Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  “My dear boy, our enemy in the East is so terrible that every other consideration has to give way before it. If he [Stalin] succeeds in overrunning Europe, even only temporarily, it will be the end of everything which has made life appear worth living! Of course I would go.”324

  Rommel spent the rest of the morning in conversation with Manfred, then later with Lucie, and at one point asked Aldinger to assemble all of the directives and orders issued by Army Group B during the Normandy campaign. Shortly before noon Rommel changed out of his civilian clothes and into his old Afrika Korps tunic, his favorite, carefully pinning on all of his decorations, ribbons, and service badges. Punctually at noon a dark green car pulled up at the front gate: in it were General Burgdorf and General-leutnant Ernst Maisel, along with Major Anton Ehrnsperger, Maisel’s aide, and an SS sergeant named Doose, the driver. The two generals asked to speak to Rommel privately.

  Once behind closed doors in the field marshal’s study, Burgdorf came straight to the point: Rommel had been accused of being complicit in the attempt on Hitler’s life. Burgdorf had with him copies of the interrogations of von Hofacker, von Stülpnagel, and Speidel, along with a letter written by Keitel, ostensibly dictated by Hitler himself. In the letter, the Führer gave Rommel an impossible choice: if he believed himself innocent of the allegations against him, then Rommel must report to Hitler in person in Berlin; refusal to do so would be considered an admission of guilt, his arrest, trial, and conviction would be inevitable. As a final gesture of respect, the Führer had allowed that Rommel be permitted to take his own life; Burgdorf had brought a fast-acting poison with him for that purpose.

  There was no mention of Rommel’s case first being put to the Wehrmacht’s Court of Honor, a curious omission if Rommel were indeed being brought to book as part of von Stauffenberg’s conspiracy, less surprising if all Hitler truly sought was to be rid of this troublesome field marshal. Bergdorf’s next words to Rommel confirmed the truth: in exchange for Rommel’s life, the Führer offered his assurances that Rommel’s “treason” would never be made known to the German people, instead the official story would be that he died of complications from his wounds; he would be given a state funeral, Lucie would receive the full pension of a field marshal’s widow, and there was to be no application of the sippenhaft against Rommel’s family or members of his household. There was even talk of a monument being raised to Rommel at some future date. Implicit in Burgdorf’s words, however, was the assurance that if Rommel proved uncooperative, the reprisals against his family would be swift, severe, and complete.

  At that Rommel understood everything: one way or the other, Hitler wanted him dead and safely out of the way—even if he denied the charges against him, Rommel would never reach Berlin alive. The accusation of complicity in the attempted coup on July 20 was the fiction through which, if Rommel refused to cooperate, his family would be punished. It was the one threat that Hitler could make which he could be certain Rommel would not greet with open defiance. Even so, the field marshal must have toyed with the idea: he spent nearly an hour closeted with Burgdorf and Maisel before excusing himself and slipping quietly into Lucie’s bedroom.

  Seeing a look on her husband’s face that had never been there before, she blurted out, “What is the matter with you? Has something happened? Are you ill?”

  “In a quarter of an hour I shall be dead.” Rommel said simply; this was not the time or place to mince words. “I’m accused of having taken part in the attempt to kill Hitler. . . . They say that von Stülpnagel, Speidel, and von Hofacker have denounced me. It’s the usual trick. I’ve told them that I don’t believe it and that it cannot be true, but the Führer has given me the choice of taking poison or being dragged before the People’s Court. They have brought the poison: they say it will take only three seconds to act.” At first Lucie begged him to fight back, but Rommel gently refused, explaining that it was all an elaborate theater staged by Hitler: no matter what he said or did, he would never live to reach Berlin. There was time for one final, silent embrace—Erwin and Lucie had been together for 33 years, married for 28, and there were no words for a moment like this. Finally Rommel stepped away and turned to leave the room; Lucie burst into tears behind him. At that moment Manfred, overcome with teenage curiosity and oddly confident that Burgdorf and Maisel had not, after all, come to arrest his father, walked in.325

  Without preamble, Rommel repeated to Manfred what he had just told the boy’s mother. The young man would never forget his father’s calm when he declared, “To die by the hand of one’s own people is hard. But the house is surrounded and Hitler is charging me with high treason. ‘In view of my services in Africa,’ I am to have the chance of dying by poison. . . . If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family, that is, against you. They will also leave my staff alone.”

  “Do you believe it?” Manfred asked.

  “Yes,” Rommel replied. “I believe it. It is very much in their interest to see that the affair does not come out into the open. By the way, I have been charged to put you under a promise of the strictest silence. If a single word of this comes out, they will no longer feel themselves bound by the agreement. . . . Call Aldinger, please.”326

  Aldinger, a decorated combat veteran and fiercely loyal to Rommel, wanted to fight it out with Burgdorf, Maisel, and whatever escort had accompanied them, but Rommel dissuaded him, explaining that even if they made their escape from the house, they had nowhere to go: their only hope would be reach the front, and it was too distant for them to have any chance of getting there before they were caught. “Besides,” he said, “I have Lucie and Manfred to think of. It’s all been prepared to the last detail. I’m to be given a state funeral. I have asked that it should take place in Ulm. In a quarter of an hour, you, Aldinger, will receive a telephone call from the Wagnerschule reserve hospital in Ulm to say that I’ve had a brain seizure on the way to a conference. Now, I must go, they’ve only given me ten minutes.”

  Downstairs, Burgdorf and Maisel were waiting outside by the car. After shrugging his way into the black leather coat which had become his trademark in Normandy, Rommel thrust his hand into an inner pocket in his tunic and withdrew his wallet; the thrifty Swabian to the end, he held it out to Aldinger, saying “There’s still 150 marks in there. Shall I take the money with me?”

  “That doesn’t matter now, Herr Feldmarschall,” said Aldinger. Rommel nodded, thrust the wallet back into his pocket, settled his peaked officer’s hat on his head, then took a firm grip on his marshal’s baton. Together, the trio walked through the front door—Lucie could be heard sobbing in her room upstairs. When they reached the waiting car, Burgdorf and Maisel greeted Rommel with the Hitlergrüsse, the stiff-armed Nazi salute that by decree had replaced the traditional military salute in all of Germany’s armed forces in the days following the July 20 attentat. Rommel merely raised the tip of his baton to the brim of his hat, then thrust it under his arm and turned to Manfred and Aldinger, wordlessly offering his hand to each one last time.327

  Climbing into the back seat of the car, Rommel was joined by the two generals, while Major Ehrnsperger took his place in the front next to the driver. The car quietly drove off from the house, sped up the hill and disappeared round a bend a quarter-mile away. Rommel did not look back; Manfred never saw his father again.

  The driver, Sergeant Doose, drove down the lane for perhaps five minutes, then at a signal from Burgdorf, pulled off the road and stopped. Maisel, Ehrnsperger, and Doose left the car at this point, leaving Burgdorf alone with Rommel. Whatever words, if any, passed between the two men in the car at that point remain unknown: there are no records of Burgdorf ever recounting exactly what happened in those moments. After a short time had passed, he waved to his companions, who returned to the automobile, there to find Rommel slumped forward and, in the words of Sergeant Doose, “sobbing.” The field marshal was clearly seconds away from death; Doose, unsettled by the indignity of the moment, raised Rommel back into a si
tting position and replaced the hat that had fallen from his head. Rommel by now was gone.

  What happened next simply continued the charade stage-managed by Hitler, done solely to give the appearance of satisfying the requirements of German law, no more. Burgdorf and Maisel rushed Rommel to the Wagnerschule Hospital in Ulm, where an attending physician, a Dr. Meyer, was directed to attempt reviving the field marshal. The doctor complied, but as he later recalled, “One look at the man and it was obvious he had not died a natural death.” Meyer then officially pronounced Rommel dead, and suggested an autopsy; Burgdorf immediately quashed that idea: “Don’t touch the body,” he said firmly. “Everything is being handled from Berlin.”328

  As Rommel had promised, a telephone call was placed to the house in Herrlingen—the caller was Major Ehrnsperger—where Aldinger took it and was given the news that Field Marshal Rommel had suddenly and unexpectedly died of a cerebral hemmorhage while being driven to the train station in Ulm, where he was to have boarded a special express for Berlin. Ehrnsperger informed Aldinger that he was returning to the house in Herrlingen, and when the major arrived, Aldinger informed him that Frau Rommel was unable to receive visitors. Ehrnsperger, perhaps embarrassed by his part in this travesty, did not insist, and together he and Aldinger drove into Ulm, where Aldinger saw his old chief’s body. The following day, he would return, this time with Lucie and Manfred: both wife and son would be struck by the expression of contempt on Rommel’s face; Rommel’s sister, Helene, who had come down from Stuttgart that morning, would likewise remember the look on her dead brother’s countenance. General Maisel, still lurking about in some official function or other, attempted to offer official condolences to Lucie; she pretended not to see him or his outstretched hand.

  Rommel’s body lay in state in his home for two days, draped in a Nazi flag and guarded by two officers from the garrison in Ulm. While it did so, messages from all over Germany of sympathy and condolence began arriving at Herrlingen. Some were formalities, some were not, some were very different than what might have been expected from the sender. The official communiqué from Adolf Hitler was almost perfunctory, even brusque:

  In the Field

  16 October 1944

  Accept my sincerest sympathy for the heavy loss you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name of Field Marshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in North Africa.

  ADOLF HITLER

  Field Marshal Model, who had replaced Rommel in France as commander of Army Group B, issued a special Order of the Day, praising Rommel as “. . . one of the greatest German commanders . . . with lightning powers of decision, a soldier of the greatest courage and unequaled dash. . . .” Gastone Gambarra, an Italian lieutenant general who for two years had fought under Rommel’s command in Libya, cabled Lucie to say “[Rommel] will always live in the hearts and minds of those who had the honor to see him, as I did, always calm and fearless under fire.”329

  Perhaps the most unusual communication sent to Lucie at this time came from, of all people, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS and chief of all the Reich’s police and security apparatus, including the Gestapo. Himmler personally sent Alfred Berndt, Rommel’s longtime and well-liked companion in France in 1940 and then in North Africa, to pay a call on Frau Rommel. Berndt, by now a hauptsturmführer (captain) in the Waffen-SS, conveyed to Lucie Himmler’s dismay at her husband’s fate: he had no part in it and would have never condoned it had he known what was to happen. Oddly enough, there may be a glimmer of truth in this, given that in six months’ time Himmler himself would be attempting to negotiate a separate peace of his own with the Allies—he probably imagined that Rommel would have been very useful in such a situation, not realizing the contempt in which Rommel held him and his minions.

  The state funeral that was promised to Rommel did indeed come about, carried out on October 18 in the town hall of Ulm with all of the excess pomp and neo-pagan pageantry at which the Third Reich excelled: flags and banners, wreaths, black-crepe-draped eagles, honor guards, flickering candles, Rommel’s awards, decorations, and baton on display. The histrionics reached their crescendo when Field Marshal von Rundstedt gave the funeral oration in the name of Adolf Hitler, who, “as head of the army has called us here to say farewell to his field marshal, who has fallen on the field of honor.” This exercise in hypocrisy was only exceeded a few moments later when von Rundstedt, knowing full well where Rommel’s true loyalties had always lain, uttered the perfectly ridiculous assertion that Rommel had been a “tireless fighter in the cause of the Führer and the Reich . . . imbued with the National Socialist spirit. . . .” Rommel’s heart, von Rundstedt reassured his audience, “had always belonged to the Führer.”330

  Lucie and Manfred, faithful to the pledge of silence extorted from Rommel by Hitler, said nothing to contradict any of this, even though they both knew how far from the truth were any of von Rundstedt’s utterances. At the funeral with Lucie and Manfred was Vice-Admiral Ruge, who also knew the truth about Rommel. The occasion was especially bitter for Ruge: after Rommel’s injury in the strafing attack, the admiral had considered urging the field marshal to allow himself remain in the hospital at Le Vésinet, rather than be evacuated to Herrlingen, and so be captured by the advancing Allies; Ruge was certain that Rommel had more to fear from his “friends” than from his foes. “I never plucked up the courage to suggest it,” he would later remark. Now as he sat in Ulm’s town hall and listened to von Rundstedt’s banalities, he wondered if the world would ever know the truth about the fate of the man who had once been his commanding officer—and his friend.331

  Hitler, as events played out, was as good as his word—almost: Lucie duly collected her pension; she, Manfred, Aldinger, and the remainder of Rommel’s household and entourage were not interfered with in any way by the Gestapo, SS, or any other police or security services; and the fiction that Rommel had died of his wounds was carefully maintained, preserving the integrity of his memory and legacy for the German people. Lucie would survive the war and the chaos which followed Germany’s collapse and surrender, and live to see a new Germany, the Federal German Republic—popularly known as West Germany—emerge from the wreckage of the Third Reich. She would also see her beloved Erwin become an icon for the new German army, West Germany’s Bundeswehr, the exemplar and ideal of the modern German officer, both in ability and conduct; Rommel’s stature in the eyes of his former enemies would grow in equal measure: his operations and tactics, both offensive and defensive, would become essential course material in the military academies of both the United States and Great Britain. Lucie would never remarry, and died in Stuttgart on September 26, 1971.

  Manfred was discharged from the Luftwaffe a few weeks after his father’s death; that was the end of his military “career”: after the war he became a lawyer, working for the state of Baden-Württemberg. In 1974 he was elected oberbürgermeister—Lord Mayor—of Stuttgart, a post he would hold for the next 22 years. He became a popular figure in Germany, and was noted for his very public—and very genuine—friendships with Major General George S. Patton IV, U.S. Army, and David Montgomery, 2nd Viscount Montgomery of Alamein—respectively the sons of General George S. Patton, Jr., and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Retiring from politics in 1996, Manfred Rommel embarked on a second career as an author, and was always in great demand as a public speaker as well. Manfred died in Stuttgart on November 7, 2013, leaving behind a wife and a daughter.

  THE SOLE EXCEPTION to Hitler’s assurances to Rommel’s family was the promised memorial—it never materialized. It was not until early March 1945 that Lucie was even approached on the subject of a monument to Rommel, by which time, of course, the whole idea was rendered preposterous by circumstances. A letter arrived at her home from the chief design officer for German Military Cemeteries, announcing that

  . . . the Führer has given me an order to erect a monument to the late Field Marshal Rommel, and I have asked a nummber of sculptors to su
bmit designs. I enclose some of them. At this point it would not be possible to erect this monument or to transport it. One can only make a model. . . . I think the Field Marshal should be represented by a lion. One artist has depicted a dying lion, another a lion weeping, the third a lion about to spring. I prefer the last, myself, but if you prefer a dying lion, that too can be arranged.

  The slab can be made immediately, as I have special permission from Reichsminister Speer. Generally monuments cannot now be made in stone. But in this special case it can be made and quickly shipped.332

  The absurdity of the proposal only served to underscore for Lucie the injustice done to her husband; the widow in the house in Herrlingen could never be bothered to respond.

  No monuments to Erwin Rommel would ever be raised in Germany. It is very easy to believe that, if he somehow knew of it, Rommel would be pleased by that fact: for all of his vanity, he was never guilty of ostentation. He would be quite satisfied, certainly, with the knowledge that his ashes are buried, as he had wished, in the cemetery at the Community Church of St. Andrew in Herrlingen, and that Lucie rests beside him. They lay together in a shaded, secluded corner of the cemetery. Like all German churchyards this one is immaculately cared for; well-laid paving stones lead a visitor from the street back to the rear of the cemetery, then make a left turn, and descend three steps to where Erwin and Lucie lay. Marking the resting place of Rommel’s ashes is a wooden post, topped with an oversize Iron Cross; beneath the cross are carved representations of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, along with the Pour le Mérite. The inscription is simple, reading only

  General Feldmarschall

  ERWIN ROMMEL

  1891–1944

  EPILOGUE

  THE LEGEND OF THE DESERT FOX

  One must not judge everyone in the world