Discovering the Rommel Murder

by Charles F. Marshall

  "How did the Fiihrer react to that'?" I asked.

  "His response," replied Speidel, "was to angrily tell Rommel not to worry about the future course of the war, but to take care of his own front. The gulf between them had widened. Hitler's mistrust, indeed his hatred, had visibly grown."

  The meeting, which began at nine in the morning, lasted till four in the afternoon, except for a short break for lunch. It was a one-course meal consisting of a casserole of rice and vegetables, which Hitler hungrily devoured after it was first tasted for him. Behind his chair stood two SS guards and around his plate were pills and liqueur glasses with different medicines, and he would periodically interrupt his eating to take one of them.

  "At this stage of the game," Speidel went on, "it was time to throw in the towel. The Western Powers had complete mastery of the skies. An army that fights without adequate air cover is doomed. That was our undoing in Africa and again in France. Already in early 1944 your dominance of the air was so complete that the High Command issued an order that said, 'Every airplane in the sky is to be considered hostile,'

  "An army ceases to be an army when it is no longer capable of fighting, and responsible political and military leaders draw the appropriate conclusions. But Hitler was idiotically determined to fight to the last man in the hope of Endzieg (final victory) but without a strategic plan for its achievement. Had he taken Rommel's advice and brought the war to an end at this point, many young men on both sides who are dead would be alive today."

  "So the meeting changed nothing," I said.

  "There was one odd aftermath. Just before the meeting ended, General Schmundt, Hitler's chief adjutant, with whom Rommel had remained on friendly terms since his African days, came to me and asked that I summon all field commanders to La Roche Guyon so that they could personally report to Hitler on their problems. Like Rommel, for whom he had a high regard, Schmundt felt the High Command needed firsthand knowledge of conditions at the front."

  "What happened at that meeting?" I asked.

  "That meeting never came off. It was to be in two days, on June 19. So the next day in the process of coordinating matters, I called Blumentritt and was told the incredible news that Hitler had returned to Berchtesgaden. It seems that shortly after we left, one of Heinemann's V bombs meant for the British Isles was misdirected by a defective gyrosteering mechanism and landed close to headquarters. There were no casualties and not much damage."

  "I guess that's as close to the war as Hitler wanted to get," I said.

  "He was not big on visits to the front," said Speidel. "Shortly after the landings. Churchill visited the front. Hitler should have too. Sadly lacking at the Fiihrer's headquarters was an evaluation based on front-line knowledge. Impressions were divorced from reality.

  "After this acrimious meeting," Speidel went on, "we returned to our headquarters and composed a three-page memorandum, a review of the situation as Rommel had outlined it, and ending with: `I must beg you, my Fiihrer, to draw the inevitable conclusions. I feel it is my duty as the commander in chief of the army group to state this clearly.' And we sent it off by teletype."

  This conference, which lasted seven hours, is mentioned in a letter the Fox wrote his wife the next day but which he apparently did not trust to the mails:

  June 18: Today I have a chance to send you a letter by one of the men. Yesterday I went to see the Fiihrer and made everything perfectly clear. If the High Command was initially under the impression that the soldiers upfront did not fight well, their views have since been changed. The enemy himself has given the highest credit to my troops. Naturally, large elements of our forces were crushed by the tremendous impact of the enemy bombing and naval artillery bombardment, but those who survived fought like devils. Had they listened to me we would have counterattacked the first night with three divisions and probably beaten off the landings. Due to the panzer divisions having to be brought up from points 250 to 400 miles away, terrible delays resulted and the battle was very precarious at times.

  Of particular significance in this letter is Rommel's reference to his proposal to counterattack the first night with three divisions. General Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, later revealed that a strong German counterattack at an early moment was the principal anxiety of the Allied planners. Said he: "It was not the Atlantic Wall, but what we believed the Germans would do once we had demonstrated the vulnerability of theircoastal defenses.... Good judgment in this case would have been to concentrate infantry and panzer divisions fora strong counterattack at the earliest moment, before we were ready." Exactly the Swabian's prescription for defense.

  At the Margival meeting the relationship between Hitler and Rommel was irretrievably sundered. The Fiihrer lost his faith in Rommel. For his part, Rommel had already lost faith in Hitler with the miscarriage of the African campaign. Now his current mission was again marked by promises unkept, reinforcing his disdain for Hitler and his claque, particularly Keitel, the chief of the High Command. The latter was a tall, distinguished-looking figure with a mustache. His patriarchic appearance did not, however, shield him from the contempt in which he was regarded by many General Staff officers. By them he was appraised as a vassal of Hitler, an officer whose main attribute was a willingness to carry out without question the orders of the Fuhrer. Behind his back Keitel was sneeringly referred to as a lackey.

  Rommel also wasted no love on Jodi, the High Command's chief of operations, and especially detested General Walther Warlimont, the deputy chief, whom he regarded as an ignoramus driven by ambition but minus military and moral qualities.

  In the succeeding days as the emasculation of Hitler's forces continued unabated on all fronts, Rundstedt and Rommel urgently implored the Fuhrer for another conference. On June 28 both were ordered to report but on such short notice that, flying not allowed them, they had to drive through the night hours to reach Berchtesgaden by noon, the appointed time, only to be left cooling their heels till evening. The delay angered them. Their time could have been better employed at their posts, they felt. So critical were conditions by now that, while Eisenhower could later say, "Never during the entire campaign were we forced to fight a major battle without the weapons that were needed," Rommel could only write, "Should a decisive battle take place, we will run out of ammunition."

  Instead of the private conference they had thought they would have with Hitler, and in which they had hoped to talk to him with the greatest frankness, they had to press him in the presence of a large group to reevaluate the situation and take measures to bring the hostilities to a conclusion. In response, the Fuhrer retreated into his fantasy world of miracle weapons that would bring total victory. A request by the two officers for a private interview was met with refusal. No dinner invitation was extended, only a curt leave to depart.

  Before leaving, Rommel sought out Field Marshal Keitel and told him that Hitler's dream of total victory was absurd in light of the rapidly worsening conditions, that only total defeat could be expected, including the widespread destruction of the Reich's cities by bombing, unless peace could be made with the West and the front in the East held.

  Keitel promised to paint the picture for the Fuhrer in these colors, and the two marshals, the one old and revered, the other young, popular, and venerated, returned dejected and disgusted to their respective headquarters.

  Probably thinking that he could do no worse by changing the style of his losing game, the Fuhrer two days later, on July 1, relieved Rundstedt as theater commander "for reasons of health." To be saddled with the blame for the German debacle sorely troubled the old soldier. On the other hand, he was also glad to be free from the position. In a farewell visit to Rommel at La Roche Guyon he remarked that he was thankful that he would not be in command during the coming catastrophe.

  Among the higher German brass in the field commands, it was assumed that the senior marshal's successor as theater commander would be the proven and widely admired Rommel. Instead, Rundstedt's replacement was Field
Marshal Guenther von Kluge, a Prussian, who had only recently recovered from an automobile accident on the eastern front. Kluge had proved his mettle as a top-level commander in the 1940 French campaign. (It was as a subordinate of Kluge in 1940 that Rommel had led his "Ghost" Division in its epic thrust to the English Channel.) Later he had been supreme commander of the Central Army Group in Russia.

  Kluge was a serious, cold-eyed, energetic man who was quick to grasp a situation, courageous, unsparing of himself, remorseless in extracting the last ounce of effort from his underlings, but, in all, a bit of a peacock. While not enamored of Hitler, he felt indebted to him, perhaps swayed by a sense of being obligated for the special honors and gifts he had accepted from him.

  The overlord dared not supplant the popular Desert Fox. This would have been too much of a jolt for the German citizenry, whose confidence in Hitler's military acumen was waning rapidly despite Goebbel's constant assurances of the Fiihrer's omniscience. Rommel's removal would have been interpreted as an admission of military bankruptcy and the cult of the Fiihrer as "the greatest general of all times" (which had come into being after the successful campaigns in Poland, Norway, France, and the Balkans) would have been diminished.

  Rommel had viewed Rundstedt as an officer with many capabilities but now so old (he was approaching seventy) he had one foot in the grave. He had felt hindered by him, and when he was replaced Rommel had mixed feelings. The two had been in agreement on the political situation and on the overall conduct of the war. What Rommel saw in the old man was an eminent strategist, an expert in using the tools of war, but at the same time a man whose creative drive had been replaced by a sarcastic indifference, who was too tired for modem-day battle and so rarely left his command post.

  In taking leave of his staff, the embittered old warrior swore never to accept anothercommand. Yet, only weeks later, afterthe failure of the July 20 attempt on Hitler's life, he, along with Keitel, accepted membership on the "Court of Honor," which cashiered 1,200 officers, including 250 of the General Staff Corps and many of his fellow generals, for suspected complicity in the conspiracy. These degraded officers were then passed on to the "People's Court." Here they were usually sentenced to hanging, and their families, after first paying the cost of the execution, were sent to concentration camps.

  This part of Rundstedt's career has been charitably described by one of his associates as "the result of the physical and spiritual deterioration of an old man after five years of hard war and bitter experiences."

  Over dinner one evening with Speidel and his wife, Ruth, we discussed at considerable length Rundstedt's membership on the Court of Honor. Mrs. Speidel had a similar forgiving view of Rundstedt, whereas her husband's was harsher and less absolving.

  Fresh from the Fiihrer's headquarters at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had told him, "Rundstedt and Rommel are just dawdling along," and had blamed the disaster in the West on the omissions and commissions of the pair, a cocky Kluge visited Rommel at La Roche Guyon on the afternoon of July 5 for orientation. A robust, aggressive individual, confident that Rommel's pessimism was unwarranted and that he could turn the situation around, Kluge began sharply with, "Rommel, it is time you learned to listen!"

  "You are talking to a field marshal!" shouted Rommel, enraged, jumping to his feet. "I demand an explanation of that remark! I have equal rank with you and I am responsible to the Fiihrer for my decisions!"

  The conversation took on such a tempestuous character that General Speidel and the other officers present were ordered to leave the room. It lasted an hour, with Rommel interrupting Kluge's diatribe with suggestions that he withhold judgment until he had seen for himself the situation and the needed countermeasures.

  In fairness to the new theater commander, it must be understood that Rommel's realistic assessment of the war situation and his messages prodding the Fiihrer to face the consequences of defeat on the battlefield had not endeared him to Hitler and his sycophants, who viewed the Swabian as too popular, too independent, ofttimes disobedient, and now defeatist. This characterization they had conveyed to Kluge. Later in the day, still under the influence of the Fiihrer's aerie talk, Kluge expressed incredulity as Rommel portrayed German impotence in the face of Allied power. "I think you view the situation too pessimistically," he said. "I shall visit the front myself tomorrow."

  "Do so," said Rommel, "but be careful. Enemy planes patrol the roads continuously."

  "Oh, they won't bother me," said Kluge deprecatingly. "I won't even get out of the car."

  "I warn you," repeated Rommel, "be careful. Whenever I go up forward I keep my hand on the door release, ready to jump out. I have to dive into a ditch ten or fifteen times, and I don't permit the presence of my driver or the accompanying officers to embarrass me."

  The conference ended in a satisfactory working arrangement, their responsibilities defined, although the Swabian resented Kluge's refusal to discuss the all-important question of how to save Germany from destruction. He knew through confidential sources that Kluge had been in touch for years with forces opposing Hitler. The two parted with chilly formality.

  In Kluge, known to the troops as "der kluge Hans" (cunning Hans), Rommel recognized the schooled and polished General Staff officer, a type for which he had an aversion. Kluge, for his part, saw in Rommel an unsophisticated officer who did not come up to the General Staff standards of a field marshal.

  Beginning the next day, following an itinerary prepared by Rommel's staff, Kluge went on a two-day tour of inspections and talked with the troops and field commanders. A convert returned.

  "How many times did you get out of the car?" asked Rommel.

  "Twenty!" exclaimed the chastened Kluge. "And I find your description of the situation much nearer the truth than the Fiihrer's!" He apologized to Rommel for his original remarks, excusing his behavior on the grounds that Hitler and Keitel had misled him. This they had done in Russia, too, he said.

  Kluge's opinion of Rommel steadily heightened in the next weeks and the two men, different as they were in background and method, approached a unanimity in outlook.

  The substitution of Kluge for Rundstedt did little to curtail the success of the Western Powers, who during the next ten days rapidly pushed deeper into France and seized more bases for their planes. They bombarded the railroads funneling into the combat area so heavily and repeatedly that a oneday trip now took a week. To reinforce the first half million men he had landed, Eisenhower shuttled over another half million. Supplies he had safely ferried over the Channel by now totalled a million tons. To move them to the troops and to keep the troops moving, he had landed 30,000 vehicles. With every passing day the efficiency and scope of the liquidation of the Teutonic legions increased.

  While the German Seventh Army was bleeding to death in Normandy, the Fifteenth Army sat stoically guarding the coast of the Pas de Calais. The High Command dared not send it to the rescue. German Intelligence was imbued with the idee fixe that the Normandy invasion was only a diversionary effort, that the main assault was yet to come, and that when it did, it would be directed against the Pas de Calais. An invasion here offered the Allies a minimum of water travel, a maximum of air coverage and, once established, the most direct route to the heart of Germany.

  This illusion was carefully nurtured by the Allies with dummy ships in the Thames and on the Dover coast, plus dummy camps in East Anglia and more than usual bombing of the Fifteenth Army preserve. Luftwaffe scouting did little to correct the catastrophic Nazi analysis of Eisenhower's intentions. "Already by May 15," said Speidel, "Allied air supremacy was so absolute that not once after that date could one of our reconnaissance planes penetrate the island defenses to get a suitable strip of photographs of the English harbors."

  Rommel's letters are evidence that he, too, misinterpreted the Allied intentions. Four days after the initial landings he wrote: "/t will probably soon start at another point." A week later he still thought so: "We expect the next assault, perhaps on an even greater s
cale, at another point within the next few days." And several weeks later, as he lay wounded in the hospital, he still thought there was a likelihood of such an attack. Intelligence available to him placed thirty to thirty-five divisions still in England. He guessed the site for the second assault as the eastern edge of Calais.

  On July 8 Montgomery assaulted Caen, a key city in the German plan of defense, after first striking the enemy with an air attack by 500 heavy bombers. The next day troops of the British Second Army occupied all of the town north and west of the Orne River. On the 10th Maltot fell, promising to snare the Nazis between Orne and Odon. Seeing nothing but a long series of disasters ahead, Rommel discussed the situation with Kluge. "We have lost the war in the West," he said. "It must be brought to an end."

  Kluge agreed.

  At this time the Military Governor of France, General Stuelpnagel, who wanted the marshal to take independent action to end the war, sent a staff officer, Dr. Caesar von Hofacker, to see Rommel for a definitive analysis of the conditions on the front. So that plans could be synchronized, this was to be reported to Colonel General Ludwig Beck, the Army faction's conspiracy leader in Berlin, and to Colonel Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who was eventually to place the bomb beneath Hitler's map table.

  On July 12 Kluge came to La Roche Guyon for another discussion of the military situation. Kluge asked Rommel how long the front could be held, with the fighting units being whittled down and no reserves in support. The Fox suggested that the corps and division commanders be asked their opinions and those opinions be forwarded to Hitler with an ultimatum. Kluge agreed with the suggestion and said he would take these reports into account in making his final decision.