The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (205 page)

All depended for success, after Hitler had been assassinated—and Stauffenberg personally would see to this—on the ability of the plotters to utilize for their purposes, and with the utmost speed and energy, the available Army troops in and around Berlin. This posed a knotty problem.

Only General Fritz Fromm, the commander in chief of the Home or Replacement Army, could normally give the order to carry out Valkyrie. And to the very last he remained a question mark. All through 1943 the conspirators had worked on him. They finally concluded that this wary officer could be definitely counted upon only after he saw that the revolt had succeeded. But since they were sure of its success, they proceeded to draft a series of orders under Fromm’s name, though without his knowledge. In case he wavered at the crucial moment, Fromm was to be replaced by General
Hoepner
, the brilliant tank commander who had been cashiered by Hitler after the battle for Moscow in 1941 and forbidden to wear his uniform.

The problem of another key general in Berlin also plagued the plotters. This was General von
Kortzfleisch
, an out-and-out Nazi, who commanded Wehrkreis III, which included Berlin and
Brandenburg
. It was decided to have him arrested and replaced by General Freiherr von Thuengen. General Paul von
Hase
, the commandant of Berlin, was in on the plot and could be counted upon to lead the local garrison troops in the first, all-important step of taking over the city.

Besides drawing up detailed plans for seizing control of Berlin, Stauffenberg and Tresckow, in collaboration with Goerdeler, Beck, Witzleben and others, drafted papers giving instructions to the district military commanders on how they were to take over executive power in their areas, put down the S.S., arrest the leading Nazis and occupy the
concentration camps
. Furthermore, several ringing declarations were composed which at the appropriate moment were to be issued to the armed forces, the German people, the press and the radio. Some were signed by Beck, as the new head of state, others by Field Marshal von Witzleben, as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, and by Goerdeler, as the new Chancellor. Copies of the orders and appeals were typed in great secrecy late at night in the Bendlerstrasse by two brave women in the plot, Frau Erika von Tresckow, the wife of the general who had done so much to further the conspiracy, and Margarete von Oven, the daughter of a retired general and for years the faithful secretary of two former commanders in chief of the Army, Generals von
Hammerstein
and von Fritsch. The papers were then hidden in General Olbricht’s safe.

The plans, then, were ready. In fact, they had been perfected by the end of 1943, but for months little had been done to carry them out. Events, however, could not wait on the conspirators. As June 1944 came they
realized that time was running out on them. For one thing, the Gestapo was closing in. The arrests of those who were in on the plot, among them Count von Moltke and the members of the
Kreisau Circle
, were mounting with each week that passed, and there were many executions. Beck, Goerdeler, Hassell, Witzleben and others in the inner circle were being so closely shadowed by
Himmler
’s secret police that they found it increasingly difficult to meet together. Himmler himself had warned the fallen
Canaris
in the spring that he knew very well that a rebellion was being hatched by the generals and their civilian friends. He mentioned that he was keeping a watch on Beck and Goerdeler. Canaris passed the warning on to Olbricht.
¹⁷

Just as ominous for the conspirators was the military situation. The Russians, it was believed, were about to launch an all-out offensive in the East.
Rome
was being abandoned to the Allied forces. (It fell on June 4.) In the West the Anglo–American invasion was imminent. Very soon Germany might go down to military defeat—before Nazism could be overthrown. Indeed, there was a growing number of conspirators, perhaps influenced by the thinking of the Kreisau Circle, who began to feel that it might be better to call off their plans and let Hitler and the Nazis take the responsibility for the catastrophe. To overthrow them now might merely perpetrate another “stab-in-the-back” legend, such as that which had fooled so many Germans after the First World War.

Stauffenberg himself did not believe that the Western Allies would attempt to land in France that summer. He persisted in this belief even after Colonel Georg
Hansen
, a carryover from the Abwehr in Himmler’s military-intelligence bureau, had warned him early in May that the invasion might begin on any day in June.

The German Army itself was beset by doubts, at least as to the date and place of the assault. In May there had been eighteen days when the weather, the sea and the tides were just right for a landing, and the Germans noted that General Eisenhower had not taken advantage of them. On May 30 Rundstedt, the Commander in Chief in the West, had reported to Hitler that there was no indication that the invasion was “immediately imminent.” On June 4, the Air Force meteorologist in Paris advised that because of the inclement weather no Allied action could be expected for at least a fortnight.

On the strength of this and of what little information he had—the Luftwaffe had been prevented from making aerial reconnaissance of the harbors on England’s south coast where Eisenhower’s troops at that moment were swarming aboard their ships, and the Navy had withdrawn its reconnaissance craft from the Channel because of the heavy seas—Rommel drew up a situation report on the morning of June 5 reporting to Rundstedt that the invasion was not imminent, and immediately set off by
car for his home at
Herrlingen
to spend the night with his family and then to proceed to Berchtesgaden the next day to confer with Hitler.

June 5, General Speidel, Rommel’s chief of staff, later recalled, “was a quiet day.” There seemed no reason why Rommel should not make his somewhat leisurely journey back to Germany. There were the usual reports from German agents about the possibility of an Allied landing—this time between June 6 and June 16—but there had been hundreds of these since April and they were not taken seriously. Indeed, on the sixth General Friedrich Dollmann, who commanded the
Seventh
Army in
Normandy
, on whose beaches the Allied forces were about to land, ordered a temporary relaxation of the standing alert and convoked his senior officers for a map exercise at
Rennes
, some 125 miles south of those beaches.

If the Germans were in the dark about the date of the invasion, they were also ignorant of where it would take place. Rundstedt and Rommel were certain it would be in the Pas-de-Calais area, where the Channel was at its narrowest. There they had concentrated their strongest force, the
Fifteenth
Army, whose strength during the spring was increased from ten to fifteen infantry divisions. But by the end of March Adolf Hitler’s uncanny intuition was telling him that the
Schwerpunkt
of the invasion probably would be
in Normandy
, and during the next few weeks he ordered considerable reinforcements to the region between the Seine and the Loire. “Watch Normandy!” he kept warning his generals.

Still, the overwhelming part of German strength, in both infantry and panzer divisions, was retained north of the Seine, between
Le Havre
and Dunkirk. Rundstedt and his generals were watching the Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy and they were encouraged in this by a number of deceptive maneuvers carried out during April and May by the British-American High Command which indicated to them that their calculations were correct.

The day of June 5, then, passed in relative quiet, so far as the Germans were concerned. Severe Anglo–American air attacks continued to disrupt German depots,
radar
stations, V-l sites, communications and transport, but these had been going on night and day for weeks and seemed no more intense on this day than on others.

Shortly after dark Rundstedt’s headquarters was informed that the
BBC
in London was broadcasting an unusually large number of coded messages to the French resistance and that the German radar stations between
Cherbourg
and Le Havre were being jammed. At 10
P.M.
the Fifteenth Army intercepted a code message from the BBC to the French resistance which it believed meant that the invasion was about to begin. This army was alerted, but Rundstedt did not think it necessary to alert the Seventh Army, on whose sector of the coast farther west, between
Caen
and Cherbourg, the Allied forces were now—toward midnight—approaching on a thousand ships.

It was not until eleven minutes past 1
A.M.
, June 6, that the Seventh Army, its commander not yet returned from his map exercise at Rennes, realized what was happening. Two American and one British airborne
divisions had begun landing in its midst. The general alarm was sounded at 1:30
A.M.

Forty-five minutes later Major General Max Pemsel, chief of staff of the
Seventh
Army, got General Speidel on the telephone at Rommel’s headquarters and told him that it looked like “a large-scale operation.” Speidel did not believe it but passed on the report to Rundstedt, who was equally skeptical. Both generals believed the dropping of parachutists was merely an Allied feint to cover their main landings around
Calais
. At 2:40
A.M
. Pemsel was advised that Rundstedt “does not consider this to be a major operation.”
¹⁸
Not even when the news began to reach him shortly after dawn on June 6 that on the
Normandy
coast between the rivers Vire and Orne a huge Allied fleet was disembarking large bodies of troops, under cover of a murderous fire from the big guns of an armada of warships, did the Commander in Chief West believe that this was to be the main Allied assault. It did not become apparent, Speidel says, until the afternoon of June 6. By that time the Americans had a toehold on two beaches and the British on a third and had penetrated inland for a distance of from two to six miles.

Speidel had telephoned Rommel at 6
A.M.
at his home and the Field Marshal had rushed back by car without going on to see Hitler, but he did not arrive at Army Group B headquarters until late that afternoon.
^*
In the meantime Speidel, Rundstedt and the latter’s chief of staff, General
Blumentritt
, had been on the telephone to OKW, which was then at Berchtesgaden. Due to an idiotic order of Hitler’s not even the Commander in Chief in the West could employ his panzer divisions without the specific permission of the Fuehrer. When the three generals early on the morning of the sixth begged for permission to rush two tank divisions to Normandy, Jodl replied that Hitler wanted first to see what developed. Whereupon the Fuehrer went to bed and could not be disturbed by the frantic calls of the generals in the West until 3
P.M.

When he woke up, the bad news which had in the meantime arrived finally stirred the Nazi warlord to action. He gave—too late, as it turned out—permission to engage the Panzer Lehr and 12th S.S. Panzer divisions in Normandy. He also issued a famous order which has been preserved for posterity in the log of the Seventh Army:

In the eerie mountain air of the Obersalzberg, from which Hitler was now trying to direct the most crucial battle of the war up to this moment—he
had been saying for months that Germany’s destiny would be decided in the West—this fantastic order seems to have been issued in all seriousness, concurred in by Jodl and
Keitel
. Even Rommel, who passed it on by telephone shortly before 5 o’clock that afternoon, an hour after his return from Germany, seems to have taken it seriously, for he ordered
Seventh
Army headquarters to launch an attack by the
21st Panzer
Division, the only German armored unit in the area, “immediately regardless of whether reinforcements arrive or not.”

This the division had already done, without waiting for Rommel’s command. General Pemsel, who was on the other end of the line when Rommel called Seventh Army headquarters, gave a blunt reply to Hitler’s demand that the Allied beachhead—there were actually now three—“be cleaned up by not later than tonight.”

“That,” he replied, “would be impossible.”

Hitler’s much-propagandized Atlantic Wall had been breached within a few hours. The once vaunted Luftwaffe had been driven completely from the air and the German Navy from the sea, and the Army taken by surprise. The battle was far from over, but its outcome was not long in doubt. “From June 9 on,” says Speidel, “the initiative lay with the Allies.”

Rundstedt and Rommel decided that it was time to say so to Hitler, face to face, and to demand that he accept the consequences. They enticed him to a meeting on June 17 at
Margival
, north of
Soissons
, in the elaborate bombproof bunker which had been built to serve as the Fuehrer’s headquarters for the invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940, but never used. Now, four summers later, the Nazi warlord appeared there for the first time.

But the prospect of another stunning defeat was emboldening the generals, or at least Rommel, whom Rundstedt left to do most of the talking when Hitler’s diatribe against them had come to a momentary pause. “With merciless frankness,” says Speidel, who was present, “Rommel pointed out … that the struggle was hopeless against the [Allied] superiority in the air, at sea and on the land.”
^*
20
Well, not quite hopeless,
if Hitler abandoned his absurd determination to hold every foot of ground and then to drive the Allied forces into the sea. Rommel proposed, with Rundstedt’s assent, that the Germans withdraw out of range of the enemy’s murderous naval guns, take their panzer units out of the line and re-form them for a later thrust which might defeat the Allies in a battle fought “outside the range of the enemy’s naval artillery.”