For Hitler, whatever the sounds that troubled his now very unsettled sleep, the Second Front must have struck deep into his soul. Being obsessed does not mean that the rest of your faculties go to sleep, and Hitler was not stupid. What is the more astonishing is that he was still able to command obedience from so many. Ignore self-serving senior officers, simply look at the rank and file and not only the rank and file of 18 years of age, all of whom had become well indoctrinated in the organizations set up by the Nazis to control the people from the earliest years of cognition until they themselves were indoctrinating others. An 18 year-old had been 7 in 1933, the year of absolute power, by which time many of the youth and children’s organizations were already in operation. As well, look at the older men, the killers in the Einsatzgruppen and the Police Battalions, still unswervingly following the Fuehrer’s commands. Remember also that ordinary Germans would, almost all of them, have relied on their daily newspapers and German radio for the latest information on the progress of the war. However Hitler did it, it was a fact that the German army kept on fighting as strongly as they had done before, as if, in fact, this were the first year of the war instead of almost its last.
Hitler had carried on in his position of command as if there were no doubt that Germany would eventually win and many were the discussions with various generals and, finally, Rommel, as to the possible landing sites in northern France. Meanwhile he kept his eye on the position in Italy, arranging reinforcements and approving strategy. The only area which he virtually ignored, apart from fitting in supplies by rail in between the demands on the railways for death trains to Auschwitz and elsewhere, was the eastern front and the result was, of course, that the Russian juggernaut simply kept on moving at a faster pace. Nevertheless, the landings when they occurred were still a shock and only half expected. What had happened was that the generals, the intelligence staff and Hitler had all become so used to warnings that tonight’s the night, that they had become lulled by inaction, so much so that even Rommel, by now the commander in France under Rundstedt, C-in-C in the West, had been allowed to journey to Germany on 5th June to see his family and then to meet Hitler. This had been allowed on the strength of no information on what was happening on the English side of the Channnel, as the Luftwaffe had lost control of the skies; and none from the German Navy which had brought all its reconnaissance craft back into harbour because of heavy seas. In any event the greater part of the German strength was concentrated in the Pas de Calais area, where the Channel was narrowest, this being the likeliest area of landing in the opinion of Rommel and Rundstedt. Hitler, to give a little of his due, had been warning them, however, that the landing would be in Normandy, a considerable distance to the west. The result had been some reinforcements sent to Normandy but not enough and this was compounded by Hitler’s standing orders that no one, not even Rundstedt could order the deployment of the Panzers, only Hitler had that authority. There was a chance, once the area was known, that a concerted push by the available Panzer divisions if brought in at once, could have prevented the establishment of a bridgehead, but no one was going to risk acting independently even when the situation quite obviously justified it.
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