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It's Tuesday the 6th of June 1944, a little after 6 am in Herlingen, southern Germany. But Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is already busy. A man of strict self-discipline, Rommel is an habitual early riser. For the past six months he's been working around the clock, making Hitler's fortress Europe a reality. His particular attention has been the stretch of the Fuhrer's Atlantic Wall that runs along the Normandy coastline.
He's made countless detailed inspections of the beach defences, doing his best to ensure that should the Allies choose to land in Normandy, the Germans will be ready for them. Right now though, Rommel is 500 miles away from the Normandy coast. He's back home in Germany, arranging birthday presents. Mrs. Rommel, Lucy, is celebrating the big 5-0, and her husband has made the 10-hour trip to be with her. Because there's a curious contradiction about Field Marshal Rommel.
This is the man they call the Desert Fox, legendary commander of the Africa Corps, the military genius who gives the Allies sleepless nights. But he's also a devoted family man. He's got Lucy a special present, an exquisite pair of grey suede shoes, size five and a half, handmade in Paris. Their 15-year-old son, Manfred, is here too, on leave from the anti-aircraft battery he's serving in. The boy is shot up of late,
In the family photos they took over the weekend, he towers over his old man. It's a scene of domestic bliss, at home at the Rommels. But the Field Marshal's vacation is about to be rudely interrupted. Just before breakfast, the phone rings. There's no such thing as work-life balance when you're in charge of defending the Third Reich. It's Hans Speidel, Rommel's second-in-command, and he's got some news from Normandy. Allied paratroopers have been landing throughout the night.
And now, at the break of day, a massive naval bombardment has started just off the coast. It might be nothing. All the experts agree the big invasion won't be coming for several days at the earliest. Not in this weather. And in any case, when it does come, it will surely be in the Palekale, not Normandy. Most likely this is a prelude to another foolish Allied raid. Like the disastrous attempt on Dieppe. Nothing we can't handle. Rommel thinks for a moment.
Then he thanks Speidel for the call and asks to be kept informed of any developments. And with that, Germany's greatest military commander goes back to his weekend off, unaware that this is the day when it all unravels. After breakfast, Rommel asks Lucy what she thinks of her present. "The shoes are beautiful," she tells him. "Shame they don't fit." From the Noiser Network, this is D-Day.
While Field Marshal Rommel sits down to breakfast with his family, his boss, Adolf Hitler, is fast asleep. In fact, it's not long since he went to bed. Surrounded by sycophants, the Fuhrer was holding court late into the night. Professor Thomas Faber, author of Becoming Hitler, The Making of a Nazi.
Ever since being in power, he had got this tendency to late at night to summon people around him. He would ask them questions, but ultimately he would give these monologues that could last half a night. They were often actually dreaded by people closest to him because they knew if they were called into one of those monologues, they wouldn't get much sleep that night. Last night, Hitler's entourage included propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, along with a group of cronies.
The Fuhrer whiled away the hours lecturing, boasting, pontificating, and watching distinctly one-sided newsreels, the usual diet of self-aggrandizing fantasy. Goebbels stuck it out until midnight, but Hitler didn't turn in for at least another hour. Meanwhile, far away in Normandy, the first Allied paratroopers were making landfall. Currently Hitler is staying at the Berghof, his beloved hideaway in the Bavarian Alps.
Surrounded by acres of rolling farmland and boasting a commanding view of the mountains, the Berghof is an oasis of calm, 700 miles away from the chaos taking place in Normandy. And here, the world operates on Fuhrer time. Jonathan Trigg, author of D-Day Through German Eyes.
Hitler had a very, very strange working routine. So he would sleep in late and he would very rarely be up before kind of midday, but he would work until the early hours. So he was a night owl. He liked to be up at, you know, three, four, five in the morning. And of course, what that meant was that when he did finally go to bed, all his staff were told, well, don't, whatever you do, don't wake up the Fuhrer. Oh, you know, he's not a morning person. So of course, there's the invasion going on and
Everyone was afraid to wake the guy up. Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy, author of Selling Hitler, Propaganda and the Nazi Brand. Hitler's nightmare is happening now. The Allies have landed, but no one dare wake Hitler. The Fuhrer is asleep. King Redbeard is asleep in his mountain. You mustn't, mustn't wake him because he's the most glorious man in all history. He must have his sleep.
Rather typical of Hitler in the mid to later war, how utterly disastrous he was. In any case, Hitler's attention is less focused on developments in the West than we might imagine. Professor Jeremy Black. Adolf Hitler, as he was throughout the war from the summer of 1941 onwards, is concentrating on the Eastern Front.
That is absolutely crucial. And the question for Adolf Hitler in 1944, as far as an attack is concerned, is not primarily where the Brits and the Americans are going to go. It is primarily what is going to be the main axis of advance of the Soviet summer offensive. As far as Hitler's concerned, whatever the Anglo-Americans are up to in the Channel can be left in the capable hands of his regional commanders in France. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel,
he of the fancy ill-fitting shoes, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Germany's Commander-in-Chief in the West. But getting those two to agree on military strategy could be tricky. The two men are chalk and cheese, both personally and professionally. Their relationship is strained. Erwin Rommel was a professional officer.
He was a guy who led from the front. In those days, most generals would sit back from the front and command their troops via radio and telephone and so on, via map boards. Rommel wasn't like that at all. Rommel was in his half track, surrounded by radio nets and so on and so on, as close to the front as he could so he could smell the cordite.
Gerd von Rundstedt was the epitome of the Prussian officer class. He was born into the Prussian aristocracy. Rommel, for him, was an upstart. One thing Rommel and von Rundstedt do agree on is that Panzer tank divisions will be vital to defend against an Allied invasion. These units are the elite of the Nazi infantry, but precisely how to use them is a bone of contention.
Von Rundstedt favors holding them back, away from the coast. Let the Allies drift inland first, then smash them. Rommel thinks this is asking for trouble. The panzers need to be on hand to push invaders back into the sea the moment they arrive. It's left to Hitler to play mediator. He agrees to place some panzer divisions near the front and keep others in reserve. Predictably, the compromise pleases no one.
In any case, by early June 1944, the location of Pancis is a moot point. Hi listeners, did you know that the team behind this show has other podcasts too? Discover them all at Noiser.com, home of the Noiser Network. You'll find hundreds of immersive true stories. There's a world of podcasts waiting for you. Take your pick. Listen at Noiser.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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On Sunday the 4th of June, while James Stagg and his team were preparing their weather report for General Eisenhower, the Nazi's leading meteorologists are also hard at work. And they're confident that given the state of the weather in the channel, the invasion isn't coming any time soon. Historian and author Giles Milton
So they looked out of their windows on the 4th of June and they thought, well, there's no way they could come in the foreseeable future. So they all left their shore bases and they went inland to meet in the city of Rennes, where ironically they were going to hold a war games exercise of how to defend Normandy against an invasion from the Allies.
So this meant that not a single German general was at his post in Normandy on the 6th of June, which was a huge bonus for the Allies. In fact, not everyone is busy at the Staff Away Day. Some are pursuing extracurricular activities. The nightclubs of Paris, the spas of Baden-Baden, or in Rommel's case, a cosy family get-together in southwest Germany.
He too is confident the invasion won't be coming for a while. Rommel has spent years facing down the Allies. Based on past experience, he's convinced that an invasion will only happen at high tide, with little moonlight, the very opposite of the conditions right now. It's a fatal miscalculation. With Rommel hundreds of miles away, celebrating his wife's birthday, his headquarters in France, the splendid Château de la Roche-Guillant, is left in the hands of his subordinates.
And they're making the most of it. On Monday evening, D-Day -1, Rommel's Chief of Staff, General Hans Speidel, is hosting a dinner party. The guests are an interesting bunch. Like Speidel himself, they've all thrived under Nazi rule. Yet all of them despise Adolf Hitler. Through the fog of cigar smoke, the writer Ernst Jünger presents his latest work, a 30-page outline for the future of Germany once the Führer is toppled in sendry stuff.
But it's all just talk. Soon after midnight, the guests drift off home. It's only now that Speidel learns German intelligence have picked up some potentially worrying coded messages about Allied military activity. He waves away the information. It's late. Time for bed. A couple of hours later, he's awoken by fresh news from the coast. Engines can be heard now, and radar is picking up ships in the channel. But Speidel isn't interested.
He fires back a dismissive message. Whatever the Allies are up to, it clearly isn't a major operation. Certainly not worth interrupting Field Marshal Rommel's family time. In Paris, von Rundstedt concurs. Around 2:40 AM, he's told that the Navy's radar screens are jammed with dots. But he isn't worried either. It could be an advancing armada, or just a flock of seagulls. Either way, von Rundstedt is wedded to the idea that any attack on Normandy will be diversionary.
The Padakale is where the real invasion will take place. I think it's fair to say that the German response isn't as rapid as it could have been, but it's also important for them to try and work out what is going on, which is not easy, to work out what scale the landing is on.
which again isn't easy. And at the same time, got to bear in mind, certainly as far as the central German military headquarters are concerned, they deal with information all of the time from all sorts of fronts. And it's very, very difficult to decide what priorities should be set. It's not just when they're being told, it's what they're being told. And of course, what everyone's hearing is something's happening in Normandy,
We're not quite sure. There's reports of landing of paratroopers and gliders. There's been some bombing and so on. And there are isolated reports of naval units. And we think some landings might be going ahead. We don't know what strength. We think it's around about this area, but we're not sure. And of course, all of their thoughts is, is this a diversion? But there are German officers who sense the danger. The legendary 21st Panzer Division is Rommel's favourite unit.
the one Panzer Division stationed, as the Field Marshal wanted, by the Normandy coast. Soon after the paratrooper landings begin, Hauptmann Eberhard Wagemann, the duty officer, alerts the 21st Division to prepare itself, start the tank engines and get ready to crush the invaders. But nobody higher up the chain of command will authorize their deployment.
It doesn't help that the commander of the 21st Division, General Edgar Feuchtinger, is out on the town in Paris. Elsewhere requests are made to summon the panzers held in reserve. Out of the question, says Central Command. Only the Fuhrer can give the go-ahead to move those panzer units. And he is dead to the world.
He's just fast asleep and no one really dares to wake him up. And several hours are lost through that and reasonable arguments have been made. Had the commanders in France, had Rommel in France, had he received authorization to move immediately with German units towards Normandy, that they could have halted the invasion. In fact, down in Herlingen,
Rommel remains blissfully unaware of what's going on back in Normandy all through the morning of June 6th. Four hours pass before his number two, Spiedel, calls again with an update. By now it's almost lunchtime, and the news from the French coast is a lot worse. Whatever's happening in Normandy is no joke. Forget Dieppe. This looks like the full-scale invasion they've all been waiting for. Rommel turns white as a sheet.
and within minutes he's in the back of his staff car speeding towards Normandy. But his HQ at the Chateau de la Roche-Guillon is 500 miles away. It's doubtful he'll make it there before nightfall. Military high command might have laid bare the fractures and flaws that beset the Nazi war machine, but on D-Day the rank and file do their damnedest to push the invaders back into the sea, though the odds are stacked against them. Just behind Sword Beach is a Nazi fortress.
a bunker complex encased in concrete, surrounded by a minefield and barbed wire, and armed with a dozen deadly gun emplacements. The Allies call it Hillman after the British car brand. Other strongholds in the area are codenamed Daimler and Morris. Behind its nine feet thick walls, Hillman acts as the HQ for the Wehrmacht's 736th Infantry Regiment, led by Colonel Ludwig Krug, a redoubtable Nazi warhorse.
Allied soldiers on their way to capture Caen will have to go through Hillman first. But Colonel Krug's force of 300 men proves staunch in their defense. Within their network of bunkers, Krug's regiment is virtually untouchable. Hour after hour, the Allies are repelled, like waves crashing onto the sea wall. A little further west, at Omaha Beach, there's also dogged defending.
Heinrich Saevalow's main job is as driver for a senior Nazi officer, Oberleutnant Bernhard Freyking, but today his duties are very different. When American soldiers begin to land on Omaha around 6:30 am, Saevalow is in a concrete bunker at the eastern end of the beach. He watches the landing craft approach, his finger resting on the trigger of an MG 42, a machine gun capable of firing 1200 rounds a minute. He waits.
The first American soldiers wade into the sea. With the water still around the enemy's knees, Saevalos squeezes the trigger. The MG42 does its worst. For the next nine hours, Saevalos stands his ground. He burns through ammunition at such a rate that the MG42 frequently risks overheating. To give it a chance to cool, he periodically picks up his rifle.
The hail of machine gun bullets is replaced by intermittent shots of deadly precision. As the morning gives way to the afternoon, Saevalo has claimed countless lives. His actions will earn him a nickname, "The Beast of Omaha." But like so many of those he fells, Saevalo is actually little more than a boy, just 20 years old.
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And with Bluehost Cloud, your sites can handle surges in traffic no matter how big. Plus, you automatically get daily backups and world-class security. Get started now at Bluehost.com. There's no such Sturm und Drang at the Berghof. While young men like Heinrich Saevalow fight doggedly all morning, the Fuhrer is left to slumber. And when Hitler does finally get up, he's in a cheerful mood.
There's no anger or anxiety today, no barking and gesticulating. When he learns the Allied invasion is underway, he's all confidence and calm. Hitler's been waiting for this moment for two years now. His men are ready for it. He issues a typically optimistic order: this invasion must be crushed by sunset.
I think as far as Hitler was concerned, this was just the kind of invasion that was at that point inevitable. And he was kind of almost thinking, let it just come or the sooner the better because then we can deal with it.
It was this kind of underestimation of the strength of American and British and Canadian forces and the ability or overestimation of German defense forces because the real issue was that Hitler thought that an invasion could be fought off relatively easily and that was the real miscalculation. Hitler's faith in his own military forces is total and is not entirely misplaced. Many of them are prepared to die for him.
Sir Max Hastings. I always remember interviewing Montgomery's chief of intelligence a long time ago now, and he was often interviewing German prisoners. And he said one day he had two German colonels in front of him. And this is in Normandy. And he said, well, why do you guys keep this going? Because it's obvious the gig is up. You've lost. You know, all this is wasted motion. And they clicked their heels and they said, ah, we are German officers. We continue to fight for the fatherland to the last ditch.
But other soldiers in Normandy couldn't give a fig about the fatherland. So threadbare are Wehrmacht resources that the Atlantic wall is teeming with foreign conscripts: Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Russians, Georgians, Turkmens. Some of them, by the warped logic of Nazi ideology, are considered Untermenschen, racially inferior, and they're treated as such. Little wonder that they surrender at the first opportunity.
not merely willingly but gleefully. For many of the Atlantic War defenders, the sheer quality as well as quantity of the Allies' military kit is staggering. Some of them are still relying on First World War era weaponry: bicycles, horses and carts,
The propaganda images of the Atlantic wall, the classic one, is the German soldier, German sentry, standing there next to an enormous gun, you know, in this huge concrete emplacement, a gun that looks as though it could fire a shot to the moon, and it probably could. I mean, it's absolutely huge. But that was in the part of Calais. So that was hundreds of miles away from where these guys were. So what have they got? You know, what are they equipped with? And most of them, it's a rifle.
So they've got a rifle that was designed, you know, in 1898. We've got quite a few first-hand testimonies from German survivors, which really does paint a picture of just shock, seeing, you know, that sort of force ranged against them. And they could see what was around them on their side. So they're looking around going, we're outmatched here. We brought a knife to a gunfight.
My German father-in-law was in Normandy. He was a wireless operator, Morse code operator, in June 1944. And his stories were very interesting. He said that him and all of his men, when they saw the military hardware that was being chucked at them, both in the air and from the sea,
they knew immediately that the war was lost. They realised there's absolutely no way that the Germans were going to win or going to be able to even push the Allies back into the sea. And at that point, he and all his comrades, they simply wanted to give themselves up. They wanted to surrender. They wanted to survive the war. If the Germans are to have any chance of pushing back the tide, the panzers surely are their only hope.
Yet even two hours after Hitler finally gets out of bed, he still hasn't given the go-ahead to deploy the reserve units. So much of the Nazi system is built around the Führer's whims and caprices. His inaction infuriates Wehrmacht veterans. For senior military men, men who understand strategy, it's intolerable. To them, the propaganda image of Hitler the military genius is a sick joke, and one they know may cost their country dearly.
A lot of the German panzer divisions and the senior echelons of the German army, they were Prussian aristocrats from terribly grand families in East Prussia. And they looked down on Hitler as an upstart who didn't know what he was doing.
And so you have men who fought on D-Day, Prussians, one of whom notably led the only great panzer counteroffensive on D-Day itself. I mean, you only have to listen to his name. He was Colonel Leopold Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski. His blood was bluer than anyone else's. And he, like so many, just thought that Hitler didn't know what he was doing, that to hold back the panzers was the most ridiculously inept thing that could have been done on D-Day itself.
Eventually, at half past two in the afternoon, Hitler gives a blessing for the Panzers to start moving. But it's too late. There's no way they can make it to the battlefield today. And the same is true of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. He is still sat, restless in the back of a chauffeur-driven car, pummeling his fist into the palm of his hand. The driver's foot is glued to the floor. The vehicle rattles along at ninety miles an hour.
but it's a long way to Normandy. Imagine what it would be like for him being stuck in a car. And of course, the Allied air forces have been making an absolute mess of all of the transport system of Northern France. So he'll have had to go on diversion after diversion, you know, so it's not, you can't go on a motorway because the motorway bridges have been knocked out and so on. They're all shattered. I imagine that the sense of frustration that he must have felt would have been just off the scale.
Rommel's car stops briefly so he can make a phone call to his number two, Speidel. But the update fails to lift his mood. By now, the Allies have breached the Atlantic wall and are making progress inland. If this isn't the real invasion, Rommel mutters, then God help us when it finally does come. The Field Marshal's frantic agitation could scarcely be more of a contrast to Hitler's mood. He sees no need to change his plan that afternoon.
cheerfully meeting with the rulers of Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. This confident, laid-back Fuhrer is far from the Hitler of popular imagination.
It's a great mistake that we tend to focus on the pictures, images and sounds produced by the Nazis themselves in trying to make sense of Hitler. We see the last 10 seconds of Hitler's speech. We see the raging and spitting Hitler. And that is our image of Hitler. And we somehow think that that is how Hitler always operated, how Hitler gave orders, why people fell for him. And if we look behind the scenes,
We get a totally different image of Adolf Hitler. Part of the reason why the Third Reich could function for so long is because Hitler managed to persuade people to go along with him. Throughout D-Day, the Führer remains quietly confident. He's convinced this Norman attack is no more than a diversion. "Keep your eye on Calais, gentlemen. That's where the real invasion will come. But on the beaches? That's an increasingly minority view."
Here, the full force of the invasion is taking its toll. A sense of futility is spreading. After a day of ferocious fighting, even Hillman is finally creaking. Colonel Krug calls his commanding officer for advice. The response is dumbfounding. "I can no longer give you orders," says Major General Wilhelm Richter. "You must make your own decisions now. So much for the iron will of the Wehrmacht.
You can't help thinking that by that stage, a lot of thinking Germans must have realized that the gig was up, must have realized that there we were in June 1944, and the war had been going on for nearly five years, and the best of the German army was dead in Russia, and the Allies were deploying overwhelming firepower and airpower against them in the West. I think what's amazing is what a good show they put up.
It's getting dark by the time Rommel finally arrives at La Roche-Guillon. As he and his aides stride into the chateau, they can hear something drifting through the hallway. It's music, Wagner to be precise, and it's coming from the office of Hans Speidel. Normandy is swarming with enemy troops, the Western Front is on a knife edge, and senior commanders are playing gramophone records? But Speidel seemed as relaxed now as he did at the start of the day.
Over a plate of cold meat, he brings Rommel up to speed on the day's events. The deluge of invaders, the failed counterattack, the wave after wave of allied reinforcements. The Field Marshal listens quietly. The fury of the last few hours fades with the sunlight. What is there to say? The day is lost. Perhaps if he'd been there from the start, things could have been different. Rommel, the Desert Fox, Montgomery's Betmar,
Perhaps he could have driven the Allies into the sea. Six weeks earlier, Rommel made an ominous prediction. The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive, he told his aide on the 22nd of April. For the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day. So it is proved. And the Third Reich's best hope for victory just missed it. It's an error he will never recover from.
If Rommel had been there right from the start, I don't think that the outcome of D-Day would have been different. However, I do think that the German response would have been quicker. It would have been far more aggressive.
and would have led to a far tougher fight than was ultimately the case. In particular, I think the counter-attack philosophy that was central to both German tactical thinking at the time and central to Rommel's belief in how to defeat the Allied invasion would have been pressed home far more vigorously.
It's entirely possible the Germans could have made a better fist of it on D-Day. It's entirely possible the Allies could have made a better fist of it on D-Day. Given the distribution of German units on the 6th of June 1944 and the presence that day of overwhelming Allied air power over the Normandy beaches,
as well as very large numbers of heavily gunned warships, I'm not entirely convinced as to how it could have worked out differently." As it is, D-Day is the beginning of the end for Rommel. Six weeks later, a botched assassination attempt against Hitler leads to a purge of the Wehrmacht. Rommel is charged with supporting the coup, though it's far from clear he was actually involved.
Hitler offers him a way out: suicide by cyanide capsule. For the sake of Lucy and Manfred, Rommel accepts. In the next episode: The first Allied journalists report from the front lines, parachuting into France and landing on the beaches with the invasion force. Legendary war reporter Martha Gellhorn stows away aboard a hospital ship, set on beating her estranged husband, Ernest Hemingway, to the D-Day scoop.
And a homing pigeon known as Gustav brings the first news of D-Day to Britain. That's next time.
