The Road to Avranches

The Allies had made the Normandy invasion successful. A Wehrmacht plot to kill Adolf Hitler had failed. Field Marshal General GUenther von Kluge, one of the plotters, knew that he was finished and suspected that Germany was, too.

One day last August he suddenly left his headquarters on the Western Front, which he had just taken over from Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. With some of his staff, Kluge drove to a spot on a lonely road near Avranches in northwestern France. There he waited, hour after hour, for a party of U.S. Third Army officers with whom he had secretly arranged to discuss surrender. They did not appear. Fearing betrayal, Kluge hurried back to his headquarters. Awaiting him there was an order to report to Hitler in Berlin. Kluge got into a car, swallowed poison and died on the way to an airfield near Metz.

A U.P. correspondent at Berchtesgaden, telling this story last week, also told why Kluge's surrender went wrong. On the day of the rendezvous, Allied air attacks blocked the Third Army party's route to Avranches. By the time the U.S. negotiators arrived, Kluge had gone.

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