Third Reich Victorious (43 page)

Eisenhower, Dwight David,
Eisenhower’s Own Story
(Arco Publishing, New York, 1946).

Gunston, Bill,
Bombers
(Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1978).

Irving, David,
The German Atomic Bomb, The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany
(Simon and Schuster, New York, 1967).

Jackson, Robert,
Unexplained Mysteries of World War II
(Smithmark, New York, 1991).

Moore, Mike, The Incident at Stagg Field,
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
, www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1992/d92.moore.html

Mosely, Leonard,
The Battle of Britain
(Time-Life Books, Alexandria VA, 1977).

Powers, Thomas,
Heisenberg’s War
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993).

Rhodes, Richard,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
, (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986).

Weather Factors in Combat Bombardment Operations in the European Theater
(US Strategic Bombing Survey (Restricted), US Department of Defense Military Analysis Division, 1945).

1
. Heisenberg met with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941, ostensibly to assure the senior physicist that he would not pursue bomb development. Bohr was not convinced.

2
. In actuality, the Allies went even further: Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, went so far as to forward suspected atomic research targets to Washington to try to kill Heisenberg and all those around him. A remarkable man, that General Groves!

3
. As spoken to Major General Dornberger, Commander of the A-4 (V-2) project, 1942.

*
4
. Herr Figge, Reich Director of the Supply Committee for Special Projects, stated that sufficient material for the third and fourth weapons was scheduled to be available by October 1944, but “this was not achieved, due, chiefly, to the interruption of processes and the destruction of transportation as a result of air raids.”

5
. See Dornberger,
V-2
, for details of that takeover.

Peter G. Tsouras

Rommel vomited. He leaned against the barracks wall, emptying his stomach until only the green bile was left. The staff officers around him were deathly silent, ashen-faced, save for those who were similarly sick.

The field marshal straightened himself, wiped the filth from his lips, and swung his gaze to the SS commandant standing behind him, white as a ghost. Rommel’s eyes were two red coals, his body trembling with rage. He drew his pistol and shot the man dead oft the spot.

“I did not believe you, Stauffenberg. God forgive me. God forgive us all.”

The one-eyed, one-armed colonel was a repeated hero, as attested by the maiming he had received on the Eastern Front. He was also a patriot and a devout Christian, two qualities that had led him to risk everything in the successful plot to kill Hitler, the anti-Christ. Though he didn’t have the central almost suicidal role in the originally planned assassination, he had been a vital link between Rommel’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Hans Speidel, and the Berlin plotters. He had insisted that Rommel stop there on his flight to Berlin after his victory in Normandy. Now a thousand things needed to be done to save Germany from the Red wave advancing from the east. Yet the most important was confronting them with a vile immediacy. Stauffenberg said, “We must care for the survivors, Herr Feldmarschall.”

The piles of emaciated bodies, the stench coming from the barracks, and worst of all, the nightmare olfactory assault from the huge ovens as they spewed out black, oily clouds of smoke screamed that it was all beyond help, beyond atonement. Yet Stauffenberg’s simple statement gave Rommel something practical and direct to grasp. “Yes.” He turned to the commander of a nearby training unit that Stauffenberg had arranged to be present. “Colonel, arrest every SS swine in the camp. Put them in some of these barracks and put them on the same rations these people have had. Get your men in here immediately and disarm these creatures. Strip them of German uniforms. I charge you with saving as many lives as you can here.” Then he ordered the immediate transfer of the nearest army medical units to the camp. The colonel was as overwhelmed as everyone. He mumbled about not being able to feed or care for so many quickly. In a rage, Rommel turned on him, raising his baton in the air. “Then let the good people of Dachau help! By God, order the whole damn town up here to help!”
¹

The drive back to Munich was not pretty. Rommel’s anger was still white hot at what he had seen. That anger was not enough, though, to override his sense of the importance of immediate action. That day and the next, every Nazi death factory came to a halt as the army moved in. Courts-martial followed immediately for the senior officers and the more sadistic of the guards. Another fate was in store for the rank and file of the guard force, that collection of brutes from prisons and asylums, in whom humanity was so absent as to arouse not one spark of empathy or pity for all those they had tormented.
²

The more thoughtful and intellectual type of officer would have been overwhelmed by this experience and the new burden of national leadership. Luckily, Erwin Rommel was not that sort. It is the intelligent man of action who sees things through, and this was Rommel. He had been on top of the world after defeating the Amis (Anglo-American Allies) in Normandy. Hitler had brought his entourage to gloat at the overthrow of Perfidious Albion and view the wreckage and the endless columns of prisoners. For Rommel, this was a heaven-sent opportunity to arrest Hitler and stop the war. After all, the Allies—particularly the British—had suffered a defeat beyond measure in the Norman countryside. An offer of an armistice in the West was vital if Germany was to hold off the Bolshevik hordes grinding their way toward the Reich. For a straightforward man of honor, this seemed the only correct solution, and Hitler’s trial before the nation would seal it properly.

Fortunately, Speidel was far more worldly and took matters into his own hands. While Rommel was discussing an armistice with Eisenhower, Speidel arranged for the demolition of the wing of the Château La Roche Guyon, Rommel’s army group headquarters, where Hitler and his cronies were feasting in its great hall. At one stroke Speidel eliminated any prospect of recalcitrant Nazis rallying around or attempting to rescue an imprisoned Hitler. The explosion that killed the Führer also killed almost all the important Nazi leaders, including Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, and the particularly dangerous Martin Bormann. The rest were rounded up in Berlin and elsewhere by the anti-Hitler plotters. After that, the Nazi party simply collapsed. The German people were too orderly minded for civil war. It was obvious to everyone, as well, that one war at a time was more than enough.
³

The terms of the July 1 armistice were also enough in and of themselves to dispel any lingering affection for National Socialism. At first glance it seemed the Allies had won. Rommel pledged to evacuate all the occupied territories in western and southern Europe and to cease the U-boat campaign against Allied shipping in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. He also pledged to suppress the Nazis. The Allies pledged not to resume the bomber offensive against Germany, which had been suspended to support the battle in Normandy. The Allies would be allowed to deploy troops in the evacuated countries, but without heavy equipment, and only enough to keep order if so requested by the returning governments. In any case, no Allied troops would be allowed nearer than fifty miles of the German border. Most important, for the German people, all military prisoners on both sides would be immediately returned. That meant almost 300,000 German fighting men would be coming home.
⁴

Montgomery’s defeat had taken the wind out of the British. They had been strained to the utmost by the war, and the British Army had scraped the bottom of the manpower barrel by the time Operation Overlord began, with fewer than 4,000 infantry replacements in the United Kingdom. Montgomery was conscious that he had Britain’s last army, but he’d lost it in the catastrophe of Rommel’s great counterattack. Without that army, Britain could not wage war on land in northern Europe. With the disaster had come a massive letdown at home. Exhausted by the war and seduced by the prospect of retrieving their army as well as achieving the liberation of western Europe, the British public rationalized an acceptance of the armistice. Churchill was a broken man, and his office soon slipped from his fingers into the eager grasp of Lord Halifax, who was all too eager to end the war on such terms. The shock waves of the disaster triggered a vote of no confidence in the government almost immediately, bringing Labor to power with Clement Attlee as Prime Minister.

The Americans wanted to keep fighting; their lodgment built around the Utah Beach landings had rapidly expanded while Rommel and Montgomery fought it out around the British and Canadian beachheads, but their combativeness was useless without the partnership of Britain. With unsubdued rage they obeyed the orders of President Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s death from a stroke three days later, on July 4, further unsettled their national councils. The swearing in of Vice President Henry Wallace created chaos in Washington. The new president was so left-wing that even most Democrats thought he was dangerous. The ensuing constitutional crisis paralyzed American leadership until the election of Republican moderate Tom Dewey in November. The Germans also played their hand well by immediately releasing all British prisoners captured in Normandy. To say that the Anglo-American alliance had soured would have been a major understatement.

The most delicate issue for the Allies was their now awkward alliance with the Soviet Union. The Germans had insisted they would withdraw their U-boat fleet from the seas only if aid to the Soviets was stopped. Admittedly, by July 1944 the submarine arm was no longer the collection of ravening wolf packs of 1941-42. The Allies had in turn insisted on maintaining Lend-Lease and its British counterpart; their only concession was to stop shipments via Murmansk, but by then most aid was tunneling through Iran and Vladivostok. Attlee tried to salvage something to save the Labor Party’s cause of aid to the Soviet Union. The issue convulsed the more radical and outright communist elements of the party. Trying to ride this tiger made this timid man downright unbending. In the end, the Germans gave way. The Allies had already conceded the one gift beyond price—the strategic freedom to concentrate on only one front.

Stalin remained a center of icy calm in the blast wave of anger and betrayal that surged through Moscow. He was always at his calmest when he plotted revenge. Hatred seethed behind the stolid, grim faces of the members of the Stavka (Soviet military high command) arrayed around him in the Kremlin conference room. He just quietly puffed on his pipe as the briefings rolled on. NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria, his pince-nez glasses a ludicrous affectation for a pedophile and mass murderer, was coldly excited at the prospect of “liberating” more Western POWs of the Germans the farther west the Red Army drove. The Gulag could expect new ethnic spices for its stew of misery. The briefings from the Red Army’s general staff were more matter-of-fact assessments of how the armistice would strengthen the German forces they faced. Marshal of the Soviet Union, and the most brilliant and brutal of Stalin’s fighting generals, Georgi Zhukov, took the floor to summarize the estimates.

“We have dealt the Germans a crippling blow in Operation Bagration, far beyond what we expected to be able to do. As of now, we have destroyed at least twenty of the thirty-eight divisions in Army Group Center, effectively wrecking four Fascist armies, and pushed them west of Minsk. The continuation of the offensive operation should inflict irretrievable damage on this army group. Subsequent offensive operations against Army Groups North and South should add further strain to the fascist position. Army Group North is especially vulnerable to being cut off now that its hinge with Army Group Center has been thinned and pushed back almost to the Baltic.

“We can expect the fascists to reinforce their forces by as much as 40 percent now that the so-called Second Front has failed. Given the suspension of the Anglo-American bombing campaign, the enemy should be able to repair their transportation system quickly and transfer those forces to the east in two months. Unfortunately, this reinforcement will begin just as our offensive operations are exhausting themselves. By the time we resupply and are ready to resume the offensive in the autumn, the fascists will also have been strongly reinforced. At that time, the effort required of the Red Army will be much greater and success less assured.”
⁵