by David Irving
At the villa Rommel changes into his open-collared Afrika Korps tunic. Then he puts on his Pour le Mérite—its blue enamel chipped and dented from the car crash in France. He sends for Rudolf and says: “Open the garden gate—the two gentlemen will be coming from Berlin.”
Promptly at noon the bell jangles. Rudolf opens the front door, and the final act of the drama begins.
WILHELM BURGDORF steps in. He is a large and florid man. His deputy, Ernst Maisel, is somewhat shorter, with a long pointed nose, foxy ears and twinkling eyes. Both are at pains to act courteously and correctly. Everyone salutes. Lucie invites the two to stay for lunch, but Burgdorf declines: “This is official business.” He asks if they can talk privately with Herr Feldmarschall. For no reason at all, a feeling of relief floods over Rommel—the generals note the expression on his face—but all the same, as he takes his visitors through into his ground floor study, he turns to his adjutant and says: “Have that Normandy dossier ready, Aldinger!”
Meanwhile, Major Ehrnsperger waits in the garden. He is joined there after a while by Aldinger, and they chat about the Dresden infantry school, where Rommel was the major’s instructor, and about the battle of Monte Kuk in 1917.
Rudolf walks out to the little Opel and invites the driver to bring it in through the gate. The driver shakes his head. “That doesn’t make sense,” sniffs Rudolf.
The driver coldly retorts, “Kamerad, you do what you’re told and I do what I’m told.”
Farther down the lane Rudolf can see another, larger car waiting.
In the study Burgdorf looks gravely at his old friend and then speaks. His first words cruelly destroy all Rommel’s expectations. “You have been accused of complicity in the plot on the Führer’s life,” he declares, and hands over the letter from Keitel. Burgdorf reads out the written testimonies of the army officers under Gestapo arrest—Hofacker, Speidel, Stülpnagel. They are damning indictments, particularly Hofacker’s. He hands the testimonies to Rommel: the doomed colonel has described from his death cell how Stülpnagel sent him to see the field marshal with various proposals, and how “after some thought” Rommel agreed to them. The colonel now even claims that as he was leaving the château Rommel called after him, “Tell your gentlemen in Berlin that when the time comes they can count on me.”
Burgdorf sees an agonized expression flicker across Rommel’s features. How can Rommel explain that he had no part whatever in the assassination plot-never even knew about it? That “all” he was contemplating was a possible separate armistice with Montgomery, with or without the Führer’s consent? Even to admit that will put him on the scaffold now. His life is forfeit—but perhaps he can at least save Speidel’s. He hesitates and then announces, according to General Maisel’s recollection: “Jawohl. I will take the consequences. Ich habe mich vergessen [I forgot myself].”
After this candid admission there can be no going back. He quickly asks Burgdorf, “Does the Führer know about this?” Burgdorf nods. Rommel’s eyes mist over, and Burgdorf asks Maisel to leave them alone for a few minutes. He now states what is not in the letter—the Führer’s promise that if Rommel will commit suicide, then the secret of his treason will be kept from the German people, a fine monument will be erected in his memory and there will be a state funeral. The usual steps, moreover, will not be taken against his next of kin; on the contrary, Lucie will draw a full field marshal’s pension. “This is in recognition of your past services to the Reich.”
Still stunned by the unexpectedness of it all, Rommel asks for a few minutes to think things over. He is tired and unsteady. How ironic that he, Erwin Rommel, who has survived bombs, aircraft cannon fire, tank shells and rifle bullets in two world wars, should have to die now because of a failed conspiracy to which he has never been a party, organized by a General Staff to which he did not belong!
“Can I take your car and drive off quietly somewhere?” he asks Burgdorf. “But I’m not sure I can trust myself to handle a pistol properly.”
“We have brought a preparation with us,” Burgdorf softly replies. “It works in three seconds.” He joins Maisel and Ehrnsperger in the garden while Rommel goes upstairs to Lucie’s bedroom.
Rommel’s face is an expressionless mask. “In fifteen minutes I will be dead,” he tells Lucie in a distant voice. “On the Führer’s instructions I’ve been given a choice between taking poison or facing the People’s Court. Stülpnagel, Speidel and Hofacker have implicated me in the July twentieth conspiracy. And it seems I was nominated as the new Reich President on the list of Mayor Goerdeler.”
He bids Lucie his last farewell. She does not weep—the tears come only later, when she is alone. Neither of them has expected this sudden twist in his fortunes. She feels faint, but bravely returns his last embrace.
Afterward he tells Rudolf to fetch his son, and announces with a steady voice what is about to happen. Then he sends Manfred to get Aldinger. Captain Aldinger bounds up the stairs carrying the Normandy dossier. Rommel waves it aside: “I won’t be needing it—they came about something quite different.”
Downstairs, the generals are waiting.
It has turned into a fine autumn day. By the time he walks down the steps, Rommel has recovered his poise. Rudolf helps him into his topcoat and hands him his cap and field marshal’s baton. Rommel shakes hands with his staff and strides out of the villa for the last time, with young Manfred loping silently at his side. In his pocket Rommel finds his house keys. He hands them with his wallet to Manfred. “Speidel has told them I was one of the leading men in the July twentieth conspiracy,” he tells his son. “He says that only my injury prevented me from taking a direct part. Stülpnagel said much the same.”
They have reached the Opel now. Burgdorf salutes and murmurs: “Herr Feld-marschall!” Manfred marvels at his father’s composure. Rommel puts his foot on the running board, then turns around and says, “Manfred, I think Speidel’s probably had it, too. Take care of Frau Speidel, won’t you?”
He climbs into the back of the car with Burgdorf. The driver, an SS master sergeant, lets in the clutch, and the Opel vanishes down the road toward the next village.
THE DRIVER was thirty-two year old Heinrich Doose. He later told what followed. After two hundred yards Burgdorf ordered him to pull over. “I had to get out,” he said, “and General Maisel walked on with me up the road for some distance. After a while, about five or ten minutes, Burgdorf called us back to the car. I saw Rommel sitting in the back, obviously dying. He was unconscious, slumped down and sobbing—not a death rattle or groaning, but sobbing. His cap had fallen off. I sat him upright and put his cap back on again.”
Inquest
Inquest
ONE EPISODE CAPTURES the essence of Erwin Rommel. It took place in 1944, during the last fatiguing weeks before the Normandy landings. Rommel, during his excursions, often paused for lunch or afternoon tea at the hostels run for his troops by German women’s units. Pretty air force girls and nurses used to besiege him for autographs, and some were so bedazzled by this famous and virile soldier that they embarrassed him with gifts, favors and affectionate offers. On this day their avidity and the scent of their French perfumes roused even the dour field marshal. As he stepped out of one such home to his waiting Horch, he turned to General Wilhelm Meise, his chief engineer. “You know, Meise,” he said with a wry grin, “some of those girls are so darned attractive I could almost be a rat!”
But Rommel knew he never would. If there was one quality that was supremely his, it was instinctive fidelity.
As soon as the war was over, people began to link Rommel with the plotters around the assassin Stauffenberg. It was probably inevitable. In April 1945 young Manfred revealed that his father had committed suicide after Generals Burgdorf and Maisel had visited the house in Herrlingen—only that, but it was enough to allow people to draw conclusions. So many other high-ranking officers, after all, had been tied to the plot and then killed themselves. But to the Rommel family, who still believed the anti-Hi
tler plot dastardly, and loyalty to Hitler a field marshal’s only proper course, the link with Stauffenberg was a smear. On September 9,1945, Lucie issued a statement. “In order to keep the name of Rommel clean,” she said, “and to uphold the field marshal’s honor as a son of Württemberg, I want it made quite clear that my husband had no part whatever in the preparations for, or the execution of, the July 20 plot. My husband always stated his opinions, intentions and plans quite candidly to the very highest authorities, even if they did not like it.”
That was certainly the truth. But the plotter label clung to Rommel. The Americans, for example, still in the grip of the Rommel myth and ready to conclude that their favorite Nazi, Rommel, must surely have been part of the plot against their arch-foe, Hitler, treated Rommel like a hero of the German resistance and hunted down every general felt to have had a hand in his Socratic death. Keitel was accused at the Nuremberg trials of having “murdered” Rommel. On June 6,1945, the homestead of his friend General Meise was officially turned over to looters by the American commandant of Berchtesgaden—they had confused Meise with General Ernst Maisel, who had accompanied Burgdorf to Herrlingen with the poison.
But the genesis of the myth of Rommel the plotter went back, of course, to Colonel von Hofacker and General Speidel. Hofacker, through wishful thinking or calculation, had left his meetings with Rommel at the château telling all and sundry that Rommel had been won over. And in his first Gestapo interrogations, on July 22,1944, he stated it as a fact. Speidel had been more subtle, both before and after July 20, but the effect was similar.
Speidel’s reasons for implicating Rommel, however, went beyond the conspiratorial, in the first instance, and self-justification, in the second. During the postwar years, for quite another purpose, he set out to build up the “plotter” Rommel legend. By 1946 it was plain to even the dullest German that in postwar Germany only those with a proven connection to the Stauffenberg plotters would be considered reliably anti-Nazi and be given power. Speidel had been Rommel’s chief of staff. If Rommel could be cast in the role of honorable conspirator and maintained as such, then Speidel’s credentials as a plotter would gain legitimacy. If Rommel could be made into a figure eligible for exaltation in postwar Germany, then Speidel, by association, would be exalted too. He admitted quite frankly to another German general in an American prison camp in 1946: “I intend making Rommel into the hero of the entire German people.”
In a book which Speidel published upon his release from captivity, he proceeded to construct the myth. It was a book that was to blind and bedevil history ever after. Briefly summarized, his argument held that beginning with April 1944—the time of his arrival as Rommel’s new chief of staff—a stream of plotters marched in columns of four through the portals of the château, where Rommel warmly greeted them and assured them that he supported their plans and devices and was willing to assume power after Hitler’s overthrow. There is no evidence in support of Speidel’s account. On the contrary, Rommel’s own private letters and his remarks as recorded at the time by his staff officers and Friedrich Ruge and Hellmuth Lang disclose his continued, though eventually strained, loyalty to Hitler throughout the entire period. Speidel’s general historical accuracy can be judged from his contention that Rommel had always expected the invasion to hit Normandy (Speidel’s “hero” had to be prescient), and that it was Hitler and the foolish generals of the High Command who had obliged him to tie his reserves down to the Fifteenth Army’s sector until mid-July of 1944.
Apparently, Speidel’s gambit worked. Rommel became indelibly the myth-marshal and Speidel, aglow with reflected glory, rose from prisoner of war to become the new commander of the army of the Federal Republic of West Germany and, later, a top general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Ruge, by a like process, came to command Germany’s new navy.
What is the truth? There is no doubt that by mid-June of 1944 Rommel had become aware of the basic criminality of the Hitler regime. From Ruge’s shorthand diary we know that Rommel had begun talking of his troubled feelings, mentioning the rumors of “big massacres” by the Nazis and of the killing of fifty escaped British airmen at Sagan prison camp, and his suspicion that Hitler’s hands were “not clean.” As the battle in Normandy tilted ever more against him, Rommel began to indulge in daydreams. He began flirting with the idea of acting against Adolf Hitler’s commands and dealing directly with the enemy. But he probably knew that he never would. He was like the faithful husband who occasionally finds satisfaction in fantasies of infidelity, but never actually commits adultery. “I could almost be a rat!” he had said to Meise. Almost, but not quite.
Yet he was brave enough to go much farther than most generals in stating his views to Hitler. Twice in June 1944 he orally told the Führer that it was time to draw conclusions; in July he had sent his grave and outspoken ultimatum, designed for Hitler’s eyes; and he had tried to enlist Field Marshal von Kluge in a joint approach to Hitler. The rest—the “letter to Montgomery,” the idea of voluntarily opening the Normandy front to the enemy, the naïve idea of a joint German-British-American drive against the Red Army—these projects just lurched around Rommel’s brain and surfaced occasionally in conversation with his most trusted intimates. Not, of course, that he could volunteer this subtle point in his own mitigation when Burgdorf and Maisel called at the house in Herrlingen in October 1944.
Like the marriage vow he had sworn to Lucie in Danzig in 1917, the oath of allegiance he and every officer had sworn to the Führer in 1934 was inhibiting enough to prevent a man of Rommel’s convictions from actually “cheating.” Besides, he and the active field marshals had personally signed a second testimony of allegiance to Hitler in March 1944. Non-Germans may find it difficult to accept that upstanding generals could become tyrannized by their own oath of allegiance. But they were. Their entire military careers had been dominated by it and by the ethos that superior orders have to be obeyed. Victories had flowed from it, defeats had been impeded. Rommel demanded instant obedience from his juniors, and he liked to believe he was an obedient man himself. Had he not written in July 1941 to his commander in chief, Brauchitsch: “Above all I must demand from my officers that they set an example and obey”? Had he not sternly advised his own son in December 1943: “Obey without question”?
And how Hitler’s generals had obeyed! In the First World War, when Germany had lost 2 million men in battle, only ten of those casualties were generals. In Hitler’s war every combat general right up to army group level went onto the battlefield himself, flying by Storch, driving in tanks or armored cars or crawling on hands and knees. Literally hundreds of them were killed in action, in blind obedience to their oath, however hopeless the situation seemed. The agony, the conflict within Rommel between the dictates of his conscience and his allegiance to Hitler, can be seen mirrored in the strength of feeling on this issue for years after the war. General Blumentritt—Rundstedt’s chief of staff— wrote down his own reactions in 1947 on learning from Speidel for the first time that he had been one of the Stauffenberg plotters. “I still cannot change my own opinion,” wrote Blumentritt. “An oath is an oath and remains an oath, particularly in ‘impossible’ or ‘hopeless’ situations—that’s when the oath is needed most. . . . Troops fighting for their lives have a basic right to expect their commanders to be loyal, even when the going gets too rough.”
WHAT CAN WE SAY about Rommel the man?
Born, like any other child, without adjectives, he had accumulated few that were out of the ordinary in his infancy and youth. As a schoolboy he was frail but diligent, as a young man he became disciplined, tough and inventive. As a husband and father he was affectionate, devoted and imaginative.
It was in the army that he first began the ascent to distinction. He was fearless, brave, resourceful, reckless, self-confident. He was ambitious: though conscious of his humble origins as a schoolmaster’s son, he aspired to the highest goals and was impatient for the power and responsibility of high rank. In the las
t weeks of his life he admitted to Manfred, “You know, even as an army captain I already knew how to command an army!” In all his life there was never one instance of his showing personal fear, and he went to his rendezvous with death with the same unflinching tread as he had gone into battle all his life.
Age, maturity and rank did add less enviable qualities, it is true. He became dogmatic, reluctant to heed professional and superior advice, brash, immodest and oversensitive to rebuke.
As Hitler said of him in August 1944, “He is not a real stayer.” General Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, himself a fine panzer commander, recognized in Rommel a common type of officer defect: during any run of victories he was a real source of inspiration to his men; but he was all too rapidly discouraged by defeats.
As a strategist, Rommel was shortsighted. He saw only the immediate welfare of his own troops as an issue, while blindly refusing to accept that political or strategic considerations might demand a course of action that seemed tactically unacceptable. For instance, he allowed his ignorance of Hitler’s grand strategy in 1941—the forthcoming attack on Russia—to lead him to a fateful overextension of his own forces in Libya. In 1943, Rommel could not see any profit at all in playing for time—but from Allied files now released to scrutiny, we perceive how inconvenienced Churchill and Roosevelt were by Hitler’s stonewalling tactics in Italy and the Balkans. At times, in fact, Rommel seems to have been guided only by one thought—to retreat into Germany as fast as his troops could travel. It did not noticeably perturb him that his accelerated retreat from Libya into Tunisia, and later from southern Italy toward the Alps, was exposing the Balkans to enemy invasion, or the southern Reich to Allied strategic bombing. When the danger of the Italy-based strategic bombers dawned on him, in the summer of 1943, he concerned himself only with trivia—like the safety of his bank account in Wiener Neustadt.