Erwin Rommel

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Erwin Rommel rode into Tripoli on the 12th of February 1941 as commander of a freshly created desert force, the Afrika Korps, with orders to hold a defensive line. He ignored them within weeks. By the time the war in North Africa ended, he had been promoted to Generalfeldmarschall, earned a nickname that followed him into postwar legend, and become the most famous general on either side of the entire conflict. He would also be dead within three years of his arrival in Africa, forced to swallow a cyanide capsule in the back of a German staff car a few miles from his own home.

  The questions his life raises are not simply military ones. How did a boy from a middle-class family in the Kingdom of Württemberg rise to command armies and become the object of propaganda on both sides of the war? What did his relationship with Adolf Hitler actually look like, and when did it begin to fracture? Was the image of the chivalrous, apolitical Desert Fox a genuine portrait, a convenient postwar construction, or something more complicated? And how did the man who once commanded Hitler's personal escort end up implicated in a plot to kill him?

• 2. A Soldier's Formation

  ›

  Rommel was born on the 15th of November 1891 in Heidenheim, 45 kilometres from Ulm, the third of five children in a family with no notable military pedigree beyond his father's early stint as an artillery lieutenant. He joined the Württemberg Infantry Regiment No. 124 in Weingarten as an ensign at age 18, studied at the Officer Cadet School in Danzig, and was commissioned as a lieutenant in January 1912. It was at the cadet school that he met his future wife, 17-year-old Lucia Maria Mollin, of Italian and Polish descent; they married in November 1916.

  His first combat experience came on the 22nd of August 1914, near Verdun, where he and three men opened fire on a French garrison without waiting for the rest of his platoon. It was impulsive, it was successful, and it was entirely characteristic. The pattern he developed throughout the war combined penetrating enemy lines under heavy covering fire with rapid flanking manoeuvres designed to arrive behind hostile positions before defenders could regroup.

  The action that made his reputation came during the Battle of Caporetto, which began on the 24th of October 1917 on the Isonzo front in mountainous Italy. From the 25th to the 27th of October, Rommel and 150 men captured 81 guns and 9,000 prisoners while losing six dead and 30 wounded. He achieved this by exploiting terrain to attack from unexpected directions, and on one occasion by pressing forward when he had orders to the contrary. Acting as advance guard at the capture of Longarone on the 9th of November, he gambled again: convinced they were surrounded by an entire German division, the 1st Italian Infantry Division, 10,000 men, surrendered to him. For Caporetto and Matajur he received the Pour le Mérite, imperial Germany's highest military honour.

  Some historians later described his infiltration methods at Caporetto as Blitzkrieg without tanks, a form of manoeuvre warfare that foreign armies eventually adopted. Rommel himself, however, played no role in the formal adoption of Blitzkrieg doctrine in the Second World War.

• 3. Drift Toward the Regime

  ›

  In the years between the wars, Rommel spent nearly a decade with the 13th Infantry Regiment in Stuttgart, then moved to instructor positions in Dresden and Potsdam. His manual on infantry training, published in 1934, preceded his more celebrated Infantry Attacks by three years. The 1937 book drew on his World War I experiences and became a bestseller that, according to Scheck, later enormously influenced many armies. Hitler owned a copy.

  His first meeting with Hitler came on the 30th of September 1934, when Hitler inspected his battalion at Goslar. By 1938, biographer Ian Beckett wrote, Rommel had drifted toward uncritical acceptance of the Nazi regime, pointing to a letter in which Rommel described the German Wehrmacht as "the sword of the new German world view". During a visit to Switzerland that year, he reported that Swiss soldiers showed "remarkable understanding of our Jewish problem". Biographer Daniel Allen Butler noted that Rommel shared the view, then common in Germany and elsewhere, that Jewish people were loyal to themselves rather than to their nations. Yet other evidence shows he regarded Nazi racial theories as rubbish.

  The picture that emerges from multiple sources is contradictory. He repeatedly clashed with SA members in Goslar who terrorised Jews and dissidents. His son Manfred later told Stuttgarter Nachrichten that their family knew about discrimination but could not foresee the scale of what was coming. Uri Avnery noted that even as a low-ranking officer Rommel protected Jews in his district. Yet Rommel also requested proof of Aryan descent from the Italian boyfriend of his illegitimate daughter Gertrud.

  In February 1937 Hitler assigned Rommel as War Ministry liaison to the Hitler Youth for military training. There he clashed with Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach over which organisation should control the boys' training. Rommel twice proposed plans that would have subordinated the Hitler Youth to the Wehrmacht. Schirach appealed to Hitler, and Rommel was quietly removed from the project in 1938. In October of that year Hitler personally requested that Rommel command his escort battalion, the Führerbegleitbataillon, which accompanied Hitler whenever he travelled outside Germany. Rommel wrote to his wife that Hitler possessed a "magnetic, maybe hypnotic, strength" rooted in Hitler's conviction that he had been "called upon by God".

• 4. Ghost Division in France

  ›

  On the 10th of February 1940, Rommel took command of the 7th Panzer Division, which had been converted to an armoured force of 218 tanks in three battalions, supported by two rifle regiments, a motorcycle battalion, an engineer battalion, and an anti-tank battalion. He had lobbied hard for the posting; the army's personnel office had offered him a mountain division instead. He got the panzer command because Hitler backed him, along with army commander Wilhelm List and likely Heinz Guderian.

  When the invasion began on the 10th of May 1940, Rommel drove to the Meuse by the third day only to find the bridges destroyed. He brought up tanks and anti-aircraft units to suppress French fire, had nearby houses set alight to create a smokescreen, sent infantry across in rubber boats, commandeered bridging equipment from the 5th Panzer Division, grabbed a light machine gun to fight off a French counterattack, and went into the water himself to help lash pontoons together. By the 17th of May his forces had taken 10,000 prisoners at a cost of 36 men.

  By the 20th of May he had reached Arras. After the British counterattack there was repulsed, the 7th Panzer pressed north toward Lille, whose French garrison of 40,000 surrendered on the 31st of May. Rommel then drove the Seine, advancing 100 kilometres in two days toward Rouen. On the 10th of June, near Dieppe, he sent his corps commander the message: "Am on the coast". On the 17th of June, 7th Panzer advanced 240 kilometres in 24 hours toward Cherbourg, whose French garrison surrendered after two days of shelling.

  The division's habit of outrunning both the enemy and its own high command earned it the nickname Gespensterdivision, the ghost division. At the end of the campaign it had lost 2,160 men and 42 tanks while capturing more than 100,000 prisoners and destroying or seizing about 450 tanks, vehicles, and guns. Corps commander Kluge considered Rommel's decisions impulsive and accused him of claiming excessive credit by presenting misleading diagrams and failing to acknowledge other units, particularly the Luftwaffe. Those complaints would not be the last.

• 5. The Desert Fox

  ›

  On the 6th of February 1941, Rommel was appointed commander of the Afrika Korps, initially consisting of the 5th Light Division and the 15th Panzer Division. He arrived in Tripoli six days later, sent to shore up Italian forces that had suffered heavy defeats. His orders from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht were to hold a defensive line near Sirte. On the 24th of March, with the 15th Panzer Division not yet present, he launched a limited offensive anyway.

  The campaign that followed brought him the nickname "Desert Fox" in both Allied and German reporting. He took Benghazi on the 3rd of April, pushed east toward Tobruk, and by the 8th of April Axis forces had reoccupied most of Cyrenaica. Tobruk held out, garrisoned by about 36,000 Commonwealth troops under Australian Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead; a surprise assault on the 14th of April failed, and repeated German-Italian attacks over months also failed.

  His methods in the desert were distinctive. He used sandstorms, darkness, and rapid manoeuvre to unsettle the enemy. He flew over the battlefield in a reconnaissance aircraft and directed operations personally from the front. When the British mounted Operation Flipper deep behind German lines to kill him before Operation Crusader, Rommel was indignant that they expected to find his headquarters 250 miles behind the front. Staff officer Mellenthin later cited the Crusader counterattack as an example of how Rommel's habit of personal intervention could leave him out of touch with the wider situation.

  His most decisive success came at Tobruk in June 1942. After the Battle of Gazala broke the British Eighth Army's line and triggered what troops called the "Gazala Gallop" toward Egypt, Rommel assaulted Tobruk on the 20th of June. The garrison, now under South African rather than Australian command, surrendered the next day; around 32,000 Commonwealth troops and substantial supplies were taken. Only at the fall of Singapore earlier that year had more British Commonwealth troops been captured in a single action. On the 22nd of June Hitler promoted Rommel to Generalfeldmarschall.

  The tide reversed at El Alamein. At the Battle of Alam el Halfa, which opened on the 30th of August 1942, Rommel's armour became bogged in unexpected soft ground, came under heavy fire, and ran low on fuel. By the 2nd of September he had broken off the attack. He had suffered nearly 3,000 casualties and lost about 50 tanks, losses he could not replace. He concluded the war in Africa could no longer be won, handed command to General Georg Stumme, and flew to Germany to recover from illness.

  The Second Battle of El Alamein began on the 23rd of October. Stumme died of a heart attack at the front on the 24th, and Rommel was recalled the next day. By the 25th of October, 15th Panzer Division had only 31 operational tanks remaining from an initial 119. On the 2nd of November Montgomery launched Operation Supercharge with a massive artillery barrage. Rommel ordered a withdrawal, Hitler radioed a stand-fast order, and Rommel initially complied. He later called the resulting delay his greatest mistake in Africa. His final offensive, at the Battle of Medenine on the 6th of March 1943, ended after losing 52 tanks against anti-tank defences that had been forewarned by Ultra intercepts. On the 9th of March he returned to Germany for the last time; command of Army Group Africa passed to General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim.

• 6. The Conspiracy Question

  ›

  After Italy, where he argued unsuccessfully for a defensive line north of Rome while Kesselring prevailed with a line south of the city, Rommel was moved to Normandy in November 1943 as General Inspector of the Western Defences. He threw himself into expanding the Atlantic Wall, laying millions of mines, erecting beach obstacles, and installing anti-landing stakes that Allied troops later nicknamed Rommel's asparagus. On the 5th of June 1944 he left France to attend his wife's fiftieth birthday. The Allied landings in Normandy began on the 6th of June.

  On the 17th of July, while returning from a visit to I SS Panzer Corps headquarters, his staff car was strafed by Allied fighters near Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery. The driver lost control, Rommel was thrown from the vehicle, and he suffered severe head and facial injuries, including three skull fractures. He was removed from command.

  His precise role in the 20th of July plot to kill Hitler remains disputed, since most conspirators were killed and documentation is fragmentary. A conversation recorded by British intelligence captures Heinrich Eberbach, in captivity, recalling Rommel telling him, a month before Rommel's own death, that Hitler and his closest associates had to be killed as the only way out for Germany. Papers belonging to Rudolf Hartmann and Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, discovered in 2018, include an account of a meeting between Rommel and Stülpnagel in May 1944 and photographs of a resistance gathering that included Rommel at Mareil-Marly. Stuttgart mayor Karl Strölin stated after the war that he, Stülpnagel, and Alexander von Falkenhausen approached Rommel in early 1944, and that Rommel agreed in February to support the resistance.

  At least initially Rommel opposed assassination, fearing it would trigger civil war and create a martyr cult; he preferred arrest and trial. He did not attempt to seize Hitler at their meeting on the 17th of June at Wolfsschlucht II, though that operation would in any case have been unlikely to succeed. On the 15th of July he wrote Hitler a letter describing it as a last chance to end hostilities with the Western Allies and urging him to "draw the proper conclusions without delay".

  After the plot failed on the 20th of July, mass arrests followed. The badly wounded Stülpnagel repeatedly muttered Rommel's name before attempting suicide. Under torture, Caesar von Hofacker also named Rommel as involved. On the 27th of September Martin Bormann submitted a memorandum to Hitler stating that Stülpnagel, Hofacker, and other defendants had testified that Rommel knew of the assassination plan and had promised to serve the new government. Gestapo surveillance of Rommel's home in Ulm followed.

• 7. The Choice at Herrlingen

  ›

  Two generals from Hitler's headquarters, Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel, arrived at Rommel's home on the 14th of October 1944. Burgdorf laid out three options. Rommel could defend himself before Hitler in Berlin, but refusal to go would be taken as admission of guilt. He could face Roland Freisler's People's Court, a proceeding that amounted to a guaranteed death sentence, with the additional consequence that his family would suffer and his staff would be arrested and executed. Or he could choose suicide; in that case the government would announce he had died a hero, bury him with full military honours, and guarantee his family pensions. Burgdorf had brought a cyanide capsule.

  Rommel chose suicide. Wearing his Afrika Korps jacket and carrying his field marshal's baton, he got into Burgdorf's car, driven by SS-Stabsscharführer Heinrich Doose, and was driven away from the village. Doose and Maisel walked away from the car, leaving Rommel with Burgdorf. Five minutes later Burgdorf gestured them back. Doose noticed Rommel slumped over. He died before reaching the Wagner-Schule field hospital.

  The official announcement stated he had died from a heart attack or cerebral embolism resulting from the skull fractures he had suffered when his staff car was strafed in Normandy. Hitler ordered a day of mourning. Rommel was given a state funeral, held in Ulm rather than Berlin as he had requested; Hitler sent Field Marshal Rundstedt as his representative, though Rundstedt did not know the actual cause of death.

  The truth became known to the Allies when intelligence officer Charles Marshall interviewed Rommel's widow, and from a letter written by his son Manfred in 1945. Rommel's grave is in Herrlingen, a short distance west of Ulm. For decades after the anniversary of his death, veterans of the Africa campaign, including former opponents, gathered there.

• 8. The Myth and the Record

  ›

  Numerous postwar authors portrayed Rommel as an apolitical genius victimised by the Nazi state, a construction historians have called the Rommel myth. His son Manfred served as the longtime mayor of Stuttgart; Stuttgart Airport carries Manfred Rommel's name. The German Army's largest base, the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks at Augustdorf, and a ship of the Lütjens-class destroyer fleet are named in Rommel's honour. Several of his former subordinates, notably Hans Speidel, played central roles in West German rearmament and NATO integration, and Rommel's reputation for conducting a clean war was actively used to smooth reconciliation between West Germany and its former adversaries.

  Military assessments of Rommel divide sharply. Basil Liddell Hart placed him among the great captains of history. Norman Schwarzkopf described him as possessing a feel for the battlefield like no other. Moshe Dayan considered him a model; Ariel Sharon rated his methods superior to Montgomery's. Wesley Clark stated that Rommel's reputation still sets the standard for daring, charismatic leadership. Chinese military leader Sun Li-jen carried the laudatory nickname "Rommel of the East".

  Others are sharply critical of his performance above the tactical level. US major general David T. Zabecki considered his reputation as an operational commander overstated. General Klaus Naumann agreed with historian Charles Messenger that Rommel's repeated violation of the unity of command principle contributed materially to Axis failure in North Africa. Wolf Heckmann called him "the most overrated commander of an army". Critics point to his poor grasp of logistics, his misunderstanding of his theatre's strategic importance to the German High Command, and what Ian Beckett described as a penchant for glory hunting.

  The question of his conduct beyond the battlefield remains open. He did not pass Hitler's Commando Order to his subordinates, and units under his command reported treating captured commandos as regular prisoners of war. He reportedly forbade his son from joining the Waffen-SS after learning of atrocities committed by the Leibstandarte in Italy in 1943. Research by Norman Ohler adds a further complication, arguing that Rommel's behaviour was heavily influenced by Pervitin, which he took in heavy doses; Ohler's term for him is "the Crystal Fox".

  Rommel was among the very few Axis commanders targeted for assassination by Allied planners. Operation Flipper in North Africa in 1941 and Operation Gaff in Normandy in 1944 were both mounted against him, a measure of the threat his opponents believed he represented even as the wars on two continents ground toward their conclusions.