McAuliffe would have rejected this as nuts. And Bulge followers who have carefully read my book on the battle for Bastogne in the winter of 1944-45 must think that they have missed something vital or that I am taking them for a ride. You have not. And I am. That said, Hitler did capture Bastogne. But that was, of course, at the height of his power in 1940. In May of that year, Hitler paid a quick visit to von Rundstedt’s Heeresgruppe A headquarters in Bastogne while German troops were waging merciless Blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France. Ironically, the aircraft that took him there landed on a strip in a field not far from where today stands the Mardasson Memorial, the towering star-shaped monument that commemorates America’s massive victory in the Bulge. This picture of Hitler and von Rundstedt, making their way through Bastogne in an open car, was probably taken by the Führer’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Hitler can be seen saluting ecstatic German soldiers on this mild spring day in 1940. It forms quite a contrast with the brutal images of exhausted and frozen German soldiers surrendering at the end of the Battle of the Bulge.
