal regularly saying of an evening, “Well, Speidel, what lies shall we tell the war diary this time?” So I tracked down the lieutenant whose job it had been to compile it—Hans Dümmler. I interviewed him in his large, paneled boardroom in Munich, where he is now president of one of Germany’s most imposing insurance conglomerates. Suave, his face tanned to a leathery brown, and looking twenty years younger than his age, Dümmler at first denied hotly that the diary had been doctored in any way. Then a twinkle came into his eye. “I’ll tell you one phone conversation that I did take down in shorthand, and then tore up. It was the shortest conversation I had ever listened in on. It was on the afternoon of July 20, 1944. Somebody telephoned Speidel from Paris. ‘Hello, Speidel,’ he says. And then just one word: ‘Dead.’ ‘Good-bye,’ says Speidel, and put the phone down.”
On July 18, the day of Montgomery’s failure to breach the Caen line, Colonel Caesar von Hofacker left Berlin for France. In Paris the next day he told his fellow plotters that the assassin Stauffenberg was about to act. Early on the twentieth, the plotters learned that Hitler was going to be killed at about noon.
Colonel Finckh, the Quartermaster West, advised against tipping off Kluge, the Commander in Chief West, in case nothing happened; but Speidel evidently was warned, as his later remarks showed.
Shortly after 12:30 P.M. Stauffenberg duly planted a suitcase bomb in Hitler’s war conference hut in East Prussia. He then escaped and flew back to Berlin. From there he telephoned his associates in Paris. Finckh told Kluge’s chief of staff, Blumentritt, “Herr General, there’s been a Gestapo coup in Berlin, and the Führer has been assassinated.”
About three-thirty, Blumentritt tried to reach Kluge at the château, but Speidel told him that Kluge was on the battlefield and would not return until evening. Speidel asked Blumentritt to come to the château at once. Hofacker and Stülpnagel also hurried to La Roche-Guyon.
In Kluge’s absence, Speidel refused to take decisions. He withdrew into his office, and when his operations officer, Tempelhoff, inquired what he proposed to do now that Hitler was dead, he pleaded that he was too tied up with the Normandy fighting just now. Speidel’s instinct served him well.
The field marshal returned at 6:15 P.M. Speidel told him the news. Kluge too wavered, uncertain whether or not to stop the battle—as the conspirators were urging him to do—in order to do an about-face to fight the Russians. Now he remembered approaches made to him a year before by emissaries from Field Marshal von Witzleben and General Beck. He had sent them packing. “Gentlemen,” he had said, “I
want you to leave me out of your little game.”
Twice now the phone rang for him at the château—anonymous calls from Berlin: “Herr Feldmarschall, you’ve got to make up your mind now.”
Each time Kluge put the instrument down without speaking.
Like Rommel, he had signed that manifesto of allegiance to Hitler in March 1944—he could hardly join a conspiracy now.
At 6:28 P.M. the German radio was interrupted with news of the assassination attempt and the announcement that Hitler had survived: “Apart from minor burns and bruises, the Führer was uninjured.”
Staubwasser, the intelligence officer, innocently rushed word of the radio bulletin to Colonel von Tempelhoff. The colonel waved it aside. “The Führer is dead,” he insisted. “The field marshal, Speidel and I are in the know. It’s been in the cards for some time.”
Several conflicting telegrams and telephone messages now reached Kluge and Speidel. Some insisted that Hitler was alive, others claimed that he was dead. Hofacker and Stülpnagel implored the field marshal to force Hitler’s hand by capitulating in France. Kluge rebuffed them: “If the swine is still alive, my hands are tied. I must obey orders.”
At 8:40 P.M. Jodl’s deputy, General Walter Warlimont, himself telephoned Kluge from Hitler’s headquarters: “This morning a wretched attempt was made on the Führer’s life. The Führer is completely unscathed.”
Kluge hung up, turned to his staff and said unemotionally: “Ja, an assassination attempt that failed.”
Hofacker asked permission now to brief the field marshal more fully on the conspiracy. Kluge nodded, listened quietly, then stood up and absolutely dissociated himself from it. A cold shudder ran down Stülpnagel’s spine as it dawned on him that Hofacker’s claim to have won over both Rommel and Kluge was false. “Herr Feldmarschall,” he exclaimed, “I was under the impression that you were in the picture!”
Kluge shook his head firmly. “Nein,” he replied. “Not an inkling of it.”
Speidel was a passive observer of the tragicomedy. There was nothing else he could do.
A formal dinner was then served to all present. Hofacker left the table after a while and went to Tempelhoff, whom he begged to phone Berlin. “Nobody’s sure what’s happening,” said Hofacker. “You know Stauffenberg personally. Can’t you phone him and find out?”
Surprisingly, Tempelhoff managed to get a line to the War Office. He spoke with his old war academy comrade Colonel Merz von Quirnheim for a few seconds; then the telephone at the other end went dead.
Moments later the door into Tempelhoff’s room burst open, and Hans Dümmler, who had been listening in, writing the war diary, snatched the telephone from Tempelhoff’s hand, “Herr Colonel!” he exclaimed. “Don’t get involved! It’s dynamite!”
After midnight, Hitler himself made a broadcast. His voice was unmistakable, and it was quivering with anger at the outrage. Now there was no doubt at all that the plot had failed.
Not long after, Tempelhoff, listening on his phone extension, overheard Kluge call up his son-in-law, an army doctor in a Paris hospital.
“I recently asked you about a certain item,” said Kluge cryptically. “Can you bring me one at once? . . . I’ll have you picked up by a launch from across the river.”
Kluge had decided that, like General Dollmann, he might need cyanide.
Who Killed Rommel?
DURING THESE ANXIOUS events at the château, Rommel is far away—still at the Luftwaffe hospital at Bernay, thirty miles from the bloodstained and shell-scarred patch of asphalt where his Horch was shot up. The Luftwaffe’s neurosurgical consultant, Professor A. Esch, is treating him. The X rays show that Rommel has sustained a quadruple skull fracture. His survival astonishes the surgeons. One says, “They’re going to have to rewrite all the textbooks after this case.”
The field marshal is a restless, obstinate and disobedient patient. Esch sedates him with morphine, chloral hydrate and barbiturates, and performs lumbar punctures. He records in his treatment notes that the punctures produce a clear fluid with no blood—a good sign. The field marshal suffers no “major motor deficit” and responds satisfactorily to strong sensory stimuli. But a “complete left oculomotor lesion” makes it impossible for him to open or move his left eye, and he is deaf in his left ear.
In his darkened room, however, Rommel can hear the incessant rumble of army trucks on the highway and the wooden clatter of refugee carts. This is enough to tell him that the battle is not going well. He broods ceaselessly on the danger to his troops if the dam finally bursts in Normandy. When Tempelhoff visits him, Rommel cries out: “Bicycles! The troops must get as many bicycles as they can, so they don’t get cut off.”
On July 22 Speidel and Ruge call to pay their respects. As soon as the doctors leave them alone, Rommel swings out of bed and sits up to show how “fit” he now is. Speidel brings him up to date on the battle in the bridgehead. At Caen the British have been checked, although at an appalling cost in German infantry. The Americans captured Saint-Lô on the eighteenth, but so far they have been prevented from gaining a breakthrough there too. Since D day the enemy have lost 2,117 tanks. But Rommel’s forces have lost 2,722 officers and over 110,000 men are killed, missing or injured.
Incredibly, Speidel still insists that a second invasion is imminent. “In Great Britain there are fifty-two divisions still standing by,” he says, “of which about forty-two can be transported to the Continent.” His head swimming with pain, Rommel lies down again, and the visitors are ushered out.
One topic was barely mentioned by Speidel to his chief—the fiasco of the attempt on Hitler’s life two days before. And Rommel’s only comment was: “It’s going to have undreamed-of repercussions.” But when earlier visitors had brought him the first sensational news of the assassination attempt, Hellmuth Lang had seen how Rommel had blanched and expressed his disgust in forceful terms. He had pressed for details with such urgency that the aide was convinced Rommel had known nothing. Never once, even to his most intimate friends, did the field marshal condone what Stauffenberg had attempted, for Rommel had always been Hitler’s man. As Blumentritt later pointed out to Hans Eberbach, “Though Rommel never extolled the Führer, he never strongly condemned him.” When Kluge called on him a few evenings later, Rommel kept on repeating, “Madness. Incredible. Against the Führer! Nobody wanted that.” To Lucie, the field marshal exclaimed as soon as he could dictate a letter, “Coming on top of my accident, the attempt on the Führer’s life has given me a terrific shock. We can thank God that things turned out as well as they did.”
The conspirators had evidently misunderstood Rommel and Kluge. And Sepp Dietrich, who had earlier told Rommel he would put Rommel’s orders ahead of Hitler’s, now spoke his fury at the plot. He angrily commented to Admiral Ruge on July 22 that they could thank the sabotage efforts of the conspirators for the failure of the war machine in Germany. (“I hadn’t thought of that,” Ruge admitted in his diary.)
Rommel’s other staff took a similar line. His engineer general, Wilhelm Meise, wrote to him, “Today we can see things in quite a different light, Herr Feldmarschall—particularly the constant undercutting of your plans by the inadequate supplies provided by the Quartermaster General.” That quartermaster general was Eduard Wagner; he had put a bullet through his head after the assassination attempt failed.
“The swine!” shouted Hitler, learning of Wagner’s treachery. “He did well to shoot himself, otherwise I would have hanged him. In the open countryside of the Ukraine, we have bazookas in abundance where they can’t be used. And in the hedgerows of Normandy where our troops can ward off the enemy’s super-abundance of tanks only with such bazookas, we have none!”
At five A.M. on July 23, a specially modified automobile gently transported Rommel on a stretcher even farther away from Normandy, to the thousand-bed hospital at Le Vésinet just outside Paris. He was put in a small, brightly furnished private room. “I’m in the hospital now and being well looked after,” he dicta
ted to Lucie the next day. “Of course I’ve got to keep quiet until I can be moved home, and that won’t be for another two weeks yet. My left eye’s still gummed up and swollen, but the doctors say it will get better. My head’s still giving me a lot of trouble at night, but I feel very much better in the daytime.”
He continued to be an undisciplined patient, and refused to recognize how serious his injuries in fact were. He repeatedly climbed out of bed, until a surgeon finally brought him a human skull from the pathology department and deliberately battered it in with a hammer: “That’s how bad your skull has been crushed. We know that from the X rays.” For some days after that the field marshal did as he was told.
Every day Admiral Ruge sat at his bedside and read books to him. Rommel whispered to him that he urgently needed to see Hitler, to discuss Germany’s future. “As I see it, our only hope will be to make peace on one front, so that we can commit our entire strength to holding the other,” he told the admiral on July 24. And the next day Ruge wrote this in his secret shorthand: “Rommel is determined to see the Führer and tell him his views about the situation—and about making a separate peace on one front. Someone’s got to tell him.”
Every day the doctors had the same battle with him. Rommel wanted to get out and see Hitler, he wanted to resume command in Normandy before it was too late. But every night he was in extreme pain.
Lang wrote on the twenty-sixth: “Last night he had an appalling headache, probably because of the hot and oppressive weather.” By day Rommel sat impatiently on the edge of his bed, swiping at passing flies with a slipper—but it was difficult to hit them, with only the one eye working. One thing nagged at the back of his mind. The Nazi press had made no announcement of his injury—the whole world still believed he was directing the fighting in France. “Apparently,” Lang suggested in a letter, “Rommel’s name is still being counted on as a military factor.” Rommel himself was less sure—the silence seemed to indicate that the blame for the inevitable collapse was going to be pinned on him. He had received a brief telegram from the Führer: “Accept my best wishes for your further speedy recovery.” But after that, nothing.