In Speer’s absence, and despite the extensive damage from air-raids, Saur had in fact masterminded a remarkable increase in fighter-production – though with a corresponding decline in output of bombers. Delighted as he was with better prospects of air-defence, Hitler’s instincts lay, as always, in aggression and regaining the initiative through bombing. The new chief of the Luftwaffe operations staff, Karl Koller, was, therefore, pushing at an open door when he presented Hitler with a report, in early May, pointing out the dangerous decline in production of bombers, and what was needed to sustain German dominance. Hitler promptly told Göring that the low targets for bomber-production were unacceptable. Göring passed the message to the Fighter Staff that there was to be a trebling of bomber-production – alongside the massive increase in fighters to come off the production lines. Eager to please, as always, Göring had told Hitler of rapid progress in the production of the jet, the Me262, of which the Dictator had such high hopes.
The previous autumn, having removed top priority from production of the Me262 because of its heavy fuel-consumption, Hitler had changed his mind. He had been led to believe – possibly it was a misunderstanding – by the designer, Professor Willi Messerschmitt, that the jet, once in service, could be used not as a fighter, but as a bomber to attack Britain and to play a decisive role in repelling the coming invasion, wreaking havoc on the beaches as Allied troops were disembarking. Göring, at least as unrealistic as his Leader in his expectations, promised the jet-bombers would be available by May. At his meeting with Speer and Milch in January, when he demanded accelerated production of the jet, Hitler had stated, to the horror of the Luftwaffe’s technical staff, that he wanted to deploy it as a bomber. Arguments to the contrary were of no avail.
Now, on 23 May, in a meeting at the Berghof with Göring, Saur, and Milch about aircraft production, he heard mention of the Me262 as a fighter. He interrupted. He had presumed, he stated, that it was being built as a bomber. It transpired that his instructions of the previous autumn, unrealistic as they were, had been simply ignored. Hitler exploded in fury, ordering the Me262 – despite all technical objections levelled by the experts present – to be built exclusively as a bomber. Göring lost no time in passing the brickbats down the line to the Luftwaffe construction experts. But he had to tell Hitler that the major redesign needed for the plane would now delay production for five months. Whether fuel would by that time be available for it was another matter. Heavy American air-raids on fuel plants in central and eastern Germany on 12 May, to be followed by even more destructive raids at the end of the month, along with Allied attacks, carried out from bases in Italy, on the Romanian oil-refineries near Ploesti, halved German fuel production. Nimbly taking advantage of Göring’s latest embarrassment, Speer had no trouble in persuading Hitler to transfer to his ministry full control over aircraft production.
Three days after the wrangle about the Me262, another, larger, gathering took place on the Obersalzberg. A sizeable number of generals and other senior officers, who had been participants in ideological training-courses and were ready to return to the front, had been summoned to the Berghof to hear a speech by Hitler – one of several such speeches he gave between autumn 1943 and summer 1944. They assembled on 26 May in the Platterhof, the big hotel adjacent to the Berghof on the site of the far more modest Pension Moritz, where Hitler had stayed in the 1920s. A central passage in the speech touched on the ‘Final Solution’. Hitler spoke of the Jews as a ‘foreign body’ in the German people which, though not all had understood why he had to proceed ‘so brutally and ruthlessly’, it had been essential to expel.
He came to the key point. ‘In removing the Jews,’ he went on, ‘I eliminated in Germany the possibility of creating some sort of revolutionary core or nucleus. You could naturally say: Yes, but could you not have done it more simply – or not more simply, since everything else would have been more complicated – but more humanely? Gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘we are in a life-or-death struggle. If our opponents are victorious in this struggle, the German people would be eradicated. Bolshevism would slaughter millions and millions and millions of our intellectuals. Anyone not dying through a shot in the neck would be deported. The children of the upper classes would be taken away and eliminated. This entire bestiality has been organized by the Jews.’ He spoke of 40,000 women and children being burnt to death through the incendiaries dropped on Hamburg, adding: ‘Don’t expect anything else from me except the ruthless upholding of the national interest in the way which, in my view, will have the greatest effect and benefit for the German nation.’ At this the officers burst into loud and lasting applause.
He continued: ‘Here just as generally, humanity would amount to the greatest cruelty towards one’s own people. If I already incur the Jews’ hatred, I at least don’t want to miss the advantages of such hatred.’ Shouts of ‘quite right’ were heard from his audience. ‘The advantage,’ he went on, ‘is that we possess a cleanly organized entity with which no one can interfere. Look in contrast at other states. We have gained insight into a state which took the opposite route: Hungary. The entire state undermined and corroded, Jews everywhere, even in the highest places Jews and more Jews, and the entire state covered, I have to say, by a seamless web of agents and spies who have desisted from striking only because they feared that a premature strike would draw us in, though they waited for this strike. I have intervened here too, and this problem will now also be solved.’ He cited once again his ‘prophecy’ of 1939, that in the event of another war not the German nation but Jewry itself would be ‘eradicated’. The audience vigorously applauded. Continuing, he underlined ‘one sole principle, the maintenance of our race’. What served this principle, he said, was right; what detracted from it, wrong. He concluded, again to storms of applause, by speaking of the ‘mission’ of the German people in Europe. As always, he posed stark alternatives: defeat in the war would mean ‘the end of our people’, victory ‘the beginning of our domination over Europe’.
VII
Whatever nervousness was felt at the Berghof in the early days of June about an invasion which was as good as certain to take place within the near future, there were few, if any, signs of it on the surface. To Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, it seemed almost like pre-war times on the Obersalzberg. Hitler would take Below’s wife on one side when she was invited to lunch and talk about the children or her parents’ farm. In the afternoon, he would gather up his hat, his walking-stick, and his cape, and lead the statutory walk to the Tea House for coffee and cakes. In the evenings, around the fire he would find some relaxation in the inconsequential chat of his guests or would hold forth, as ever, on usual themes – great personalities of history, the future shape of Europe, carrying out the work of Providence in combating Jews and Bolsheviks, the influence of the Churches, and, of course, architectural plans, along with the usual reminiscences of earlier years. Even the news, on 3–4 June, that the Allies had taken Rome, with the German troops pulling back to the Apennines, was received calmly. For all its obvious strategic importance, Italy was, for Hitler, little more than a sideshow. He would have little longer to wait for the main event.
Hitler seemed calm, and looked well compared with his condition in recent months, when Goebbels accompanied him to the Tea House on the afternoon of 5 June. Earlier, he had told the Propaganda Minister that the plans for retaliation were now so advanced that he would be ready to unleash 300–400 of the new pilotless flying-bombs on London within a few days. (He had, in fact, given the order for a major air-attack on London, including use of these new weapons, on 16 May.) He repeated how confident he was that the invasion, when it came, would be repulsed. Rommel, he said, was equally confident. On 4 June Rommel, whom Hitler had the previous autumn made responsible for the Atlantic defences, had even left for a few days’ leave with his family near Ulm. Other commanding officers in the west were equally unaware of the imminence of the invasion, though reconnaissance had provided telegraph warning
s that very day of things stirring on the other side of the Channel. Nothing of this was reported to OKW at Berchtesgaden or, even more astonishingly, to General Friedrich Dollmann’s 7th Army directly on the invasion front.
That evening, Hitler and his entourage viewed the latest newsreel. The discussion moved to films and the theatre. Eva Braun joined in with pointed criticism of some productions. ‘We sit then around the hearth until two o’clock at night,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘exchange reminiscences, take pleasure in the many fine days and weeks we have had together. The Führer inquires about this and that. All in all, the mood is like the good old times.’ The heavens opened and a thunderstorm broke as Goebbels left the Berghof. It was four hours since the first news had started to trickle in that the invasion would begin that night. Goebbels had been disinclined to believe the tapping into enemy communications. But coming down the Obersalzberg to his quarters in Berchtesgaden, the news was all too plain; ‘the decisive day of the war had begun.’
Hitler went to bed not long after Goebbels had left, probably around 3 a.m. When Speer arrived next morning, seven hours later, Hitler had still not been wakened with the news of the invasion. In fact, it seems that the initial scepticism at the High Command of the Wehrmacht that this indeed was the invasion had been finally dispelled only a little while earlier, probably between 8.15 and 9.30 a.m. Influenced by German intelligence reports, Hitler had spoken a good deal in previous weeks that the invasion would begin with a decoy attack to drag German troops away from the actual landing-place. (In fact, Allied deception through the dropping of dummy parachutists and other diversionary tactics did contribute to initial German confusion about the location of the landing.) His adjutants now hesitated to waken him with mistaken information. According to Speer, Hitler – who had earlier correctly envisaged that the landing would be on the Normandy coast – was still suspicious at the lunchtime military conference that it was a diversionary tactic put across by enemy intelligence. Only then did he agree to the already belated demand of the Commander-in-Chief in the West, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt (who had expressed uncertainty in telegrams earlier that morning about whether the landing was merely a decoy), to deploy two panzer divisions held in reserve in the Paris area against the beachhead that was rapidly being established some 120 miles away. The delay was crucial. Had they moved by night, the panzer divisions might have made a difference. Their movements by day were hampered by heavy Allied air-attacks, and they suffered severe losses of men and matériel.
At the first news of the invasion, Hitler had seemed relieved – as if, thought Goebbels, a great burden had fallen from his shoulders. What he had been expecting for months was now reality. It had taken place, he said, exactly where he had predicted it. The poor weather, he added, was on Germany’s side. He exuded confidence, declaring that it was now possible to smash the enemy. He was ‘absolutely certain’ that the Allied troops, for whose quality he had no high regard, would be repulsed. Göring thought the battle as good as won. Ribbentrop was, as always, ‘entirely on the Führer’s side. He is also more than sure, without, like the Führer, being able to give reasons in detail for it’, wryly commented Goebbels – like Jodl, one of the quiet sceptics. There were good grounds for scepticism. In fact, the delay in reaction on the German side had helped to ensure that by then the battle of the beaches was already as good as lost.
The vanguard of the huge Allied armada of almost 3,000 vessels approaching the Normandy coast had disgorged the first of its American troops on to Utah Beach, on the Cotentin peninsula, at 6.30 a.m., meeting no notable resistance. Landings following shortly afterwards at the British and Canadian sites – Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches – also went better than expected. Only the second American landing at Omaha Beach, encountering a good German infantry division which happened to be in a state of readiness and behind a particularly firm stretch of fortifications, ran into serious difficulties. Troops landing on the exposed beach were simply mown down. The casualty rate was massive. Omaha gave a horrifying taste of what the landings could have faced elsewhere had the German defence been properly prepared and waiting. But even at Omaha, after several torrid hours of terrible bloodletting, almost 35,000 American troops were finally able to push forward and gain a foothold on French soil. By the end of the day, around 156,000 Allied troops had landed, had forged contact with the 13,000 American and British parachutists dropped behind the flanks of the enemy lines several hours before the landings, and been able successfully to establish beachheads – including one sizeable stretch some thirty kilometres long and ten deep.
What appears at times in retrospect to have been almost an inexorable triumph of ‘Operation Overlord’ could have turned out quite differently. Hitler’s initial optimism had not, in fact, been altogether unfounded. He had presumed the Atlantic coast better fortified than was the case. Even so, the advantage ought in the decisive early stages to have lain with the defenders of the coast – as it did at Omaha. But the dilatory action was costly in the extreme. The divisions among the German commanders and lack of agreement on tactics between Rommel (who favoured close proximity of panzer divisions to the coast in the hope of immediately crushing an invading force) and General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Panzer Group West (wanting to hold the armour back until it was plain where it should be concentrated), had been a significant weakness in the German planning for the invasion. Allied strategic decoys, as we noted, also played a part in the early confusion of the German commanders on the invasion night itself. Not least, massive Allied air-superiority – compared with over 10,000 Allied sorties on D-Day, the Luftwaffe could manage to put in the air only eighty fighters based in Normandy – gave the invading forces a huge advantage in the cover provided during the decisive early stages. Once the Allied troops were ashore and had established their beachheads, the key question was whether they could be reinforced better and faster than the Germans. Here, the fire-power from the air came into its own. The Allied planes could at one and the same time seriously hamper the German supply-lines, and help to ensure that reinforcements kept pouring in across the Normandy beaches. By 12 June, the five Allied beachheads had been consolidated into a single front, and the German defenders, if slowly, were being pushed back. Meanwhile, American troops were already striking out across the Cotentin peninsula. The road to the key port of Cherbourg was opening up.
Nazi leaders, for whom early optimism about repelling the invasion had within days evaporated, retained one big hope: the long-awaited ‘miracle weapons’. Not only Hitler thought these would bring a change in war-fortunes. More than fifty sites had been set up on the coast in the Pas de Calais from which the V1 flying-bombs – early cruise missiles powered by jet engines and difficult to shoot down – could be fired off in the direction of London. Hitler had reckoned with the devastating effect of a mass attack on the British capital by hundreds of the new weapons being fired simultaneously. The weapon had then been delayed by a series of production problems. Now Hitler pressed for action. But the launch-sites were not ready. Eventually, on 12 June, ten flying-bombs were catapulted off their ramps. Four crashed on take-off; only five reached London, causing minimal damage. In fury, Hitler wanted to cancel production. But three days later, the sensational effect of the successful launch of 244 V1s on London persuaded him to change his mind. He thought the new destructive force would quickly lead to the evacuation of London and disruption of the Allied war effort.
The triumphalist tones of the Wehrmacht report on the launch of the V1, and of a number of newspaper articles, were equally fanciful, filling Goebbels – still anxious to shore up a mood of hold-out-at-all-costs instead of dangerous optimism – with dismay. The impression had been created, noted the Propaganda Minister with consternation, that the war would be over within days. He was anxious to stop such illusions. The euphoria could quickly turn into blaming the government. He ordered the reports to be toned down, and exaggerated expectations to be dampened – persuading Hitler that his own instructions to the
press, guaranteed to foster the euphoric mood, should follow the new guidelines.
The continued advance of the Allies, but what seemed the new prospects offered by the V1, prompted Hitler to fly in the evening of 16 June from Berchtesgaden together with Keitel and Jodl and the rest of his staff to the western front to discuss the situation with his regional commanders, Rundstedt and Rommel. He wanted to boost their wavering morale by underlining the strengths of the V1, while at the same time stressing the imperative need to defend the port of Cherbourg. After their four Focke-Wulf Condors had landed in Metz, Hitler and his entourage drove in the early hours of the next morning in an armour-plated car to Margival, north of Soissons, where the old Führer Headquarters built in 1940 had been installed, at great expense, with new communications equipment and massively reinforced. The talks that morning took place in a nearby bomb-proof railway-tunnel.
Hitler, looking pale and tired, sitting hunched on a stool, fiddled nervously with his glasses and played with coloured pencils while addressing his generals, who had to remain standing. Rundstedt reported on the developments of the previous ten days, concluding that it was now impossible to expel the Allies from France. Hitler bitterly laid the blame at the door of the local commanders. Rommel countered by pointing to the hopelessness of the struggle against such massive superior force of the Allies. Hitler turned to the V1 – a weapon, he said, to decide the war and make the English anxious for peace. Impressed by what they had heard, the field-marshals asked for the V1 to be used against Allied beachheads, only to be told by General Erich Heinemann, the commander responsible for the launch of the flying-bomb, that the weapon was not precise enough in its targeting to allow this. Hitler promised them, however, that they would soon have jet-fighters at their disposal to gain control of the skies. As he himself knew, however, these had, in fact, only just gone into production.