The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (213 page)

On August 17 Field Marshal Walther Model arrived to replace Kluge—his sudden appearance was the first notice the latter had of his dismissal. Kluge was told by Hitler to leave word as to his whereabouts in Germany—a warning that he had become suspect in connection with the July 20 revolt. The next day he wrote a long letter to Hitler and then set off by car for home. Near
Metz
he swallowed poison.

His farewell letter to the Fuehrer was found in the captured German military archives.

Hitler read the letter, according to the testimony of
Jodl
at Nuremberg, in silence and handed it to him without comment. A few days later, at his military conference on August 31, the Supreme warlord observed, “There are strong reasons to suspect that had Kluge not committed suicide he would have been arrested anyway.”
⁴²

The turn of Field Marshal Rommel, the idol of the German masses, came next.

As General von Stuelpnagel lay blinded and unconscious on the operating table in the hospital at
Verdun
after his not quite successful attempt to kill himself, he had blurted out the name of Rommel. Later under hideous torture in the Gestapo dungeon in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin Colonel von Hofacker broke down and told of Rommel’s part in the conspiracy. “Tell the people in Berlin they can count on me,” Hofacker quoted the Field Marshal as assuring him. It was a phrase that stuck in Hitler’s mind when he heard of it and which led him to decide that his favorite general, whom he knew to be the most popular one in Germany, must die.

Rommel, who had suffered bad fractures of his skull, temples and cheekbones and a severe injury to his left eye, and whose head was pitted with shell fragments, was first removed from a field hospital at Bernay to St. Germain to escape capture by the advancing Allied troops and thence, on August 8, to his home at
Herrlingen
near Ulm. He received the first warning of what might be in store for him when General Speidel, his former chief of staff, was arrested on September 7, the day after he had visited him at Herrlingen.

“That pathological liar,” Rommel had exclaimed to Speidel when the talk turned to Hitler, “has now gone completely mad. He is venting his sadism on the conspirators of July 20, and this won’t be the end of it!”
⁴³

Rommel now noticed that his house was being shadowed by the S.D. When he went out walking in the nearby woods with his fifteen-year-old son, who had been given temporary leave from his antiaircraft battery to tend his father, both carried revolvers. At headquarters in Rastenburg Hitler had now received a copy of Hofacker’s testimony incriminating Rommel. He thereupon decreed his death—but in a special way. The Fuehrer realized, as Keitel later explained to an interrogator at Nuremberg, “that it would be a terrible scandal in Germany if this well-known Field Marshal, the most popular general we had, were to be arrested and haled before the People’s Court.” So Hitler arranged with Keitel that Rommel would be told of the evidence against him and given the choice of killing himself or standing trial for treason before the People’s Court. If he chose the first he would be given a state funeral with full military honors and his family would not be molested.

Thus it was that at noon on October 14, 1944, two generals from Hitler’s headquarters drove up to the Rommel home, which was now surrounded by S.S. troops reinforced by five armored cars. The generals were Wilhelm Burgdorf, an alcoholic, florid-faced man who rivaled Keitel in his slavishness
to Hitler, and his assistant in the Army Personnel Office, Ernst Maisel, of like character. They had sent word ahead to Rommel that they were coming from Hitler to discuss his “next employment.”

“At the instigation of the Fuehrer,” Keitel later testified, “I sent Burgdorf there with a copy of the testimony against Rommel. If it were true, he was to take the consequences. If it were not true, he would be exonerated by the court.”

“And you instructed Burgdorf to take some poison with him, didn’t you?” Keitel was asked.

“Yes. I told Burgdorf to take some poison along so that he could put it at Rommel’s disposal, if conditions warranted it.”

After Burgdorf and Maisel arrived it soon became evident that they had not come to discuss Rommel’s next assignment. They asked to talk with the Field Marshal alone and the three men retired to his study.

“A few minutes later,” Manfred Rommel later related, “I heard my father come upstairs and go into my mother’s room.” Then:

And that is what happened.

Rommel, wearing his old
Afrika Korps
leather jacket and grasping his field marshal’s baton, got into the car with the two generals, was driven a mile or two up the road by the side of a forest, where General Maisel and the S.S. driver got out, leaving Rommel and General Burgdorf in the back seat. When the two men returned to the car a minute later, Rommel was slumped over the seat, dead. Burgdorf paced up and down impatiently, as though he feared he would be late for lunch and his midday drinks. Fifteen minutes after she had bidden her husband farewell, Frau Rommel received the expected telephone call from the hospital. The chief doctor reported that two generals had brought in the body of the Field Marshal, who had died of a cerebral embolism, apparently as the result of his previous skull fractures. Actually Burgdorf had gruffly forbidden an autopsy. “Do not touch the corpse,” he stormed. “Everything has already been arranged in Berlin.”

It had been.

Field Marshal Model issued a ringing order of the day announcing that Rommel had died of “wounds sustained on July 17” and mourning the loss “of one of the greatest commanders of our nation.”

Hitler wired Frau Rommel: “Accept my sincerest sympathy for the heavy loss you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name
of Field Marshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in
North Africa
.” Goering telegraphed “in silent compassion”:

Hitler ordered a state funeral, at which the senior officer of the German Army, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, delivered the funeral oration. “His heart,” said Rundstedt as he stood over Rommel’s swastika-bedecked body, “belonged to the Fuehrer.”
^*

“The old soldier [Rundstedt],” Speidel says, “appeared to those present to be broken and bewildered … Here destiny gave him the unique chance to play the role of Mark Antony. He remained in his moral apathy.”
^†
45

The humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army was great. It had seen three of its illustrious field marshals, Witzleben,
Kluge
and Rommel, implicated in a plot to overthrow the Supreme warlord, for which one of them was strangled and two forced to suicide. It had to stand idly by while scores of its highest-ranking generals were hauled off to the prisons of the Gestapo and judicially murdered after farcical trials before the People’s Court. In this unprecedented situation, despite all its proud traditions, the corps did not close ranks. Instead it sought to preserve its “honor” by what a foreign observer, at least, can only term dishonoring and degrading itself. Before the wrath of the former Austrian corporal, its frightened leaders fawned and groveled.

No wonder that Field Marshal von Rundstedt looked broken and bewildered as he intoned the funeral oration over the body of Rommel. He had fallen to a low state, as had his brother officers, whom Hitler now forced to drink the bitter cup to its dregs. Rundstedt himself accepted the post of presiding officer over the so-called military Court of Honor which Hitler created to expel from the Army all officers suspected of complicity in the plot against him so that they could be denied a court-martial and handed over in disgrace as civilians to the drumhead People’s Court. The Court of Honor was not permitted to hear an accused officer in his own defense; it acted merely on the “evidence” furnished it by the Gestapo. Rundstedt did not protest against this restriction, nor did another member of the court, General Guderian—who the day after the bombing had been appointed as the new Chief of the Army General Staff—though the latter, in his memoirs, confesses that it was an “unpleasant task,” that the court sessions were “melancholy” and raised “the most difficult problems of conscience.” No doubt they did, for Rundstedt, Guderian and their fellow judges—all generals—turned over hundreds of their comrades to certain execution after degrading them by throwing them out of the Army.

Guderian did more. In his capacity of General Staff Chief he issued two ringing orders of the day to assure the Nazi warlord of the undying loyalty of the officer corps. The first, promulgated on July 23, accused the conspirators of being “a few officers, some of them on the retired list, who had lost all courage and, out of cowardice and weakness, preferred the road of disgrace to the only road open to an honest soldier—the road of duty and honor.” Whereupon he solemnly pledged to the Fuehrer “the unity of the generals, of the officer corps and of the men of the Army.”

In the meantime the discarded Field Marshal von Brauchitsch rushed into print with a burning statement condemning the putsch, pledging renewed allegiance to the Fuehrer and welcoming the appointment of Himmler—who despised the generals, including Brauchitsch—as chief of the Replacement Army. Another discard, Grand Admiral Raeder, fearful that he might be suspected of at least sympathy with the plotters, rushed out of retirement to Rastenburg to personally assure Hitler of his loyalty. On July 24 the Nazi salute was made compulsory in place of the old military salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

On July 29 Guderian warned all General Staff officers that henceforth they must take the lead in being good Nazis, loyal and true to the Leader.

So far as is known no one applied.

With this, comments a German military historian, “the story of the General Staff as an autonomous entity may be said to have come to an end.”
⁴⁶
This elite group, founded by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and built up by Moltke to be the pillar of the nation, which had ruled Germany during the First World War, dominated the Weimar Republic and forced even Hitler to destroy the S.A. and murder its leader when they stood in its way, had been reduced in the summer of 1944 to a pathetic body of fawning, frightened men. There was to be no more opposition to Hitler, not even any criticism of him. The once mighty Army, like every other institution in the Third Reich, would go down with him, its leaders too benumbed now, too lacking in the courage which the handful of conspirators alone had shown, to raise their voices—let alone do anything—to stay the hand of the one man who they by now fully realized was leading them and the German people rapidly to the most awful catastrophe in the history of their beloved Fatherland.

This paralysis of the mind and will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in the old virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility. By now the generals knew the evil of the man before whom they groveled. Guderian later recalled Hitler as he was after July 20.

Nevertheless, it was this man alone, half mad, rapidly deteriorating in body and mind, who now, as he had done in the snowy winter of 1941 before Moscow, rallied the beaten, retreating armies and put new heart into the battered nation. By an incredible exercise of will power which all the others in Germany—in the Army, in the government and among the people—lacked, he was able almost singlehandedly to prolong the agony of war for well nigh a year.