Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Rommel was transferred to the much larger hospital at Le Vésinet, just outside Paris, on July 23, where he proved to be a particularly cantankerous patient. Despite his problems with balance and vision, he repeatedly insisted on getting out of bed and trying to walk about; not until one of his surgeons came into his room, produced a human skull, courtesy of the hospital’s pathology laboratory, and shattered it with a hammer, remarking that this was the sort of battering Rommel’s own skull had undergone, did he subside. He dictated a letter to Lucie the day after his arrival at Le Vésinet, saying

  I’m in the hospital now and being well looked after. Of course I’ve got to keep quiet until I can be moved home, and that won’t be for another two weeks yet. My left eye’s still gummed up and swollen, but the doctors say it will get better. My head’s still giving me a lot of trouble at night, but I feel very much better in the daytime.306

  Speidel and Ruge continued to be frequent visitors; they were reluctant to discuss the July 20 assassination attempt with Rommel, although he learned of it just before being transferred to Le Vésinet. Ruge and Hauptmann Lang, both of whom, unlike Speidel, had not known in advance about the plot, were convinced that Rommel, when he was told of the attentat, had been just as startled as they.

  No official announcement had yet been made about Rommel’s injuries, the O.K.W. apparently believing that there was still sufficient potency in his name, both to bolster German morale and encourage caution and hesitation among the Allies, to maintain the fiction that he was still in command in Normandy. A terse, rather impersonal message from the Führer that arrived at Le Vésinet on July 24—“Accept, Herr Feldmarschall, my best wishes for your continued speedy recovery”—was the only acknowledgment by Hitler of Rommel’s injury. Some may have taken this as an expression of Hitler’s displeasure with Rommel, but the fact was that the Führer was utterly preoccupied at that moment with the identification and arrest of the surviving conspirators from the July 20 bomb plot. His attentions—and suspicions—had not yet turned toward Rommel.307

  Rumors about Rommel were circulating, however: a radio broadcast by the BBC at the end of July announced that Rommel had been gravely wounded in an air attack and might possibly have died as a consequence. This spurred him into calling an impromptu meeting on August 1 with a collection of German war correspondents; having managed to shrug his way into his old Afrika Korps uniform tunic, complete with decorations, he firmly assured the gathered reporters that the rumors of his recent demise had indeed been greatly exaggerated, and that he was going to prove far tougher to kill than the British would like to believe. Even so, he was still a very sick man—the daily briefings and conferences with Speidel, Ruge, Lang, and Templehoff, despite their formality, were merely gestures of courtesy, something the pragmatist in Rommel grudgingly recognized; his doctors insisted that it would be no less than three months before Rommel would be fit for even limited duty. Meanwhile, he was able to keep himself occupied for a time with establishing that his recent injuries entitled him to the rare—and thus highly prized—Wound Badge First Class; the award was confirmed on August 7. Though there was still a deep depression on the left side of Rommel’s forehead, his left eye was still swollen shut, and he continued to have problems with balance, there were no indications of permanent brain injury, and thus nothing to be accomplished for his recovery by remaining at Le Vésinet; thus on August 8 he was cleared to be evacuated to Herrlingen, where he would continue to mend.

  BUT EVEN AS Rommel was returning to his home, events had been unfolding in Normandy, Paris, and Berlin which would soon overtake, then overwhelm him.

  On July 25, the American First Army broke out of the Normandy perimeter at the town of St. Lo, and, exactly as Rommel had predicted in his memoranda to Hitler, the entire Normandy front collapsed like a house of cards. Outnumbered four-to-one in infantry and better than twelve-to-one in tanks, with absolutely no air support, the defenders had no chance of ever stopping the Allied attack: the German reserves had all been committed to holding the Normandy perimeter. Despite several fiercely fought actions, no cohesive defense was possible: by the time Rommel was packed off to Herrlingen, the German Seventh Army had ceased to exist; before the month of August was out, four Allied Armies—two American, one British, and one Canadian—had reached the Seine River. The Seine had been the Allied objective for D+90, that is, 90 days after the D-Day landings; they reached it in 86.

  In Paris Field Marshal von Kluge did his best, but he was fighting a battle no general, however skilled and experienced, could have won—the Germans had too many disadvantages. The worst, of course, was Hitler’s obsession with holding every square yard of ground—his refusal to acknowledge the wisdom, let alone the necessity, of strategic withdrawals—which played right into the Allies’ hands; his demands that the German defenders hold their positions at all costs had not delayed the Allies’ advance by so much as one day; instead it needlessly pinned valuable German forces in place, where they could be enveloped, cut off, and eliminated or taken as prisoners of war at the Allies’ leisure. What made the situation more difficult still for von Kluge and the other generals in the West who were now trying to salvage something from the wreckage was the knowledge that a cloud of suspicion hung over every senior officer in the Wehrmacht, so that none now dared show the slightest hesitation in carrying out the Führer’s orders, or appear to question their wisdom.

  Adding to von Kluge’s problems was the disarray in his command structure created by the July 20 attentat—a disarray compounded in no small part by the growing suspicions in Berlin that von Kluge himself may have been involved. When news of Hitler’s apparent assassination reached Paris, the commander of the German occupation forces in France, General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, ordered the arrest of SS and Gestapo personnel in Paris, a prearranged part of the conspirators’ plan to mobilize the German Army in the West in support of their coup. He had previously approached von Kluge, seeking to enlist the field marshal in the putsch—how much von Kluge knew, when he knew it, and how much support, if any, he initially offered the conspiracy, is still uncertain. But when it became clear that Hitler had survived the assassination attempt, von Stülpnagel was unable to convince von Kluge to support the conspirators. Instead, the field marshal dismissed von Stülpnagel from his staff, and privately urged him to try to escape to the Allied lines. Rather than take advantage of the confusion at the front and allow himself to be swept up as a prisoner of war, von Stülpnagel tried to brazen it out in Paris, but was recalled to Berlin on July 26; once there, he was certain, he would be arrested by the Gestapo: to prevent this, he attempted suicide near Verdun, but succeeded only in blowing his eyes out of his head. Despite his injury, he was indeed taken into Gestapo custody where, delirious with pain and rambling in semi-coherence, he murmured Erwin Rommel’s name. This was the first indication of any possible connection between the July 20 conspirators and Rommel.

  The Gestapo grew more suspicious after von Stülpnael’s Luftwaffe liaison officer, Oberstleutnant Cäsar von Hofacker, was arrested the same day that his superior departed Paris. Von Stülpnagel’s actions the night of July 20 had implicated both of them; when it was confirmed that Hitler had survived the assassination attempt, they knew that arrest, conviction, and execution were all but inevitable. They had not only been involved in von Stauffenberg’s plot almost from the beginning, they were key participants in the entire undertaking, von Stülpnagel of course as the commander of the occupation army in France, and von Hofacker as the liaison between the Berlin and Paris branches of the conspiracy. Consequently they were privy to the names of most of the men involved; the two officers did their best to destroy whatever documentary evidence existed, in the hope of protecting other members of the conspiracy.

  While von Stülpnagel may have muttered Rommel’s name in a paininduced delirium, hardly admissible evidence even by Gestapo standards, von Hofacker was perfectly lucid when he spoke of the field marshal to his Gestapo interrogators. Exactly w
hat he said and under what conditions he said it is still unclear, as the files and records of both von Hofacker’s and von Stülpnagel’s interrogations vanished late in the war or sometime shortly after the end of the conflict. Second-hand accounts of von Hofacker’s ordeal vary wildly, ranging from claims that he was subjected to intense physical torture to assertions that the Gestapo resorted to sophisticated psychological techniques in drawing information out of the Luftwaffe colonel. On the face of it, the latter seems more credible, as von Hofacker, although condemned to death alongside von Stülpnagel by the People’s Court—the Volks-gerichtshof—on August 30, would manage to survive another four months in Plötzensee Prison before the Gestapo decided that they had wrung out of him every scrap of useful information to be had.

  There was one small problem with the information von Hofacker provided—just how useful was it, really? Von Hofacker was a keenly intelligent man, more so than most of his interrogators, who, while not stupid, were unused to matching wits with a clever customer who already knew his life was forfeit. Von Hofacker appears to have been playing a deep game with the Gestapo, offering up names, inferences, red herrings, always providing just enough valid information to ensure that the Gestapo would continue to find him useful, his willing cooperation a ploy to buy time, in the faint chance that he could last long enough for the Allies to overrun Germany and—he hoped—liberate him. If true, it should not be construed to mean that he was lacking in courage: on the contrary, such was a game that only the most courageous—and desperate—men would have dared to play. When led before the Volksgerichtshof, an experience which reduced most defendants to a state of near panic, he was openly defiant and aggressive—a stance which required considerable moral courage.308

  The Volksgerichtshof—the People’s Court—was the ultimate Nazi travesty of justice. It was an extra-constitutional court, that is, it was not bound in its processes or procedures by any legal or constitutional restraints: there was no presumption of innocence, while defendants were denied legal counsel as well as any opportunity to present a formal defense; it was given jurisdiction over cases involving “political offenses,” as determined by the Gestapo. Presiding over the Court was Roland Freisler, an indifferent lawyer of no great intellect but a fanatical Nazi, a borderline psychopath who enjoyed offering up from the bench long, vulgarity-strewn harangues of defendants as well as humiliating them personally. Freisler, who alone decided and delivered the verdicts, almost always came down in favor of the prosecution; invariably the penalty for a finding of “guilty” was immediate execution: all of Germany knew the Volksgerichtshof as “kangaroo court.”

  The trials of the accused July 20 conspirators were Freisler’s finest hours: the defendants were brought into the court unwashed and unshaven, dressed in ill-fitting, shabby clothes not their own, denied belts or suspenders for their trousers; in the case of Field Marshal von Witzleben, his false teeth were taken away, allowing Freisler the opportunity to mock the general for his poor diction and ridiculous appearance. By turns derisive, sarcastic, incredulous, raging, Freisler heaped his scorn on the defendants, like a predator playing with its prey, knowing that their fates had been decided before they had ever walked through the doors of the court. (At one point Freisler’s conduct became so outrageous that official complaints against him were filed by other German judges, who felt that he was diminishing the overall dignity of German jurisprudence.) Few defendants ever scored points in return on Freisler—most who did were among the July 20 conspirators. Von Witzleben was one of them, bellowing back at the judge that “You may hand us over to the executioner, but in three months’ time our disgusted and harried people will bring you to book and drag you alive through the dirt in the streets!” Von Hofacker was another, shouting down Freisler to damn Hitler and declare that he only wished he could have carried out the assassination attempt himself. When the foregone death sentence was handed down, however, instead going straight to the hangman, as had his superior, von Stülpnagel, von Hofacker was remanded back to the Gestapo for further interrogation.309

  Only one man, short of Hitler himself or the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, could have kept von Hofacker alive at this point: SS-Obergrup-penführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt—the Reich Main Security Office, or RSHA—which was responsible for defending the Reich from all enemies within and without Germany’s borders by means of espionage and counterespionage; the Gestapo was one of the office’s departments. One of the few German intellectuals to embrace National Socialism, Kaltenbrunner often intimidated many of his fellow Nazis not only with his intelligence, but also with his utter ruthlessness; it was those traits which were now called upon to identify all of the July 20 conspirators, as well as those who had aided and abetted them. Ultimately he proved more than a match for von Hofacker, who finally ran out of stories to tell and so outlived his usefulness, going to the gallows on December 20, 1944. Somewhere in early August, though, the Luftwaffe colonel mentioned the name “Rommel”; in doing so, he set in motion the final chain of events that led to Rommel’s suicide.

  Because no transcripts, notes, or files of von Hofacker’s interrogations survived the war, it is impossible to know exactly what he said regarding Rommel, or in precisely what context. Whatever he offered up lacked any real substance, however, that much can be inferred from what transpired once the information was in Kaltenbrunner’s hands. A report was submitted to Himmler on August 14 which contained whatever statements von Hofacker had made about Rommel; Himmler handed the report to Hitler the following day. Intriguingly, the Führer, who was already convinced that General Hans Speidel, Rommel’s Chief of Staff, had been deeply involved in the July 20 conspiracy, did not demand immediate direct action against Rommel. The SS began round-the-clock surveillance of the field marshal and his villa in Herrlingen, but nothing further was done.

  In the same report Kaltenbrunner had included whatever information von Hofacker had offered up concerning Field Marshal von Kluge and whatever part he may or may not have played in the conspiracy. Whatever was there was sufficient to cause Hitler to immediately relieve von Kluge as oberbefehlshaber West and demand his immediate return to Berlin; he was replaced by Field Marshal Walter Model, a defensive genius who had repeatedly saved the German front from disintegration in Russia. Despite the enduring myth that Rommel was Hitler’s favorite general, Model had for some time been the new apple of the Führer’s eye—known as “the Führer’s Fireman,” he was expected to work the same sort of miracle against the Americans and British that he had performed against the Red Army.

  In taking over von Kluge’s command, Model also became the commanding officer of Army Group B, Rommel’s former posting, and inherited Rommel’s staff. In the same directive dispatching Model to Paris, Hitler also ordered Speidel to return to Berlin, where he would be confronted with the evidence of his complicity in the July 20 attentat (“The interrogations prove that he was in it up to his neck!”); Model immediately protested, insisting that Speidel was too useful to be spared for such nonsense: whatever evidence had been produced which incriminated Speidel had to be a fabrication by over-zealous Gestapo agents. Hitler, however, was adamant, sending out General Hans Krebs, another veteran of the Russian Front, as Speidel’s replacement.310

  While informing Krebs of his new assignment, Hitler made a revealing comment about Rommel, saying, “What he did was the worst possible thing a soldier can do in the circumstances: he tried to find some other way out than the purely military. At one time, you know, he was also predicting imminent collapse in Italy; yet it still hasn’t happened. Events proved him wrong there and justified my decision to leave Field Marshal Kesselring in charge. . . . I regard Rommel, within certain limitations, as being an exceptionally bold and also a clever commander. But I don’t regard him as a stayer, and everybody shares that view.” Evidently Rommel had ceased to be Hitler’s darling long before any rumors reached the Führer regarding Rommel’s possible complicity in the attempted p
utsch. Favoritism, then, would clearly have little, if anything, to do with the fate that in two months’ time Hitler would decree for Rommel.311

  At the same time, the final denouement of Field Marshal von Kluge’s personal drama, and Hitler’s reaction to it, also spoke to the substance of any evidence Kaltenbrunner and Himmler had against Rommel. When informed of his relief as OB West and his orders to report to Berlin, von Kluge immediately assumed that he was—or soon would be—formally implicated in the July 20 conspiracy. While being driven across France, von Kluge composed a final letter to the Führer, urging Hitler to make peace, as befitting a great man, then, on August 20, near the ancient fortress city of Metz, he bit into a cyanide capsule and died. Upon receiving this news and reading von Kluge’s letter, Hitler’s only comment was, “There are strong reasons to suspect that had not von Kluge committed suicide he would have been arrested anyway.” Eventually sufficient evidence would be gathered to show that von Kluge had not only assured the conspirators of his support once Hitler was dead, but that he had also been involved in a similar but abortive plot in 1943. Yet when he had von Hofacker’s information in his hands, Hitler only had “strong reasons to suspect” von Kluge—strong enough to convince him to take the precaution of relieving von Kluge, yet insufficient to convince him of the field marshal’s guilt. This from the man who had screamed that he wanted the officers who tried to take his life “hanged like cattle,” and whose favorite entertainment until his final days would be watching films of those sentences being carried out. Whatever “evidence” von Hofacker gave Kaltenbrunner, it must have been very thin indeed, otherwise there was no explanation for the comparatively mild reaction: given how completely Rommel had lost Hitler’s confidence, together with the Führer’s suspicions of Speidel, had von Hofacker offered up anything more than the vaguest hearsay and innuendo about any role Rommel might have played in the conspiracy, Hitler’s response would have been swift and brutal.312