Hitler's Commanders (20 page)

Hugo Sperrle left The Hague a disgusted man. As he had foreseen, the Luftwaffe was defeated over the skies of London. In October, Goering seized on the pretext of deteriorating weather to call off daylight operations over the United Kingdom. Great Britain remained in the war, and the Luftwaffe suffered its first major defeat.

It was clear that Goering and Kesselring were wrong in changing their tactics, but was Sperrle’s assessment of the situation correct? It would appear so. After the war, Churchill wrote:

If the enemy had persisted in heavy attacks against the adjacent sectors and damaged their operations rooms or telephone communications, the whole intricate organization of the Fighter Command might have been broken down. This would have meant not merely the maltreatment of London, but the loss to us of the perfected control of our own air in the decisive area. It was therefore with a sense of relief that Fighter Command felt the German attack turn on to London on September 7, and concluded that the enemy had changed his plan. Goering should certainly have persevered against the airfields, on whose organization and combination the whole fighting power of our air force at this moment depended . . . he made a foolish mistake.
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Second Air Fleet left France for Poland in May 1941, and Field Marshal Sperrle became the sole air fleet commander on the Western Front. There was little left to command, however. Of the 44 bomber wings that had attacked Britain in August, only four remained. A month later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Sperrle was now commanding what amounted to a backwater theater of operations.

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The decline of Hugo Sperrle can be dated from July 1940, when he transferred his headquarters to Paris and took up residence at the Palais du Luxembourg, the former palace of Marie de Medici.
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Prior to this, Lieutenant General Karl Veith described him as “very unpretentious,” but now “gradually everything went to his head.”
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The brewer’s son was corrupted by the debauchery of Paris. He became addicted to laziness and luxurious living. Munitions Minister Albert Speer later commented, “The Field Marshal’s craving for luxury and public display ran a close second to that of his superior Goering; he was also his match in corpulence.”
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As early as September 1, 1940, Sperrle was seen in the company of Field Marshal Milch, enjoying life in the gambling casinos of Deauville, where Sperrle had established a command post, despite its lack of military value. Field Marshal Sperrle enjoyed the life of power and luxury, neglected his duties, and allowed training to go to seed. Then on March 1, 1943, the RAF attacked Berlin. When the last bomb fell, 35,000 people in the German capital had lost their homes. Hitler immediately ordered Sperrle to raid London in reprisal. On March 3, Sperrle’s bombers flew across the English Channel and dropped 100 tons of bombs, but only 12 tons fell on London. Hitler was furious. In his conference of March 5, he lambasted 3rd Air Fleet’s inability to find London, a target 30 miles wide and only 90 miles from the French coast. The Fuehrer was still criticizing Sperrle six days later. Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels recorded Hitler’s views (and his own) in his diary: “Field Marshal Sperrle . . . was not equal to his tasks. Like all air force generals he had withdrawn to a castle and was there leading a sybaritic life. Air warfare against England probably didn’t interest him much more than, say, an excellent luncheon or dinner. The Fuehrer wants to recall him.”
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Hitler’s attitude toward Sperrle had softened by early July 1943. Perhaps because the air fleet commander was in debt as a result of his luxurious lifestyle and gambling, the Fuehrer sent him a gift of 50,000 Reichsmarks. The field marshal was not found at his headquarters, however; he was busy vacationing on the Atlantic coast south of Biarritz at the time.

Sperrle became more and more disillusioned over Hitler and Goering’s conduct of the war, and this may have accelerated his own lack of interest in the conflict. Lieutenant General Hans Speidel, the Chief of Staff of Erwin Rommel’s Army Group B in France in 1944, remembered, “Sperrle was a man of unusual vitality; but the more clearly he saw the unholy disorder in Hitler’s leadership, the more he expended his energies in bitter sarcasm.”
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The 3rd Air Fleet had no chance of defeating the U.S. and British air forces, who, in April 1944, began paving the way for the Allied invasion. As of May 31, Sperrle had only 891 aircraft, of which 497 were serviceable. His few, understrength units faced a vast aerial armada of some 14,000 combat aircraft. The enemy’s primary objective prior to D-Day was to seal off the battlefield and isolate 7th Army in Normandy from its supplies and reinforcements. To accomplish this task, the French railroad network had to be destroyed. Before the Allied air offensive began, the German transportation staff was running more than 100 supply trains a day to the armies in France. By the end of May only 20 trains per day were operating throughout France. All bridges over the Seine, Oise, and Meuse rivers had been destroyed or seriously damaged, and railroad traffic to Normandy had virtually ceased. By April 30, some 600 supply trains were backlogged in Germany, and the Allied air forces were destroying up to 113 locomotives per day in France. By early June, MacDonald and Blumenson wrote, “Allied air attacks had weakened the railroad transportation system in France to the point of collapse.”
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On June 3, 1944, the Luftwaffe Operations Staff reported:

In the area of northern France and Belgium—the zone of the invasion in the narrower sense of the word—the systematic destruction that has been carried out since March of all important junctions of the entire network—not only the main lines—has most seriously crippled the whole transport system (railway installations, including rolling stock). Similarly, Paris has been systematically cut off from long distance traffic, and the most important bridges over the lower Seine have been destroyed one after another. . . . In the “intermediate zone” between the German and French-Belgian railway system all the important through stations . . . have been put out of action for longer or shorter periods. . . . In May the first bridge over the Rhine—at Duisburg—was destroyed “according to plan” in a large-scale attack.
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The report concluded that the rail network had been completely wrecked and that “the Reichsbahn authorities are seriously considering whether it is not useless to attempt further repair work.”
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On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Normandy resembled a strategic island. Field Marshal Rommel was unable to bring up his panzer reserves quickly enough to launch a counteroffensive before the Allied beachhead was firmly secured. Meanwhile, enemy fighter-bombers absolutely dominated the air space above the battle zone, destroying tanks, strongpoints, supply installations, and gun emplacements. Sperrle’s units were able to operate only on the fringes of Eisenhower’s air umbrella. German operations against the Allied naval forces were equally devoid of success.

When the Anglo-Americans broke out of the Normandy bridgehead in August, most of the Luftwaffe ground service and signal units simply turned tail and headed east as rapidly as they could. Hitler (with considerable justification) charged them with running away and held Sperrle responsible. This was the last straw. On August 19 the Fuehrer relieved Sperrle of his 3rd Air Fleet command and replaced him with Colonel General Otto Dessloch. A month later, on September 22, 3rd Air Fleet was downgraded and redesignated Luftwaffe Command West.

Very much embittered after the fall of France, Sperrle was no longer considered fit for important assignments and was unemployed for the rest of the war. After the collapse of Nazi Germany, Field Marshal Milch and General Speidel, among others, charged that Sperrle was a scapegoat for Goering’s failures in the West.
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However, it is significant that Sperrle hardly raised a voice in his own defense. Also, Field Marshal Rommel had expressed disappointment about the Luftwaffe in France as early as the end of 1943, and Milch biographer David Irving described Sperrle as “indolent and harmful”
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to the Luftwaffe’s war effort in the West.

Richard Suchenwirth noted that in 1944 Sperrle was unaccustomed to the rigors of war and attributed at least part of his failure in France to that fact.
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Major Lionel F. Ellis, the official British historian, summed it up well when he wrote of the Luftwaffe’s battle in Normandy:

Greatly outnumbered by the Allied air forces, they had perhaps been as active as their strength and supremacy of Allied air forces allowed, but their resulting effort was of little account to the Allied armies. Their most effective operations were the dropping of mines in the shipping-infested waters of the assault area. The commander of the Third Air Fleet, Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, had held that appointment during the whole of the German occupation of France, “living soft” in Paris. He does not seem to have had any lively reaction when the Allies landed and none of his subordinates is distinguishable in the air fighting in Normandy. The war diaries of the army commands in the West have few references of the Luftwaffe that are not critical and they give no indication that Sperrle had any voice in shaping the conduct of operations.
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Sperrle was captured by the British on May 1, 1945.
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He was tried at Nuremberg for war crimes but was acquitted of all charges on October 27, 1948. Officially de-Nazified in June 1949, he moved to Munich. Here he lived quietly (although bitter and depressed) until his death on April 2, 1953.
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He was buried in Munich on April 7.
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friedrich dollmann
, a large, physically impressive officer who showed great adaptability throughout his career, was born at Wuerzburg, Bavaria, on February 2, 1882. He joined the army as a Fahnenjunker in 1899 and was commissioned second lieutenant in the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment in 1901. Despite his junior rank he attended the School of Artillery and Engineering at Charlottenburg from 1903 to 1905, did a stint as a battalion adjutant (1905–1909), and was sent to the War Academy for General Staff training in 1909. Promoted to first lieutenant in 1910 and to captain in 1913, he served briefly as a brigade adjutant in early 1913, before becoming an aerial observer—an unusual post for a General Staff officer. Moreover, he served in this capacity for the first two years of the Great War, before assuming command of an artillery battalion in late 1916. He did not take up his first wartime General Staff assignment until November 1917, when he became the intelligence officer of the 6th Infantry Division on the Western Front, a post he held at the end of the war.
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Dollmann did not win any promotions during World War I, nor did he achieve any particular distinction; nevertheless he was selected for the Reichswehr and was appointed to the administrative section of the Peace Commission in 1919, no doubt largely because he could speak both French and English and because he had a talent for making himself acceptable. There is little in his personnel file to explain why he advanced to the top rungs of the army in the next 20 years, except that he was an expert in long-range artillery, was a good administrator, and knew how to play the political angles that exist in any army but proliferated in those of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. The fact that he was stationed in Munich (the cradle of Nazism) almost continuously from 1923 to 1933 no doubt gave him some early contacts with the Nazis and may have accelerated his later advancement; in any event, by February 1930, he was a colonel and chief of staff of Wehrkreis VII (Munich) and on February 1, 1931, assumed command of the 6th Artillery Regiment. Eighteen months later, he was promoted to Artillery Commander VII and deputy commander of the 7th Infantry Division in Munich, and on February 1, 1933, he was named inspector of artillery in the Defense Ministry in Berlin. Dollmann was promoted to major general on October 1, 1932, and to lieutenant general exactly one year later.

Although not a Nazi, Friedrich Dollmann saw which way the political winds were blowing and made himself very prominent in fostering good relations between the army and the party in the early years of Hitler’s regime. Partially as a result, he was named commander of Wehrkreis IX at Kassel on May 1, 1935. From this corps-level military district headquarters he issued directives criticizing those members of the officer corps who opposed the concept and outlook of the Nazi Party. He openly and officially blamed the officer corps for the mistrust that existed between the party and the army and wrote that “the Officer Corps must have confidence in the representatives of the Party. Party opinions should not be examined or rejected.”
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He demanded that “worthy” pictures of the Fuehrer be hung in officers’ messes and that those of the Kaiser be removed or hung only in tradition rooms; furthermore, officers’ wives should play active roles in the National Socialist League of Women, and the only civilian guest speakers who should be invited to address service functions were the politically nonbiased National Socialists.
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Dollmann went even further in 1937, when he called in his Catholic chaplains and harangued them for not having a sufficiently positive attitude toward the Nazis. Although he was a Catholic himself, he told the padres, “The Oath which [the soldier] has taken to the Fuehrer and supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht binds him unto the sacrifice of his own life to National Socialism, the concept of the new Reich. . . . No doubts may be permitted to arise out of your [the padres’] attitudes towards National Socialism. The Wehrmacht, as one of the bearers of the National Socialist State, demands of you as chaplains at all times a clear and unreserved acknowledgement of the Fuehrer, State and People!”
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Largely because of his pro-Nazi attitudes and orders, Friedrich Dollmann was promoted to general of artillery on April 1, 1936, and on August 25, 1939, he was elevated to the command of 7th Army. This last advancement seems to have been engineered by Bodewin Keitel, the chief of the Army Personnel Office, who had worked for Dollmann for years and was his chief of staff at Kassel until 1938. Six days after Dollmann took charge of his new command, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier, starting the Second World War.