Hitler subsequently ordered an investigation of this renewed Intelligence failure, which had resulted in Rommel leaving his French headquarters for Germany on the fourth, Dollmann being absent on a map exercise at Rennes, and Sepp Dietrich being in Brussels.
Working in conjunction with the SS, the Abwehr in France had since early 1944 penetrated numerous Resistance “cells” in France ; thus they had learned that two lines of a Paul Verlaine poem broadcast by the BBC’s French service would be the invasion-alert.
On June 1 the first line was heard for the first time : les sanglots longs des violons de Pautomne. This, Intelligence knew, indicated that the invasion was due in the first half of the month. At 9:15 P.M. on the fifth the BBC broadcast the second line : blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone. This was the prearranged signal for the Resistance to start sabotage operations for an invasion beginning within forty-eight hours of midnight.
Salmuth’s radio operators picked this up and alerted every lower echelon as well as the HQ of Army Group B—where Speidel was acting in Rommel’s absence. Rundstedt’s headquarters also subsequently claimed to have intercepted the signal and warned “all echelons concerned.” But for some reason neither the OKW, nor the Berghof, nor the Seventh Army was warned—and it was Dollmann’s army, in Normandy, that took the blow.
This is all the more inexplicable as German Intelligence in Paris had analyzed the BBC secret messages—125 invasion-alerts were transmitted on the afternoon of June 1 alone—and found that nearly all 28 that were transmitted to cells penetrated by the Germans were in the Normandy-Brittany area.
The results of Hitler’s investigation are not known ; the noisy tread of history approaching soon took his thoughts elsewhere, and if the culprits were either Colonel Georg Hansen, Canaris’s successor as chief of military Intelligence, or Colonel Alexis von Roenne, chief of Foreign Armies West, both were shortly executed in another context. Thus by June 10 German optimism had evaporated. Dnitz conceded : “The invasion has succeeded.
The Second Front has come.” Loud recriminations began at the Berghof. When Gring blamed the navy for having assured everybody that the enemy would not risk his capital ships in a Channel invasion and for objecting to the earlier laying of the secret “pressure mines” off the French coast. Dnitz bridled : “Discussion of such matters does not seem opportune at this moment.” It was obvious that the enemy planned to capture the deep port of Cherbourg next.
If this could not be prevented, warned Rundstedt on June 11, the Fhrer might be confronted with a situation requiring “fundamental decisions.” Rommel echoed this in a letter to Keitel the next day.
Hitler now realized that his optimism had been misplaced, and belatedly ordered two high-grade SS panzer divisions (the 9th and 10th)—which had been standing by to attack a minor Russian salient near Kolomea—to entrain immediately for the Normandy front instead.
“If I had had the 9th and 10th SS panzer divisions in the west,” he grumbled at the end of August, “all this would probably never have happened.” With these reinforcements Rundstedt was ordered to destroy the Normandy bridgehead piecemeal. The new campaign took the British completely by surprise.
Though Hitler did not know it, Churchill had to order a complete redistribution of the British antiaircraft and fighter defenses : bombing of the V-1 sites now assumed a priority above the destruction of German cities, aircraft factories, and oil refineries.
Gring retracted his earlier statement about the authorship of the weapon ; but at 5:35 P.M. on the seventeenth Hitler telephoned Milch to congratulate him in person, and a few days later he jubilantly ordered Speer to throttle back A-4 rocket production to release manpower and materials to increase V-1 and jetbomber production. Back at the Berghof the next evening, the news was that the Americans had, as feared, reached the west coast of the Cherbourg peninsula.
At 11 P.M. he said accusingly to Jodl, “They are stating quite bluntly that they’ve got through. Now, have they or haven’t they !” “Jawohl,” conceded the general ; “they got through.” He had also spoken of the Messerschmitt jet bomber. Gring’s propellor-driven fighter-bombers were being massacred in France, just as Hitler had feared. During June he closely followed the jet bomber’s production progress and studied the photographs of the underground factories being built.
General Korten appealed for the immediate appearance of twelve to fifteen Me-262 bombers at the battle front—whether piloted by civilians or officers was immaterial—and for three more to be used, despite Gring’s misgivings, as high-speed photographic reconnaissance planes. Production of the Heinkel 177 heavy bomber was to be stepped up as well, with a corresponding cutback in medium-bomber (Junkers 188) production.
On June 20, Hitler accepted Speer’s proposal that all aircraft production be transferred to his armaments ministry. At last Hitler was taking a more personal interest in the Luftwaffe’s equipment. Zeitzler rejected all the conflicting evidence. On June 17, the OKL telephoned him directly to warn of evidence of an imminent Red Army offensive near Smolensk.
A captured Russian cipher officer revealed that three corps of fighter planes, including one from the Crimea, had just arrived at Smolensk ; over four thousand five hundred aircraft were suddenly confronting Army Group Center. Soviet reinforcements had been moved from Kovel, after the German attack had failed to materialize there, to Gomel and Smolensk, and they were confronting the Ninth and Fourth armies, respectively.
On June 18 and t9, Hitler called for the Fourth Air Corps, the last great air reserve in the east, to bomb the Gomel armies, and he refused to transfer the corps to Normandy for minelaying operations for just this reason. As late as June 20, General Zeitzler was still obstinately maintaining that the real Soviet offensive would shortly come against Model’s front. Hitler ignored his advice.
From the Berghof, the Luftwaffe was informed the next day : “The general appreciation is that the expected attack on Army Group Center begins tomorrow.” Once more, toward 2 A.M.
on June 22, Hitler personally ordered the Sixth Air Force to stand by on full alert for that attack within the next few hours. Next afternoon, on June 22, the same generals listened to a secret speech by Hitler on the Obersalzberg, on the nature of war and revolution. The shorthand record has survived in Bormann’s files.
To frequent storms of applause, the Fhrer expounded his philosophy that in war as in nature the weakest must go to the wall, and that a nation which failed to recognize this would as surely vanish from the face of the earth as had countless prehistoric species. “Nor can there occur a revolution in the Germany of today.
The Jews have gone ; and the born leaders I have already singled out long ago, regardless of their origins, for positions of authority.” If any man now turned to the outside world against Germany, then a death sentence would be meted out to him.
The generals fiercely applauded Hitler’s image of the “little worm” of an infantryman in a slit trench, confronting ten or more Russian tanks with only a grenade in his hands, while democrats at home plotted his country’s surrender.
“How can one expect the brave little rifleman to die for his country on the battlefield, while at the same moment others at home are doing no less than plotting the betrayal of these men’s sacrifices !” When people asked him, “How easy is your conscience now ?” he could only respond that he could often not sleep, but that he never for one instant doubted that Germany would survive every danger.
“I still have not made my ultimate appeal to the German nation,” he reminded the generals, and they responded with frenetic applause and shouts of “Heil !” Far into the night Hitler debated with General Guderian and General Walter Buhle ways of providing Rundstedt with long-range artillery capable of engaging such enemy battle fleets from the shore.
The next afternoon, June 26, Keitel ordered court-martial investigation of the negligence and omissions that had so weakened the Cherbourg garrison ; everybody involved from Seventh Army downward was to be examined. Early
on June 28, the Seventh Army’s commander, Friedrich Dollmann, took poison. Hitler was told the general had died of a heart attack, believed it, and authorized a generous obituary. Zeitzler left without saluting and suffered a complete nervous and physical collapse later that day. Hitler never saw him again. He managed without a Chief of General Staff for the following three weeks. He introduced Kluge to the murderous V-1 flying bomb and explained its strategic purpose.
The enemy was already forced to keep 250 fighter aircraft on patrol against the V-1s ; to add an element of confusion, Hitler had ordered them painted with the same black-and-white stripes as the Allied invasion aircraft.
On June 26 he stepped up the V-1 saturation of London, still hoping to force the Allies to stage a disastrous second invasion in the Pas de Calais ; and when the OKL suggested filling 250 V-1s a month with an extradestructive aluminized explosive, Trialen, Hitler responded by ordering ten times that number.
He was ecstatic that England was suffering again, and by all accounts even worse than in 1940. “The all-out bombing attacks on our catapult sites are sufficient proof of the effectiveness of our weapons !” two officers of the V-1 regiment assured Hitler at the Berghof
on June 29. Hitler proudly explained to Kluge that all the shells fired at Paris by Krupp’s Big Bertha in World War I contained less explosive than one V-1. “We spare our men and our aircraft.—The V-1 is aircraft and bomb alike, and it needs no fuel for a return flight !” That night the two-thousandth flying bomb was launched against England.
These he spelled out on June 29, first to Rundstedt and Rommel and then that evening to Dnitz, Gring, and Sperrle, the Third Air Force commander in France.
First, the enemy’s offshore battle fleet had to be driven off or sunk, and his transport ships had to be prevented from reaching the invasion coast ; Hitler proposed saturating the coastal waters with the new secret mines, sowing them with the same “bulldog tenacity” the enemy had shown in bombing the German ground-transport system.
“It’s far more effective to sink an entire ship’s cargo than to have to deal with the troops and equipment piecemeal after they have been unloaded,” he pointed out.
He recommended the ruthless employment of every weapon available—circling torpedoes, submarines with snorkel breathing-tubes, radio-controlled launches packed with high explosives, and V-1 flying bombs manned by suicide-pilots.(3) The second requirement was for motor transport to match the enemy’s immense mobility ; if necessary, trucks and buses would have to be ruthlessly requisitioned from the French.
Third, no proposed counterattack could survive long without logistics support ; Hitler asked the Luftwaffe to establish certain “convoy highways” to the bridgehead, heavily protected by antiaircraft and fighter cover. The fourth requirement was for at least localized air superiority—an armada of fighters and fighter-bombers to keep the enemy bombers at bay. Rundstedt’s fatalism was powerfully expressed
on July 1, when he submitted to the OKW his own view that no counterattack would ever be possible and advised them to give up the bridgehead at Caen—the main enemy Schwerpunkt of attack—and withdraw the remaining front line beyond the range of the enemy ships’ artillery.
He enclosed a similar appreciation by General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Panzer Group West ; Geyr suggested that there was a choice between tactical mending, which left the initiative with the enemy, and elastic warfare, which would give the defenders the initiative for at least some of the time. Precisely how he hoped to fight an elastic war with the panzer divisions immobilized by lack of fuel and motor transport he did not stipulate.
Jodl soberly pointed out that the Rundstedt-Geyr proposals would be the first step toward a catastrophic evacuation of France. There were only two choices : either evacuation, or fighting this decisive battle where they stood at the first possible opportunity. Late that day Hitler signaled to Rommel that “the present lines are to be held.
Any further enemy breakthrough is to be prevented by tenacious defense or by local counterattacks.” Rundstedt was dismissed—Hitler sent one of his army adjutants, Colonel Heinrich Borgmann, to decorate him with the Oak Leaves and hand him the ominous blue envelope in person—and Kluge took his place. Geyr von Schweppenburg was also sacked, and Hitler nearly dismissed Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s Chief of Staff, as well.
For a time the energetic commander, fresh from the Berghof, brought new inspiration to the defense of France. Such was the background to Hitler’s final decision to scrap most bomber production, announced
on July 1. General Koller forcefully argued that if only fighters were produced, there would be no minelaying, no guided bombs, no air launching of the V-1, and no Fourth Air Corps operations in the east—their only strategic bombing experiment ; moreover, if the enemy began to use poison gas, the Luftwaffe would be powerless to reply. Thus Hitler’s ax fell only on the Heinkel 177—but that decision was final.
The next day he asked Saur on the phone how fighter production would now rise. “In June we turned out twenty-six hundred single- and twin-engined fighters,” came the reply. “In July I hope to top the three thousand mark. In August thirty-three hundred, and then rising three hundred a month to forty-five hundred fighters in December.
This will make our total aircraft output eventually sixty-five hundred, of which five thousand will be single- and twin-engined fighter types.” As he replaced the receiver, Hitler recognized that the strategic issue was now this : could the bulging, straining battlefronts be kept from the Reich long enough for these figures to be attained ? Much would depend on the courage and convictions of his field marshals. The Fhrer lectured Kesselring on this when the field marshal came to the Berghof
on July 3. After weeks of unremitting, hard-fought retreats, Kesselring had brought the enemy’s advance in Italy to a standstill, still some way south of the as yet unfortified Apennine line. Kesselring depicted his plight in Italy—with insufficient troops, air cover, and civilian manpower—vividly.
General Koller wrote that day : The Fhrer replied in great detail to all this, and explains just why we have to fight for every square meter of ground—because for us gaining time is everything now. The longer we can hold the enemy off at the periphery the better.
Perhaps the individual soldier or NCO may not grasp why he is asked to fight in the Abruzzi mountains instead of the Apennines, but his Supreme Commander must understand why and comply, because the interests of Germany’s fight transcend those of the individual soldier.Kesselring fears that he will be breached in his present position if he holds it too long, and he wants to fall back on the Apennine line early on.
But the Fhrer wants that postponed as long as possible, as there is nothing else behind the Apennines, and if the enemy gets through there, the entire lowlands of Upper Italy will be lost ; nor is that all, because the troops will find their escape cut off by the leapfrogging Allied tank formations.
Another reason is that any withdrawal to the north increases the threat to the coasts of Greece, Albania, and Dalmatia.Turning to the war in the air, the Fhrer again emphasizes how enormously different the situation would be if we still had the air superiority we used to. We are going to win it back—at least partially—but for that we need time, and we must not give up ground before then.
Kesselring fears that he will be breached in his present position if he holds it too long, and he wants to fall back on the Apennine line early on. But the Fhrer wants that postponed as long as possible, as there is nothing else behind the Apennines, and if the enemy gets through there, the entire lowlands of Upper Italy will be lost ; nor is that all, because the troops will find their escape cut off by the leapfrogging Allied tank formations.
Another reason is that any withdrawal to the north increases the threat to the coasts of Greece, Albania, and Dalmatia.Turning to the war in the air, the Fhrer again emphasizes how enormously different the situation would be if we still had the air superiority we used to.
We are going to win it back—at least partially—but for that we need time, and we must not give up ground before then. Turning to the war in the air, the Fhrer again emphasizes how enormously different the situation would be if we still had the air superiority we used to. We are going to win it back—at least partially—but for that we need time, and we must not give up ground before then. At first the cause of this defeat was a mystery.
Zeitzler’s faulty strategic appreciation alone was not to blame ; more serious was the Luftwaffe’s virtual impotence—thrown into confusion by the sudden loss of its forward airfields and paralyzed by the first serious fuel shortage to affect the eastern front.
Hitler’s demands for an airlift to the encircled Fourth Army southeast of Minsk could not be fulfilled ; the Messerschmitt 323 giant transport planes were grounded, and the entire Sixth Air Force was hamstrung by the lack of refined aviation fuel. Most ominous of the causes was the sudden unwillingness of leading army officers to continue the fight.
As General Jodl put it soon after : “Practically the entire Army Group Center surrendered to the enemy this summer.” There was evidence that Soviet-trained “Seydlitz officers” had infiltrated the battle zone, in German uniforms, and issued false orders to sabotage the army group’s defense. Others seemed to have been active in Moscow’s cause even longer. After the Fourth Army surrendered
on July 8, Hitler was shown an order signed by General Vinzenz Mller of the Twelfth Army Corps(5) in which that army’s soldiers were instructed to put an “end to the pointless bloodshed”: The Russian command have promised (a) to care for the injured and (b) to let officers retain daggers and medals, and other ranks their decorations. All weapons and equipment are to be collected and handed over in good condition.
Two weeks later Mller and fifteen fellow generals of Army Group Center signed a long pamphlet attacking Hitler and denigrating their colleagues’ continued defense of the Reich. Millions of facsimiles were scattered over the German lines. The text was personally broadcast by the generals on Moscow radio.
Shortly afterward, the same generals, abetted by Paulus and Seydlitz, appealed to Army Group North officers to desert or disobey Hitler’s “murderous orders” to stand fast. “Now,” said Hitler, “I am beginning to understand how such frightful things could have happened in the Center.” Hitler did not reply. 6 In Berchtesgaden
on July 9, 1944, Speer had chanced upon the army’s Quartermaster General Wagner—who had just reported to Hitler on the equipment lost in the Center—and Generals Erich Fellgiebel, Helmuth Stieff, and Fritz Lindemann, who were conniving in a luxury hotel.
Zeitzler was also in the hotel, “convalescing.” “The hotel ambience of coffee and cigarettes formed a distasteful contrast to the topic under discussion,” recorded Speer’s office chronicler ; “—namely the divisions lost on the Russian front … [Wagner] makes the problems in the east all seem so trivial and it is hard to understand why his comments as Quartermaster General do not show greater concern, as he is responsible for the all-important military supplies.
Inroads like these into the armaments sphere would have had the Minister [Speer] speaking in a very serious tone of voice. But this afternoon the generals were nonchalantly referring to the various eastern situations as mere trifles.” (All were plotting, and suffered the consequences.) p. 656 According to the stenographer’s diary, Hitler’s July 13, 1944, secret speech lasted from 10:22 to 11:40 P.M.
Eighteen days later, his health shattered by the bomb attempt, Hitler admitted to Jodl : “Obviously I can stand up and even speak for a certain length of time, but then I suddenly have to sit down again. I would not trust myself to speak to ten thousand people today. Nor would I trust myself to make a speech like that one I recently did on the Obersalzberg, because I might suddenly faint and collapse” (Heiber, page 608). Its content was evidently the familiar litany.
On April 11, 1945, General Fellgiebel’s adjutant told British interrogation officers that General Stieff—chief of the OKH organization branch—had privately muttered, “If I hear that phonograph record played once more I’ll go crazy !”—to which Fellgiebel, a fellow-conspirator, replied with heavy irony, “Well, Stieff, that was the last time.”