Discovering the Rommel Murder

by Charles F. Marshall

  The following year as the Afrika Korps besieged Tobruk and was forced to drink the salty water in the poor wells outside the port city, Rommel drank the same salty water. When Tobruk fell the next year and the newspapers carried lengthy accounts of the booty captured, Mrs. Rommel expected the general on his next leave to bring home some sugar, a scarce commodity in Germany. Instead, he presented her with a few tins of corned beef.

  "I was exasperated," Mrs. Rommel told me. "I said, `My God, I wrote you to bring sugar!"'

  "Say, listen," said Rommel, vexed. "What do you think my men are fighting this war for, my personal comfort?"

  Taken ill with appendicitis in Italy in October 1943, he underwent an operation and mentioned it in a letter to his wife only after leaving the hospital. Upbraided for not having notified her earlier so that she could visit him, he replied, "I can't permit my men such visits. I couldn't permit myself one."

  Mrs. Rommel recounted another incident, in the fall of 1943, when he was visited by his family at his headquarters, then in Munich. At dinner he objected to the orderly placing butter on the table.

  "But that's all right, HerrFeldmarschall," protested the orderly. "It comes out of the guest allowance."

  "My family are not guests," said Rommel, and he waved the luxury away again.

  This son of a teacher was interested in the spiritual and the artistic, and in France at his headquarters in the palace of La Roche Guyon, formerly the seat of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, he once asked the owner to remove a valuable Gobelin tapestry from his office and place it in the cellar for protection against air raids. He was not, however, in the ordinary sense of the word an intellectual. As instructor of tactics, and then as director of courses and commandant of a military school, he placed first emphasis on practical knowledge-the biggest need of the line officer-and simultaneously strived to inculcate his charges with high standards of character and behavior. He himself was in the best sense of the word a moral example.

  For women he had a great respect, but he did not lose his head to them. He was happily married, a fact that is attested by his letters, and would drive extreme distances to see his wife for a few hours. Alternating with his orderly at the wheel, he once sped the thousand miles from Bordeaux to Vienna within twenty-four hours. He had no extramarital affairs. Not only did other women hold no interest for him, but he was uneasy in their presence. One woman acquaintance of long years, the secretary of the pre-Hitler chief of the German Navy, recalled to me only one time that Rommel had seemed at ease in talking to her. "That was the time that he raptly explained the plans he had just drawn up for a house he was building," she said. "Otherwise he was always distant and gentlemanly decorous. It was difficult for women to establish contact with him and become friends."

  "His character was marked by a stern morality," said Hesse. "To him ribaldry was not acceptable. He was not a man to tell or be told an off-color story."

  Yet despite his high regard for women, it was the opinion of the general that the Army had no place for them. The Kriegshelferinnen, the female auxiliary, he held to be more of a disruptive influence than they were worth and stymied all attempts to assign them to his headquarters.

  In the use of alcohol he was exceptionally temperate, and the war changed his drinking habits little. His liquid consumption during the day was usually two quarts of seltzer water and now and then a glass or two of wine. To some he sometimes seemed a little too dry, although to his associates, to whom he distributed the liquor admirers kept sending him, this virtual teetotaling was not to be too strongly censured. Indicative of the value he placed on liquor is the time an officer on his staff, on duty late at night and bored, asked Rommel's orderly if he didn't have anything to drink.

  "No," replied the orderly, "but the field marshal has plenty."

  "He wouldn't miss a bottle, would he?" suggested the officer.

  "No," said the boy. "We could take a case and he wouldn't miss it."

  "Suppose you bring us a bottle then," said the officer, "and a little of his seltzer."

  "Oh, no!" said the orderly, panicky. "Not his water! He'd miss that and there'd be hell to pay!"

  One of the most popular lectures at the military academy in Dresden was Rommel's presentation of the storming of Monte Matajur. He delivered this lecture over three hundred times. Nevertheless, on the three hundredth time his performance still gripped the audience. Those who heard the lecture several times never formed the impression that he automatically repeated himself. Each time he relived the experience and fascinated the listener anew. Yet the effect he produced was not accountable to any magnetic oratory. He spoke curtly and gruffly. Listeners sometimes even gathered the impression that his words were about to stick in his throat. This was not the case. Rather was he concerned with the formulation of his words. Then, in staccato tempo and slight Swabian accent, he would rip them from his mouth.

  To illustrate his lectures Rommel used slides made from his own colored sketches. His talent for drawing, which had come to the fore in his youth, was marked particularly by the skill with which he was able to give terrain plasticity, a fact that is evident in the eighty-two very creditable sketches with which he had illustrated his book. This gift he also put to good use on inspection trips of the Channel coast defenses, Speidel told me, often drawing detailed sketches to give the construction engineers a better idea of what he had in mind.

  Other slides he used in his lectures were made from photographs. He was a photographer and a good one. I spent hours with Mrs. Rommel looking at his pictures. Artistically and technically they left little to be desired. The desert pictures were taken during his advances. He didn't photograph his retreats.

  Despite his trying days in Africa, he neverbecame oblivious to the beauties of the desert. He was beguiled by the sunrises and sunsets and endeavored in colored pictures to capture their magnificence. They once made up a good part of his collection. In a camera-conscious army, one that rarely yielded a prisoner with fewer than twenty pictures in his pockets. Rommel was the "Man of the Snapshot." When German planes attacked a British ship headed for Tobruk, he wrote his wife:

  The day started well. As / was having breakfast in my tent, an enemy vessel was sighted one and a half miles away just off the coast. It had apparently lost its course during the night. Soon ourfighters were above her, but she still fired her machine guns. A few minutes later, however, the gasoline on the ship started to burn. Then minutes later the crate blew up with a terrific explosion. I took pictures, of course.

  It is certain that had he outlived the war, he would one day have given a superbly illustrated presentation of his campaigns.

  In the writing of history the marshal had a more than ordinary interest and did what he could to gather the basic material for it. Visited in his quarters in France by his military historian friend Kurt Hesse, he called attention to several cases standing in the bedroom. In one were his personal notes for the daily orders, reports and estimates of the situation, each in separate folders. Liberally interspersed were his photographs. Anothercase contained his work maps, which Hesse noted, were chronologically arranged. Situation maps were neatly bound in a photo album.

  His boyhood love for the technical, as well as his fondness for skiing, hunting, canoeing, horseback riding, and mountain climbing, remained with him throughout his life. Not a great reader, and regarding the arts as of secondary importance, his idea of a good time was a day spent outdoors. His early passion for aeronautics never left him, either, and in Africa, on long flights, he often piloted the plane. It relaxed him. He had a thorough understanding of tank engines and had the born mechanic's gift for engine diagnosis. Until the pressures of his duties no longer permitted, he made the mechanical and electrical repairs on his cars himself. He was not loathe to admit the superiority of enemy equipment and had a special affection for the American jeep, often driving to the front in it before changing to his British command car.

  "Rommel has been accused with some justice of usin
g the medium of publicity to further himself," said Hesse. "But with rare exceptions, it must be said, the publicity appeared in bearable form and without excessive puffery. He was exceptionally photogenic, but it was sometimes even unpleasant to him to see himself too dramatically presented. He was unable, however, to prevent correspondents, photographers, and newsreel men from occasionally exploiting his personality excessively."

  As a possessor of flair, a sense of news values, and a knack for handling the press, it is easy to understand why journalists wrote more enthusiastically of the Swabian, whose comradely acceptance and feverish activity generated a flow of good stories, than they wrote of cold and unreceptive Prussian generals. In 1942, after driving into Egypt, the Fox addressed correspondents in the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. He said, "We have not gone to Egypt to retreat! I can assure you positively that what we have we hold!" Like Churchill's "blood, sweat and tears," such phraseology clamored for headlines.

  When, during his direction of the construction of defenses in France, an officer much his junior in rank questioned the wisdom of Rommel's wide publicity in autocratic Germany, the general thanked him for the advice. And thereafter there was a marked reduction in the publicity emanating from his headquarters, and what there was, was muted.

  One could talk frankly to the marshal. He spoke frankly himself, a characteristic of Swabians, and demanded clear, honestly evaluated replies. He insisted that a situation be reported on the basis of facts, no matter how depressing, and even though it displeased higher headquarters. His reports in 1942 on the hopelessness of the African struggle were disagreeable to Jodl and Keitel and sometimes were pigeonholed before reaching Hitler. Jodl's refusal to accept Rommel's realistic views on the worthlessness of the Italian alliance and Mussolini's grandiose promises strained their relations further. His critical and angry reports on the state of the Atlantic defenses for a time alienated Rundstedt, who had built most of them. Although Marshal List had earlier told Hitler in Russia in a private conversation that Germany did not have the resources to win the war, Rommel was the first general with the courage to tell Hitler the war was lost.

  If a general's predictions concerning fronts other than his own must be taken into account in measuring his stature, it would have to be pointed out that Rommel was no less wrong than the large majority of military experts who had predicted that the Red Army would quickly collapse before the German onslaught. The day after the Germans attacked Russia, he wrote his wife: "Considering the superiority of our armed forces, the war with Russia will soon end with our victory."

  Just how rapidly he expected Stalin's armies to give up can be seen from a letter written only two weeks after the attack was launched: "I hope to be able to fly to Germany in a fortnight. The Russian affair must be more or less ended by then, otherwise the High Command will not bother with my affairs."

  The waron Russia, Hesse told me, Rommel later considered one of Hitler's three cardinal failures. For the Stalingrad disaster he blamed the Fuhrer personally and refused to accept his optimistic view of it as "my Kundersdorf." The other two failures were Hitler's unreserved support of the Italian attack on Greece, which he referred to in private conversation as "Mussolini's Balkan folly," and the African campaign, which he felt should have been undertaken only if the supply problem had been solved and better guarantees obtained that the Duce would fulfill his commitments.

  In the conduct and standards of his life Rommel was definitely National Socialist in the sense that he favored the original social programs of the Party, not too dissimilar from the programs introduced by Roosevelt's New Deal. Simple, companionable, and socially adjusted, he was the authoritative leader. The much-heard view that "Rommel was a Party general" was one that circulated even in some higher German military circles. For instance, the commander of his 21 st Panzer Division in Africa, General Johannes von Ravenstein, a traditional, highly cultured Prussian officer, expressed this view after his capture and transfer to a Canadian prisoner of war camp. In letters to his friend, Countess Rosie S. Waldeck, he admitted that Rommel possessed the "supreme courage of a bull" on the battlefield while simultaneously accusing him of lacking civil courage. This latter charge certainly does not stand up considering Rommel's several exhortations to Hitler to end the war, advice few of the cultured Prussian elite had the courage to give. One can reasonably assume that some of the negative views in these higher military circles masked the jealousy prompted by Rommel's lightninglike promotions from colonel to field marshal, and those promotions awarded to a man without any formal university education.

  The claim that Rommel was a Party general," said Hesse, "is without foundation. It rests on too little knowledge of the individual and his inner adjustments, and carries strongly detrimental and unjustified implications."

  Stories circulated in the United States during the war often gave the impression that the Swabian was one of Hitler's first adherents, rendered the Party unswerving loyalty, and was one of the bullies assigned to pommel hecklers at Nazi street-corner meetings. That Rommel could have made the transition from brass knuckles to a marshal's baton-supposedly the reward for his Party services-should strain the credulity of even the most gullible. He had, in fact, not one Party decoration. At no time was he a member of the Party or any of its affiliates.

  An analysis of the Fox's political beliefs must explore his stand in relation to the original National Socialist program, to the Fiihrer, and to the Party.

  To the original program of social reform that carried the Nazis to power and characterized their first years of reign, Rommel early bound himself and remained faithful until the end of his days. As a young officer viewing the chaotic aftermath of the First World War, he considered Germany's greatest misfortune to be that the great masses of the very industrious working classes had alienated themselves from national thinking, that they thought internationally, in the sense of Karl Marx and Karl Liebknecht. On the other hand, he did not deny the facts of the existing social emergency. He saw the gaps between the rich and the poor and hoped to get from National Socialism a solution to these class disparities, which he saw as the real reason for Germany's weakness. He was certain that a thunderous break with the Communist ideology was unavoidable, and it was his opinion that in view of Russia's strength it was of the highest importance that all German forces be united, a union possible only under National Socialism.

  Many other factors also attracted him to National Socialism. "Just as our people are divided into numerous parties," he remarked to Hesse in 1938, while a liaison officer to the Hitler Youth, "so our youth is split by numerous leagues and groups that do not march in step. It is urgent that they be directed by one ideology."

  On the other hand, it would be unfair to say that Rommel followed National Socialism down all its halls of thought. He sharply objected to everything that took place in the dark: the Jewish pogroms, the concentration camps, the Gestapo. The security police activity in Poland he denounced as the work of a "pack of criminals" and a "band of murderers." More than once he called Hitler's attention to illegal and immoral activities, a practice that did not ingratiate him with the Fiihrer's inner circle.

  It was Hitler personally who gave the impetus to Rommel's career. Tending to unite the two was the community of ideas of the frontline soldier of World War I, common experiences, and a mutual recognition of the other as a fighting personality. The power of the will and the mind seemed to both men more important than the power of the intellect. Similarly, both overestimated the power of propaganda, overassessed the strength of Germany, and underassessed the strength of the opposing forces. Like Hitler, Rommel knew England and France only superficially.

  As Hitler alleviated the unemployment problem in Germany following the war, seemingly creating order out of chaos and returning the Fatherland to the orbit of the great nations, Rommel developed a sincere admiration for him. "He was blind at that time to the dangers inherent in the Nazi dictatorship," Oskar Farny told me during our visit. "He was as naive po
litically as he was brilliant militarily."

  How much the Fox had admired the spellbinding Austrian earlier can be deduced from the letter written to his wife on August 31, 1939, as Britain, France, and Poland rushed the mobilization of their armies:

  How will the situation develop? I still believe that we shall be able to avoid complications of a graver and a military nature.... The Fi hrer knows exactly what is good for us. Up to now he has always been able to solve the most serious problems for us, and he will solve this one too.

  The next day Hitler invaded Poland.

  Yet deep as Rommel's admiration was, it was tempered by an equally deep realism based on a knowledge of what is and what is not possible in warfare. Nor was it ever so blind that he would obey an unsoldierly order. In 1942 he received a directive from Hitler instructing him to shoot all captured British commandos. He tore it into pieces minutes after its arrival.

  The African war was a clean war, as the British have often said. Both sides were quick to call the other's attention to infractions of the Geneva rules of war, and both were quick to end the infractions. No charge of war crimes was ever levelled against Rommel. Among generals who only too often carried out criminal orders, Rommel is a bright spot on the German record. His chivalry in battle is legendary among the British, who, with their sporting spirit, retain an affectionate awe for this unconventional soldier and knightly practitioner of the warrior's code. In hundreds of years of warfare, only Napoleon made a comparable impression on the British.

  The French, too, have always held the marshal in high esteem, and at the close of the war invited the Rommel family to move into the French occupation zone. Said General Jean-Marie de Lattre to Rommel's son, "Your father always fought fairly and with the greatest success."