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By Root 1527 0

Allies, of course, but it also needed to be lost, comprehensively and personally, by Hitler himself. His suicide in the bunker after the total collapse of his dreams had to be the last chapter of the tale, the crucial prerequisite for the decent, peace-loving Germany we know today.61 If Hitler had been killed by the generals in 1944 – with or without British help – and a compromise peace had been arranged that way, present-day Germans would always have wondered whether the Führer might have won the war. There would always be the nagging doubt that Hitler was about to pull off his greatest master-stroke in a career that had hitherto been full of them. Furthermore, if a post-Hitler German government had been allowed to escape Allied occupation as part of the peace settlement, it is even uncertain whether the full facts about the Holocaust would ever have been revealed in the dramatic, undeniable way that they were.

It is also doubtful that the death of Hitler in the summer of 1944 would have necessarily shortened the war. The historian Peter Hoffmann has written that ‘Göring would have sought to rally all the state’s forces by an appeal to völkisch and national-socialist ideals, by vowing to fulfil the Führer’s legacy and to redouble the efforts to fight the enemy to a standstill.’ If Göring, or more probably Himmler – who controlled the SS – had taken over and not made the many strategic blunders perpetrated by Hitler in the final months, Germany might even have fought on for longer. Before June 1944, Germany had wreaked far worse damage on the Allies than they had on her. A negotiated peace would have let the German people off the hook, although it would have saved millions of lives in Europe and, by presumably shortening the war against Japan, in the Far East too. Yet to have concluded an armistice on the demonstrable fallacy that the war was begun and carried on by one man’s will, rather than through the wholehearted support and enthusiasm of the German people, would hardly have produced the most durable and profound period of peace Europe has ever known.

On 24 July 1944 Churchill warned the War Cabinet that ‘Rockets may start any minute,’ referring to the Germans’ ‘wonder-weapon’, the supersonic V-2 missile. The V-2’s sister-weapon, the V-1 flying bomb, had been terrorizing southern England for six weeks, even though fifty-eight of the ninety-two V-1 launching sites had been damaged. After Brooke’s encouraging report on the Normandy campaign, Churchill reported on his trip to Cherbourg, Arromanches and Caen over the previous three days, saying that he ‘Saw great many troops – never seen such a happy army – magnificent looking army – only want good weather. Had long talks with M[ontgomery] – has outfit of canaries – two dogs – six tame rabbits – play with dogs – frightful bombing of Caen… remarkable clearing of mines in Cherbourg harbour.’62 Amid all this talk of Monty’s menagerie, Admiral Cunningham diarized that ‘PM full of his visit to France and was more inclined to talk than to listen.’63 But one difference between Churchill and Hitler was that Churchill was capable of listening to – indeed asking for – news and advice he did not like. After the Bomb Plot, Hitler became highly suspicious of the veracity of what he heard from his generals, suspecting that many more of them were involved than in fact had been.

By 24 July the Allies had lost 122,000 men killed, wounded or captured in France, to the Germans’ 114,000 (including 41,000 taken prisoner). The highly competent, robust and aggressive Günther von Kluge – who by the summer of 1944 had recovered from injuries sustained in a bad car-crash in Russia – took over control of the defence, having been given Rundstedt’s job by Hitler, and he also temporarily inherited Rommel’s job on 17 July when the latter’s car was strafed from the air and he fractured his skull. Overlord having now ended, the next phase of the invasion was codenamed Operation Cobra and was intended to break out from the linked beach-heads and strike south and east into central France. The hinge was