Das Reich (36 page)

Weidinger and other veterans arrived in Normandy expecting to take part in a great counter-attack to force the Allies back into the sea. To their astonishment and dismay, they were ordered simply to plug a gaping crack in the line, alongside the remains of the superb Panzer Lehr Division commanded by Bayerlein. Bayerlein laughed when they talked to him about their hopes of taking the offensive. ‘It will be a miracle if we can stand where we are,’ he said laconically. The Das Reich’s divisional staff had wanted time for a few hours’ tactical training behind the line, or at least a spell in a quiet sector. But there were no quiet sectors. ‘Where is the German Air Force?’ men asked those who had arrived before them in Normandy: ‘There is no more German Air Force.’ The newcomers were dismayed to see the exhaustion and sagging morale of units coming out of the line – the open defeatism and crippling casualties, the strain of incessant bombardment and the roaring – like so many trains – as the huge shells from the warships offshore tore past them into the rear
areas. Experienced officers were shocked to discover that they had a significant desertion problem, chiefly among the Alsatians.

But it would be false to suppose that the Das Reich was an enfeebled fighting unit in Normandy. The only redeeming merit of the SS was that they were among the most dogged, fanatical soldiers in the world. Fritz Langangke, sitting battened down in the turret of his Panther under artillery fire one afternoon, cursed the code of his corps when he saw the Volkswagen field car of their commander, Tyschen, dashing up the lane towards him, with the major standing erect and exposed behind the windscreen. Langangke was compelled to leap down from his turret and stand at attention before Tyschen to receive his orders while shells shattered around them.

The Der Führer regiment lost 960 men – almost half its strength – in the first four days of battle. Shelling accounted for most of them; regimental headquarters received a direct hit which killed nine men and a visiting war correspondent. They became unwilling to gather company commanders for briefings in case they should all die under a single hit. Runners had to carry all messages between positions. The use of radio appeared to be instantly detected by Allied locators and met with artillery fire. It was futile to lay telephone wires under constant bombardment. Major Stuckler came to visit them in their positions, and was appalled by what he found. With Pak guns and Teller anti-tank mines, they halted one British tank attack within yards of regimental headquarters. Just as in Russia, they found that the postal service collapsed, and they spent weeks without letters from home, with all the corrosive consequences for morale.

It was in the line in Normandy that the division at large learned some of the details of the reconnaissance battalion and the Der Führer’s accomplishments at Tulle and Oradour. Unheard-of requests for inquiries and courts-martial were being forwarded through Army Group B. But in the first weeks in Normandy there were two very convenient casualties in the Der Führer regiment. Captain Kahn was in a group of men hit by shellfire, and was
badly wounded, losing an arm. He disappeared from the division and was never traced again. On 30 June Major Otto Dickmann foolishly moved outside his bunker one morning without his helmet, and was caught by a shell splinter in the head which killed him instantly. There was some speculation among his comrades that Dickmann had lost the will to live, to commit such a suicidal act. It is difficult to imagine that he was stricken by remorse. But it is possible that he was exasperated by the inquiries being pursued into his actions. With his death, these could reasonably be allowed to lapse, to the relief of the Das Reich and, no doubt, of Army Group B.

The thirtieth was the day of Von Rundstedt’s celebrated telephone conversation with Führer headquarters. Keitel asked: ‘What shall we do? What shall we do?’ Von Rundstedt replied: ‘Make peace, you idiots – what else can you do?’ and was replaced three days later. Did not even the SS now begin to feel that their lives were being sacrificed in a hopeless struggle? ‘Could we allow anyone to say that we were only willing to fight abroad, that we would not fight on in defence of our own country?’ asked Weidinger. ‘The English would have done the same.’

Wisliceny’s regiment met sixty-four American attacks in eleven days, fifty-six of these without armoured support. There was a chronic shortage of Pak anti-tank ammunition. The stench of dead cows made the forward positions almost intolerable in the summer heat. The men read, talked, and played chess and scat between attacks. Lammerding was wounded by a splinter in an air attack, and relinquished command of the division.

Major Heinrich Wulf’s reconnaissance battalion went into action for the first time to reinforce the western flank against an American attack. A reserve infantry regiment was cracking under pressure. Three times Wulf and his men with their armoured vehicles persuaded the infantry to move back into positions from which they had retreated, and three times they did so under intense shelling. On 8 July, Wulf reported to Stuckler that he had only 200 men left: ‘If we do this again, you’ll be looking for a new
CO.’ Stuckler brushed aside his fears. If they could simply restore the line once more, he promised Wulf, the battalion could be relieved. A few hours later, Wulf and his staff were at their headquarters in a dairy when a 105 mm shell blew off the roof, wounding almost every man in the building. A splinter severed the nerves in Wulf’s left leg, while another tore off a finger. Wulf never fought again on the Western Front.

Only one man in three from the Das Reich Division came out of Normandy with his unit. They suffered terribly at Falaise, where among many others one of the hangmen of Tulle was blown up while asleep in a barn, beside a half-track loaded with Teller mines which was hit. Fritz Langangke ended up swimming the Seine to escape, leaving his gunner and loader dead behind him. Otto Pohl was in his Panther when it was blown bodily from the road by a Wehrmacht anti-tank mine, killing his driver. ‘At Falaise’, wrote Eisenhower, ‘the SS element fought to annihilation.’

Not long after, Colonel Karl Kreutz was handed a signal by his adjutant announcing that he had been awarded the Knight’s Cross. Kreutz remained expressionless. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ asked his adjutant, puzzled. Kreutz pointed to the skyline, torn open by one of the great American bombardments. ‘Pleased? How can I be pleased? Look at that.’

‘For the first time,’ he said thirty-six years later, ‘I knew that we had lost.’

The march of the Das Reich Division to Normandy began to achieve the status of a legend as early as 16 June 1944, when the daily Intelligence summary to SHAEF G-3 reported: ‘An organization in the field claims that Resistance succeeded in delaying the departure of 2 SS Pz Div for over a week . . . The results achieved by the FFI have far surpassed those generally expected. Wherever armament is sufficient, they have displayed unity in action and a high fighting spirit.’

‘The movements of German formations to the battle area have
tended to be slow on the whole,’ wrote the British War Office Director of Tactical Investigation in a report in August 1944. ‘In the south and south-west, the reason had been, for the most part, effective action on the part of French Resistance groups, while in the case of those divisions obliged to cross the line of the rivers SEINE and LOIRE, the hindrance has been bomb damage to bridges etc . . .’ The same report, turning to information derived from prisoner interrogation, gave the first hints of the troubles of the Das Reich on its journey northwards: ‘It is estimated that on this move, most elements took twice, and some thrice as long as the distance warranted. Considerable delay was caused to the rail party by the bridge at TOURS being damaged by bombing. On 7 June a company of the Panzer Grenadier Regt was attacked by partisans at SOUILLAC, and a similar incident occurred to this unit on 11 June. Casualties were suffered, and troops deployed to deal with the partisans . . .’

After the Liberation, the story achieved a special place in the canon of Resistance. Characteristically, it was André Malraux’s vision which scaled the highest peaks of rhetoric, when he delivered the oration at the tomb of Jean Moulin:

For many years there has been a misunderstanding, that on 8 June 1944 the 2nd SS Panzer division left Montauban under orders to proceed immediately to Normandy. This was not so. There has also been an attempt to give solely to Resistance (or for that matter, by passionate advocates of air power, to the RAF and
USAAF) the credit for the crippling of movement to Normandy. But as Churchill wrote in one of his most brilliant commentaries on the nature of war: ‘All things are always on the move simultaneously.’ It is impossible precisely to divide credit for Allied victory in Normandy between the Allied deception plans, the invading troops and their commanders, the blunders of the German High Command, the air forces and the achievements of Resistance.

French historians and former
résistants
have wildly exaggerated the material damage inflicted upon the Das Reich in action against
maquisards
. There is no reason to doubt the division’s casualty return for 8–9 June – the days on which it was most heavily engaged – of seventeen killed and thirty wounded. Even adding Kampfe, Knug, Gerlach’s driver and a generous allowance for Terrasson and other minor incidents on the road in the days that followed, it is easy to believe that the SS lost no more than thirty-five killed in all, out of some 15,000 men.

But casualties and material damage were never the matters at issue. The highest ambition of the Allied commanders before D-Day was that Resistance might unbalance the German forces in France, delay the passage of reinforcements and divert strength from the Normandy battle. In all these things the
résistants
of the Lot, Corrèze, Dordogne and Limousin succeeded. If the German decision to commit the Das Reich to a
ratissage
operation two days after the invasion was profoundly foolish, it was a decision to which they were goaded by Resistance. The
maquis
and the AS created a climate before and after D-Day which provoked the Germans to divert eight divisions – admittedly, as Professor Foot has said, their worst eight – to suppress the ‘terrorists’.

The officers of the Das Reich today make light of their difficulties on the march, and the OKW War Diary professed that internal guerilla war in France after D-Day developed less dramatically than the staff had expected: ‘The terrorist movement which had already crippled parts of France before the invasion did not increase to the extent expected.’ But the scale of the German
response and the almost hysterical note of some of the German signal traffic emanating from Army Group G belie these statements. SHAEF Intelligence wrote of the Das Reich’s march from Montauban: ‘It has been estimated that on this movement, most elements took twice and some thrice as long as the distance warranted under favourable conditions.’ It is difficult to follow Professor Foot so far as to suggest that the arrival of the Das Reich in Normandy ten days earlier might have tipped the balance of the battles against the Allies, but it would certainly have made their task significantly harder. This book does not attempt to assess the overall achievement of Resistance. But it is useful to stress that its contribution to Allied victory in France must be judged chiefly by what it did in the first weeks after D-Day, and not by its later and more glamorous successes. Much nonsense has been written about the Resistance ‘Liberation’ of cities and departments in August and September 1944. These achievements were generally made possible simply by German withdrawals. Most of the garrisons that surrendered to
résistants
were low-grade reserve troops, unlikely to be missed.

But the story of the Das Reich Division may have helped to demonstrate the courage – the often reckless sacrifice – with which the Resistance compensated for its lack of military skill. It is worth noting the total wartime casualties of
résistants
in Region R5, where most of the actions with the Das Reich were fought: Corrèze: 248 killed, 481 deported; Creuse: 123 killed, 190 deported; Dordogne: 771 killed, 308 deported; Haute-Vienne: 957 killed, 373 deported. Lest anyone should imagine that Oradour and Tulle were entirely isolated occurrences, the following numbers of hostages and prisoners were executed by the Germans: in and around Paris: 11,000; Lille: 1,113; Angers: 863; Orléans: 501; Reims: 353; Lyon: 3,673; Nice: 324; Limoges: 2,863 – and so on across France. In all, 100,000 French men and women died in Resistance activities and German reprisals.

Because the FTP’s ruthlessness and political objectives seemed so distasteful, I believe that they have been given insufficient
credit for their contribution to Resistance’s achievements. It was their relentless, widespread campaign of violence in the Corrèze and the Limousin before D-Day which provoked the Germans to dispatch the Das Reich. The restrained military policy of the
Armée Secrète
was more rational, and sought to spare the civil population from many terrible reprisals. But I believe that it contributed less to the climate of chaos which so exasperated the Germans around D-Day. When
résistants
embarked on major military operations – as admittedly the FTP attempted in Tulle – they usually failed, or provoked a catastrophe. They could never face crack trained troops. But when, in Jacques Poirier’s perfectly apposite phrase, they simply set out to ‘make a mess’, the Germans were often goaded beyond endurance. ‘Resistance is small business,’ said Macdonald Austin reflectively, recalling his Jedburgh experience. ‘Any attempt to make it anything more than that is bound to go wrong.’ General Dick Barry, Gubbins’s former chief of staff, looked back on the entire effort of SOE/SO and said: ‘It was only just worth it.’