Hitler's Commanders (21 page)

Dollmann’s army, which consisted of nonmotorized divisions made up primarily of inadequately trained, older-age reservists, remained in Germany while Hitler conquered Poland. In the invasion of France (1940), it had the unspectacular mission of manning the southern end of the Westwall (the Siegfried Line), opposite the Maginot Line. Only after the best of the French divisions had been destroyed and the end of the campaign was clearly in sight did the 7th Army go over to the offensive, breaking through the Maginot north of Belford. Demoralized French resistance collapsed quickly, and on June 19, Dollmann linked up with the 1st Panzer Division of Panzer Group Guderian, completing the encirclement of 400,000 French soldiers in the Vosges Mountains. The French formally surrendered at Compiègne two days later. On July 19, 1940, a jubilant Adolf Hitler rewarded his generals with an outpouring of medals and promotions. Among those to benefit was Friedrich Dollmann, who was promoted to colonel general. He then returned to occupation duty in France, where he remained for the next four years.

From 1940 until 1944, while most of the Wehrmacht was fighting on the Eastern Front, Colonel General Dollmann and his 7th Army vegetated in France. During this period Dollmann—to his credit—began to have serious second thoughts about the Nazi regime he had previously supported. As the months went by and the war dragged on, and as the Nazis became more and more repressive and vicious in the occupied areas, the directives exhorting his troops to cooperate with the party ceased to flow from Dollmann’s headquarters. He was, in fact, a deeply troubled man; his health began to deteriorate, and he apparently felt guilty and ashamed of his previous support for the Nazis and was deeply concerned about the future of his country and his command. However, he did very little about either. Headquartered comfortably in LeMans, Dollmann grew fat and followed the lead of his superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, and neglected the coastal defenses of his sector. He did not see any active campaigning of any kind and, more debilitating, did not keep abreast of developments in his profession. Indeed, he had little or no grasp of panzer tactics and no understanding of the implications of Allied air superiority. By 1944, Dollmann was almost an anachronism; he simply was not prepared to deal with what he would soon be called upon to face: the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. Before Eisenhower’s forces landed, however, Dollmann faced another threat to his position when Field Marshal Rommel arrived in France in December 1943.

Erwin Rommel, the famous Desert Fox, was the commander-in-chief of Army Group B, a headquarters that was interjected between Rundstedt’s
Oberbefehlshaber West
(OB West)
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and Dollmann’s 7th Army Headquarters. Rundstedt, like Dollmann, had vegetated in a static command and was living in the past. He believed that the proper strategy for Germany was to let the Allies land, build up, and advance inland. Here they could be engaged and perhaps destroyed in a blitzkrieg-like tank battle, well out of range of their big naval guns. Rommel, however, had experienced firsthand the devastating effects of Allied aerial supremacy in North Africa and realized that a battle of the kind envisioned by Rundstedt and his chief armored adviser, General of Panzer Troops Baron Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, was no longer possible. The dynamic Rommel now insisted that the invaders be halted on the beaches and immediately counterattacked to throw them back into the sea. These tactics would require the laying of tens of thousands of mines, the construction of dozens of bunkers and anti-tank traps, and the erection of countless anti-glider and anti-parachute obstacles.

For almost four years, Friedrich Dollmann had done little to improve his coastal defenses. But Erwin Rommel had a reputation for replacing subordinate commanders who did not enthusiastically support his concept of operations. Suddenly, therefore, the 7th Army commander became a firm advocate of coastal obstacles and offshore barriers. “Dollmann was now absolutely for Rommel’s ideas,” Rommel’s naval adviser recorded in February 1944.
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However, four months of feverish activity could not make good four years of inactivity. When the Allies landed on D-Day, 7th Army was not ready.

Friedrich Dollmann was not only ill-prepared for D-Day—he was unlucky as well. Field Marshal Rommel was in Germany, away from his post, and Dollmann had scheduled a war game at Rennes for the morning of June 6. As a result, most of the key divisional and corps commanders of the 7th Army were also absent when the Anglo-American paratroopers began to land. Shortly thereafter, the assault forces stormed ashore. Acting in Rommel’s absence, Dollmann tried to restore the situation via an immediate armored counterattack with his only available armored division, but he experienced little success, and the 21st Panzer Division was devastated in the process. Furthermore, when Lieutenant General Fritz Bayerlein, the commander of the elite Panzer Lehr Division, turned up at 7th Army Headquarters in LeMans, Dollmann ordered him to move up his division at 5 p.m.—in broad daylight.

Bayerlein objected immediately. Having served with Rommel in the Afrika Korps, he realized the risks involved in a daylight move, but Dollmann refused to listen. He was more concerned with his invasion front, which was being hammered by vastly superior Allied forces and would soon be on the verge of collapse. Summer days are long in France; to comply with Bayerlein’s request would have meant a delay of more than three hours, and Dollmann did not think he could spare the time. He insisted that the division begin its move at 5 p.m. and even proposed a change in the preselected approach routes, but on this point Bayerlein held firm—any modification at this point certainly would have resulted in chaos, as Dollmann surely should have known. To make matters even worse, Dollmann imposed radio silence on the division. “As if radio silence could have stopped the fighter-bombers and reconnaissance planes from spotting us!” a disgusted and angry Bayerlein snapped later.
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As Fritz Bayerlein foresaw, the Allies quickly spotted the move, and Panzer Lehr’s approach to contact quickly became a nightmare. The fighter-bombers were soon everywhere, shooting up the long columns of vehicles and blasting bridges, crossroads, and towns along the division’s five routes of advance. Night brought no relief, because Allied airplanes now knew the approximate location of the division’s columns, so they illuminated the countryside with flares until they found a suitable target. All the while the columns became more and more spread out, scattered, disorganized, and fragmented. The tanks were relatively safe from the bombardment (only five were knocked out), but the rest of the division suffered terribly. During the night of June 6–7, Bayerlein lost 40 loaded fuel trucks; 84 half-tracks, prime-movers, and self-propelled guns; and dozens of other vehicles. Perhaps more important, the elite but now depleted Panzer Lehr Division arrived at its assembly areas in dribs and drabs. Field Marshal Rommel once predicted that the invasion must be thrown back into the sea within 48 hours or the war would be lost. Partially as a result of the Panzer Lehr debacle, the Desert Fox could not launch his armored counterattack until June 9—at least two days too late. It was repulsed. The war was lost.

Significantly, almost as soon as he returned to France (he was in Germany, en route to see Hitler, when the invasion struck), Rommel took the panzer divisions away from the control of Friedrich Dollmann and placed them under Headquarters, Panzer Group West (later 5th Panzer Army) under Geyr von Schweppenburg. Seventh Army now had responsibility only for the left wing of the invasion front—which was quite enough. For the next three weeks an increasingly distressed Dollmann slowed, but could not halt, the progress of the Allied invasion, and the units of the 7th Army were slowly ground to bits in the hedgerow country of Normandy. The French port of Cherbourg, Eisenhower’s initial strategic objective, was cut off from the rest of the army on June 18. Despite the fact that it had enough food and ammunition to hold out for eight weeks, the defenses of Cherbourg collapsed with incredible speed. Lieutenant General Karl Wilhelm von Schlieben, the fortress commander, surrendered at 1:30 p.m. on June 26. Although isolated resistance would continue for several days, the fall of the critical port was now just a matter of time.

Hitler, naturally, was furious, and Keitel ordered a court-martial investigation of the fall of the fortress. Dollmann was questioned, of course, and not too politely. He was accused of negligence in connection with the disaster—and probably rightfully so. In any event, Hitler summoned Rommel and von Rundstedt to Berchtesgaden and, on the afternoon of June 29, demanded that Dollmann be court-martialed for losing Cherbourg. Rundstedt, however, refused to listen to such talk. (Dollmann, after all, had been no more negligent in the pre-invasion years than Rundstedt himself had been.) Hitler then turned to Rommel and demanded that Dollmann at least be relieved of his command. Dollmann, however, had obeyed Rommel’s orders to the best of his ability and the field marshal was personally fond of the fat general; furthermore, the Desert Fox was not accustomed to sacking commanders who had served him loyally.

Like Rundstedt, he stood up for Dollmann and then changed the subject.
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It was only after the marshals left that Hitler sent the order to LeMans, personally relieving Dollmann of his command. He was replaced by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Paul Hausser (see chapter 8). Friedrich Dollmann, however, never knew that he had been sacked. At 10 a.m. on June 28, overworked, stressed out, and very worried about the ongoing investigation that Hitler had ordered, he suffered a heart attack at his forward command post.
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Sources differ as to whether he succumbed on June 28 or 29, and word of his death did not reach LeMans for hours; however, it seems certain that while Hitler, Rommel, and von Rundstedt were arguing about his fate, Dollmann was already dead. In any case he was buried in France on July 2. Perhaps remembering better days, or perhaps feeling a twinge of guilt for sacking him (if that were possible), Adolf Hitler authorized a laudatory obituary for Colonel General Dollmann.

rudolf stegmann
, one of the few German heroes of the Cherbourg debacle, is a good example of the typical German divisional commander—tough, resourceful, courageous, and innovative. Having this caliber of officer at the divisional level and below was a major contributing factor in the successes the Wehrmacht enjoyed during its glory days and one reason it managed to stay in the field as long as it did, once the tide of war had turned irrevocably against it.

Born at Nikolaiken, East Prussia, on August 6, 1894, Stegmann entered the Imperial Army as a Fahnenjunker in 1912 (at age 18) and was commissioned second lieutenant in the 141st Infantry Regiment in May 1914. This unit remained in East Prussia when the Russians invaded that province later that year, and it helped scatter the czar’s armies at Gumbinnen and Tannenberg—a defeat from which Imperial Russia never recovered. After taking part in the invasions of Poland and Russia, young Stegmann’s regiment was transferred to France in September 1915 and spent the rest of the war on the Western Front. When the war ended, Lieutenant Stegmann was selected for the Reichsheer and was a major when Adolf Hitler became ruler of Germany.

Apparently never a member of the General Staff, Stegmann was associated with the infantry and motorized infantry throughout the Nazi era. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel on January 1, 1938, and was named commander of the II Battalion, 14th Motorized Infantry Regiment at Oppeln, Silesia (now Opole, Poland), later that year. After fighting in Poland, he was promoted to the command of his regiment (part of the 5th Panzer Division), which he led in the Western campaign of 1940, fighting in the Ardennes breakthrough and in the battles around Cambrai, Lille, Rouen, and Brest. Promoted to colonel in late 1940, Stegmann directed the refitting of his regiment in Germany in the summer of 1940, serving on occupation duty and participating in maneuvers in Poland in the winter of 1940–1941. He then took part in the conquests of Yugoslavia and Greece, before being sent to the Russian Front in time to take part in the final drive on Moscow and the subsequent retreat, during which Army Group Center was almost destroyed.

It is unclear from the few available records whether Rudolf Stegmann collapsed from exhaustion or from wounds, but he was forced to give up command of the 14th Motorized Infantry on February 5, 1942, and was without an assignment for several months. When he did regain his health and returned to the front in September 1942, it was with a promotion: he was now commander of the 2nd Panzer Grenadier Brigade (part of the 2nd Panzer Division) in the Rzhev salient of the Moscow sector. For Stegmann, this command was destined to be extremely brief, because he was sent back to Germany in late 1942 to attend a divisional commanders’ training course. He returned to Russia in April 1943, where he assumed command of the remnants of the 36th Panzer Grenadier Division, which had been mauled in the Rzhev battles of 1942–1943. Stegmann was given the dubious task of rebuilding the 36th as a nonmotorized infantry division. This task he successfully completed by September, when his division took part in the battles around Smolensk, in the retreat to Mogilev, and in the successful defensive battles around Bobruisk, during which he was seriously wounded. Sent back to Germany, Stegmann did not fully recover until spring. By then the prospect of the Anglo-American invasion loomed large in the minds of the generals of the German High Command, and OB West needed every experienced divisional commander it could get; consequently, Stegmann was sent to France, where he officially assumed command of the 77th Infantry Division on May 1, 1944.

Stegmann’s new command hardly fit the definition of an elite unit. It had been created in January 1944, when the 364th Infantry Division had been combined with the remnants of the 355th Infantry Division to form the 77th. The 355th Infantry—a unit composed mainly of Wuerttemberger reservists—had been smashed in the Kharkov and Krivoy Rog battles on the Russian Front. The 364th Infantry was formed in Poland in late 1943 but never saw combat. The new division was understrength and had only two infantry regiments (the 1049th and 1050th Grenadiers); its artillery regiment (the 177th) was very weak; it had no engineer battalion, few reconnaissance forces, and only two anti-tank companies (instead of the normal battalion); and it was short on trained officers and equipment of every description. The human factor was no more promising. A high proportion of the men were Volksdeutsche, Polish, or Soviet citizens, mainly Tartars from the Volga region, whose loyalty to the Third Reich was questionable at best. In short, General Stegmann had very little to work with in May 1944. A highly dissatisfied Field Marshal Rommel had come to the same conclusion somewhat earlier. In April he had inspected the 77th Infantry Division, which was charged with the defense of the Caen area. Deciding that this unit was too poor to defend such a potentially important sector, he replaced it with the 21st Panzer Division, which is why the 77th Infantry was not involved in the initial D-Day landings. He sent the 77th to the less threatened St. Malo–St. Brieuc sector in Brittany and sent its original divisional commander to find employment elsewhere. This is how Stegmann came to command the 77th in the first place.