Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Rommel recognized this for what it was, a complete abrogation of the Fahneneid, and understood it as such far sooner than did most of his colleagues. He was also aware that the junior officers and their soldiers, sailors, and airmen, were growing increasingly weary and disillusioned. Hitler and the O.K.W. kept promising miracles if only the men at the front would hold out a little longer, but delivered only more defeat, death and destruction. Whatever threats and exhortations Göbbels and his minions at the Propaganda Ministry might yet be breathing out, only the most dedicated fanatics or hopelessly gullible retained any measure of confidence in the Führer and National Socialism. For the men in uniform, the degree of their loyalty was measured in inverse proportion to their distance from the fighting; by the time the Allies were ashore in Normandy, they were truly fighting only for Germany, in the hope that somehow, some way, the Allies would tire of the war and seek to make peace—who sat in the seats of power in Berlin was immaterial to them. Rommel, having seen first-hand the Allies’ overwhelming superiority in materiel and manpower, knew there was no chance of the Allies giving up: it would be the Germans who would have to stop fighting. Given the depth of his vanity, Rommel was most assuredly well-aware that he was more popular, in the proper sense of the word, than Adolf Hitler himself among Germany’s soldiers as well as large parts of her civilian population; he also knew that such popularity could bestow a moral authority on him which would be a potent, even decisive, weapon if he were determined to use it.

  By 1944 Hitler and the Nazis retained their grip on most Germans through fear and intimidation: the vast majority of Germans had come to understand that it was dangerous to not at least pay lip-service to loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime. Rommel himself had done so, in early March 1944, when he added his signature to a document being circulated among the Wehrmacht’s most senior officers which affirmed their devotion to the Führer. (The document had been drawn up in response to Hitler’s anger at radio propaganda broadcasts being made by German generals—some voluntarily, others under compulsion—captured by the Soviet Army urging Wehrmacht officers and other ranks to stop fighting.) Von Rundstedt signed it, so did Field Marshals Erich von Manstein, Ewald von Kleist, Maximilian von Wiechs, and Ernst Busch; when presented with the document, Rommel signed his name with a flourish.

  Yet it was a hollow gesture, something done only as a sop to an increasingly paranoid Hitler rather than as a genuine demonstration of fidelity; Rommel had already made up his mind as to where his true loyalty lay. Germans—and especially Germans of his generation—never confused patriotism with blind loyalty to an individual; the tradition began with Old Fritz himself, when the greatest of the Prussian kings had declared, “A king is the first servant and first magistrate of the state.” A successor, Friedrich Wilhelm III, had carried the idea even further: “Every servant of the state has a dual obligation: to the sovereign and to the country. It can occur that the two are not compatible; then, the duty to the country is higher.” When, in November 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II insisted that loyalty to Germany was inseparable from loyalty to himself, he was repudiated not only by the German people at large, but more importantly, for the precedent it set, by the Imperial Army whose fidelity he had taken for granted. And therein lies an essential part of the answer of Rommel’s plans—a true German’s loyalty was always given to Germany, not to any particular governmental form or leader.

  It was just this sort of patriotism which put Rommel at loggerheads with the July 20 conspiracy: like many of the officers who wanted to see Hitler eliminated, the source of von Stauffenberg’s anger toward him was that Germany was losing the war, for which he held Hitler responsible. As long as the war progressed in Germany’s favor, von Stauffenberg found himself able to rationalize, excuse, or simply overlook the excesses of the Nazi regime, whichever was convenient. When the victories ceased and events turned against Germany, however, then Hitler suddenly became an evil, raving madman who had to be removed from power by whatever means was possible. Rommel, while equally angry that Hitler was losing the war for Germany, was furious at Hitler for how it was being lost: the Führer’s fanatical insistence on defending every square yard of ground and refusal to even attempt to negotiate a peace, however unlikely an event that might have been, were proof to Rommel that Hitler was only interested in retaining his position and power as long as possible—to the last German soldier and the last German city if need be. Hitler’s great crime, in Rommel’s eyes, was not losing the war, but the death and destruction he brought down on the Germans and Germany by pointlessly prolonging the losing.

  While it is impossible to know in detail what Rommel planned for any move he might have made against Hitler, it can be concluded without fear of effective contradiction that it did not coincide—in scope, timing, or purpose —with the plans of the July 20 conspirators. For all of his later protests as to how deeply and vitally involved he was in von Stauffenberg’s plot, Speidel’s masterful inactivity at La Roche Guyon the day of the attentat when informed that Hitler had been killed in the bomb blast—which should have been his signal to put into action whatever plans for which he was responsible, he did absolutely nothing—demonstrates how marginal he truly was to the actual putsch. It is also proof that Rommel’s plans, whatever they may have been and what there were of them, were not meant to coordinate with those of von Stauffenberg and his clique—including Speidel. There is every reason to believe that when Rommel was incapacitated and almost killed in the strafing attack on July 17, whatever schemes he had concocted were as yet incomplete, and that had he been at his post on July 20 he would have been taken by surprise at the news of the assassination attempt.

  It is distinctly possible that Rommel would not have ever created a fully developed plan, at least as the term was understood by most General Staff officers, preferring instead to resort to his command habits from the days in North Africa, when he would have an objective and a vague outline of an operational plan in mind, and would make up the details as he went along. There is a certain essential credibility to this scenario, given how fluid and confusing the situation would be had Rommel been able to act against Hitler: much as he had done in Libya, he would have had to respond with improvisation and inspiration to adapt what would inevitably have been an ever-shifting and volatile situation. In such circumstances, Rommel’s name and reputation—and the moral authority which accompanied them—would have been his greatest asset: however ambitious he may have been for professional advancement and public recognition, Rommel was never regarded by his friends or his enemies as a Praetorian—no “man on horseback” with aspirations to political power was he.

  Almost as valuable to any plan of Rommel’s would have been the open support of Field Marshal von Kluge, the new OB West. Nominally Rommel’s superior, he was, according to Fritz Bayerlein, prepared to follow Rommel’s lead when the moment to act arrived; the knowledge that the two senior commanders in the West were standing together in open defiance of the Nazi regime would have imbued any orders they gave to units under their command with an air of legitimacy all but impossible to ignore or disregard. So too would have been the knowledge that men like Sepp Dietrich, Wilhelm Bittrich, and Fritz Bayerlein himself, stood with the two field marshals. Each of them was an experienced, worldly-wise combat commander in his own right, who inspired tenacious loyalty among their officers and men; in the case of Dietrich and Bittrich, senior Waffen-SS officers (each man commanded an SS panzerkorps), their presence at Rommel’s side would have shivered the SS, and in doing so eliminated any hope that the Nazi regime could have mounted an effective resistance to the fait accompli which Rommel intended to present to them.

  But what was it Rommel hoped—intended—planned—to do? There is very clear-cut evidence, in Rommel’s own words, of the broad outlines of his grand design to end the war in the West and bring down the Nazi regime. First and foremost, assassination would have played no part in Rommel’s undertaking: unlike, say, the French or the Russians, the Germans have nev
er regarded assassination as a viable political tool, and, as a result, they have never been very good at it—witness the several bungled attempts on Hitler’s life from 1938 to 1944. Assassination is a very messy process, which violates the Teutonic sense of ordnung, but more importantly, it violates the political process, as an attack on the office holder is simultaneously seen as an attack on the office itself: while Hitler was not the state, he was the head of state, thus an assault on his person was also an assault on the dignity and integrity of the state. As Rommel saw it, and declared most emphatically to his son Manfred in one of the last conversations they would ever have, “The attempt on Hitler was stupid. What we had to fear with this man was not his deeds, but the aura which surrounded him in the eyes of the German people.” A dead Hitler would have been a martyr, a rallying point for the fanatical minority possessed of just sufficient strength to plunge Germany into a civil war even as she was being assailed east and west by the Soviets and the Allies. A marginalized Hitler, on the other hand, one deprived of office and power, would have been a far less potent and moving figure, shown to be so ineffective that he was unable to retain his position or authority.303

  That such was Rommel’s intent for Hitler and his cronies was made clear in early July 1944, when Rommel confided to General Heinrich Eber-bach, Geyr von Schweppenburg’s replacement as commander of Panzer Group West, that “Germany’s only possible hope in getting off reasonably well lies in doing away with Hitler and his closest associates as soon as possible.” Later, again speaking of Hitler, Rommel would tell Eberbach that “there is nothing else to be done but to make an armistice, at once if possible, and if necessary take steps against his government, in case they weren’t sensible enough to give the order.” Rommel’s choice of verb, umgelegt, in this conversation with Eberbach was revealing, for while it does translate as “doing away with,” it does so in the sense of setting aside, discarding, or relegating to insignificance a person or thing, rather than an intent to violently dispose of them.304

  A few months later, Rommel laid out for Manfred what was at the heart of his strategy for making an end of the war in the West. The armistice of which he had spoken to General Eberbach was the first and absolutely fundamental step in the process. “The revolt [against the Nazis] should not have been started in Berlin, but in the West,” he told Manfred. “What could we have hoped to achieve by it? Only, in the end, that the expected forcible American and British occupation of Germany would have become an unopposed march-in, that the air attacks would have ceased, and that the Americans and British would have kept the Russians out of Germany. As for Hitler the best thing would have been to have presented him with an accomplished fact.”305

  There it was: Rommel hoped to negotiate a straightforward ceasefire in the West, with nothing like any of von Stauffenberg’s demands and preconditions, in order to allow the Allies to overrun Germany and hopefully meet the Soviets while the advancing Red Army was still short of German soil. It was an audacious plan, as bold as any operation of which he had conceived in France or Libya, and yet there was a core element of genius in it that defied rational explanation. For decades the whole idea was derided by historians as unworkable, little more than wishful thinking, the conventional wisdom holding the entire concept as little more than madness, given what was assumed to be the solidarity of the Nazi regime; and yet it may have been an inspired madness, as it is coming to be understood that Nazi Germany was nowhere near so monolithic as was once believed. There is certainly no reason to assume that the sort of sauve qui peut deal-brokering, scrambling for personal survival and the salvation of private empires which marked the final collapse of the Third Reich in April 1945 would not have occurred in autumn 1944 had the Allies suddenly flooded across the Rhine and into the Reich. It may well be that Rommel was actually counting on something very like that taking place.

  This is not to say that there was not considerable naivety in Rommel’s plan. There were certain assumptions he made about the nature of the Anglo-American-Soviet coalition which, while neither unreasonable nor illogical, were nevertheless flawed. The first was that the Allies recognized a distinction between “Germans” and “Nazis.” It was a given that, for ideological reasons, the Soviets would regard the two as synonymous, but Rommel had no idea how successful had been the efforts of Dr. Göbbels in presenting to the world the view that all Germans were united behind Adolf Hitler and wholly embraced National Socialism. As a result, the British and American people, and for the most part their governments as well, were fully convinced that Nazism had permeated every level of German society. Experience would prove that such distinctions were real and meaningful, and millions of Germans would come to resent that the Allies did not immediately recognize them as such, but in the summer of 1944 to the Allies the “Germans” and “Nazis” were both “the enemy,” and the hair-splitting could wait until the war was won.

  The second false assumption was that the Allies would make some sort of common cause with the Germans in keeping the Soviets at arm’s length. The British might well have been receptive to the idea, given Prime Minister Churchill’s long-standing mistrust of the Soviets and Britain’s firm opposition to Bolshevik expansionism since 1919, but President Franklin Roosevelt would have been far more likely to oppose such a proposal, as the Allied demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender, first put forward at Casablanca in January 1943, had originated with him, and he might well be loathe to have to repudiate himself. Still, it is difficult to conceive of the British and Americans not rushing at the opportunity to end the war in autumn 1944; there were, nonetheless, a myriad of issues, many of them complex and interrelated, that would have prevented such an undertaking from being the relatively straightforward operation Rommel apparently believed it would be. However it might have turned out, it would not have been a simple process of “opening the floodgates” and letting the Allies roll into Germany, bringing a swift end to the bloodshed and destruction.

  Ultimately, of course, none of this ever happened or had an opportunity to take place. Rommel’s plan never stood a very good chance of success in any event, as it would have relied on a greater reservoir of goodwill among the Allies than they actually possessed. Rommel might have been respected, even admired, by Allied officers and some Allied politicians, but while he had indeed fought a “war without hate” in North Africa, the rest of the world had not followed his example. There was far too much animosity and mistrust on both sides to overcome for the fighting to have simply ceased as Rommel hoped it would have done. Yet if it showed nothing else, Rommel’s plan for a ceasefire in the West demonstrated his determination to see the needless death of Germans and the pointless destruction of Germany come to an end, and in that showed where his true loyalties lay. Germany no longer possessed the ability to win this war, it was Adolf Hitler who was prolonging the conflict, and Erwin Rommel was unwilling to be an accessory to further slaughter. He had unflinchingly spoken this truth to Adolf Hitler, something few other German generals would ever dare to do. Truth, when it was something the Führer did not wish to hear, most especially from the man who was Germany’s most popular hero, equated to treason. Though the field marshal had never been part of von Stauffenberg’s plot, in Hitler’s mind he had acquired the same taint, so that when the Gestapo began its manhunt for the July 20 conspirators, Adolf Hitler would have a score to settle with Erwin Rommel.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE DEATH OF A FIELD MARSHAL

  Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.

  —JULIUS CAESAR, Act II Scene 2

  For almost four days following the crash, Rommel lay in a drug-induced fog at the Luftwaffe hospital at Bernay. His survival was considered by expert neurologists to be near miraculous: he had suffered a quadruple skull fracture, an injury so traumatic it would kill most men outright. There was no sign of cerebral hemorrhaging, and in his conscious moments Rommel was lucid and seemed to have full motor control. That was the g
ood news; the bad news was that the lesions on his brain made it impossible for him to open or move his left eye, left him deaf in his left ear, created problems with his equilibrium, and caused him severe, almost debilitating, headaches at night.

  On July 22 Speidel and Ruge came to visit Rommel for the first time. Rommel being Rommel, he did his best to convince them both that he was far less severely injured than in fact he was, and that he would soon be fit enough to resume his duties as commander of Army Group B. Speidel, knowing that his commanding officer would have insisted no matter what the doctors advised, briefed Rommel on the situation in Normandy; the news was not good, of course, as the German perimeter around the Allied bridgehead continued to grow ever more brittle with casualties continuing to mount and replacements only a fraction of losses. Despite the field marshal’s theatrics, both he and his officers knew he was far from fit, and even if he were there was nothing he could have done to prevent the debacle in France everyone knew was coming.