by Unknown
“Our troops are fighting heroically but even so the end of this unequal battle is in sight.”
In his own handwriting Rommel added the words, “I must beg you to recognise at once the political significance of this situation. I feel it my duty, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army Group, to say this plainly.”
Von Kluge's covering letter, dated July 21st, is of interest. It shows that, for all the high hopes with which he took over, it did not take him long to come to the same conclusion as von Rundstedt and Rommel. It also shows him to have exhibited, on this occasion at least, considerable moral courage, for he cannot have supposed that it would be popular at the F�hrer's headquarters.
My F�hrer [he wrote], I forward herewith a report from Field-Marshal Rommel, which he gave to me before his accident and which he had already discussed with me. I have now been here for about fourteen days and, after long discussions with the responsible commanders on the various fronts, especially the S.S. leaders, I have come to the conclusion mar the Field-Marshal was, unfortunately, right.... There is absolutely no way in which we could do battle with the all-powerful enemy air force... without being forced to surrender territory.... The psychological effect on the fighting forces, especially the infantry, of such a mass of bombs raining down on them with all the force of elemental nature is a factor that must be seriously considered. It is not in the least important whether such a carpet of bombs is laid on good or bad troops. They are more or less annihilated by it and, above all, their equipment is destroyed. It only needs this to happen a few times... and the power of resistance is paralysed....
I came here with the fixed intention of making effec- tive your order to make a standat any price. But when one sees that this price must be paid by the slow but sure destruction of our troops-I am thinking of the Hitler Youth division, which has earned the highest praise... then the anxiety about the immediate future on this front is only too well justified.
In spite of all our endeavours, the moment is fast approaching when this overtaxed front is bound to break up.... I consider it my duty as the responsible commander to bring these developments to your notice in good time, my F�hrer.
Five weeks later Field-Marshal von Kluge had been superseded and was dead. With death everywhere about for the asking and stray bullets making heroes of frightened men every moment of the day and night, he chose to die by his own hand. He felt, he said, that he failed his F�hrer in the control of the operations. This was not, however, his only reason for being unwilling to meet him.
Desmond Young - Rommel, The Desert Fox
CHAPTER 11
“A Pitiless Destiny”
When, after the explosion of the atomic bomb, American sailors went aboard the surviving target ships at Bikini, they gradually became gripped by a strange, obsessive fear. “Decks you can't stay on for more than a few minutes; air you can't breathe without a gas-mask but which smells like all other air; water you can't swim in; fish you can't eat: it's a fouled-up world,” they said.*
[*No Place to Hide by David Bradley.]
For fission products, having fallen like a coat of paint over these ships, could not be washed off by the Navy's old prescription of a good scrubdown fore and aft. The neutrons and gamma rays remained, detectible only by Geiger counters but threatening disease, disintegration and the novel horror of atomic death.
One need not be psychic or even unduly sensitive to atmosphere to feel that something evil, not to be registered by Geiger counters, still hangs in the air of Germany today.
Miasmas no longer arise from the ruined cities; the countryside is clean and beautiful. Relieved from the worst of their material distress, the Germans go cheerfully enough about their work. In the village inns in the evenings they sing and dance and drink their beer more lightheartedly than most of us. Hatred of the occupying troops and their camp-followers is doubtless there but it is well concealed. Why, then, is one seldom quite at ease? Perhaps because one knows that so many of the Gestapo and S.S. are still at large, with false papers or free because those who might accuse them are buried; that the polite young man who waits on one so attentively in the hotel may have the blood of hundreds on his hands. (A Gestapo agent, wanted for sixty separate murders, was recently identified in the popular interpreter of a British camp.) Perhaps the reason is a little more remote-that the taint of the Nazi regime, which has not disappeared with the suicide or execution of its leaders, will not vanish with the death of the last of their accomplices. The acid of the unceasing spying and suspicion, of arrests at dawn, of torture and sadism and murder in cellars, above all, of the lying and hypocrisy which pervade a police state, has eaten in too deep. Like the fission products, it cannot be washed out. The shadow of Hitler still darkens the German scene. “It's a fouled-up world.”
At least, so I felt as I listened to the story of the last days of Rommel and of the manner of his end. Not that there was anything at all sinister about the surroundings in which I heard it or anything at all morbid about those who told it to me. On the contrary, when I sat in General Speidel's house above the peaceful Black Forest town of Freudenstadt, I had a feeling almost of nostalgia for the Victorian and Edwardian interiors of my childhood. It was in just such houses as this, a little over-furnished to modern taste but so well-ordered, so solidly and smugly comfortable (though never, perhaps, quite so incredibly clean), that the middle-class English, too, used to live their comfortable and well-ordered lives, their money in sound investments, their trust in God and the Government, the servants in their place, the cat on the hearth, the police-man on his beat. One might have been in North Oxford, forty years ago.
Frau Rommel's little house, though it is filled with relics of Rommel, though paintings and photographs of him cover the walls, though his death-mask is kept in a case in a corner, has the same atmosphere of tranquillity and security. So has Aldinger's. So has that in which I found Dr. Str”lin, the last of my informants. In each the story had to be interrupted and papers removed so that an embroidered cloth could be laid for tea. In each the china was Meissen, cherished and un-chipped and afterwards restored to its cabinet. In each were those once familiar four-decker cake-stands which might be the symbol of a vanished age.
As for General Speidel, he looks what in fact he is, a don.
His wife, much too young, one would say, to be the mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter, might never have had a care in the world beyond minor domestic worries. The children are handsome, punctiliously well-mannered and brought up to speak when they are spoken to. Aldinger and his wife are typical pillars of small-town society. Dr. Strolin has the assured air of a man long accustomed to position and authority. Frau Lucie Maria Rommel, though her strong face is heavily lined, shows no other sign of an experience as harrowing as any woman has had to undergo. Much more Northern Italian than German in appearance, with her black hair and grey eyes, she has none of the sentimentality to be found in so many Germans. When she speaks of “mein Mann,” it is cheerfully and with pride. For nearly thirty years they had a good life together, in spite of two wars, and were happy. Of her husband's end she is willing to talk when one has her confidence. She does so without bitterness but with great disdain for those who were responsible. Only once did she show how deep her feelings still are after five years. When we drove up together to her former house on the hill above Herrlingen, now a school, she stayed in the car outside the gates. “I like to see the children in the garden,” she said, “but I do not wish to go in there again.”
Manfred, the son, now studying law at T�bingen University, is a pleasant and perfectly normal young man, devoted to his mother and to the memory of his father, and entirely free, so far as one can judge, of any “complexes.” He is neither unbalanced nor embittered by what he saw at the impressionable age of fifteen.
Yet, against this background of almost Victorian normality, elsewhere now hard to find, these seemingly normal people had been involved, or had deliberately involved themselves, in a struggle with a regi
me so ruthless that death was far from the worst of its punishments for those who challenged it. It was this contrast which, to me, made the whole story more disquieting and macabre. Incidentally, they had all displayed a four-o'clock-in-the-morning courage which convinced me that their nerves were stronger than my own.
Rommel returned from North Africa in March, 1943, having, as they say, “had” Hitler. For a long time he had known that Keitel and Jodl were both professionally and privately his enemies. Goering he despised and distrusted, suspecting him of having been prejudiced by Kesselring against himself and the Afrika Korps. Recently he had been warned by General Schmundt that his stock had slumped with the Party bosses and particularly with the mysteriously influential Bormann. He had, in fact, no friend at court except Schmundt himself, who still spoke up for him. However, until after El Alamein he continued to believe that the trouble with the F�hrer was his entourage and that he would act fairly and see reason if only he would free himself from his sycophants. Now he had no such illusions. He had come to realise that there was in Adolf Hitler neither fairness, generosity nor loyalty to those who served him. Nor was he open to reason. This was a distressing revelation to Rommel, a straightforward, simple man with little subtlety, except in battle. Since he had never been a political soldier and was completely out of touch with current politics, the shock was at first purely personal and professional. He had lost faith in a man who had been his friend and patron and was head of the armed forces. It was only gradually that he came to see that more than victory was being endangered, that, thanks to Hitler, Germany was on the way to degradation as well as to defeat.
His eyes were opened during the months he was in Germany before he took over command of Army Group B. He had long disapproved of the Nazi “scum.” For the first time he now learnt at first hand from German officers what the Gestapo and the S.S. had done in Poland and Russia, what they were still doing there and in the occupied countries of Western Europe. For the first time he learnt of slave labour, of the mass extermination of Jews, of the battle of the Warsaw ghetto, of gas-chambers and the rest of it. In North Africa it had been assumed that Germany was fighting “a gentleman's war.”
It was characteristic of Rommel that he went straight to Hitler himself with these discoveries. “If such things are allowed to go on,” he said, “we shall lose the war.” He then proposed the disbandment of the Gestapo and the splitting up of the S.S. among the regular forces. At the same time he begged Hitler to stop the enlistment of very young boys. “It is madness,” he said, “to destroy the youth of the country.”
Such ingenuousness must have staggered Hitler. It may have amused Himmler, if Hitler communicated Rommel's proposals to him. Strangely enough, the F�hrer condescended to argue with Rommel at some length. But he left no doubt in the latter's mind that he had not the slightest intention of changing his methods. Rommel thus realised that his master's crimes were of commission also.
During the early part of the summer he brooded over these matters and, for the first time in his life, became politically conscious. His conclusions were those of many other German generals. Hitler would lead the country to ruin. He ought, therefore, to be curbed. So long as he had the Party, the S.S. and many young officers and soldiers of the Reichswehr behind him, there was no way of removing him short of civil war. It might be sufficient to remove his advisers and keep him as a figurehead, without any real authority. How could that be done? Before Rommel had followed out this line he was appointed to Army Group B and went off, first to Northern Italy and afterwards to France. He put the whole problem temporarily at the back of his mind and, as was usual with him, applied himself to the work in hand.
There were others, however, whose plans were more advanced and who for some time had had their eyes on Rom- mel. Dr. Goerdeler, Mayor of Leipzig, and Colonel-General Beck, former Chief of the General Staff, were the key men in the conspiracy against Hitler. They realised that, if it were to have any chance of success, they must find a popular figure, a modern Hindenburg, to put at the head of it when the time came. He must be one who already had the public confidence and who could not be suspected of acting from self-interest.
He must be a soldier whom the Army would follow. General Beck, though his character and ability were of the highest, would not do. The majority of Germans had hardly heard of him and he had been dismissed by Hitler as far back as 1938. Among the serving generals there was none with a reputation, in the eyes of the public, which approached that of Rommel.
After Hitler himself, he was probably the most popular man in Germany. Politically there was nothing against him. He had, indeed, to his own annoyance, been built up by the propagandists as a good Nazi. At the same time he was known to be respected by the British, with whom, at the crucial moment, he would have to treat. Outside a small circle, no one knew that he was at cross-purposes with the F�hrer. He was, therefore, the obvious choice, indeed the only one.
Fortunately the conspirators had just the right contact in Dr. Karl Str”lin,Oberb�rgermeister or Mayor of Stuttgart from 1933 and well-known abroad as chairman of the last meeting before the war of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning. Immensely popular in Stuttgart and a man of great energy and ability, Dr. Str”lin was one of those who had originally been a strong supporter of Hitler and the Party. That it was possible to be a Nazi, at least at first, without being a gangster is shown by a tribute paid to Strolin by the Consul-General of the United States in Stuttgart, who knew him there for seven years, from 1934 to 1941.
“He is a man of the highest humane principles,” he wrote in 1948 in a letter which I myself have seen, “as is confirmed by what I heard of him from Americans and Germans alike and especially from members of the Jewish faith, many of whom spoke of him with great appreciation and reverence. His nobility of character and untiring efforts on behalf of those in distress should entitle him to the greatest respect of the German people, as well as of those he served so unselfishly.”
It was the rape of Czechoslovakia which turned Dr. Str”lin against Hitler; it was his friendship with Dr. Goerdeler which made him a conspirator. Though he contrived, astonishingly, to remain Mayor of Stuttgart until the end of the war, he worked actively against the Nazis from 1939 onwards. The story of how he saved twenty-one members of the French Resistance, condemned to death in Alsace, has been told by one of them. It does the greatest credit to his intelligence and courage.
As an infantry captain in the first war, he served with Rommel in 1918, after being twice wounded, on the staff of the 64th Corps. Because they were both front-line soldiers and unhappy on the staff, they became friends. Though Str”lin's interests were much wider than Rommel's, the friendship had been maintained between the wars. Recently Strolin had helped Rommel to move his family from Wiener Neustadt to W�rttemberg.
It was through Frau Rommel that Str”lin started to work. In August, 1943, he had the courage to put his name to a document, which he and Goerdeler had drafted, demanding that the persecution of Jews and of the churches be abandoned, that civil rights be restored and that the administration of justice be taken out of the hands of the Party. This heretical paper was sent to the Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior. Str”lin was promptly warned that he would be put on trial for “crimes against the Fatherland” if he did not keep quiet. “At least I was now satisfied,” he said, “that nothing could be done by legal methods.”
Str”lin gave a copy of the paper to Frau Rommel. Towards the end of November or when he was home on short leave for Christmas, she cannot remember which, she in turn handed it to her husband. It made a profound impression on him, since his own mind had been working in the same direction. In December, Str”lin also managed to visit Frau Rommel at Herrlingen when he knew that General Gausi, Rom- mel's Chief of Staff, would be there. His intention was merely to ask for an interview with Rommel but he found that Gausi was also against Hitler, having recently had to deal with some of his Gauleiters.
The
fateful interview took place in Rommel's house in Herrlingen towards the end of February, 1944. Str”lin had to make his way there secretly. He had been warned by the ex-Commissioner of Police at Stuttgart, the same Hahn whom Rommel had known in 1919, that he was on the list of those for immediate liquidation should a resistance movement develop in Germany. He also knew that his telephone was tapped and his conversations recorded.
The interview lasted between five and six hours and Str”lin still has a vivid recollection of it. “I began,” he said, "by discussing the political and military situation of Germany. We found ourselves in complete agreement. I then said to Rommel, 'If you agree about the situation you must see what it is necessary to do.' I told him that certain senior officers of the Army in the East proposed to make Hitler a prisoner and to force him to announce over the radio that he had abdicated. Rommel approved of the idea.Neither then nor at any time afterwards was he aware of the plan to kill Hitler.
“I went on to say to him,” continued Strolin, “that he was our greatest and most popular general and more respected abroad than any other. 'You are the only one,' I said, 'who can prevent civil war in Germany. You must lend your name to the movement.' I did not tell him that it was proposed to make him President of the Reich: the idea was not, in fact, suggested until I returned and had a talk with Goerdeler, and I don't think he ever heard of it until the last day of his life. ”Rommel hesitated. I asked him again whether he saw any chance of winning the war, perhaps by means of the secret weapons. Rommel said that he knew nothing about secret weapons except what he had read in the propaganda reports, but that he personally saw no chance. Militarily, it was already lost. Did he think that Hitler realised how bad things were? 'I doubt it,' said Rommel, 'in any case he lives on illusions.' Could he not ask for an interview and try to open his eyes? 'I have tried several times,' said Rommel, 'but I have never succeeded. I don't mind trying again, but they are suspicious of me at headquarters and certainly won't leave me alone with him. That fellow Bormann is always there.'