Discovering the Rommel Murder

by Charles F. Marshall

  We were not there long before the widow returned home. A dignified, self-assured, and well-groomed woman of fifty with black hair, a dark complexion, and gray eyes, Mrs. Rommel was dressed in the black and gray of semimouming and wearing a strand of pearls.

  I sought to direct the conversation toward a discussion of Marshal Rommel's relations with Adolf Hitler and leading Nazi personalities, but with poor results. "I have a sixteen-year-old son in the Labor Service," explained the widow. "Therefore you will understand why I dare not criticize any member of the government." When asked about corruption in the Nazi Party, she replied, "Everybody now scorns the Party, but it once did good things too."

  The conversation turned to the clothing, equipment, and tactics of the Allies in comparison with those of the Wehrmacht, all of which Mrs. Rommel discussed at length and with surprising knowledge. "Just before he died," she said, "my husband remarked that he was surprised at the speed with which the American men and officers adjusted to modern warfare. Some of that he thought was due to their not having so much to unlearn. Even though he had a taste of American efficiency in Africa, he was astonished at the cohesion of the air, land, and sea forces in France and how quickly a young army mastered their technologically advanced weapons. `Your materiel superiority,' he said, `makes our fighting seem like that of primitive man."'

  My impression of Field Marshal Rommel's widow as summarized in my diary that night reads, A woman general.

  "How did the marshal die?" I asked.

  With a nervousness not previously apparent, she told how on July 17 of the previous year he had driven forward to confer with corps and divisional commanders on the crucial situation confronting them, and how, while returning to his headquarters, his car had been strafed by American planes. "As the car crashed," she said, "my husband was catapulted into the road and suffered severe head injuries. The left side of his head was pushed in and the base of his skull fractured. After several weeks in a hospital and over the remonstrations of the doctors, he returned home to recuperate under the care of his personal physician, Professor Albrecht of Tuebingen University. `I have always told my students that a man with such a wound could not live,' the professor said to my husband, and my husband answered, "That just proves what a Swabian blockhead I am!' The wound healed nicely but left him with a paralysis of the left side of the face and the loss of sight in one eye."

  Mrs. Rommel asked if we cared to see the marshal's death mask, and we indicated our interest. The niece left the room to get the mask and the widow continued: "Day by day, he appeared to be regaining his health. He was even going through painful exercises trying to raise his paralyzed left eyelid when his heart gave out and he died."

  The explanation affirmed the official cause of death: not one word of murder.

  There was a momentary lull in the conversation as we waited for the niece to return. Mrs. Rommel began to weep. "Oh," she moaned, "if only I could tell you what all I've gone through!"

  The niece then brought the mask, which clearly showed the soldier's wound. The skull was no longer symmetrical, and there was a very noticeable depression over the left temple. The mouth was firm and the nose straight. The face was that of a man with a marked personality, its most dominant characteristic being, perhaps, self-discipline. "He was a man who drove himself, his friends, and his staff mercilessly," said his wife. "During all the war he never attended a concert or took time out for any form of relaxation. He worked feverishly and lived for nothing but the war-his job. When he returned from Africa in September 1942 for a few weeks' rest cure, he already knew that he had lost the campaign and Germany the war. He was a broken man. He knew that further sacrifice was senseless, but he was a soldier and he had his orders."

  The death mask. The plaster replica of Rommel's face was shown to the author during his interrogation of the widow. Wounded in France three months before his death, Rommel's mask shows evidence of the injuries, particularly the indentation of the left temple. Photo from Mrs. Rommel.

  Her husband, she continued, had disagreed with the strategy employed in the defense of France and was not permitted to dispose his forces as he wished. Furthermore, contrary to all reports, Rommel was not a protege, or even a member, of the Nazi Party. He was a professional soldier and a good one. He was no politician. He made many enemies, as do all men with power. He was willing to place his services at the disposal of whoever governed Germany. It was his book Infanterie Greift An (The Infantry Attacks) that won him Hitler's attention. When he was appointed commandant of the military academy at Wiener Neustadt, he had never met Hitler.

  Asked why Rommel had carried on when he knew the war was lost, she replied in a shaking voice, "A soldier cannot ask questions, even if he is a field marshal and commander of an army group. If he had ... well, you read the papers ... you see what happens to those who oppose. His fight in Africa was hopeless and he knew it. He could not get supplies and sufficient reinforcements, especially after the American landing. But he had orders to hold. When it was over and he had seen the best of his men fall or be captured, he begged Hitler to allow him to return and share the fate of his troops. But Hitler would not allow him to return.

  "My husband also believed that if the Allies were able to land and establish a firm bridgehead in France, the war was definitely lost for Germany. Events have proven him right."

  What did she think of the continuation of the war?

  "It is insanity! The best are dying and only the disabled and cowardly remain. All German youth has been killed off. It will be felt for generations."

  What did Rommel think of Americans as soldiers?

  "He had, unfortunately, deservedly, only the highest respect. Also for the English."

  There was much more that I wanted to know about this man, but we had already been there two hours and I could not spare any more time from my other obligations back at Corps Headquarters. "It is my regrettable duty," I said, "to have to ask you to turn over to me your husband's papers."

  "There are none," she replied. "After my husband's death all his official papers were removed to Berlin by the High Command." This I had expected. "All I have," she added, "are personal papers"

  "May I see those?" I asked.

  With a slight shrug and a perplexed look, she led us into the cellar. There, into one suitcase and a wooden box, Mrs. Rommel had crammed hundreds of letters. I assured her that I would return any papers we were not interested in, and as we left I noticed on a table a German translation of a booklet on the art of generalship by Rommel's first desert opponent, British Field Marshal Archibald P. Wavell.

  Once we had returned to headquarters, I skimmed through the papers and noted that while some of them were Rommel's correspondence with numerous German luminaries, the bulk were the letters from Rommel to his wife. Inasmuch as he was in the habit of writing her a daily commentary on his activities, I decided they would be a rich source of material for Rommel's biographers and for historians reconstructing the African and Normandy campaigns.

  When I called the attention of my boss, the G-2, Colonel Joseph Langevin, to what I had brought back, he exclaimed, "God! You've got a gold mine!"

  In the diary that I kept during the war, the entry that evening reads:

  I am having the sergeants translate the Rommel letters while I edit and excerpt them for a Rommel diary. It will be widely reproduced and circulated and the original letters should wind up in the Library of Congress for future study by historians.

  I wrote about the interrogation for the Beachhead News, the newspaper published by VI Corps for the troops under its command. (Its name originated as a result of its having its origins on Anzio beachhead where the soldiers of VI Corps had landed preliminary to their capture of Rome.) Other army papers copied it, and it was widely reproduced in the press in America and around the world.

  Throughout the greater part of the war Erwin Rommel had ranked next only to the Fi in the German public's esteem. No popular periodical was complete without a picture of him
peering through field glasses, addressing his troops, or inspecting an installation. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, constantly sought to identify Rommel with the National Socialist rule, to have the Nazi Party ride piggyback on his popularity. In the governing circles it was no secret that this dashing officer was Hitler's favorite commander-and deservedly so. Had he not so repeatedly demonstrated his wizardry in the seesaw battles of the North African deserts that observers universally accorded him the accolade of the "Desert Fox"'? Had he not led his army to within fifty miles of Alexandria and sixty miles of Cairo, coming within a shadow of taking Egypt, changing the complexion of the war and the course of the world's history? And finally, in the face of overwhelming British and American manpower and materiel superiority, had he not staved off the inevitable disaster for months, proving himself a genius in "fighting a poor man's war?"

  During the next days, chaotic ones as the war was drawing to a close, I assigned Greiner and another sergeant to the job of translating Rommel's letters to his wife into English. Every moment that I could spare from my other work I would use to edit them and extract bits to compose a war diary. Since my last jobs of the day were to censor the outgoing mail of my men (who, unfortunately for me, were copious correspondents), and then write the nightly story of the day's activity on the front for the Beachhead News, my editing of the letters often ran into the early morning hours.

  DURING THE WEEK FOLLOWING OUR VISIT TO MRS. RommEL, THE German Army lapsed into its death throes. High-ranking officers were surrendering left and right. I could find little time to work on the Rommel letters. To complicate matters, General Charles Palmer, the VI Corps chief of staff, received a call late one afternoon from our 44th Division informing him that an emissary of General Andrei A. Vlassov, commander of the renegade Russian troops fighting in the German Army against Russia, had crossed the lines to negotiate a surrender.

  Vlassov was a lieutenant general who had been a Soviet adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in China in 1938-39. In 1942 he was one of the heroes in the defense of Moscow when the Germans were hammering at its outskirts. He later headed an army in the defense of Leningrad, but as the battle progressed Stalin refused to allow him to retreat to a more defensible position, causing the annihilation of his army and his own capture.

  Feeling deeply that Communism was worse than Naziism, and hoping to set up a free Russia after the defeat of Stalin, Vlassov offered his services to the Wehrmacht. He was given command of all Russians under German control, taking over the Russian Army of Liberation. This consisted of 100,000 Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other anti-Stalinists, and he now fought against the Red Army. The sending of his emissary was an important development, and I knew we would be called upon to interrogate him.

  Indeed, General Palmer asked me to stand by for his arrival. A half hour passed and a jeep pulled up containing Colonel Snyder, G-2 of the 44th Division, and the emissary, a Major Jung, a man about forty, a little short of six feet, effortlessly graceful, and wearing a black overcoat over a black uniform.

  Colonel Snyder spoke German, so he, not I, did the interpreting between the emissary and Palmer and my boss, Colonel Langevin.'Ihe talk concerned the 100,000 Russians in the German Army who wanted to surrender to the Americans and fight with the Allies against the Germans or, failing that, surrender as PWs with the condition that they would not be returned to Russia at the end of the war.

  Upon completion of the talk I was told to take the emissary to Seventh Army Headquarters with the expectation that I would be interpreting between him and General Alexander M. Patch, commander of Seventh Army.

  Colonel Langevin ordered a sedan for me, and with a driver and an MP I took the emissary to Seventh Army Headquarters, which, since we had been advancing so rapidly, was now a long drive behind us. Standard operating procedure (SOP) for a situation like this was to blindfold the man while he was being brought to Corps Headquarters. Upon leaving Corps Headquarters to go to Army Headquarters, he was again to be blindfolded. Since Germany was now in the last stages of collapse, however, I considered the blindfold unnecessary and removed it after a few miles, for which he was appreciative. After two hours on the road, I had the driver stop so that we could stretch our legs, and I handed him my camera for a picture of the emissary and me.

  We arrived at Seventh Army Headquarters a few minutes before midnight, only to learn that two other emissaries of General Vlassov had crossed the lines and all three were to be interrogated in detail by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center (CSDIC). My trip of 120 miles had turned out to be only as officer courier.

  During the drive I had discovered the Russian major to be friendly, intelligent, informative, objective, and, as it turned out, prescient. "What," I had asked, "will happen to Vlassov's men if the terms of his surrender offer are rejected?"

  "If we are returned to Stalin," he said, drawing his hand across his throat, "that will be it."

  And that wasthe fate that eventually befell Vlassov and his men. Unknown to us at the time was that under a secret agreement made at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Soviet citizens who fell into American custody had to be repatriated, even against their will. And the Allied media, playing into Stalin's hands, portrayed them as traitors.

  When I got back to VI Corps Headquarters it was 4:30 A.M. and I was dog tired. Not only was the hour late, but for the past days I had been working feverishly on a catch-as-catch-can basis editing Rommel's letters, working late into the night and sometimes into the early morning hours, devoting every moment to them that I could steal from my myriad other duties. I needed a good night's sleep, but instead I had time for only a two-hour nap before we packed up and moved to our new command post in Steingaden.

  Major Jung, General Andrei Vlassov's emissary, and the author en route to Seventh Army Headquarters on April 29, 1945. The emissary had come through the lines empowered to initiate conditions of surrender for the 100,000 Russians fighting under the German flag. Photo from author.

  There the command post was located in a cheese factory and my quarters were in the vacated home of a Generalleutnant, the equivalent of a major general in the U.S. Army. In the late afternoon, when I was counting the hours before I could get away to bed in my fine quarters, we were notified that our rapidly onrushing forces had captured a colonel, a major general, and the famous Field Marshal Wilhelm List, whom our 36th Division had thought they had killed in France the previous September and whose death I had tried unsuccessfully to confirm at the time.

  List was the long-time chief of the Wehrmacht's training section and was widely credited with the development of the German powerhouse. He had been a planner and chief executor of the blitz of France. Disagreeing with Hitler's strategy in the Russian campaign, he had been relieved of his command and was now at home on inactive duty.

  While I enjoyed interrogating high-ranking officers, all I wanted at this point was sleep. Instead Langevin told me that when List arrived I was to take him to the quarters of Major General Brooks, the commanding officer of VI Corps, and interpret. Shortly a jeep arrived containing a military police major and Field Marshal List. I introduced myself to the German, and we walked over to the general's quarters. And there it was that I committed the worst faux pas of my life: in my torpor I presented List to Brooks as Field Marshal Rommel.

  Field Marshal Wilhelm List (right) and the author at the home of the marshal in Garmisch-Partenkirchen on April 30,1945, while the war was in progress. The picture was taken the morning after the author had been List's overnight guest. The marshal had been one of the Ftihrer's top commanders until they disagreed on strategy in Russia. Photo from author.

  The quizzical look that crossed the general's face alerted me to my error. Mortified beyond words, I corrected myself and apologized. Perhaps the misintroduction would not have occurred had I not been so tired and so engrossed in working on Rommel's letters. I still tell myself so.

  Captain Wilson, the general's aide, served tea, and two hours quickly passed. The
conversation proved fascinating inasmuch as Brooks was an excellent interviewer. His questions were incisive and precise, and List responded fully and freely, often expanding in some detail since Brooks at the start had promised to keep the interview confidential. And confidential it was kept. I mentioned the capture in the Beachhead News but said nothing of the interview with Brooks.

  At the close of the talk, the general chivalrously asked if there was anything he could do for the marshal before he was sent to the rear for high-level interrogation and internment.

  "Yes," said List. "Your troops took me away so quickly I had no chance to pack a bag. Could you let me return to pack and bid my wife and daughter good-bye?"

  "Yes," responded Brooks. "You may spend the night and return in the morning, if you will give me your word as an officer that you will not try to escape."

  The German agreed and asked another favor. "Can you spare the captain to accompany me? Your troops are occupying my house and I may have trouble."

  "Yes," said Brooks, "Captain Marshall will go along as your guest, not as your guard, and he will see that no problems arise."

  "How bizarre!" I thought. "I am surely the first American officer in history to be the overnight guest of a German field marshal while our countries are at war."