Needless to say, this technique was not one approved by headquarters. In fact, it was prohibited. A very different technique is mentioned in my diary entry of November 16, 1944:
On night duty last night.
In afternoon Petty picked me up-I took my jeep to Ordnance yesterday for overhauling-and we went to the 103rd. They had seventy-five PWs during the day and I showed the MPs how to search prisoners quickly and showed the interrogators and order of battle men how to interrogate them quickly and efficiently.
One of the PWs was an officer, a battalion commander, who refused to answer any of the interrogator's questions. After the interrogation I sat down next to him in the big hall downstairs and we chatted for an hour. We talked about the American and German soldier, the differences and similarities, politics, discipline, prisoners, interrogation, and everything else. In spite of his original security-mindedness, I found out that the Meurthe River was to be the winter defense line and that no defenses exist between the Meurthe and the Rhine.
Obviously this was a valuable piece of information for our commanding general. It was not elicited through threat, but through quiet discussion and some obtuse questioning. I convinced the German that the war was lost and that any help he could give us toward bringing it to a faster end would be of greater benefit to the Fatherland than his silence, and therefore his true patriotic duty lay in helping us.
Interrogation was not always routine; sometimes it was dramatic and at the end called for a difficult decision. One such episode occurred when our 103rd Division first came into the battle area and I was ordered to report to the G-2 section of 103rd Headquarters to supervise the installation of the order-of-battle system so that it would mesh with that of the VI Corps system. The same Lieutenant Heide was a new interrogator at the time and I sought to help him with a few tips. That night some prisoners were taken. As I stood by, together with a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officer, Heide's questioning of one soldier revealed that he was from the 2nd Company of the 15th Field Punishment Battalion. His identity was confirmed by his Soldbuch, a passport-size booklet that contained his entire military record. German soldiers were forced to carry these at all times. The reason for his being in this unit, he said, was that he had gone AWOL to see his girl and had been caught and sentenced to eighteen months in the battalion.
By the rules of the Geneva Convention, however, his civilian clothes branded him a spy. Worsening his plight, we caught him in a lie as to where he had acquired the clothing. First he said it was given to him, and then he said that he had taken it from a bombed French house.
After two hours of grilling, during which we made him strip, he still stuck to his story that he was a deserter and had used the civilian clothes to help him escape. What made it hard for us to believe him was a pair of opera glasses we found on him, but his military history checked out. I knew all about the field punishment battalion.
All in all, this was one of the most dramatic and soul-searching moments I had experienced. Heide and I sat on one side of the table, the German, a tall, twenty-six-year-old blond, on the other. The blacked-out room, heated by a little stove in the adjoining room, was lit by two candles that shone on the prisoner.
By 9 P.M. Heide had filled out a form that would turn the German over to the French secret police. This meant that he would be mercilessly beaten and then shot, no matter what story he told. Based on my observations, French passions made no allowance for reasonable doubt. Turned over to our Gallic allies, this German was as good as dead. I couldn't sit by knowing this would be his fate and yet do nothing. I believed the essence of his story.
The German's defense for having the opera glasses was plausible. He said he had found them in the same house as the clothes and wanted to use them to help him pick his way to the American lines. The CIC man who was present at the grilling was all for turning him over to the French. I turned to Heide and explained my reasons for believing the German's story-mainly the accuracy of his military history. Fortunately for the German, Heide respected my opinion and acceded to my suggestion that he be classed as a bona fide deserter.
THOUGH THE PACE OF INTERROGATING HIGH-RANKING PRISONERS PICKED up, as more and more surrendered or were captured, I continued to work on Rommel's letters late into the nights.
May 6, 1945 (My diary): Finished editing Rommel's letters.
The product of the excerpts of the letters of the "Desert Fox" was a compilation of fifty-two legal-sized pages. Distributed to division, corps, army, army groups, SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces), and other high headquarters throughout the European theater, it quickly became popular reading and requests for additional copies poured in.
After the publication of the Beachhead News story it would be months before I had a chance to see Mrs. Rommel again. I had many more questions to ask her. There was so much more that I wanted to know about this man Rommel.
In the course of several postwar visits to the Rommel home, plus a study of the field marshal's Soldbuch and the letters to his wife, and visits with his associates and intimates, I was able to form a more accurate picture of his background and career than had up to then been possible. For years much mystery, misinformation, and baseless propaganda had been intermingled with the facts, both in Germany and abroad, about the German commander whose Afrika Korps, inferior in numbers, weary, and starved for supplies, had for most of two years plagued and outdueled the British forces in North Africa. The American forces would especially remember the drubbing administered them by his troops at Kassarine Pass in the closing weeks of the African campaign.
Third of five children, Erwin Eugen Johannes Rommel was born in Heidenheim, a small town in Wuerttemberg near Ulm, on November 15, 1891. The parents' first child died young, the second was a daughter, followed by Erwin and two younger brothers.
In his preteen years, Erwin Rommel was a frail and docile child to whom schoolwork did not come easily. He spent much time on his bike in warm weather and on his skis in the winter months. Forays into the fields and woods developed in him a lifelong love of the outdoors.
Friends remembered him as a warm-hearted, lively boy, well liked by his schoolmates, an excellent athlete and gymnast who had a will of his own and early displayed courage, endurance, and a marked leadership ability. As the son of a mathematics teacher and high school principal it was expected that he be a good pupil; but, except for mathematics and drawing, in which he excelled, he was only a fair student who deeply resented the homework that curbed his freedom. He was fond of technical toys, and his love of the technical found expression in engine tinkering, chemical experiments, and the building of scooters and wagons. By the time he was seventeen he had developed a wiry body, although a little on the short side, and he and friends built model airplanes and a life-size glider. Experiments were carried out with the glider, although the flights often ended in more bone breaking than aeronautical achievement, the ventures usually in the air for no more than ten to thirty yards.
At the age of eighteen, on July 19, 1910, after wavering for a time between a career in engineering and one in soldiering, Rommel enlisted as a Fahnenjunker (officer candidate) in the 124th Wuerttemberger Infantry Regiment at Weingarten in Upper Swabia. This status obligated him to serve in the enlisted ranks before attending a war academy.
After three months he was promoted to corporal and in another two to sergeant. Three months later he was admitted to the war academy in Danzig. Here his fellow candidates found a fair-skinned young man with light blond hair who was shrewd, a good judge of people, easy to get along with but not one to be pushed around, and who spoke slowly and then only after reflection. Not one to let the sow run wild, as the Germans put it, he was temperate in his use of alcohol and resolute in his refusal to smoke, not normally considered great virtues by young soldiers, but nevertheless two precepts he adhered to until the end of his days. He did not try to force his puritanical habits on others, for he did not envy them the pleasures of life. To those who knew
him well, he was a good friend with a pleasant sense of humor.
Like most Wuerttembergers, Rommel was careful with his money. The stipend the Army paid him set him free from financial dependence upon his father, a matter of lifelong pride and honor with him.
In later years, when reminiscing, he would refer to this Danzig period as the happiest of his life. Not only was it the soldiering, which he took to like a fish to water, but it was while here that he was introduced to Lucie-Maria Mollin, a student in aboarding school who was studying to become a language teacher, and who was to become the one and only woman in his life. She was the daughter of a landowner in West Prussia who had died while she was still young. The family was of Italian origin, having emigrated to Germany centuries earlier, which no doubt explains the swarthy complexion I described in my Beachhead News article after my first meeting with her.
The courtship was to go on for four years. Then, in the middle of the First World War, on November 27, 1916, Rommel returned to Danzig on leave to marry her. He was twenty-five and she, twenty-two. Pictures of the young woman at this time show a face of classically modelled features, the type so often sculptured into Italian cameos.
"When he got his first motorcycle, shortly after we were married," the marshal's widow had told me, "the first thing he did was to take it completely apart."
"You don't mean completely," I said.
"Yes, I mean completelv," she replied. "When I saw that mess of nuts and bolts and gears and things, I said, 'My God! What have you done? You'll never get that thing together again!' He said, 'I've got to know how it works, don't I? How else can I fix it if it breaks down?' He did get it together again, and when we got our first car, he did the same thing. But by that time I had more confidence in him."
The reasons for Rommel's choice of the military life are not clear. Unlike some of his fellow cadets, he did not have the incentive of an illustrious military ancestry. The Prussian officer class with its rigid traditions had dominated the Army since Frederick the Great. To it the family Rommel, whose roots were in the hills of Swabia in the opposite comer of the Fatherland, was unknown. In this class-conscious Army, no Rommel had ever been a general.
One explanation of Rommel's choice may have been the inherent love of the Wuerttembergers, and especially of the Swabians among them, for the profession of arms. They have, in fact, made better soldiers than the more renowned Prussians, combining steadiness, courage, and agility to a greater degree. Rommel unquestionably personified this type of Wuerttemberger.
After graduating from the academy in Danzig, Rommel was sent back to the 124th Infantry Regiment and then for a period to an artillery unit in Ulm. Here, as a mounted officer, he developed a love for riding and a pride in his battery that stayed with him throughout life. But when the kaiser's armies marched into Belgium and France, Rommel, back in the infantry, marched too. He quickly distinguished himself and was the first lieutenant of his regiment to be awarded the Iron Cross First Class.
Rommel's career in the First World War thoroughly grounded him in the fundamentals of infantry warfare, and to those years may be traced his knowledge of tactics. Every battle he refought in his mind, not once, but again and again. He drew sketches and made elaborate notes. He analyzed his successes and failures. Ten years later he was able to write a detailed analysis of every action in which he had participated.
The young lieutenant's first combat mission called for taking five men and reconnoitering a town eight miles away. He started for the front lines by horse and wagon. After the first few miles the unfamiliar Belgian bays took the bit and went by the last outposts in full gallop. "No amount of yanking or yelling helped," he afterwards wrote, "but finally we landed, unhurt, in a manure pile." From this ignominious beginning one of the most remarkable careers in German military history was to evolve.
Five weeks after his aromatic mishap the young officer was severely wounded while leading two platoons in a counterattack in the Argonne. Coming upon five Frenchmen behind thick oaks, he fired. Two of the enemy, one crouched behind the other, dropped. The bullet had penetrated both. He cocked the piece, took aim at a third, and pulled the trigger. There was no response. He ripped open the chamber. It was empty. There was no cover to be had. An accomplished bayonetist with full confidence in his ability, he charged the remaining poilus. Their rifles cracked and the German fell, his left thigh shattered.
This incident, instead of discouraging Rommel, reaffirmed his philosophy: A good soldier leads a charmed life or a short one. His own, he was sure, was charmed.
In 1915 the young Swabian was promoted to first lieutenant and transferred to a mountain battalion. In this assignment his leadership and tactics caught the attention of higher commanders as his troops carried out one difficult mission after another in the Vosges Mountains, Rumania, and Italy. In Italy he commanded a battle group equivalent in size to a battalion, despite his rank, and was awarded the Pour le Write, the kaiser's highest decoration, awarded for gallantry in action and usually reserved for the high brass. He had led his unit in the successful storming of Mount Matajur on the Isonzo front. His depleted battalion had decimated five Italian regiments, capturing 150 officers and 9,000 men. It can reasonably be assumed that from this time forward Rommel's regard for Italian soldiery was not high. His later experience of fighting with the Italians as allies in North Africa left him equally disillusioned, as letters to his wife would show.
Photostatic copy of Field Marshal Rommel's official record of military service.
Shortly before the armistice, while convalescing from his third wound, Rommel was promoted to captain and over his protests transferred to a higher headquarters.
After the war he formed an Old Comrades Association made up of the survivors of the battalion of which they had all been a part. This group was dear to his heart, and corresponding with its members took much of his spare time. Even in the desert, never blinded by his rapid rise to power, he carried on the correspondence.
Anyone harboring a belief that Rommel was a Party bully who rose to the rank of field marshal should be quickly disabused of it by an examination of his Soldbuch. It shows him in the next ten years to have been in varied assignments in the "100,000-man Army," the number to which the Germans were restricted by the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war. Selected as one of the 4,000 officers the treaty permitted, his tours of duty included a spell as commander of a machine gun company in Stuttgart and another in the War Ministry, where his work involved liaison with the Hitler Youth. This was followed by a period of teaching, beginning with a post at the infantry school in Dresden. By 1935 he was a lieutenant colonel and battalion commander and subsequently director of courses at the military academy in Potsdam.
(Above left) Rommel as horseman in 1916. His love for riding dated back to his second posting as a young officer when he served with a horsedrawn field artillery regiment. Photo from Mrs. Rommel.
(Above right) Rommel as ski instructor in 1934. The marshal was an accomplished skier since childhood, when the Swabian hills in which he grew up offered many opportunities to hone his skill. Photo from Mrs. Rommel.
The Swabian officer, as lieutenant colonel, inspecting his Goslar Jaeger Battalion on August 2, 1935, in ceremonies commemorating von Hindenberg's death. A year earlier he had first met Hitler perfunctorily when the Fuhrer came to Goslar to meet a farmers' group and inspect his battalion's guard of honor. Photo from Mrs. Rommel.
While at the Potsdam post he found time to write The Infantry Attacks, a compilation of his experiences in World War I, skillfully illustrated with his own maps and sketches. After each engagement he recorded, he pointed out the lessons to be learned. It masterfully depicted all phases of infantry warfare. So highly was it regarded by the Swiss Army that it was adopted as a text.
The book eventually attracted the attention of Adolf Hitler, who had been an infantryman during the war, and in 1939 it led to Rommel's appointment as commandant of the Wiener Neustadt military academy. A few days be
fore the invasion of Poland on September I, 1939, he was assigned to be commandant of Hitler's headquarters. Here he first made the acquaintance of the Fuhrer and thereafter often ate at his table, chatted with him, and was enthralled by him.
Rommel was a believer in the power of the will-that determination was the main ingredient of success-and by this standard the Fuhrer had proven himself. By drastic reforms and radical economic steps Hitler had quickly solved many of Germany's economic problems and reawakened the country's dormant national pride.
Rommel's letters to his wife, always addressed as "Dearest Lu." at this time show his adulation for the Fuhrer, to whom he refers as "the honored guest" and "the Master."
August 31, 1939: ... How will the situation develop? I still believe that we shall be able to avoid complications of a graver and military nature. We carried out an exercise here yesterday and today we discussed the lessons learned from it. The period of waiting is tedious, but it can't be avoided. The Fuhrer knows exactly what is good for us. Up till now he has always been able to solve the most serious problems for us and he will this time too....
Discovering the Rommel Murder Page 4