by Unknown
Thus it was with no great enthusiasm that he heard, in 1935, that the Army proposed to take over the S.A. and that he was to be given command of them. He admitted that he would have enjoyed “smartening them up” but he realised that the job would be neither easy nor agreeable. He was not called upon to undertake it. The attempt by the Army to secure control of the S.S. failed. It is unlikely that there was ever any chance of its succeeding.
Rommel, however, was not to escape contact with the Nazis. While still an instructor at the War Academy he was given a special assignment. He was to be attached to the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) with the object of improving their discipline. This suited him. He was always fond of boys and at his best with them. Most boys, with their natural instinct for hero-worship, adored him. He was a famous soldier who would stand no nonsense but he talked to them as equals. Here the material was, on the whole, good; physically it was magnificent.
It is interesting to speculate what might have happened to the Hitler Youth had Rommel been given a free hand. They would have been tough and brave, as, indeed, most of them were. In the last days of defeat they would have fought and died gamely, as many of them did, under S.S.Brigadef�hrer Kurt Meyer of the 12th S.S. Panzer (Hitler Jugend) Division, at Caen. They might have sprung at our tanks like wolves until, as a British tank commander said, “We were forced to kill them against our will.” They would not, it is safe to say, have been the intolerant and fanatical young bullies they became. Certainly they would not have killed prisoners-of-war, as they did under Kurt Meyer's orders. Nor would the survivors now form that hard core of sullen, resentful and dangerous young Germans whom no man in his senses can suppose it possible to convert to our ideas. The Afrika Korps was formed of much the same material; the boys who served in it were tough and brave and confident.
They, too, had a good conceit of themselves. But one has only to meet the survivors of the Afrika Korps and of the S.S. to see the difference.
Rommel never had a chance with them, for he quickly ran up against their leader, Baldur von Schirach. The latter, young, handsome, a good speaker, more cultured than most of the Nazis, for he was the son of the Director of the Weimar Theatre and a poet of sorts, has been represented as one of the few idealists of the Party. On the other hand he struck von Hassell as no more than “a bombastic Party ruffian... whose countenance reflects baseness.” What is certain is that he was of the type to appeal to emotional German youth and that he was slavishly and apparently genuinely devoted to the F�hrer, to whom he used to send adulatory poems. Not unnaturally he resented the importation of a regular officer who was not even a member of the Party. Rommel and he fell out, however, on an issue which would have been surprising to any one who did not know of Rommel's descent from schoolmasters. So far from wanting to militarise the Hitler Youth, he objected that von Schirach was laying too much stress on sport and military training and not paying enough attention to education and the development of character. He strongly objected, he said, to small boys of thirteen being made into “little Napoleons” and was not at all encouraging to a lad of eighteen who arrived in uniform and a large Mercedes and navely confided in him that he “felt like a commanding general.” The Hitler Youth were already contemptuous of schools and schoolmasters and refused to be treated as schoolboys. In an attempt to put this right, Rommel arranged a meeting between Baldur von Schirach and Dr. Rust, the Minister of Education. But von Schirach was arrogant and Rust was a fool and nothing came of it. Rommel then told von Schirach that, if he was determined to train the boys as soldiers, he had better first go and learn to be a soldier himself. Von Schirach, though he eventually went, objected that he would lose all his influence with his Hitler Youth if he were seen obeying the orders of a drill-sergeant!
Meanwhile, as soon as he felt able to do so, he set about getting rid of Rommel. Since he was one of Hitler's intimates it was not too difficult to represent that Rommel was not quite a good enough Nazi to be entrusted with the training of the Hitler Youth. Rommel was only attached from the staff of the War Academy and no open dispute between the Party and the Army arose. Romrnel returned to Potsdam and was rather pointedly not given the golden badge of the Hitler Jugend.
Having finished his three years' tour of duty at Potsdam on November 9th, 1938, he was appointed next day to command the War Academy at Wiener Neustadt. He had been promoted the previous year and had thus risen from captain to full colonel in nineteen yearsŽa rapid enough rise in peacetime but not sensational in view of his record and the enormous expansion of the Wehrmacht since 1935. Such as it was, no one could say that it was due to influence in the higher command of the Army, still less to any favours from the Nazis.
What his record of service does not show is that, before leaving Potsdam, he had been seconded from the War Academy to a temporary job which changed his whole future - for better and for worse. An officer was wanted to command theF�hrerbegleitbataillon , the battalion responsible for Hitler's personal safety, during the march into the Sudetenland in October, 1938.Infanterie Greift An had been published in 1937. Hitler had read and admired it. He made the appointment to his escort himself and chose the author. For the first time Rommel was brought to close quarters with the man who was to make him a Field-Marshal and to murder him.
So many buckets have been dropped into the dark well of Hitler's character, so much is known about his treachery, his cruelty, his cunning, his bloodthirstiness, his strange obsessions, his megalomania, that only one mystery now remains: how did he manage to impose so long, not upon the mass of the German people (that is understandable, for to them he was a Voice and a Vision), but upon some quite decent and intelligent men who were in daily contact with him?
Rommel was no trained psychologist, nor was he ever Hitler's intimate. But he was shrewd, a keen observer and a good judge of normal men. At this period he had an opportunity of studying the F�hrer under stress. The impressions he formed at the time may add little to our knowledge. But they were precise and he made a note of them which his son has preserved. There was no doubt, he said, that Hitler had a magnetic, perhaps an hypnotic power, derived from his evident belief that he was inspired by God orVorsehung (the force which orders all things on earth), to lead the German people “up to the sun.” (Rommel even then suspected that, if he could not lead them to victory, he would be equally prepared to lead them to destruction, provided only that the end was dramatic.)
This power was displayed in his handling of a conference. At the start Hitler would have an almost vacant look and appear to be fumbling, like a man idly turning over the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. Suddenly his sixth sense (Rommel's own Fingerspitzengef�hl) would come into play and he would listen intently. Then “out of the depths of himself,” he would produce an answer which, for the moment at least, would entirely satisfy all those to whom he was speaking.
“At such moments he would speak like a prophet.” Rommel realised that “he always acted by intuition, never by reason.” But Hitler had, he said, an extraordinary gift of grasping the essential points in a discussion and distilling a solution from them.
This same intuition enabled him to sense the thoughts of any one to whom he was speaking and, when he chose, to say what he knew would please him. His flattery was adroit. Thus, when he had already made up his own mind on a course, he would consult someone who was certain to hold the same views as himself and appear to be convinced by his arguments, even a little unwillingly. When the decision was taken, his consultant, already flattered by being asked his opinion by the F�hrer, would be doubly flattered at the thought that he had influenced it. (It would be interesting to know whether Hitler had read Mr. Dale Carnegie.)
The next thing that struck Rommel was Hitler's truly remarkable memory. Like General Smuts, he knew practically by heart any book which he had ever read and, as with General Smuts, whole pages and chapters were photographed exactly upon his mind. His grasp of statistics was particularly strong; he could reel off figures of troop dispositions
, enemy tanks destroyed, reserves of petrol and ammunition, etc., in a manner which impressed even the highly-trained products of the General Staff.
Baron von Esebeck, the German war correspondent, told me a story, which he had at first hand, to show that Hitler never lost this faculty nor the intuition which had already led the German armies to disaster. In the early spring of 1945 Hitler visited an Army Headquarters on the Eastern Front. “When do you expect the next Russian attack?” he asked the Army Commander.
The Army Commander gave a date and his reasons.
“No,” said Hitler, “it will be a week later,” which it was.
Then he asked, “How many rounds per gun have you for your medium artillery?”
The Army Commander gave a figure.
“No,” said Hitler, “I sent you more than that: you ought to have so-and-so. Ring up and ask the general commanding your artillery.” Hitler was right and the Army Commander was wrong.
This is an old trick, well known to visiting royalty and inspecting generals, but Hitler was a master of it and needed no prompting.
Hitler's last quality, which greatly impressed Rommel, who always valued it very highly, was, surprisingly enough, his physical courage. When the Germans were about to enter Prague on March 13th, 1939, Rommel was again in command of the escort battalion. “What would you do if you were in my place, Colonel?” the F�hrer asked him. Rommel's answer was in character. “I should get into an open car,” he said, “and drive through the streets to the Hradschin without an escort.” With the Czechs in the mood they were in, this was advice which few men personally responsible for Hitler's safety would have offered. It was also advice which few men in Hitler's position would have taken. But he took it and the old newsreels show them acting upon Rommel's suggestion.
Of all their stations, Wiener Neustadt, in the mountains southwest of Vienna, gave the Rommels their happiest memories of the time between the wars. Rommel had an independent command. Free from any interference by higher authority, he was doing his favourite job, the training of budding officers in minor tactics and soldierly conduct. With his wife and young son he lived in a charming bungalow surrounded by a large garden. There were endless excursions to be made in a beautiful countryside, endless opportunities for the practice of his latest hobby, photography, in which, as may be imagined, he was technically highly competent but also showed a talent for selection and composition. The rest of the staff were congenial but the Rommels were always content with a domestic life and sufficient to themselves. The summer days slipped pleasantly away. As for the shadow of war, Rommel was not alone amongst Germans in thinking, after Munich and even after Prague, that Hitler would “get away with it somehow.” General Thomas, head of the economic branch of the German High Command has, since the war, remarked that “every intelligent German came to the conclusion that the Western Powers saw in Germany a bulwark against Bolshevism and welcomed German rearmament,” which shows to what misconceptions appeasement may lead. Even as late as August 23rd, 1939, when Rommel was promoted Major General and posted to the staff of the F�hrer's headquarters, to be responsible again for Hitler's safety, he was not sure that he was off once more to the wars. An eleventh-hour settlement would not have surprised him half as much as did the alliance with Russia, signed on the same day.
That alliance made war inevitable and, at 4:40 A.M. on September 1st, the German air attack upon Poland was launched. Lloyd George had been proved right when, in his memorandum to the Peace Conference on March 25th, 1919, he said: “The proposal of the Polish Commission that we should place two million Germans under the control of a people of a different race, which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history, must, in my judgment, lead sooner or later to a new war in the east of Europe....”
It would be idle to pretend that Rommel had any qualms of conscience over the invasion of Poland. Just as he had welcomed rearmament, whether secret or open, because he felt that Germany could expect little consideration from her conquerors until she was strong enough to speak with them on equal terms, so he had always believed that the Polish Corridor must disappear and Danzig be restored to the Reich, by amicable arrangement if possible but by force of arms if necessary. The fact that his wife's family lived in West Prussia, that it was in Danzig that he had met her, that it was from the War Academy at Danzig that he was first commissioned, may have given him a direct personal interest in the matter, but his opinion was shared by the vast majority of Germans.
Moreover, it is fair to remember that in this case, as in the case of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, even the educated German swallowed the propaganda adroitly served up to him by Goebbels because he never had the opportunity of hearing the other side. Men like General Beck and Ulrich von Hassell, who could view European affairs dispassionately and from an international standpoint, were few and far between, as, indeed, they are in any country. This does not in any way excuse German aggression: it merely explains why it did not horrify the German professional soldier as much as it did the rest of the world. In much the same mood must a British regular officer have gone off to the South African War.
From Hitler's headquarters, Rommel had a bird's-eye view of the lightning campaign which overwhelmed Poland in four weeks, before the bulk of the Polish army had even reached its concentration areas. On September 2nd he was at Prusczo, on the 10th at Kielce, on the 13th at Lodz and on October 5th at Warsaw, which had capitulated on September 30th. A day or two later he was on his way back to Berlin. He did not fail to profit by this object lesson in the art of modern war. He saw the importance of close air co-operation with the ground troops and of “ground-strafing” by low-flying aircraft, which the R.A.F. was strangely reluctant to learn. He saw that to spread confusion in the back areas was often more demoralising to the enemy than to inflict casualties. He saw that, in mechanised warfare, what paid was to push on and exploit success in depth, even at the risk of being cut off, by-passing points of resistance and leaving them to be dealt with at leisure by the oncoming infantry. (This was merely an adaptation to armour of Ludendorff's infiltration tactics in the March, 1918, offensive and of his own practice in Rumania and Italy.) He saw that tanks must be used in mass and not dispersed in “penny packets.” Above all, he saw that, for a man of his temperament, an armoured division was the one command.
Incidentally, the campaign confirmed his opinion of Hitler's personal courage. “I had great trouble with him,” he told his wife; “he was always wanting to be right up with the forward troops. He seemed to enjoy being under fire.” During the invasion of Normandy, Rommel did not find the F�hrer conspicuous for courage. But by then he had long since revised his opinion of him on other grounds.
Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox
CHAPTER 4
Ghost Division
To those who took no part in it, the five weeks' fighting that preceded the fall of France seemed curiously unreal. It was as though one watched a familiar building, struck by a heavy bomb, in that split second before it crumbles and subsides into dust.
I had, I remember, flown back to India by K.L.M. from a week's hurried leave in England, landing at Jodhpur on the morning of May 10th. The previous Sunday, a magical spring day, I had lunched in the Bois, where the chestnuts were in bloom. Over a cigar and a second brandy I had wondered idly when, if ever, I should do anything so pleasant again, for there was no doubt that the “phony” war was coming to an end. But it was only a vague, personal foreboding, which few in Paris seemed to share. “Cette fois on les aura,” said the barman in the hotel when I left to catch the night train to Rome, “Ca ne sera pas comme en quatorze.” He wore the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre in his button-hole and seemed a sensible chap.
As I sat in the U.S. Club in Simla a week or so later and heard over the wireless the old familiar names, Cambrai, Marcoing, Peronne, Arras, Bapaume, the La Bassee Canal, Bethune and, soon, Amiens, Abbeville, Fecamp, St. Valery names associated with battles in which
, after months of bloody fighting, gains could be seen only on trench-maps, or with back areas where one went out thankfully to rest, it seemed impossible that this could be happening in a country one had known. Were British troops really fighting again over that old, once shell-torn ground? Could it be true that they were being pushed out overnight from places where the line had been held for years?
Dunkirk was different. One could visualise the beaches and the long lines of men stretching far out into the sea. But for me at least the weeks before were like some horrid dream, in which one went abstractedly to work, agreed with someone in the G.H.Q. mess that “It looks damned bad,” but from which one expected at any moment to awake. It was only long after the flood of victory had flowed again over the lost ground, only the other day, in fact, that I began to get the feel of it, to realise what it must have been like to live through those bewildering, hopeless weeks-and that from the other side.
On the red cloth of the dining-room table, in the little house in Herrlingen-bei-Ulm with a painting of Rommel in uniform looking down at us from the wall, Manfred Rommel and I opened out the huge velvet-covered volume in which the day-by-day and round-by-round story of the 7th Panzer Division, the “Ghost Division,” is recorded. Rommel was a great one for records. To Captain Aldinger, his old companion in the W�rttemberg battalion in the previous war, recalled from retirement and the designing of peaceful gardens to become his Ordonnanzoffizier in this, was given the task of collecting the orders and maps and casualty returns for each day that the division was in action and, subsequently, of collating them. Captain Aldinger, as might be expected of him, had done a precise and perfect job. On the left-hand page is a type-written abstract of the orders and war diary, on the right a large-scale map on which the position of the divisional units and of Divisional H.Q. is shown hour by hour. There is not a correction or an erasure. From this book, the only copy in existence, it is possible to see exactly what the division did between May l0th, 1940, when it crossed the Belgian frontier, to. 5 P.M. on June 9th, when Cherbourg capitulated to it unconditionally and Rommel accepted, in the Military Prefecture, the surrender of Admiral d'Abrial, with four other French admirals and 30,000 prisoners-of-war.