• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1187 0

Montgomery’s false claims at the time and later, there can be no doubt that the British and Canadians had kept the panzer divisions tied down at the crucial moment. The Canadians renewed the attack on 25 July to coincide with Operation Cobra, Bradley’s great offensive in the west. This again convinced the Germans that the major Allied attack towards Paris was coming down the Falaise road. A breakthrough here was their greatest fear, because it would cut off the whole of the Seventh Army facing the Americans. Kluge and his commanders did not recognize the true point of danger until it was too late. So the ‘death ride’ of the British armoured divisions was not entirely in vain.

The Germans also were shaken by news of the assassination attempt on Hitler at the Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg on 20 July. In fact the threat of an Allied breakthrough in Normandy and Hitler’s refusal to face reality had played a large part in the course of the plot.

20

The Plot against Hitler

There is a Nazi conspiracy theory to explain their defeat in Normandy, which begins with D-Day itself. Hitler loyalists still accuse Rommel’s chief of staff, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, of diverting panzer divisions from counter-attacking the British. This first ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend of 1944 pretends that Hitler had been awake early on 6 June, and that any delays in deploying the panzer divisions were not his fault. He was certain that Normandy was the site of the invasion from the first moment. But then Speidel, acting in Rommel’s absence, managed all by himself to sabotage the German response. This preposterous version, which attempts to switch the blame from Hitler to ‘treacherous’ officers of the German general staff, is riddled with countless holes and contradictions.

There was indeed a long-standing conspiracy against Hitler within the army, but nothing was ready by 6 June. So to suggest that Speidel was trying to misdirect the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend and hold back the 2nd and 116th Panzer-Divisions ready for a coup d’état in France at that moment is sheer fantasy. Speidel was, however, a key figure in the plot which produced the unsuccessful bomb explosion in East Prussia over six weeks later.

There was another level of opposition to Hitler, which did not believe in killing the dictator. This centred on Rommel himself, who wanted to force Hitler to make peace with the western Allies.43 If he refused, then they would bring him to trial. But the tyrannicides grouped round Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow and Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg rejected that course as doomed to failure. The SS and the Nazi Party would resist all the way. It would risk a civil war. Only the sudden decapitation of the Nazi regime in a coup d’état would allow them to form an administration which they hoped, with deeply misplaced optimism, that the western Allies might recognize.

Speidel had known Rommel since the First World War, when they had served together in the same regiment. On Speidel’s appointment as Rommel’s chief of staff, he had been summoned on 1 April to Führer headquarters at the Berghof. Jodl had briefed him on the ‘inflexible mission of defending the coast’, and told him that Rommel was ‘inclined to pessimism’ as a result of the African campaign. His task was to give Rommel encouragement.

When Speidel reached La Roche-Guyon two weeks later, Rommel spoke with bitterness about his experiences in Africa ‘and above all about Hitler’s constant attempts at deceit’. He added that the war should be ‘finished as quickly as possible’. Speidel then told him about his contacts with Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, a former chief of the army general staff, and the resistance movement in Berlin who were ‘ready and determined to do away with the present regime’. In subsequent discussions, Rommel condemned ‘the excesses of Hitler and the utter lawlessness of the regime’, but he still opposed assassination.

On 15 May, Rommel attended a secret conference with his old friend General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commander of