by David Irving
Another factor in the growing controversy over Rommel was his favoritism toward the Nazi bigwigs in his division. Thus for the final assault on Saint-Valéry he had given Karl Hanke command of a tank company, although even Hanke protested that he was not qualified. A shell fragment soon jammed the turret of Hanke’s Panzer IV, whereupon Hanke panicked and halted, thus blocking the entire regiment’s advance. Rothenburg had to send his own adjutant in person to get him to move over.
Hanke was also at the center of one of Rommel’s most scandalous acts.
He had recommended Hanke for the Knight’s Cross, and—again a sign of blatant favoritism—sent the citation up by special courier to the Führer’s headquarters, bypassing all regular channels. Almost at once, however, Hanke offended Rommel. He happened to mention that as a state secretary in the propaganda ministry he held a rank that technically was greater than Rommel’s as major general. Rommel immediately sent an adjutant to the Führer’s headquarters to intercept his own citation for Hanke’s medal. It was viewed as an unusually spiteful step. “This action,” wrote one tank commander, “became common knowledge in the division. It badly tarnished the image that all of his troops had gained of him on account of his courage and genius as a leader.”
Not a Penny for Africa
TO THE NAZI propaganda writers, Rommel’s exploits that summer of 1940 were a gift. “Like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” they called him. His panzer division was “like a ghost fleet.”
“His magic word is speed, boldness is his stock in trade. He shocks the enemy, takes them unawares, outflanks them, suddenly appears far in their rear, attacks them, outflanks them, encircles them, uses his genius and everything he’s got, taking night and fog and river and obstacle in his stride. Thus his tanks carve long bloodstained trails across the map of Europe like the scalpel of a surgeon.” So wrote one glorifier, an officer who had served with Rommel in the First World War and now met him again. “Like a film, his story goes on: isolated acts of bravery shine briefly, there are the individual tragedies, crises and death. I look into his eyes. There is still the intrepid look I saw all those years ago, but something of it is overshadowed by the sheer grandiose scale of today’s events.”
Another propagandist produced these words: “Yes, they know him now in France—they know this face, with its blue eyes and their hint of hidden cunning, the straight nose, the firm jaw with its lips tightly compressed when he is thinking, and the chin that says all there is to he said about these noble features—their energy, their willpower, uniformly modeled, strong and masculine to look at, but of a severity softened by the twinkling eyes and the two small wrinkles at the corners of his mouth, that show he is not averse to irony and wit.”
The Wehrmacht troops settled into occupied France and prepared for the next operation—the invasion of England. Rommel may not have been aroused by the buxom French girls promenading in only their bras and panties, because of the heat—but he noticed them; he ingenuously mentioned them in a letter to Lucie that August. In fact he had little time for women and did not take them seriously. His friend Kurt Hesse wrote, “I only recall him talking about them once. He had been to visit a town in East Prussia, and told me he had noticed that it was full of pretty girls. What he liked were horses and dogs, but he never spent money on them either.” Rommel, added Hesse, always dressed correctly, but never with great style. “He felt most at home in riding boots, an old army tunic, with his cap slightly cocked and a riding whip in his hand. He rarely carried a pistol, but he was an expert shot and if he ran into the enemy, then he grabbed the first rifle or machine gun he could lay his hands on.”
He spent his off-duty hours shooting with French landowners, who tended to be pro-German out of staunch anti-communism, or at his farmhouse headquarters writing up his own campaign history. “Do you want to see how I write?” he asked Hesse, and pointed to a row of boxes under his bed. “Here—let’s take the twenty-third of May. First folder, orders received and reports sent up to my superiors. Second folder, orders to the troops and their reports to me. Third folder, maps and sketches of May twenty-third. Fourth folder, my photographs. Fifth folder, other items of historical interest like letters found on the dead, captured enemy orders and home news items about my division and myself.” He explained, “All this is going to occupy me on my retirement. I’m going to write a sequel to Infanterie Greift an.”
The Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels, asked him to collaborate on a big army film about the campaign, Victory in the West. Rommel spent part of August reenacting for the movie cameras the Spook Division’s crossing of the Somme. He had a great time playing movie director, and he schooled his troops in acting techniques. A battalion of French black troops was hauled out of the prison camps to stage the surrender of a village. Again, this time for the cameras, Rommel’s tanks charged, guns blazing. He told the blacks to come out toward the tanks with their hands up and looking scared; but the men overacted, rolled the whites of their eyes, and screamed with terror. Rommel cut the cameras, and patiently explained through interpreters that actors had to show their emotions more subtly than that. The battle scenes were finally filmed on such an epic and reckless scale that several more lives were lost, though through no fault of Rommel’s. “No expense has been spared to show it as it really was,” he wrote on the last day of shooting. “There were blacks in it again today. The fellows had a whale of a time and thoroughly enjoyed putting up their hands all over again.”
During this period his following among the younger army officers grew phenomenally. They came from far and wide to see Rommel. He got on well with the troops, too, asked about their wives and families and inquired about their furloughs and medals. The Nazi press was filled with his exploits. But the publicity brought him more enemies in the OKW—the German High Command—and among the army’s General Staff. Hesse, by now the army’s press chief, wrote privately to him, warning of the ill feeling being stirred up. Rommel dismissed it as the old General Staff resentment against any up-and-coming outsider.
The summer of 1940 passed, with Rommel’s division practicing relentlessly for the invasion of England. He continued to thirst for new distinctions, but the thirst went unquenched. In Hitler’s Reichstag speech of July 19 many promotions were announced, but none for anyone below the rank of corps commander. In August, Rommel again felt slighted when Friedrich Paulus and Karl Kriebel—two of his prewar friends—moved up to lieutenant general: to be leapfrogged by two General Staff officers particularly stung him. “It seems that as usual we combat soldiers are only good for cannon fodder,” he muttered in one letter. “As long as this clique is at the top level, things will never change.”
Rommel’s heart leaped one evening when he was ordered by telegram to present himself at Hitler’s Chancellery on September 9. So certain was he that he was about to be awarded the Oak Leaves cluster for bravery that he purchased a new medal bar for his uniform. But Hitler had planned just a polite meeting with his generals. Rommel sat on his left at the luncheon and stood on his right at the subsequent war conference. “Just official business, so a fresh medal wasn’t in the offing,” he wrote to Lucie. “Not that I care,” he added unconvincingly.
The air battle over southern England was reaching its height that September and the meeting in the Chancellery took place only a few days after Hitler’s famous speech threatening to “wipe out” Britain’s cities if Winston Churchill would not desist from his night air raids on Berlin. “The Führer showed me the results we have obtained already—it’s quite astonishing how many military objectives we have already knocked out in London. And all this is probably only just a beginning.” Afterward he called on his friend Kurt Hesse, a mild, thoughtful man, in a suburb of Berlin. Hesse told him that rumors in the General Staff had it that Hitler intended involving Germany in Italy’s adventures in North Africa. Rommel reassured him: “Not one man and not one penny for Africa—that’s what the Führer has just told me in person.”
Hesse then aske
d how Hitler intended to defeat England. Rommel sprang up, his eyes blazing: “He says he’s going to smash Britain to smithereens and wrap the country in a shroud of death!” His voice echoed Hitler’s harsh, guttural tones.
Rommel returned to the Channel coast. At Rouen on September 14 his division practiced embarking tanks and trucks onto invasion barges—concrete-lined river barges, primitively converted for their new function with improvised landing ramps instead of sterns. The idea was that tugs would tow strings of these unwieldy craft across the Channel when Hitler gave the order. What Rommel did not know was that the whole show was one enormous bluff. Hitler had secretly abandoned his invasion plans long before and was turning to other, indirect ways of influencing Britain.
More weeks passed. Manfred Rommel, nearly twelve now, wrote to him proudly that he had won good marks in Latin—but only a “satisfactory” in math—and that he had had difficulty getting lettuce for his rabbits. It was a shame, the boy wrote, that his father was so seldom home. “Do you still go hunting?” he inquired wistfully in November. Rommel sent him snapshots from a recent hunt. Manfred replied, “I’m green with envy after seeing those hunting photos. The only good thing about it all is that you’ll soon be here again, and surely you’ll take me hunting in the forest with you!” But only one week after Rommel had ventured home to Wiener Neustadt on leave he was suddenly recalled to his division; it was being transferred to Bordeaux. So he missed sharing Christmas with his family.
On my second visit to Manfred Rommel at his home in Stuttgart, of which he is the mayor, he brought out an oversized album-like book, bound in red leather and tooled in gold. This was his father’s idea of how a war diary should look. Rommel had worked it up into a continuous narrative—at his friend Rudolf Schmundt’s suggestion—and sent it to Hitler. As I turned the heavy cartridge paper and looked at the meticulous maps facing each page, I could imagine how pleased the Führer must have been by the general’s thoughtfulness. Hitler’s response, a letter dated December 20, 1940, was in a file I studied afterward in Washington. “You can be proud of your achievements,” he wrote to Rommel. Rommel reported this ecstatically to Lucie: “For the Führer to have found time, despite his burden of work, to look at my history of the division and to write to me—that makes me enormously proud.”
There is no doubt that it was a smart and timely move on Rommel’s part, as events soon showed.
It was early in February of 1941. In Berlin, crowds were thronging the movie theater showing the new film Victory in the West. Rommel went home to Austria again, hoping to resume his interrupted furlough. But on the evening after his arrival at Wiener Neustadt, one of Hitler’s adjutants appeared with a message ordering him to fly immediately to Berlin for a meeting with the commander in chief of the army and with Hitler himself. Obviously something was in the wind.
He left Lucie next morning, the sixth of February. Some days later the postman brought her a letter from him: “Plane landed at Staaken airport at noon forty-five. . . . Drove first to commander in chief who briefed me on my new job; then to F[ührer]. Almighty hurry. My kit’s coming here. I can only take barest essentials with me. You can imagine how my head is swimming with it all. . . . So our furlough was once again cut short. Don’t be upset, either of you, that’s just the way it has to be. The new job is very big and important.”
But where was he going? Next day there was another letter from Berlin. “Slept on the new job last night. It’ll be one way of getting my rheumatism treatment. . .”
Lucie remembered that the doctor treating Erwin’s rheumatism in France had once advised him, “You need sunshine, general. You ought to be in Africa.” She guessed where destiny was about to take her husband.
AFTER THE LAST British soldier embarked at Dunkirk in June 1940, there was no point of contact between the British and German armies. Two weeks later, Italy’s proud dictator, Benito Mussolini, greedily declared war on France and Britain, hoping for a share of the spoils. Since 1890 Italy had had colonial possessions in Africa, and there were now 220,000 Italians under arms in Libya, the closest colony to Italy itself. Mussolini ordered his army to attack the British in Egypt, and capture the Suez Canal.
In September 1940, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani launched a ponderous offensive into Egypt. It was halted at Sidi Barrani, not far inside the frontier. Hitler offered Mussolini, his new ally, a German panzer division in support. Mussolini’s generals were too arrogant to accept, and Hitler’s representative in Rome—General Enno von Rintelen—was informed in October that Italian forces were considered sufficient for the offensive and that it would be resumed late in December. “Thereafter,” the Italians conceded, “perhaps one or two German divisions might like to join in the attack on the Nile Delta, where there are about 200,000 British.”
Nothing came of all this. On October 28 Mussolini invaded Greece from Albania. This was a severe shock to Hitler, who had secret plans of his own. He was furious and piqued by Italy’s act. “Nothing for Libya and nothing for Albania,” he said to the General Staff on November 1. Two days later he spelled it out to the army’s tank warfare expert, General Wilhelm von Thoma; he had decided against sending over that panzer division, at any rate “for the time being.” He would send only air force units to the Mediterranean, to help prevent a complete Italian fiasco, which would have side effects on Germany’s own strategy.
ITALY’S PRIDE TOOK severe knocks in North Africa during December 1940. The British army opposing them at Sidi Barrani, just inside Egypt, had assembled motorized forces from all over the Empire and staged a counterattack under Lieutenant General Sir Richard O’Connor’s local command. It gained ground so fast that in ten days the British were besieging the Libyan fortress at Bardia, where Marshal Graziani’s September offensive had begun. Now Mussolini appealed for German aid—he wanted that panzer division after all and also materials and equipment for his own forces.
Hitler let him stew in his own juice until January 9, 1941. By then Bardia had fallen and the heavily fortified port of Tobruk, farther to the west, was under British siege. Only now did Hitler decide that a small armored force should begin moving to Libya, in February. At a meeting in Berchtesgaden, Mussolini accepted. Meanwhile the rate of Italian collapse in Libya quickened. On January 22, before the Germans left for Africa, Tobruk surrendered to the British.
This was a real calamity. Also alarming was the report that came three days later from the commander of the Fifth Light Division, the blocking force chosen to help the Italians defend Tripoli. This officer, Major General Hans Baron von Funck, a splendid aristocrat of the old school, had gone to Libya to assess the situation for the German General Staff. He found that the proposed blocking force would be too small to save Libya. A week later he stated this to Hitler in person. According to one of Hitler’s adjutants, the Führer was shocked. “The lunacy about it all,” he said, “is that on the one hand the Italians are screaming blue murder and painting their shortages of arms and equipment in the blackest terms, and on the other hand they are so jealous and infantile that they find the idea of using German soldiers and German materials quite repugnant. Mussolini would probably like it most if the German troops would fight in Italian uniforms!”
Hitler’s first reaction was that a bigger German force would have to go. “The British must be exhausted both in personnel and materiel terms after their long advance,” he explained to field marshals Keitel and Brauchitsch on February 3. “If they come up against fresh and well-equipped German forces, it will be a very different kettle of fish.” He ordered the General Staff to prepare a complete panzer division for the transfer to North Africa on the heels of the original blocking force, the Fifth Light.
The Führer’s second reaction was instinctive: General Funck was too gloomy about North Africa—he was evidently tainted by the Italian debacle. Another general must be found to command the Fifth Light.
The choice fell on Johannes Streich, forty-nine. It was pointed out that a corps staff would also be needed for t
he overall command of the expedition. Hitler selected Rommel. (In 1942 he told an Italian diplomat he had also considered Erich von Manstein for the job. “But I picked Rommel because he knows how to inspire his troops, just like Dietl up in Narvik. This is absolutely essential for the commander of a force that has to fight under particularly arduous climatic conditions as in North Africa or the Arctic.”)
Thus Rommel was called to the Chancellery on February 6, 1941. Hitler showed him British and American illustrated magazines with photographs of Sir Richard O’Connor’s victorious drive into Libya. Rommel gleaned several ideas from these photographs. When he left, he had in his pocket written guidelines from Keitel—the chief of the High Command—for any dealings he might have with the Italians in Rome and Libya.
The document reflected Hitler’s uncompromising mood: “German troops will not be committed to a pointless battle.” By this he meant the Italians’ current intention of defending only Tripoli itself. This area was too small to allow the Luftwaffe an air base. If the Italians would not agree to hold a line far to the east of Tripoli, then Rommel was to express regrets to Marshal Graziani that there was “no point” in sending Germans over.
With the formal title of Commander in Chief, German Troops in Libya, Rommel left the Reich capital tingling with anticipation. Characteristically—for his ambitions were undimmed—he clung to that designation even when his command was formally designated the German Afrika Korps a few days later: Commander in Chief (Befehlshaber) was one rung higher in the military jargon than Kommandierender General, the commander of a corps.
His mission was ostensibly to explore the military situation, but Rommel intended to take absolute command the moment his own troops arrived. “I hinted to General von Rintelen, our military attaché in Rome, that such was my intention,” he later wrote. “He advised me to drop the idea, saying that that way I only stood to lose my name and reputation.”