Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  CHAPTER THREE

  AN OFFICER OF THE REICHSWEHR

  Against the Republic’s enemies, the Constitution was no protection.

  —GORDON CRAIG

  So in December 1918, Hauptmann Erwin Rommel, one-time commander of an abteilung of the Königliche Württembergische Gebirgs-battalion, Württembergische Armee, holder of the Pour le Mérite and the Iron Cross First Class, three times wounded in battle, returned home from the war. It was far from the sort of homecoming which he had anticipated when his regiment marched out of Ulm more than four years earlier: bold confidence in victory had been replaced by the stark reality of defeat, while the events of November 1918 had shifted the foundations of the German nation and shaken the soul of the German people. When the war ended, so too did the era of true German greatness.

  When it came, the end came swiftly, though there had been signs of its approach for those willing to see them as early as November 1917. The quality of life in Germany had been in steady decline since the summer of 1915 as the debilitating effects of the Royal Navy’s blockade began to be felt in ever-widening circles in German society. By the end of 1916 food was being carefully rationed, and for all but the wealthiest families, what had once been staples—white bread, butter, milk—were rapidly becoming luxuries. The winter of 1917–18 would be remembered as the “Turnip Winter,” when potatoes, before the war one of the cornerstones of the German diet, became all but unobtainable and Germany’s civilians were forced to turn to the less appetizing and less nourishing alternative. Malnutrition became the norm, and infant mortality soared. Before the blockade was lifted in June 1919, at least a quarter-million Germans of all ages would have died of starvation. The soldiers at the front fared slightly better, as they were usually able to draw on local supplies and sources for food, but by the summer of 1918, the cupboards of the German Army’s quartermasters were bare—uniforms and accoutrements were no longer issued, as the sources of cloth and leather had vanished. All the German Army possessed in material abundance were weapons and ammunition.

  The German people accepted these hardships with a surprising stoicism, for it was an article of faith with them that if the war had rendered their lives so miserable, conditions must be equally terrible in the Allied nations, and the Volk were grimly determined to prove that they could tough it out longer than the effeminate French or the hopelessly sentimental British. Briefly, there was an illusory sense that they would succeed. Though a formal peace treaty with Germany would not be signed until March 1918, the collapse of Russia’s provisional government in the wake of the wake of the Bolshevik coup in early November 1917 effectively took Russia out of the war, and gave a real sense of hope to the German Supreme Army Command that, despite the suffering and hardship, victory was on the horizon. But when, that same month, the Caporetto offensive failed to compel either an outright surrender by the Italians or at least a ceasefire on the Italian Front, the handwriting was on the wall. Another 10 months would pass, however, before Wilhelm and his generals were willing to read it.

  Imperial Germany’s simultaneous military and civil dissolution came to pass in relatively short order. On September 29, 1918 Field Marshal von Hindenburg and General Ludendorff presented themselves at the Imperial Army Headquarters in Spa, in occupied Belgium, where for the time being the Kaiser had taken up residence. Together they bluntly told Wilhelm, along with the chancellor, Count Georg von Hertling, that Germany’s military situation was irretrievable: there were no longer any reserves, morale was crumbling, and the supply situation was beyond redemption. Ludendorff, who for all of his façade of Prussian bellicosity and bluster was a high-strung neurotic, was in near-hysterics proclaiming that the Western Front was in imminent danger of collapse; this was far from true, but together von Hindenburg and Ludendorff were adamant in their demand for a ceasefire with the Allies. They were not prepared, they assured Wilhelm, to countenance outright surrender, and yet they also advised that Chancellor von Hertling announce that President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” were acceptable as the basis for peace talks. Since Wilson’s supposedly “equitable” peace program required the abdication of the Kaiser, the abolition of the monarchy and the empire, and at least a partial territorial dismemberment of the German nation, in practical terms it was tantamount to surrender. This was too much for Chancellor von Hertling, who resigned three days later; the appointment as his successor on October 3 of Prince Maximilian of Baden, who was widely recognized as a genuine liberal, was intended to be a conciliatory gesture to the Allies.

  In spite of Ludendorff’s dire predictions, the German Army managed to hold on for another month, but there was no disguising that it was steadily retreating, the number of desertions grew daily, and loyalty to the Kaiser was evaporating. Ludendorff was dismissed as chief of staff and replaced by General Wilhelm Gröner (von Hindenburg was not permitted to resign), who now focused solely on getting the army back onto German soil reasonably intact. Wilhelm, who technically still ruled, though he had long ago abandoned any pretense of exercising real authority over the war, clung to the delusion that even if he would no longer be Kaiser, he would at least be permitted to keep his throne as king of Prussia. The Allies were intransigent, there could only be one possible outcome, but still Wilhelm dithered, and as he did, thousands of men died needlessly every day on the Western Front.

  Finally the decision was taken out of his hands. When the sailors of the High Seas Fleet learned that Admiral Franz von Hipper was planning one final sortie against the British Grand Fleet, with the intention of turning it into a death-ride that would produce a suitably glorious—and gory—götterdämmerung for the German Navy, they mutinied in Kiel and Wilhelm-shaven on the night of October 29, setting up soldiers’ and sailors’ soviets modeled after those created in Russia a year before. Like dry tinder to which a match had been set, their revolt spread like a flash fire across the whole of Germany and the Imperial edifice began to crumble. The Allies made it absolutely clear that they would not negotiate with Wilhelm or any of his ministers—they would treat only with the representatives of a German republic. Still Wilhelm refused to act—abdication, he declared, was out of the question. Finally, Max von Baden had enough, and took it upon himself to force the issue: on November 9 he announced that the Kaiser had abdicated. Wilhelm, presented with a fait accompli, boarded his imperial train and rode it into permanent exile in the Netherlands. Two days later, at 5:00 A.M. on November 11, at Compiègne, just behind the French lines, a small German delegation, military and civilian, signed an armistice with the Allies. While technically only a ceasefire, the agreement was effectively a recognition of Germany’s military defeat. Six hours later, at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” the armistice went into effect.

  After four years of carnage the like of which the world had never before seen, the war was over and the soldiers could go home. But the Germany which Rommel, along with five million other German soldiers, sailors, and airmen, had called home, and to which they now hoped to return, the Fatherland from which the German Army had erupted, east and west, in August 1914, was no more. The German Empire vanished the moment the Kaiser’s train crossed the border into Holland; in its place it left the bastard child of military defeat and political humiliation, what was possibly the most confounding national government of the twentieth century, a schizophrenic Rube Goldberg-esque contrivance that seemed to be dedicated in equal part to self-destruction and self-preservation—the Weimar Republic.

  The “German Republic” was proclaimed in Berlin, just hours after the announcement of the Kaiser’s abdication on November 9, 1918, by the left-leaning Social Democratic Party, the largest single political party in Germany, led by Friedrich Ebert. The Imperial chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, had feared that without a central government a defeated Germany would fall into chaos, and recognized that peace with the Allies could only be reached by a central authority which was at least semi-functional. Facing these painful realities, the same day tha
t he announced the Kaiser’s abdication, he authorized a formal transfer of powers to Ebert’s republic, although he technically lacked the legal authority to do so. That afternoon, a few hundred communists who openly declared their intent to emulate the Russian Bolsheviks and styled themselves the Spartakusbund (Spartacist League), announced the formation of a rival “Socialist Republic.”

  Ebert, like Prince Max, feared a breakdown of law and order, quickly sought an accommodation with the Spartacists, and oversaw the formation with them of a “Council of the People’s Deputies.” At the same time, in order to guarantee that his fledgling government held on to the reins of power, Ebert came to terms with General Wilhelm Gröner, Ludendorff’s successor as the army’s de facto Chief of Staff, agreeing to keep the government out of army affairs in exchange for Gröner’s pledge that the army would protect the new German state. Lacking continuity with any part of the Imperial regime, its legitimacy was suspect; a republic had simply been foisted onto the German people, the question of a constitutional monarchy or a republic never having been put before the Reichstag or any other national assembly.

  Meanwhile, at the front, relief more than exultation or despair initially prevailed among the Allied and German as more than four years of fighting came to an end. Over the next two weeks, as per the terms of the armistice, the German Army evacuated the territory it occupied in France, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and Luxembourg, and withdrew into the Fatherland. While Allied armies would occupy the west bank of the Rhine River by year’s end, and the British naval blockade of Germany would continue until a formal peace treaty was signed, peace, for the Allies at least, had come last.

  But while the Great War itself may have ended with the armistice, for Germany and the German people fighting would continue uninterrupted, in one form or another, and in wildly varying levels of intensity, for another 15 years, as German soldaten went from combating Tommies, Yanks, and poilus for Kaiser, Reich, und Volk, to killing each other in the name of political causes. For the three years immediately following the sudden quiet on the Western Front, Germany stood on the knife-edge of open civil war, as ultraconservative Freikorps and their sympathizers battled Socialists and Communists in the streets of German cities and towns. Even when the imminent threat of Brüderkrieg—civil war—had passed, the looming presence of the femen (political assassins), as well as bloody, sometimes murderous, street brawls between rival gangs of political thugs, sustained a measure of simmering terror throughout Germany that the Volk had never before imagined, let alone known. The peaceful, orderly political processes of the empire were gone, replaced by the politics of the bludgeon, the knife, the gun, and the grenade. It is only when this tragic truth is recognized and accepted that the eventual rise of the Nazi Party, and with it Adolf Hitler, to the pinnacle of power in Germany becomes explicable.

  Erwin Rommel would spend the 1920s as an officer of the Reichswehr, the remnant permitted by the Treaty of Versailles of the once-mighty German Army which had gone to war in 1914. Germany’s political upheavals during that decade would, as they occurred, barely touch him or his family, but their consequences would drive the forces which in the decade that followed shaped his life and career, sometimes leading, sometimes directing him to decisions which would bring him to the moment where he would die by his own hand. For this reason they demand to be explored and examined, in order for sense to be made of a fatal choice Rommel would make in June 1944.

  From November 1918 to January 1919, the Council of the People’s Deputies, the self-appointed, makeshift committee cobbled together from members of the Fatherland’s largest political parties, left, right, and center, governed Germany more-or-less by decree. It was self-evident to all, however, that the council was very a temporary measure, hardly representative of the German people as a whole and unpalatable to the Allied powers. The Allies, intent on eradicating all traces of militarism in Germany, decided that the Hohenzollern monarchy and warmongering were synonymous, and were determined to see a popular, elective government take shape in post-Wilhelmine Germany. A Nationalversammlung (National Assembly) was elected in mid-January 1919 to write a new German constitution; in order to avoid the increasingly violent political climate in Berlin, the assembly convened in the town of Weimar. By August 11 the last debates were resolved and the constitution ratified: the newly minted document created a federal republic, governed by a president and parliament. Though it was called Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs (“the Constitution of the German Reich”—the same title borne by the old Imperial constitution) it would be forever identified by the German people and the world at large with the town where it was drafted, and so be known as the Weimar Constitution, the government it created, the Weimar Republic.

  By whatever name it would be known, the new government would never be truly popular with the German people, and it almost immediately came under attack from right, left, and center. To the millions who were still loyal to the monarchy, if not the Kaiser himself, the very idea of a republic was anathema, and the social agenda initiated by the government—a sweeping reform of labor laws establishing better hours, conditions, and pay for workers, along with the abolition of class-based social institutions—was openly regarded as the thin end of the wedge that would open the door to a radical, openly socialist state, and eventually an outright communist regime. At the other end of the political spectrum, the new government’s social policies, however enlightened they might have been, weren’t seen as being sufficiently sweeping and radical. The conservatives felt that the Republic invested too much power in the common people, the liberals and socialists maintained that for all its egalitarian pretensions, the government still favored those with money and titles at the expense of the working class. And for many Germans, regardless of their particular political persuasion, the Weimar Republic was inextricably linked to the humiliation of Compiègne: the men who accepted the terms of the armistice were the same men who created the German Republic, and who would soon be denounced as the men by whose actions “the German Army was stabbed in the back.” Seven months later those same men would set their signatures to the Treaty of Versailles, accomplices in the national shame that accompanied Germany’s compulsory acceptance of it.

  The anger created by the Versailles document originated with the fact that it was not “negotiated” in the sense that it was a consensus among equals, an international contract drawn up between all signatories; there had been no give-and-take, no compromises, no synthesis of differing ideas or goals. The Allies merely decided what terms they would present to Germany, then handed the finished draft to the German delegation, along with the choice of either signing it without question, or resuming hostilities. Allied armies, nearly a million strong in total, already held bridgeheads across the Rhine: fighting was not an option for the Germans, for they no longer had anything like a cohesive army with which to conduct a defense. Even had one been to hand, the strategic situation was hopeless: without tanks, artillery, or an air force, Germany was indefensible. The German people would come to regard the treaty as a diktat, an ultimatum. Yet in practical terms it was no harsher than the settlement the new-minted German Empire had imposed on France in 1871, while the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, concluded in December 1917 between Germany and Bolshevik Russia, had been far more punitive. However, the popular perception would prove critical, for it fostered a receptive audience to the lie, put about by the defeated German generals, that the German Army, fighting valiantly at the front, had been stabbed in the back by pacifists and revolutionaries at home. The legend of the Dolchstoss, the “dagger shock,” the “stab in the back,” had begun.

  Versailles methodically stripped Germany of nearly a fifth of her territory, reduced the German Army to a strength of 100,000 men, barely more than a glorified police force; all but abolished her navy, dispossessing the High Seas Fleet of all of its ships but an obsolescent handful; and banned the existence of a German air force. Additionally, the German armed forces were prohibited from possessing mode
rn heavy weapons, including tanks and heavy artillery, while also being forbidden the capacity to develop and produce them in the future. All of this was humiliating to a people who had bestowed an inordinate degree of national pride in their armed forces. If those conditions weren’t sufficiently punishing, the treaty imposed a crushing indemnity—“crushing” in that no specific amount was stipulated; the Germans would continue to pay until the Allies grew tired of taking their money—intended to repay the Allies for their costs in four years of carnage. The victorious powers were determined to ensure that Germany would never again wage an aggressive war.