D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [180]
The reaction of Stenglin and Beck was far from universal. Most junior officers were shaken and confused, yet preferred not to dwell on the subject. Staff officers like Zimmermann, on the other hand, suffered a ‘feeling of moral oppression and worry’. Some were curiously shocked that Stauffenberg had placed a bomb and then left the scene. An assassination by pistol, during which the assassin had been gunned down, seemed to them more in keeping with the honour of the German officer corps. What depressed them most, however, was that the failed attempt handed all power to the fanatics and eliminated any possibility of a compromise peace.49 ‘Those who were far-seeing,’ wrote Zimmermann, ‘thought this is the beginning of the end, a terrible signal. The die-hards thought: it is good that the treacherous reactionaries have been unmasked and that we can now make a clean sweep of them.’
In London, hopes were raised that the failed bomb plot ‘might well be the proverbial pebble which starts the avalanche’. But Hitler’s belief that providence had saved him made him even more convinced of his military genius, to the despair of his generals. He happened to be right, however, about one thing. He described the idea of a truce with the British and Americans, perhaps even persuading them to join the war against the Soviet Union, as ‘an idiotic idea’. The plotters, he said, were ‘unbelievably naïve’ and their attempt to kill him was ‘like a Wild West story’.
Conspiracy theories flourished in Nazi circles over the next few months, once the large numbers of officers involved in the plot and their sympathizers became clearer. Altogether some 5,000 were arrested. These theories extended beyond the idea that Speidel had deliberately misdirected the panzer divisions on 6 June. Once Plan Fortitude and the threat of a second landing in the Pas-de-Calais were finally seen to have been a brilliant hoax, the SS became convinced that there had been treason within Fremde Heere West, the military intelligence department dealing with the western Allies. The SS demanded how military intelligence could have swallowed a deception involving a whole army group which never existed. Staff officers were suspected of having inflated Allied strengths deliberately, and accused of the ‘falsification of the enemy situation’.
Tensions between Waffen-SS and the German Army also grew rapidly in the field in Normandy over the coming month. As rations were drastically reduced because of Allied air attacks on supply transport, SS foraging parties looted without compunction and threatened any army soldiers trying to do the same.
The one thing on which army and Waffen-SS seemed to agree in Normandy was their continued exasperation with the Luftwaffe. General Bülowius, the commander of II Air Corps, regarded this as very unfair. Allied air supremacy meant his aircraft were intercepted as soon as they took off, and bombers were forced to drop their loads long before they reached the target area. He suffered from the army’s ‘daily reports which even reached Führer headquarters that their own Luftwaffe and own aircraft were nowhere to be seen’. As a result he received ‘many unpleasant reproaches and accusations’ from the highest quarters.
Luftwaffe aircrew in Normandy consisted of a surviving handful of aces, while the vast majority were cannon fodder straight out of flying school.