Where Was Germany’s Leader on D-Day?

On 6 June 1944, more than 100,000 Allied troops came ashore across five beaches in Normandy in the largest seaborne invasion ever attempted. Germany had spent years preparing for that morning, with nearly 60 divisions in the west and an Atlantic Wall built under Erwin Rommel. Ten of those divisions were armoured, and several sat close enough to reach the coast inside a day. They did not move. The German chain of command had been built so that the reserve panzer divisions could not be committed without one man’s personal authorization, and on the morning of the invasion that man was roughly a thousand kilometres away, in a house in the Bavarian Alps. What he was doing there, and the appointment he kept that afternoon instead of going to France, is the part of D-Day that rarely gets told. This is the full account of where Hitler actually was on 6 June 1944, and what the delay cost the German defence in Normandy.