David Irving HITLER’S WAR PART 2 ” WAR OF LIBERATION “ The Warlord at the Western Front
On May 10, 1940, the Vlkischer Beobachter “”chief organ of the Nazi party””rolled off the presses in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna with red banner headlines : GERMANY’S DECISIVE STRUGGLE HAS BEGUN ! and THE FHRER AT THE WESTERN FRONT . After half an hour’s tough arguing, Keitel had persuaded Hitler to allow the OKW communiqu to end with the announcement that he himself had gone to the western front to take command.
Hitler was loath to steal his generals’ thunder, but the OKW generals, fresh from their command triumph in Norway, wanted to keep the army’s General Staff firmly in its secondary place. Hitler’s prestige was high. General Erwin Rommel””now commanding a panzer division in the west””had in a letter
on April 21 written a private eulogy of the Fhrer’s victory over Denmark and Norway. “Ja, if we didn’t have the Fhrer !
Who knows whether any other German exists with such a genius for military leadership and such a matching mastery of political leadership too !” Hitler had patiently gone over every aspect of “Yellow” with the leading generals””with Walther Reichenau, Gnther von Kluge, and the panzer general Ewald von Kleist, whose tanks would spearhead the thrust to the English Channel, and with General Ernst Busch, whose Sixteenth Army would string out a powerful flank defense south of the armored
thrust. Hitler found high praise for the meticulous logistics work of Kleist’s Chief of Staff, General Kurt Zeitzler.
Just as he was godfather to the strategy underlying “Yellow,” so Hitler was the progenitor of the special raids which opened the campaign””the “Trojan horse” trick used to seize the Dutch bridges, the paratroop raids against Rotterdam and the Moordijk bridge in “Fortress Holland,” and above all the glider landings on the key bridges in Belgium and on the daunting fortress-site at Eben Emael.
“Suffice to say this,” was the appraisal of one of Jodl’s staff in September, “this operation against the bridges was the factor that would determine whether the Sixth Army could advance or not. That it came off was thanks to the Fhrer alone, as regards both the decision itself and the preparation.” As a military commander, Adolf Hitler remained an enigma even to his closest associates. They admired him for his past achievements for Germany but still feared for the future.
In victory his generals worshipped him ; but those whom he rejected turned sour, abominated him, and eventually conspired against him. The depth of hatred he stirred in the souls of these intelligent outcasts can be read in the countless essays they composed in vain endeavors to synthesize and express their memories.
Alfred Jodl, perhaps his most able strategic adviser, was to write from a prison cell that he still kept asking himself whether he had really known the man at whose side he had led such a thorny and self-denying existence. “I keep making the same mistake : I blame his humble origins.
But then I remember how many peasants’ sons were blessed by History with the name The Great.” And General Zeitzler””one of Hitler’s last chiefs of the General Staff also grappled in vain with this phenomenon, though more analytically.
“I witnessed Hitler in every conceivable circumstance””in times of fortune and misfortune, of victory and defeat, in good cheer and in angry outburst, during speeches and conferences, surrounded by thousands, by a mere handful, or quite alone, speaking on the telephone, sitting in his bunker, in his car, in his plane ; in brief on every conceivable occasion.
Even so, I can’t claim to have seen into his soul or perceived what he was after.” Zeitzler saw him as an actor, with every word, gesture, and grimace under control, his penetrating stare practiced for hours before some private mirror. He won over newcomers from the first handshake and piercing look, and paradoxically appeared the very embodiment of the strong and fearless leader, of honesty and open heart. He cultivated the impression that he cared deeply for his subordinates’ well-being.
He would telephone a departing general at midnight : “Please don’t fly. It’s such foul weather and I’m worried about your safety.” Or he would look a minor official in the eye and explain, “Now I’m telling you this privately, and you must keep it strictly under your hat.” The surviving records are full of examples of the congenial impression Hitler made on others. Rommel proudly wrote
on June 3 : “The Fhrer’s visit was fabulous. He greeted me with the words, ‘Rommel ! We were all so worried about you during the attack !’ He was beaming from one ear to the other, and asked me to walk with him afterward””I was the only division commander there.” Milch wrote down Hitler’s words to him
on April 21, 1941, after a particularly hazardous return flight from North Africa : “Thank goodness you got back !” In June 1941 Albert Speer’s office chronicle noted : “The Fhrer sent a telephone message from the Obersalzberg begging Herr Speer to drop the proposed visit to Norway, as things are too uncertain up there and Herr Speer is indispensable to him.” In February 1943 Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen wrote in his diary : “Finally the Fhrer inquired very anxiously about my
health.” In midwar Hitler would halt urgent conferences with hungry generals for half an hour to allow his stenographers to eat. One wrote in his diary
on February 20, 1943 : “The midday conference was short””57 minutes””but cold. The Fhrer must have noticed that we were freezing, because he mentioned it to us. I said that if you sit still a long time you do get cold. The Fhrer then promised a heater for us.
I replied, ‘That would be very nice, mein Fhrer !’ “ And next day : “At the noon conference the heater promised by the Fhrer is indeed there””a small china stove.In the afternoon, before a brief reception of seven officers handpicked for special missions for which the Fhrer briefs them in a short speech, he inquired in General Schmundt’s presence whether the stove was warm enough for us.
When we said it was, he was hugely pleased and laughed out loud.” His assessment of character was instant and deadly. A member of Jodl’s staff, Captain Ivo-Thilo von Trotha, who was often present at Hitler’s supper table during the French campaign, wrote in 1946 : “My impression was that the Fhrer clearly recognized the human weaknesses of his colleagues and stood aloof from them.” Hitler knew precisely how far he could go with each general.
Once he snatched a document from Keitel’s hands and threw it on the floor. Keitel meekly gathered it up. Hitler judged newcomers after only a glance. Of one army commander he sourly commented, “He looks like a schoolteacher !”””and since for him every teacher was a ” Steisstrommler ,” or buttock-thrasher, that general’s career was clearly at an end.
But his staff abounded with misfits””like his personal adjutant, the crippled nonentity Julius Schaub””whose value was in their undivided loyalty to him. Of his gifts as a leader, even a military leader, there is no doubt. Halder was to refer to his unusual intellect and grasp, his imaginativeness, his tenacity and willpower.
Jodl wrote that in the French campaign Hitler’s leadership was clear, consistent, and capable ; here Hitler was to prove himself a “classical commander.” Jodl considered that in drafting the terms of the armistice with fallen France, Hitler ostensibly showed a generosity that gave cause to hope that of the two warring impulses within him it was the better that was gaining ground. By decades of planned reading, Hitler had soaked up a huge amount of technical and military learning.
His memory was proverbial. He had not only read the works of Frederick the Great, Moltke, Schlieffen, and Clausewitz, he could confound his generals with quotations from memory. What he lacked was the ability to assess and analyze a military situation logically, unhurriedly, and calmly””as a staff officer would have ; in that respect he was still the World War I corporal who had no mastery of the time and space problems involved in the deployment of great armies.
In the French campaign he was to prove as timid and cautious in the conduct of operations as he had been bold, almost brash, in designing them ; in later campaigns he asserted himself to the other extreme. The classical Fhrer Directive, in which his commanders were given a broad mission and left to their own discretion in carrying it out, was increasingly supplemented and supplanted by Fhrer Orders, in which Hitler intervened in the tactical operations at every level.
His victory in France confirmed him in his belief that he was a predestined military commander. Hitler’s headquarters for “Yellow” were at Mnstereifel. The underground command post was very cramped. Alone in his room, with its folding bed, table, and chair, he could hear every sound made by Keitel and Jodl next door. Jodl’s operations staff was billeted down in the village and worked in a wooden encampment hidden three miles away in the woods.
Hitler toured it briefly one day””the only time he ever set foot inside Security Zone II. He preferred to hold his war conferences in the open air, for the spring landscape enchanted him.
He privately suggested to his staff that when the war was over they should all return each year just this little select group around him now””to Mnstereifel, “my bird paradise.” The site remained unchanged until 1944, with even the names of the occupants left painted on the doors ; it had been intended as a permanent memorial to Hitler’s “war of liberation.” As the Luftwaffe predicted, May 10, 1940, dawned fine.
He rewarded the meteorologist responsible for the brilliant forecasting with a gold watch. During the night, his Luftwaffe had already begun mining the Belgian and Dutch ports. Now Gring struck simultaneously at seventy airfields, destroying between three and four hundred planes, and thus seizing for Hitler an air superiority that was to remain unchallenged for the next two weeks.
Soon messengers brought him the exhilarating news that the British and French armies had begun pouring into Belgium. In October 1941, his armies now before Moscow, Hitler still remembered the thrill of that moment. “When the news came that the enemy was advancing along the whole front I could have wept for joy ! They’d fallen right into my trap !
It was a crafty move on our part to strike toward Liege””we had to make them believe we were remaining faithful to the old Schlieffen Plan.How exciting it will be later to go over all those operations once again. Several times during the night I used to go to the operations room to pore over those relief maps.” The Belgians and Dutch were not unprepared.
The Forschungsamt had intercepted a last frantic telephone warning from the Dutch military attach to his government the previous evening, but the delicate “Trojan horse” operations went ahead””a calculated risk, in view of the enemy’s foreknowledge. As one of Jodl’s staff noted : “Our troops were storming an enemy who was ready and waiting for our attack to begin early
on May 10.” The Dutch government had cannily refused an entry visa to Major Kiewitz, Hitler’s special emissary to Queen Wilhelmina. Ironically it was Canaris’s Abwehr that was appointed to find out how the Dutch suspicions had been aroused ; the Abwehr adroitly diverted suspicion to a senior foreign ministry official. Extreme anxiety reigned at Hitler’s headquarters as word of the vital commando-operations was awaited.
One of Jodl’s officers was accompanying the first wave of tanks invading Holland and Belgium with a radio truck, to report direct to Hitler on the state of the bridges over the Meuse and the Albert Canal.
Between 9 and 10 A.M. the first three coded signals arrived from this officer, Captain von Trotha : the Dutch had evidently managed to blow up both bridges across the Meuse north and south of Maastricht ; the railway bridge farther north had also been blown up, but was now in German hands ; the Abwehr’s Special Battalion 100, the “Trojan horse,” had suffered fearful casualties.
But in the afternoon Trotha had better news : the Belgian bridges across the Albert Canal””where a hundred troops had silently landed in gliders as dawn broke””were intact, except for one at Canne. A Belgian infantry division close by had as yet done nothing to mop up this diminutive German holding force.
By 4:30 P.M., Hitler learned that the 4th Panzer Division had actually forded the Meuse, leaving its armor temporarily behind, and was pouring into the two bridgeheads seized across the Albert Canal. At Eben Emael a band of intrepid German engineer troops armed with hollow-charge explosives had landed by glider and immobilized the entire fortress : the underground gun-crews were sealed in, their artillery was knocked out.
By early next morning, May 11, a temporary bridge had been thrown across the Meuse at Maastricht, and an armored brigade had crossed. The 4th Panzer Division now spearheaded the advance of Reichenau’s Sixth Army. Eben Emael capitulated at midday, and with this, Belgium’s fate was effectively sealed. In the evening, Captain von Trotha brought to Hitler the first impressions of the front line.
On the approaches to Maastricht the German armor had encountered little resistance ; the frontier forces had thrown their weapons away and fled by bicycle. The Dutch population had stood curiously watching the tanks and infantry pass. The people were friendly, Trotha reported ; some of them gave the Hitler salute, others willingly helped the invaders on their way with directions stuttered in Dutch or broken German.
As Trotha had entered Maastricht in his armored radio vehicle, two colossal detonations, shattering millions of windows, had heralded the demolition of the bridges. A stolid Dutch citizen had espied his red-striped General Staff trousers and besought advice : he had left home and crossed the bridge, hatless, just to fetch milk””how was he to get back ?
Trotha had replied the Germans also regretted that the bridge was down, but that all complaints were to be addressed to the Dutch military authorities. “I was opposed to it from the start,” said the Dutchman.
Trotha replied, “Well you must just wait until our troops have finished crossing.” The Dutchman asked how long that would be. “We will try and get everybody across by the time the war ends,” joked the army officer. “But what will my wife think ?” “I expect the people over there will also learn in time that the war has come,” responded Trotha. In fact, by afternoon the Germans were already ferrying Dutch citizens from one side of the river to the other.
In southern Holland the German troops had found the Dutch garrisons of towns and villages standing idly around without their guns or gear and passively awaiting the invaders. But in the north a four-day battle raged as the Dutch tried to wipe out the paratroops and glider-borne infantry landed at Rotterdam and The Hague ; bomber squadrons had already taken off to relieve the pressure on General Kurt Student’s paratroops at Rotterdam when word arrived that the Dutch were capitulating.
Only half the bombers could be recalled””the rest dropped nearly a hundred tons of bombs on the town ; nine hundred people died in the subsequent fires. The next day Holland formally surrendered. It was now time for Hitler’s masterstroke. Every indication until now had persuaded the enemy that the offensive through Belgium and Holland was the somewhat unoriginal linchpin of Hitler’s strategy.
For month’s Canaris’s organization had been feeding clues to that effect to the enemy, using every conceivable method from elegant women agents to “indiscreet” telephone conversations on lines known to be tapped by the enemy. But Hitler’s main offensive was to start far to the south, at Sedan, on the other side of the Ardennes, where General von Kleist’s armor had just crossed the Meuse and established a bridgehead.
On May 14, Hitler directed that all available panzer and mechanized divisions were to assemble for a rapid push from this bridgehead westward and then northwestward to the English Channel ; that he should have issued a Fhrer Directive which merely repeated what had long been ordered was an augury of the extent to which he proposed to take command himself.
The course of the operations so far shows that the enemy has not perceived the basic idea of our own operation, the eventual breakthrough by Army Group A [Rundstedt]. They are still moving up powerful forces to a line extending from Antwerp to Namur and apparently neglecting the sector confronting Army Group A.
Bock’s Army Group B was given the task of luring as much of the enemy into Belgium as possible before Rundstedt’s armor cut them off in the rear by driving to the Channel. Leeb’s Army Group C had meanwhile so successfully simulated preparations for a frontal assault on the Maginot line that the French had hesitated to withdraw troops from the south until it was too late, for the Luftwaffe had destroyed the railway lines.
Their path now flattened before them by the bombers of Richthofen’s Eighth Air Corps, Kleist’s armored units rolled out of the Sedan bridgehead toward the Channel coast. From this moment on, only a resolute commander supported by outstanding military Intelligence could have saved France.
General von Rundstedt, Germany’s oldest active soldier, is said to have remarked that he would have found it much more interesting to fight the rest of the campaign in the shoes of France’s Army Chief of Staff, General Maurice Gamelin. It was now clear that the cream of the Allied forces had mustered north of Kleist’s advance and was penetrating Belgium.
German army Intelligence had located a new French Seventh Army referred to explicitly as an ” arme d’intervention dans la Belgique .” Since the end of March, Halder’s Intelligence branch, “Foreign Armies West,” had consistently estimated that half the Anglo-French forces were in the north, waiting to be cut off. (1) Again, as in the Norwegian campaign, Hitler’s nerve briefly left him. He was wary of his own good fortune.
When Brauchitsch made his regular twice-daily telephone call, Hitler nervously bombarded him with minutiae of which the army’s thorough preparations had long taken care. As Kleist’s armor swept onward toward the Channel coast,
on May 17 Hitler intervened to order that they halt to allow the slower infantry divisions time to catch up and consolidate the flank before the French could penetrate it. Army Intelligence argued in vain that the French were presently concerned only with stabilizing their own defensive line along the Aisne and the Somme : radio Intelligence had found a new French army headquarters west of Verdun, and aerial reconnaissance showed that the French transport movements were purely defensive.
Hitler would not be convinced. He drove to Rundstedt’s headquarters, nervously studied the maps, and on his