Discovering the Rommel Murder

by Charles F. Marshall

  "Yes, I know," I said.

  "But did you know, and oh, how ironic, that it was a Jewish reserve officer who recommended him for the award?"

  "That I didn't know."

  "The Battle of Stalingrad," continued the professor, "was a German catastrophe and a turning point in the war. Hitler termed it 'my Kundersdorf,' comparing it to the defeat which Frederick had suffered in August 1759 at the hands of the Russians, the defeat that lay Berlin open to attack. Since Stalingrad, Hitler had lived in the belief that he, like the great Prussian king, had to pass through the Valley of Sorrow in order to rise again-but rise he would, either through special political circumstances or through the fortunes of war.

  "Early in his rise to power Hitler considered himself a historical figure. He understood history in such a way that great achievements of a people had to be paid for with blood. Characteristic of this was a speech he made in Karlsruhe in the spring of 1939, after an inspection of the West Wall, to generals and leading state and political figures, the crux of which was that the greatest political successes a nation achieves will not endure if not paid for in blood.

  "As Rommel's popularity was rising to its zenith," continued Hesse, "the Fuhrer's had begun to ebb. I'm sure his coterie suggested that the marshal had already begun to get dangerous in 1942. Not only was he usurping the glory of the one, true general of the great, wide war,' but he had become a threat to Hitler's political position and its recognition by the German people."

  Other factors undoubtedly contributed to Hitler's decision. Wasn't Rommel too outspoken in his criticism of the Party and the regime? And wasn't he a defeatist'? When Africa had fallen and Italy was crumbling, had he not asked the Fuhrer if it weren't possible to sign an armistice with the Western Powers? Had he not advised an end to the war at Margival on June 17, and again at the end of the month? Had he not sent a virtual ultimatum on July 15?

  At first Rommel's seemingly fatal wounds had deterred Hitler from taking his life. The second restraint had been the fear of the demoralizing effect on the army and the masses if the Fatherland's most spectacular warrior were publicly accused of complicity in the putsch. By October 14, however, the marshal had substantially recovered his health. The danger had been resurrected. Hitler felt he had to act. According to Keitel's statement at the Nuremberg trial, Hitler had personally ordered him to force the Swabian to take his own life. "Hitler told everyone," said Keitel, "including Goering, Doenitz, and Jodl, that Rommel had died of `bleeding in the brain."' That they knew better is attested by their absence from the funeral.

  But that Hitler committed this murder with misgivings is proven by the state funeral he ordered to camouflage the crime. It is proven by the panicky order sent to Army B headquarters forbidding discussion of Rommel, and by the prohibition on the further publishing of his book, which by then had already sold 120,000 copies and been translated into numerous languages.

  It is interesting to speculate on how events would have unfolded had Rommel opened independent negotiations for an armistice with the Allied Powers at the time he was imploring Hitler to end the war in the West and before his July 15 ultimatum to Hitler and his wounding two days later. Of equally speculative interest is the question of how Germany's-and the world's-immediate fate and more distant future would have been affected had the July 20 affair succeeded and the Desert Fox been destined to assume the political or military command of the Fatherland.

  WHY WAS ROMMEL A GREAT GENERAL, CONSIDERED BY SO MANY military professionals the greatest of the Second World War? What manner of man was this who caused the British War Office and the American War Department so much grief in those two years that the swastika waved over the desert, and who won the marshal's baton at the unprecedented age of fifty?

  Part of the answer can be found in the hypothetical solution he would have offered to a problem once posed to me in an examination at the Officer Candidate School at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Late one night, read the problem, while on his way to his quarters to catch a little sleep before an important battle, Napoleon came upon a group of unofficered soldiers trying by the light of a lantern to move an artillery piece into position. The hill was steep and the mud deep and they were having trouble. What did Napoleon do? Did he call for the responsible officer and reprimand him? Did he hold the lantern? Did he direct the emplacement? Did he put his shoulder to the wheel? Or did he go to bed so as to be fresh to direct the next morning's battle?

  Rommel's solution probably would have read something like this: Napoleon held the lantern, put his shoulder to the wheel, and directed the emplacement; then he called for the battery commander and made certain that the officer's other guns were in position; after that, if he thought the officer at fault, he reprimanded him. If there was any time left, Napoleon went to bed.

  A less conjectural explanation for Rommel's stature as a commander can be found in the answer of his chief of staff. "Few generals," Speidel told me, "have had the flair, instinct, intuition, and genius for improvisation that were Rommel's. None instilled such confidence in his leadership or inspired such worship in his men. Few were so fearless or so ruthless of their own person. He had a way of addressing troops that left them feeling they also possessed his personality, his manly qualities, and fairness. Although he has been called a military gambler, he was not. A military gamble is an operation that can result in either a success or failure. He considered a gamble justified only if defeat appeared otherwise inevitable. He was, however, an advocate of bold operations in which success is not assured but which if not successful leave the commander enough forces to cope with whatever untoward situation might arise.

  Rommel's letter to his wife, October 10, 1943. See page 116. Courtesy of Mrs. Rommel.

  "As a tactician he had few peers. He could size up a situation clearly no matter how befuddled it appeared to others. His plans were clean-cut, shorn of all frills. They were brilliantly conceived and deftly executed. Senior officers sometimes demurred when shown his plans, but his "can do" assurance invariably prevailed. Aided by his mastery of improvisation, he made adjustments in his plans as developments dictated and was often able to extract victory from seemingly hopeless situations. He made the fullest use of every man. For these reasons he achieved a maximum of results with a minimum of troops. If a characteristic of talented generalship is the ability to do much with little, then Rommel must be rated unrivaled."

  Instances can readily be found in Rommel's history to verify the aptness of Speidel's analysis. His record in the First World War as an infantry leader, successively, of a platoon, a company, and a battalion, was one of indisputably brilliant leadership, resulting in an endless string of successfully completed missions. At one time, as a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, a battle group placed under his command exceeded regimental strength. On occasions his subordinate officers outranked him. Two weeks after his dramatic storming of Mount Matador, his battalion in conjunction with another rolled up enemy units in such swift sequence at Cimolais, Dogna, Pirago, and Fae that within a few days he held 10,000 prisoners and booty that included 200 machine guns and 250 vehicles.

  The loyalty that he was to win from his men as a field marshal, he had also won as a lieutenant. Asa wounded man was being carried past his dugout, having had a leg blown off by a shell, the young Swabian came out to press his hand and utter a few words of encouragement. "It's not so bad, Herr Leutnant," said the dying soldier, "I'll soon be back in the company again, even if with a wooden leg."

  By daily example the Fox proved that such loyalty was not misplaced. Painfully wounded in the forearm, he continued for days to lead his unit in the attack, refusing to report to the hospital. When one winter night the alarm sounded, signalling an enemy attack, he jumped off his cot and raced a kilometer through the snow in his bare feet to direct the defense and lead the counterattack-leaving it to the orderly to bring his boots. Early in his career, after being decorated for an exceptionally daring feat, he was obliged to relinquish command of his company to a newly
assigned officer with greater seniority. When the regimental commander tendered him a second company, he declined. "I'll stay where I am and take a platoon of my old men," he said. His correspondence shows that at the height of his career he still found time to exchange letters with those men. At the time of his death, they were still his most intimate friends. The loyalty of his troops was not unmixed with fear. He was feared as much as he was loved. To a sergeant who refused to follow him with his squad in an apparently suicidal attack in the Argonne, he shouted, "You'll come or I'll come back and shoot you!" The sergeant and his squad came. The Fox would have carried out his threat and the sergeant knew it.

  The Swabian instilled this same fear in his juniors in the Second World War. The same iron will was evident in Africa during the battle for El Alamein. To counter the panic some troops had manifested, he issued an order that forbade a man from abandoning his position in the defense line and said that anyone doing so would be charged with cowardice and court-martialed, and "at staff level, too."

  He was disliked by many higher officers, particularly staff officers and generals, because of his mercilessness. With them he could be abrasive and demanding, and for those he felt were derelict in their duty, or not giving their all, he had an acerbic tongue. He was adept at "chewing ass," as we Americans were wont to phrase an outburst of displeasure from a senior officer. After having verbally skinned alive an officer of high rank whose performance displeased him, he once remarked to Aldinger with a smile, "It's good to have once been a sergeant and to still remember how to talk like one."

  It was said of him that "he walked over corpses," by which was meant that he peremptorily transferred unsatisfactory officers. The tendency to protect an incompetent fellow officer is one that is common to all armies. It takes a man of strong will and principle to fire an old classmate. Rommel was never known to hesitate. For bungling subordinates he had no sympathy. Head chopping might be in had taste in the old-boy network, but it saved lives, won battles, and kept the unbeheaded in step.

  In addition to his quick use of the ax, his frank preference for younger officers was held against him. Visitors to his headquarters were instantly struck by the difference in appearance of his subordinates from those of other higher commanders. Rommel's staff was markedly younger.

  What earned the Fox the unconditional devotion of the young soldier? In talking to men who served under him one quickly becomes conscious of a recurrent idiom: Er hat die Strapazen mitgemacht: He shared the gaff. The young soldier saw in Rommel a man who feared no trouble or danger, who was always at the front, who always appeared when things were toughest and where there seemed no way out. He saw him not as a field marshal who knew how to move divisions, corps, and armies-he had not the perspective to judge him in this capacity-but as one who could tell the company commander how to lay out his platoon positions or how to deploy his squads and platoons so as to take a heavily mined, wired, and machine gun-defended strongpoint with a minimum of casualties. This was not a field marshal who was content to command from a war room miles to the rear. This was one who was not above taking a shovel from a footslogging soldier and showing him how to dig a better foxhole. This was one who was there when the dying was being done.

  Physically tough, in Africa he quickly adjusted to the hardships of desert life and was soon as much at home as in his Swabian hills. A bedouin could do no better. His orderly, Guenther, found Rommel even tempered and easy to please. When he went into the field on a long drive, all he asked was a can of sardines, a couple slices of black bread, and a canteen of water. If he was with troops at mealtime he ate the same rations as the men and returned with the can of sardines and the bread.

  Also, in Rommel the young soldier sensed a man who had the ability to feel with him. In the previous war the general had experienced cold, hunger, disease, and despondency. He had been wounded three times. He knew the heartrending wail of the dying in the night. He had learned then, and he never forgot, that it was the dirty frontline soldier with lice, diarrhea, and trench foot who fought the war, and not the staffs with their gleaming boots, beds, and duplicating machines. "I consider the term 'staff officer,' he once remarked, "an epithet." To the young lowly homesick soldiers Rommel was "one of us." For them he always had a smile and a joke.

  "'Where you find Rommel, you'll find the front,' was a byword among our troops," said Speidel. "Unlike many higher commanders, he never became deskbound. He nailed me to the desk instead. He spent about five days out of seven up forward and was usually on his way by five o'clock."

  This habitual presence in the forward combat areas is confirmed by the general's letters. Seldom does one not have a paragraph starting "I was up at the front today and ..." This was further verified by his aide. "Often," Aldinger told me, "we would reach a command post or observation post during the middle of the night or in the early morning hours. Rommel would quickly survey the area and make suggestions, intermingling praise and reprimand if warranted. Then we would move on to the next position. Sometimes we were under way day and night, accompanied only by a radio car. Sometimes his bed was nothing more than a batch of hay in a truck. Our advance CP was often no more than the command car, some radio people, and motorcycle messengers."

  Rommel was a general in the tradition of Robert E. Lee, in the tradition of Seydlitz in the time of Frederick the Great. As Lee or Seydlitz had come up on his horse, so Rommel suddenly appeared in his armored command car. There was a glance at the map, but no long poring over contour lines and hachure marks. A glance sufficed to visualize the terrain beyond the reach of his glasses. A few words with the local commander and a soldier or two and an interjected question, and he had grasped the situation. Guided by what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefuehl, a sixth sense for sizing up the problem, the peril, and the opportunity and anticipating the enemy's next move, he issued his orders. As General H. Norman Schwarzkopf was to say a half century later, "Rommel had a feel for the battlefield like no other man."

  He always acted energetically and preferred to do something bold rather than do nothing. No sign of indecision ever crossed his face. He was aggressive, a fighter; and although a general, inwardly he was as spirited as a twenty-year-old. He had constant contact with lieutenants and privates. With them he was patient, and they found him warmhearted. With old generals, staff officers, and the venerable rear-echelon gray-haired sergeant majors, he had proportionately less contact.

  Rommel's speech was hard and sparing, his orders brief. He seldom gave praise, but his praise had effect. His blue eyes, in one of which he was nearsighted since birth and the other farsighted, were everywhere. He had the farmer's ability to tell time by the sun and a sense of direction so uncanny that his entourage in Africa used to say, "Without Rommel we'd all be in Canada by this time." Captured Germans were sent to British prisoner of war camps in Canada.

  Untiring and unassuming, he hardly needed sleep. He could be out from dawn until late evening without eating or drinking. On trips to the front he rejected invitations to special meals. He wanted to eat at the field kitchen, not only because he found this food sufficiently satisfying and because it cost him the least time, but because he wanted all men in the unit to see that he as a field marshal had no wish to live better than they.

  "Although a nonsmoker himself," said Aldinger in discussing the marshal's understanding of soldier psychology, "he usually made it a point to give a soldier a cigarette. At other times he would give him one of the cookies well-wishers were always sending him. He would ask about the men's families and wives. If a man's home was in southern Germany, the General would fall into the Swabian dialect. No matter how low the men's spirits when we arrived, they were high when we left."

  Not even his detractors ever questioned his personal courage. He was the only German to win his country's highest decoration for bravery in both wars. Nor is it perhaps insignificant that the only samurai sword awarded for bravery in the German Army by the Japanese emperor was presented to Rommel. Sometimes in Afr
ica he was so far out on reconnaissance that he was taken for the enemy and shot at by his own troops. Not infrequently he brought back information unknown to the regular scouting units. "In our gravest days," said his aide, "the marshal often led the armored units in the attack himself, and it was not unusual for him to fly in search of his units and conduct the battle from the air."

  Rommel viewed leadership as leading from the front, not pushing from the rear. He rejected the theory that a higher commander's life was too valuable to be risked up forward. It was an odd battle in which he did not at least once narrowly miss death or capture. In his captured British Mammoth command car, while leading agasoline column that had gone astray, he drove into the middle of a British field hospital before realizing that it was not the German unit for which he was searching. The Tommy outposts, recognizing the lead vehicle as one of British manufacture, had waved the column on, mistaking it for one of their own. Too late to turn around, Rommel signalled the column to continue on through at doubled speed, escaping before the startled enemy discovered it had just missed the prize catch of the war.

  He believed in his lucky star, which seemingly protected him but not always those with him. In the desert and later in France his drivers were killed. Once while checking a map with another officer, the other officer was killed by a shell fragment.

  Of the privileges that go with high rank, among them a certain immunity from regulations, the Fox took little advantage. When he returned home after the fall of France in 1940, his wife expected him to bring a liberal quantity of champagne.

  "As he unpacked his luggage," Mrs. Rommel told me, "he took out two bottles. I was disappointed. I said, `Is that all?'

  "`Yes,' he said. `A soldier is allowed to take two bottles of wine out of France. Those are my two bottles."'