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Rommel myth

March 17, 2024

The Rommel myth, or the Rommel legend, is a phrase used by a number of historians for the common depictions of German Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel as an apolitical, brilliant commander and a victim of Nazi Germany due to his presumed participation in the 20 July plot against Adolf Hitler, which led to Rommel's forced suicide in 1944. According to these historians, who take a critical view of Rommel, such depictions are not accurate.

The description of Rommel as a brilliant commander started in 1941, with Rommel's participation, as a component of Nazi propaganda to praise the Wehrmacht and instill optimism in the German public. It was picked up and disseminated in the West by the British war-time press as the Allies sought to explain their continued inability to defeat the Axis forces in North Africa: the genius of Rommel was used by dissenters to protest against social inequality within the British Army and by leaders like Churchill to reduce class tensions.[n 1]

Following the war, the Western Allies, and particularly the British, depicted Rommel as the "good German" and "our friend Rommel", adhering closely to the tenets of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. His reputation for conducting a clean war was used in the interests of West German rearmament during the Cold War and the reconciliation between the former enemies—the United Kingdom and the United States on one side, and the new Federal Republic of Germany on the other. The 1950 biography Rommel: The Desert Fox and the 1953 publication of The Rommel Papers added to the myth, which has proven resilient to critical examination.

This reevaluation has produced new interpretations of Rommel, including his relationship with Nazism, his abilities as an operational and strategic level commander, and his role in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Historians and commentators conclude that Rommel remains an ambiguous figure, not easily definable either inside or outside the myth.

Terminology edit

Early authors such as Desmond Young and Basil Liddell Hart mention "the Rommel legend" in their respective books. Liddell Hart described British efforts to make counterpropaganda against Rommel's military reputation (while showing respect to his conduct of war): "Thus the British commanders and headquarter staffs were compelled to make strenuous efforts to dispel 'the Rommel legend'".[2][3] As early as 1950, the 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein's former deputy referred to the "myth" in an article titled "The Rommel Myth Debunked" where he aimed to address perceived misconceptions regarding the fighting in the North African Campaign.[4]

As used by German authors, Mythos Rommel (roughly translated into English as "Rommel myth") is a neutral description, as can be seen in works by historians such as Peter Lieb.[5] The term recognizes, per Lieb, that "Rommel is and remains a Mythos ... He could not be stuck in a single drawer. At any rate, one should decide for oneself whether one sees him as a role model or not".[6] German authors who use the word "Mythos" in this neutral manner include Maurice Philip Remy [de], Wolfram Pyta [de],[7] Jörg Echternkamp,[8] Guido Knopp,[9] and Sandra Mass.[10]

Origins edit

The origins of the myth can be found first in Generalfeldmarschall Rommel's drive for success as a young officer in World War I, and then in his popular 1937 book Infanterie Greift An (Infantry Attacks), which was written in a style that diverged from the German military literature of the time. The book became a bestseller and was supposedly read by Adolf Hitler.[11][12]

Historian Antony Beevor places the start of the "Rommel legend" on 13 May 1940, during the Battle of France, when Rommel's troops crossed the Meuse under fire and established bridgeheads at Houx and Dinant.[13]

According to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the original reason that led to Rommel's high reputation in foreign countries was that people in Allied countries heard that he treated the captured soldiers well.[14]

In Nazi and Allied propaganda edit

See also: Nazi propaganda and British propaganda during World War II
 
Rommel at the Paris victory parade, June 1940. Rommel had access to Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels via Karl Hanke, who served under Rommel in 1940.[15]

Rommel's victories in France were featured in the German press and in the February 1941 film Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West), in which he personally helped direct a segment reenacting the crossing of the River Somme.[16] Rommel's victories in 1941 were played up by Nazi propaganda, even though his successes in North Africa were achieved in Germany's least strategically valued theatre of the war.[12][n 2] In November 1941, Joseph Goebbels (head of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda) wrote about his intention to have Rommel "elevated to a kind of popular hero". Rommel, with his innate abilities as a military commander and love of the spotlight, was a perfect fit for the role Goebbels designed for him.[12]

In North Africa Rommel received help in cultivating his image from Alfred Ingemar Berndt, a senior official at the Reich Propaganda Ministry, who had volunteered for military service.[20] Seconded by Goebbels, Berndt was assigned to Rommel's staff and became one of his closest aides. Berndt often acted as liaison between Rommel, the Propaganda Ministry and the Führer Headquarters. He directed Rommel's photo shoots and filed radio dispatches describing the battles.[21][22]

In the spring of 1941 Rommel's name began to appear in the British media. In the autumn of 1941 and early winter of 1941/1942 he was mentioned in the British press almost daily. The Daily Express and The Cairns Post wrote: "No 'von' nonsense about Erich, nor the code of conduct—such as it was—that most Prussian officers have honoured in war. He is a gangster general, trained in a harder school than Chicago. He was Hitler's thug organiser before he came to power ... So Erich became leader of the S.S. Black Guard, Hitler's private army, which executes his private revenges and guards his person ... When at last Poland made a stand for democracy, it was Rommel who led a panzer corps against the Polish horse cavalry with conspicuous gallantry. Later in France Hitler made him a Knight of the Iron Cross for breaking through the Maginot Line at Maubeuge with the 7th Armoured Division. True, French resistance was almost at an end then, but Erich was entitled to his decoration, too."[23][24] Toward the end of the year, the Reich propaganda machine also used Rommel's successes in Africa as a diversion from the Wehrmacht's challenging situation in the Soviet Union with the stall of Operation Barbarossa.[25][26][n 3]

The American press soon began to take notice of Rommel as well, following the United States' entry into the war on 11 December 1941, writing that: "The British ... admire him because he beat them and were surprised to have beaten in turn such a capable general".[27] General Claude Auchinleck distributed a directive to his commanders seeking to dispel the notion that Rommel was a "superman".[28] The Battle of Kasserine Pass during the Tunisian Campaign intensified the GIs' admiration towards Rommel. The cult of personality was so strong that, according to Peter Schrijvers, "for the remainder of the war, German POWs would part with pictures of Rommel as reluctantly as GIs were eager to get them".[29] While Allied troops respected Rommel, civilians held the "widely accepted" negative image of Rommel's origin and his connection with the Nazis.[30] As described by Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck (who debunked the invented story) and The New York Times in 1943, "It has been said that Rommel started his career as a Hitler hoodlum and owes his quick rise to his early collaboration with Himmler."[30][31] This line of propaganda perpetuated until the war ended.[32] According to Atkinson, to counter the "perverse chivalry" ("war without hate", in Rommel's words) that Rommel promoted, the British and American authorities instituted hate training and tried to raise the eagerness to kill the enemies by stressing enemy brutality, as well as spattering slaughterhouse blood in assault training courses.[33] General John Strawson notes the same difference in attitudes to war between the leaderships of the two sides.[34]

The attention of the Western and especially the British press thrilled Goebbels, who wrote in his diary in early 1942: "Rommel continues to be the recognised darling of even the enemies' news agencies".[35] Rommel was pleased by the media attention, both domestic and foreign, often discussing it in letters to his wife.[35][n 4] Hitler took note of the British propaganda as well, commenting in the summer of 1942 that Britain's leaders must have hoped "to be able to explain their defeat to their own nation more easily by focusing on Rommel".[36]

Rommel was the German commander most frequently covered in the German media, and the only one to be given a press conference, which took place in October 1942.[22][37] The press conference was moderated by Goebbels and was attended by both domestic and foreign media. Rommel declared: "Today we ... have the gates of Egypt in hand, and with the intent to act!" Keeping the focus on Rommel distracted the German public from Wehrmacht losses elsewhere as the tide of the war began to turn. He became a symbol that was used to reinforce the German public's faith in an ultimate Axis victory.[38]

Military reverses edit

In the wake of the British victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, and other military reverses, the Propaganda Ministry directed the media to emphasise Rommel's invincibility. The charade was maintained until the spring of 1943, even as the German situation in Africa became increasingly precarious. In May 1943, to ensure that the inevitable defeat in Africa would not be associated with Rommel's name, Goebbels had the Supreme High Command announce that Rommel was on a two-month leave for health reasons.[39][n 5] Instead, the campaign was presented by Berndt, who resumed his role in the Propaganda Ministry, as a ruse to tie down the British Empire while Germany was turning Europe into an impenetrable fortress, with Rommel at the helm of this success. After the radio program ran in May 1943, Rommel sent Berndt a case of cigars as a sign of his gratitude.[39]

 
One of the many Nazi propaganda photographs of Rommel's inspection tours along the Atlantic Wall.

Although Rommel then entered a period without a significant command,[41] he remained a household name in Germany, synonymous with the aura of invincibility.[42] Hitler then made Rommel part of his defensive strategy for "Fortress Europe" (Festung Europa) by sending him to the West to inspect fortifications along the Atlantic Wall. Goebbels supported the decision, noting in his diary that Rommel was "undoubtedly the suitable man" for the task. The propaganda minister expected the move to reassure the German public, and at the same time to have a negative impact on the Allied forces' morale.[42]

In France, a Wehrmacht propaganda company frequently accompanied Rommel on his inspection trips to document his work for both domestic and foreign audiences.[43][44] In May 1944, the German newsreels reported on Rommel's speech at a Wehrmacht conference, where he stated his conviction that "every single German soldier will make his contribution against the Anglo-American spirit that it deserves for its criminal and bestial air war campaign against our homeland." The speech led to an upswing in morale and sustained confidence in Rommel.[45]

When Rommel was seriously wounded on 17 July 1944, the Propaganda Ministry undertook efforts to conceal the injury so as not to undermine domestic morale. Despite this, the news leaked to the British press. To counteract the rumours of a serious injury and even death, Rommel was required to appear at a press conference held on 1 August. On 3 August, the German press published an official report that Rommel had been injured in a car accident. Rommel noted in his diary his dismay at this twisting of the truth, belatedly realising how much the Reich propaganda was using him for its own ends.[45]

Post-war edit

Quoting Correlli Barnett ("The Desert War entered the British folk-memory, a source of legend, endlessly re-written as both history and fiction"), the historian Lucio Ceva argues that even though the myth was of British origin, it found its reflections in post-war West Germany.[46] The historian Peter Caddick-Adams suggests that, following his forced suicide, Rommel emerged as the "acceptable face of German militarism, the 'good' German who stood apart from the Nazi regime."[47] The ground was thus fertile for the myth to be reborn after the war, in the interest of the program of the German rearmament and the Allied–West German reconciliation.[26][48]

After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, it became clear to the Americans and the British that a German army would have to be revived to help face off against the Soviet Union. Many former German officers, including Adolf Heusinger and Hans Speidel, who had served on Rommel's staff in France, were convinced that no future West German Army would be possible without the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht. In October 1950, at the behest of West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a group of former senior officers produced the document that later became known as the Himmerod memorandum. Intended as both a planning and a negotiating tool, the document included a key demand for "measures to transform domestic and foreign public opinion" with regards to the German military.[49][50]

Foundational works edit

Rommel's former enemies, especially the British, played a key role in the manufacture and propagation of the myth.[12][51] The German rearmament was highly dependent on the moral rehabilitation that the Wehrmacht needed. The journalist and historian Basil Liddell Hart, an early proponent of these two interconnected initiatives, provided the first widely available source on Rommel in his 1948 book on Hitler's generals, updated in 1951. Portraying Rommel as an outsider to the Nazi regime in the 1948 edition, Liddell Hart concluded the 1951 text with comments on Rommel's "gifts and performance" that "qualified him for a place in the role of the 'Great Captains' of history".[52]

Five Graves to Cairo (film) edit

The 1943 movie Five Graves to Cairo, directed by Billy Wilder, was the only wartime movie that featured a German general as a major character. According to Battistelli, Erich von Stroheim's portrayal of Rommel might "have been far from reality, but it certainly contributed to give rise to Rommel's myth".[53] In June 1943, the magazine Life comments: "It will not win any Academy awards but is an important film for it re-introduces Erich von Stroheim as the screen's arch-villain in a Prussian uniform, this time portraying the Nazi's much-touted Field Marshal Rommel... Forgetting his early caricatures of pompous Prussians, he plays Field Marshal Rommel with much finesse, shows him to be human as well as cunning, brutal and vain."[54] The film "exploits one of the standard wartime German stereotypes, that of the cold, ruthless aristocratic Junker officer",[55] portraying Rommel as a "Wilhelmine officer complete with duelling scars and unbending authority."[56] Film historian Bernard F. Dick remarks that Stroheim's Rommel already had sympathetic traits, too, considering Rommel himself was a person screenwriters found hard to vilify or caricaturize.[57]

Rommel: The Desert Fox edit

Main article: Rommel: The Desert Fox

The other foundational text was the influential and laudatory 1950 biography Rommel: The Desert Fox by Brigadier Desmond Young.[58][5][n 6] Young had served in North Africa in the Indian Army in a public relations capacity, and was once taken prisoner by Rommel's troops.[58] Young interviewed Rommel's widow extensively and worked with several individuals who had been close to him, including Hans Speidel, with Liddell Hart also supporting the project. Speidel had already written in 1946 that he planned to turn Rommel into "the hero of the German people", to give them a positive role model. Rommel was a suitable candidate, since the manner of his death had led to the assumption that he had not been a supporter of Nazism. Young subscribed to this view, subtly conveying that Rommel served the regime, but was not part of it.[48][59] The result was predictably positive, "bordering on hagiography", according to the historian Patrick Major.[59][n 7]

The reception of The Desert Fox in Britain was enthusiastic: the book went through eight editions in a year.[60] Young's biography was another step in the development of the Rommel myth, with Rommel emerging as an active, if not a leading, plotter. Speidel contributed as well, starting, from the early 1950s, to bring up Rommel's and his own role in the plot, thus boosting Speidel's suitability for a future role in the new military force of the Federal Republic, the Bundeswehr, and then in NATO.[61]

The book was not without its detractors. The review in Time magazine noted the legendary status Rommel had achieved in his lifetime and quoted another review that described Rommel as "the British army's favorite German general." The Time reviewer concluded that the book was "just this side of hero worship". Quoting Ernest Bevin, a noted Labour politician, it alluded to the book being an example of the "trade union of generals" in action: Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, in a foreword to the book, honoured Rommel "as a soldier and a man", and Field Marshal Archibald Wavell included him "among the chosen few, among the very brave, the very true". The reviewer noted the obvious admiration Young had for the German generals, and that the book may well "have been written by [one]".[62] Richard Crossman, a Labour MP, objected to the portrayal of Rommel as an anti-Nazi, writing:[63]

As a nation, we deceive ourselves into believing that there are two sorts of Germans—the Good German and the Bad German. The "Bad Germans" are Nazis, militarists, anti-democratic, and perpetrators of atrocities. The "Good Germans" are peace-loving democrats and real gentlemen. Ergo, since Rommel was a clean fighter, he must have been anti-Nazi, and men like him would make good allies of democracy against the Russians.

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper commented that "the danger now is not that 'our friend Rommel' is becoming not a magician or a bogy-man, but too much of a hero". He pointed out Rommel's early proximity to Hitler; he described Rommel as representative of the connection between Nazism and the Wehrmacht and the support that the German officer corps offered for "Hitler's politics and Hitler's war".[64]

The Desert Fox film edit

Main article: The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel

The 1951 film The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, based on Young's biography, portrayed Rommel in a sympathetic way, as a loyal, humane soldier and a firm opponent to Hitler's policies.[65] The film played up Rommel's disputed role in the conspiracy against Hitler,[66] while omitting Rommel's early association with the dictator.[65]

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, under the title "Rommel: A Flattering and Unconvincing Portrait", the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had served in intelligence in North Africa during the war, commented that the film represented "a tendency towards collective schizophrenia whereas ... 'chivalry' towards a captured brigadier is in no wise incompatible with a foreign policy of perfidy and the brutal disregard for all the elementary decencies of civilised behaviour".[63] Critical and public response in the U.S. was muted, but it was a commercial success in Britain, along with a less known 1953 film The Desert Rats, where James Mason reprised his portrayal of Rommel.[67]

The film received nearly universally positive reviews in Britain, while protests at the cinemas broke out in Vienna and Milan. Liddell Hart watched the film with a group of high-ranking British officers and reported being "pleasantly surprised".[68][n 8] Patrick Major argues that the desert war indeed proved a suitable space to effect the reconciliation among the former enemies. The British popular history focused on that theatre of war, almost to the exclusion of all others. He states that The Desert Fox had a "catalytic effect" in creating an image of the German armed forces that would be acceptable to the British public. Rommel was thus successfully integrated into the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.[60] Petra Rau argues that Mason's Rommel (Contrasting with Five Graves to Cairo, Rommel here was presented as representation of British virtues and thus a sympathetic figure), like other "Good Germans" in popular culture, is not portrayed as representative of Germans, but rather, an exceptional case who was surrounded by real Nazis.[69]

The Rommel Papers edit

 
British historian B. H. Liddell Hart's introduction to The Rommel Papers drew comparisons between Rommel and Lawrence of Arabia, "two masters of desert warfare".[70]
Main article: The Rommel Papers

1953 saw the publication of Rommel's writings of the war period as The Rommel Papers, edited by the British journalist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart, the former Wehrmacht officer Fritz Bayerlein, who served on Rommel's staff in North Africa, and Rommel's widow and son. The volume contained an introduction and commentary by Liddell Hart.[71]

The historian Mark Connelly argues that The Rommel Papers was one of the two foundational works that led to a "Rommel renaissance" and "Anglophone rehabilitation", the other being Young's biography.[71] The book contributed to the perception of Rommel as a brilliant commander; in an introduction, Liddell Hart drew comparisons between Rommel and Lawrence of Arabia, "two masters of desert warfare".[70]

Meanwhile, Liddell Hart had a personal interest in the work: by having coaxed Rommel's widow to include material favourable to himself, he could present Rommel as his "pupil" when it came to mobile armoured warfare.[72] Thus, Liddell Hart's "theory of indirect approach" became a precursor to the German blitzkrieg ("lightning war"). The controversy was described by the political scientist John Mearsheimer in his work The Weight of History, who concluded that, by "putting words in the mouths of German Generals and manipulating history", Liddell Hart was in a position to show that he had been at the root of the dramatic German successes in 1940.[73]

Uncritical accounts edit

The trend continued with other uncritical biographies, such as Rommel as Military Commander (1968), by the former British soldier and author Ronald Lewin, and Knight's Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1994), by the former British general David Fraser.[74][75] These works focused on Rommel's military career, depoliticising it and presenting him strictly as a soldier.[76]

In another work on the North African campaign, the 1977 The Life and Death of the Africa Korps, Lewin wrote that it was "necessary to assert that ... the purity of the desert purified the desert war", while Fraser focused on Rommel's battlefield performance and described him as a hero.[76] Fraser's biography remains a work of high reputation,[77][78][79] with Pier Paolo Battistelli praising it for the outstanding handling of the issue of Rommel's myth as well as his life and career in general.[80] However, the work has been criticised by historian Mark Connelly as "encapsulat[ing] the post-1945 hagiographic approach". Connelly offers the example of Fraser's description of Rommel as one of the "great masters of manoeuvre in war", whose personality "transcends time" and "cuts like [a] sabre through the curtains of history".[81]

The historian Patrick Major points out that a recent work, the 2002 book Alamein: War Without Hate by Colin Smith and John Bierman, borrowed the name of Rommel's posthumous memoirs for its subtitle.[76] Connelly includes works by Sir John Squire and General Sir John Hackett in the uncritical tradition.[82] In contrast, German biographies, such as by the journalist Wolf Heckmann, were far less sympathetic.[82]

Elements of the myth edit

Some early authors who wrote about Rommel during the war and post-war biographers use the word "legend" or "myth" when describing various pieces of propaganda and rumours that the Nazi government and the Allied press spread about the life and character of Rommel. These rumours usually ignored his middle-class background and highlighted his connection with the lower classes and his early adherence to National Socialism or Hitler, using several invented anecdotes.[2][83][84][n 9] The most notable of these, according to Charles F. Marshall, was that Rommel was a storm trooper (which was designed by Nazi propaganda to show "what heights a storm trooper could claim" and promote the impression of Rommel as an ardent Nazi supporter at the same time), that several American encyclopaedias still published a decade after the war.[86]

 
An iconic picture of Rommel as the "Common Man", helping to free up his staff car alongside his men.[87]

According to the historian Mark Connelly, Young and Liddell Hart laid the foundation for the Anglo-American myth, which consisted of three themes: Rommel's ambivalence towards Nazism; his military genius; and the emphasis of the chivalrous nature of the fighting in North Africa.[71] Their works lent support to the image of the "clean Wehrmacht" and were generally not questioned, since they came from British authors, rather than German revisionists.[88][n 10] The leading German news magazine Der Spiegel describes the myth as "Gentleman warrior, military genius".[90][n 11]

According to Watson, the most dominant element in the Rommel myth is Rommel the Superior Soldier, the second being Rommel the Common Man, and the last one Rommel the Martyr.[87] Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck, writing in 1943, also takes note of the image of the general who fought with common soldiers, with an indelible youthfulness and apparent invulnerability.[91]

Historian Sandra Mass considers the Rommel myth a hero cult, a synthesis of old and new hero cults and traditions culled primarily from Germany's largely imaginary colonial past, in particular the proletarian hero cult originally represented by Carl Peters and the bourgeois one represented by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Rommel, as portrayed by this hero cult, was both chivalrous and ruthless, young and old, harsh and gentle, strong and righteous.[92] Calder, Duffy and Ricci opine that Rommel's military brilliance provoked a masochistic tendency to romanticise a worthy opponent, that because he was skilled at his profession, he must have been an anti-Nazi hero.[93][94]

Reevaluation edit

Post-1990s scholarship examined Rommel's attitude towards National Socialism, his performance as a military commander, his role in the 20 July plot and his motivations, leading to a more diverse range of interpretations of Rommel and the elements of the myth.[citation needed]

Relationship with National Socialism edit

See also: Nazism and the Wehrmacht
 
Adolf Hitler, accompanied by Rommel (far left), inspects the troops in Goslar, 1934. This was the first meeting between the two men.[95]

Rommel was not a member of the Nazi Party.[96] However, like other Wehrmacht officers, he welcomed Hitler's seizure of power.[97][98] During his time in Goslar, he clashed with those Sturmabteilung (SA) men who attacked the Jews and others who supported them. Rommel thus showed sympathy towards Hitler's elimination of the SA, believing the worst was now over, although he opined that in the future the Führer should learn to see his own true strength and refrain from such illegal processes.[99][100] Remy dated Rommel's support for Hitler as 1935, noting a speech in which Rommel praised Hitler for restoring the Germans' self-respect and establishment of the way towards an honourable and righteous peace, as well as efforts in alleviating the disadvantaged people's problems.[99]

The historians Ralf Georg Reuth, David T. Zabecki, Bruce Allen Watson and Peter Caddick-Adams, state that Rommel was one of Hitler's favorite generals and that his close relationship with the dictator benefited both his inter-war and war-time career.[101][102][98] Robert Citino describes Rommel as "not apolitical" and writes that he owed his career to Hitler, to whom his attitude was "worshipful", while the historian Charles Messenger describes Rommel's "growing admiration" towards Hitler following the invasion of Poland.[22][103][n 12] Speaking at The National WWII Museum's 2012 International Conference on World War II, the author Nigel Hamilton referred to Rommel as "quite a Nazi".[105] This sympathy did not extend to the Party though. In this regard, he was similar to many other Wehrmacht soldiers, who, with encouragement from Hitler, erroneously believed the army to be the most important element of the regime.[106] Rommel showed particular resentment towards the SA and later, the SS, for their brutality and absorption of resources and personnel.[100]

The historian Alaric Searle recasts Rommel's early involvement with the Nazi regime, including his role as a liaison between Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht. Young's biography had described Rommel's role in strictly military terms and alluded to a falling out between him and the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach on ideological grounds. In fact, Rommel had twice proposed a plan that would have subordinated Hitler Youth to the army, removing it from the NSDAP control. That went against Schirach's wishes, resulting in Rommel's quiet removal from the project. Searle describes as "patently false" another of Young's assertions, namely that Rommel first became close to Hitler because Hitler had read Infantry Attacks and wanted to meet the author in the fall of 1938. This casts doubt on the rest of Young's narrative as it pertains to Rommel's relationship with the dictator.[107] Searle writes that, by this time, "Like many other front-line officers, with little awareness of the military planning underway, Rommel was simply trying to carry out his orders."[107] Remy points out that the incident of Rommel using tanks to protect a journey of Hitler, which has been used by Reuth and Irving to prove that Rommel came to Hitler's attention in 1936, actually happened in 1939. In 1936, according to Remy, Rommel was only a part of the elaborate spectacle that welcomed Hitler, and there was no evidence for the interaction between the two.[108]

 
Rommel, to the right of Hitler from the perspective of the camera, in Poland, September 1939. During the campaign, Rommel enjoyed close proximity to the dictator.[109]

Searle argues that Rommel not only "found favor with the Nazi regime, but ... was delighted with the preferential treatment he was receiving", including access to Hitler during the 1939 invasion of Poland. During the campaign, Rommel served as commander of the Führerbegleitbrigade battalion, tasked with guarding Hitler and his field headquarters. He attended Hitler's daily war briefings and had opportunities for one-on-one conversations with the dictator, which he proudly reported in letters to his wife. In a sign that he "lost touch with reality", as Searle puts it, Rommel wrote to his wife in October 1939 from the devastated Warsaw, where he was organising a victory parade: "There has been no water, no power, no gas, no food for two days. They have erected numerous barricades which blocked civilian movement and exposed people to bombardments from which they could not escape. The mayor estimated the number of the dead and injured to be 40,000 ... The inhabitants probably drew a breath of relief that we have arrived and rescued them."[109][110]

In 1939, Rommel received a promotion from Hitler to the rank of Generalmajor ahead of more senior officers. Showalter notes that even at this early stage, Hitler already regarded Rommel as a model for the fusion of Germany's new and old orders.[111] With an intervention by Hitler, Rommel was subsequently able to obtain command of an armoured (Panzer) division despite having been turned down by the army's personnel office, which had offered him command of a mountain division. Rommel's unprofessional conduct was noted by his fellow officers and added to his growing reputation as one of Hitler's favoured commanders.[98][101] After the Fall of France, Rommel sent to him a specially prepared diary on the 7th Division and received a letter of thanks.[112] Unknown to Rommel though, Hitler had barely looked at his diary and the letter was written by an adjutant. Remy remarks that by this time, Hitler still did not treat Rommel as a significantly important person.[113]

When Rommel was being considered for appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Army in the summer of 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary that Rommel "is ideologically sound, is not just sympathetic to the National Socialists. He is a National Socialist; he is a troop leader with a gift for improvisation, personally courageous and extraordinarily inventive. These are the kinds of soldiers we need."[102]

 
Rommel and Hitler in 1942. According to Rick Atkinson, Rommel was known as "the Führer's marshal".[114]

Rommel "exercised an almost hypnotic influence on Hitler", according to Albert Kesselring,[115] and another colleague called him "the Führer's marshal". American writer Rick Atkinson concludes that Rommel was "loyal in his own fashion and as beguiled by Hitler as steel filings by a magnet ... Hitler was a bulwark against bolshevism, [Rommel] had told staff officers."[114] Despite this intimate relationship, he was not provided with basic information on Germany's strategic plan: "Rommel did not know that smashing the Soviet Union and major territorial acquisitions in the East would be the cornerstone of this plan. Nor did Rommel realise that Hitler saw no conflict of interest between Germany and the maritime power Great Britain, which he hoped to make an ally."[116] He also had only a week's warning before the launch of Case White at the start of 1943.[117] Messenger argues that Rommel's attitude towards Hitler changed only after the Allied invasion of Normandy, when Rommel came to realise that the war could not be won.[103]

Historian Thomas Vogel opines that Rommel was not a Nazi, if one uses the definition the Nazis themselves used, considering that although he did everything in his power to make his country strong again, he showed no support towards the racial policies or other aspects of the regime.[118][119]

Operational and strategic level commander edit

British military and political figures contributed to the heroic image of the man as Rommel resumed offensive operations in January 1942 against the British forces weakened by redeployments to the Far East. Speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill addressed the British defeats and described Rommel as an "extraordinary bold and clever opponent" and a "great field commander".[28][27] The trend continued after the war following the publication of The Desert Fox, which also portrays staff officers like Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl and Franz Halder, who opposed Rommel on strategic issues, as having ulterior motives in smearing him.[2] Former military opponents in Britain described Rommel as a brilliant commander and a resistance fighter, the "good German", with one senior military figure comparing Rommel to legendary military leader Belisarius. The praise led Bernard Montgomery's former deputy, Brian Horrocks, to argue in his 1950 article "The Rommel Myth Debunked" that the Eighth Army beat Rommel's Afrika Korps "fair and square".[4] In 1977, Martin van Creveld started the reevaluation of Malta's impact on supply situations[120] and concluded that Rommel was largely responsible for his supply problems (caused by overextended supply lines which prevented the Afrika Korps from receiving the supplies that the Italians were able to provide in adequate numbers). According to Creveld, the capacity of Libyan ports were too small and the distances to be overcome too great for Rommel to advance a more ambitious plan than Hitler's original one of defending a limited area.[121]

Certain modern historians, such as Larry T. Addington, Niall Barr and Robert Citino, are skeptical of Rommel as an operational, let alone strategic, level commander. They point to Rommel's lack of appreciation for Germany's strategic situation, his misunderstanding of the relative importance of his theatre to the German High Command, his poor grasp of logistical realities, and, according to the historian Ian Beckett, his "penchant for glory hunting".[122][22] Citino credits Rommel's limitations as an operational level commander as "materially contributing" to the eventual demise of the Axis forces in North Africa,[22][n 13] Meanwhile, Addington focuses on Rommel's disobedience and struggle over the North Africa strategy, whereby his initial brilliant success resulted in "catastrophic effects" for Germany in this theatre of war.[123]

The historian Geoffrey P. Megargee refers to Rommel as a "talented tactical leader", but points out his playing the German and Italian command structures against each other to his advantage. Rommel used the confused structure of the OKW (Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht), the OKH (Supreme High Command of the Army) and the Comando Supremo (Italian Supreme Command) to disregard orders that he disagreed with or to appeal to whatever authority he felt would be most sympathetic to his requests.[124] Rommel often went directly to Hitler with his needs and concerns, taking advantage of the favoritism that the Führer displayed towards him and adding to the German High Command's distrust of him.[125]

Military practitioners have also questioned Rommel's abilities at the operational level. While nearly all acknowledge Rommel's excellent tactical skills and personal bravery, many officers came to accept that Rommel was "possibly the most overrated commander of an army in world history", writes U.S. major general and military historian David T. Zabecki of the United States Naval Institute, quoting the opinion of Wolf Heckmann. Zabecki notes that Rommel's brilliant tactical moves were logistically unsustainable, which eventually led to a strategic defeat.[101][n 14] General Klaus Naumann, who served as Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr, agrees with Charles Messenger that Rommel had challenges on the operational level, and states that Rommel's violation of the unity of command principle, bypassing the chain of command in Africa, was unacceptable.[126][n 15]

Some historians, such as Zabecki and Peter Lieb, also take issue with Rommel's absence from Normandy on the day of the Allied invasion, 6 June 1944. He had left France on 5 June and was at home on the 6th celebrating his wife's birthday. Rommel planned to proceed to see Hitler the next day to discuss the situation in Normandy.[101][127][128] Zabecki calls his decision to leave the theatre in view of an imminent invasion "an incredible lapse of command responsibility".[101]

More sympathetic authors point out complex situations that Rommel had to face. Brian Hanley, from USNI's Editorial Board of Directors, comments that Rommel was beaten the moment he arrived in Africa, considering the Allied troops outnumbered the Afrika Korps and they worked under a much more straightforward chain of command, while orders sent from Berlin to North Africa were rarely kept confidential. Hanley sees Rommel turning German and Italian military authorities against each other as turning liabilities into advantages and that he repeatedly created operational miracles that made a strategic investment in the Africa theatre attractive in 1942. Also, according to Hanley, if Rommel stood still, his enemy's strength would accumulate while his own, depending on an uncertain supply line, would diminish, thus he needed the British stocks of supply to deal with his logistical problems.[129]

Daniel Allen Butler writes that if Rommel was not a formally trained strategist, he developed himself into one, becoming able to grasp strategic opportunities that others missed. Starting as a compulsive commander who imperilled his command, and his superiors' plans in Africa, he realized that his opponent's army was the main objective and not the mere holding of territory. Butler writes that it was unfair to blame Rommel considering that he had been kept ignorant of Operation Barbarossa. Butler also questions the need to obey his superiors' higher strategy, considering that Hitler never had a coherent grand strategy.[130] Reinhard Stumpf [de] opines that Rommel actually had approval of his German (and later Italian) superiors (including Hitler and the High Command) in conducting the Afrika Korps as a mobile striking force and for his offensives. With such a weak force, he came to depend on an automaticity (that required constant successful attacks) that ceased to function once he gradually lost equipment superiority, air cover and good intelligence (which, in combination with good leadership, allowed the possibility to offset numerical inferiority to some extent). This applied also in the case of Malta: even if the island had been captured, the army's condition would not have been improved immediately, but holding the ground meant Rommel would lose the initiative forever.[131] According to Maurice Remy, Rommel should not be blamed regarding strategic matters, considering Hitler and Mussolini had prepared the African offensive strategy from the beginning, despite the warnings of Brauchitsch and Halder regarding the planned invasion of Russia (that Rommel was not informed of). As the African campaign progressed, Rommel became aware of the strategic and supply situation, but his superiors (among them Kesselring) continued to ask him to advance further and promise that the supplies would reach the battlefield in time. Like Hanley and Stumpf, Remy saw Rommel's successes as working against him: his superiors assumed that despite his constant requests for more forces and supplies, he could manage with the minimum.[132] Remy also opines that Rommel's plan for the defence of the Atlantic coastline was the correct one, although he too made a mistake in seeing Calais as the main landing zone.[133]

Others like Stroud, Krause and Phillips opine that even Rommel's recklessness and disobedience during the invasion of France benefitted the German cause, while rescuing Hitler's mercurial objectives and inventing the actual application of Blitzkrieg ("lightning war"), and it was Hitler who downgraded strategic victory to operational victory.[134][135] According to Alan J. Levine, contrary to the allegation that he was only a genius tactician without a good grasp of logistics, Rommel was a clearer thinker than most of his colleagues (shown by his judgements on developing situations) and although he was the most defeatist German general, there was a serious qualification to his pessimism and he was capable of displaying a surprising amount of energy in building the Normandy defense at the same time.[136]

MacGregor Knox, whose works draw largely on Italian sources, opines that rather than technical and expertise weaknesses, effectiveness in war ultimately depends on culture, the command style and ethos, which in turn breed technological imagination and force structure. He points out that the few Italian mobile units fighting together with the Afrika Korps benefitted from working under Rommel, who helped them cope with rapidly changing situations in a war without fixed fronts, despite interference from Ettore Bastico.[137] Marvin Knorr expresses a sympathetic view of Rommel's attitude to the General Staff, saying that their attitudes towards officers of middle class like him made it understandable that he was wary about them, and worried that the officers they sent to him would report on him or try to take over. Despite this, he came to trust and depend on these staff officers, like Friedrich von Mellenthin and Siegfried Westphal, who in turn proved their talent and loyalty.[138] Rick Atkinson acknowledges Rommel's "audacity, tactical brilliance, and personal style", also noting that he "had an uncanny ability to dominate the minds of his adversaries".[139]

Some authors like Stumpf and Lewin opine that while Creveld's statistics regarding the losses of supplies are not wrong and that the vast distances were a big problem, the failure of the seaborne supply lines was still a deciding factor because operationally effective supplies often failed to arrive at decisive moments of the campaigns.[140][141] Douglas Austin points out that the overall port capacity at Tobruk and Benghazi was actually sufficient and that the recently published Enigma intercepts show that it was the bulk losses at sea (and not unloading or getting the supplies to forward areas) that had the greater impact on Rommel's decisions as well as those of other German commanders, like Kesselring.[142] Levine dismisses poor port capacity and lack of transport vehicles as the Afrika Korps' crucial weaknesses, citing evidences gathered on British intelligence by Hinsley and Bennett.[143] Others point out Rommel's dependence on captured resources as compensation for the unstable supply lines and unfulfilled promises (by 1942, 85% of his transport were captured vehicles).[144][145] Butler opines that the myth of Rommel's bad logistical management is the result of rumours started by Halder.[145] Lieb also opines that while his harshest critics (who mostly came from the General Staff) often said that Rommel was overrated or not suitable for higher commands, envy was a big factor here (Simon Ball also notes that this was the single group of people in the postwar West who had an interest in denigrating Rommel, who had never been one of them, while he opines that various elements in English and German post-war government and military circles had an interest in praising him as well).[146][147]

Role in the 20 July plot edit

Main article: 20 July plot

The extent of Rommel's involvement in the military's resistance against Hitler or 20 July plot is difficult to ascertain, as people most directly involved did not survive, and limited documentation of the conspirators' plans and preparations exists. Thus, Rommel's participation remains ambiguous, and the perception of it largely has its source in subsequent events (especially Rommel's forced suicide) and the post-war accounts by surviving participants.[148]

According to a post-war account by Karl Strölin, the Oberbürgermeister of Stuttgart at that time, he and two other conspirators, Alexander von Falkenhausen and Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, began efforts to bring Rommel into the anti-Hitler conspiracy in early 1944.[149] On 15 April 1944, Rommel's new chief of staff, Hans Speidel, arrived in Normandy and reintroduced Rommel to Stülpnagel.[150] Speidel had previously been connected to Carl Goerdeler, the civilian leader of the resistance, but not to the plotters led by Stauffenberg, and only came to the attention of Stauffenberg due to his appointment to Rommel's headquarters. The conspirators felt they needed the support of a field marshal on active duty, and gave instructions to Speidel to bring Rommel into their circle.[151]

Speidel met with former foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath and Strölin on 27 May in Germany, ostensibly at Rommel's request, although the latter was not present. Neurath and Strölin suggested opening immediate surrender negotiations with the West, and, according to Speidel, Rommel agreed to further discussions and preparations.[152] However, around the same time the plotters in Berlin were not aware that Rommel had reportedly decided to take part in the conspiracy. On 16 May, they informed Allen Dulles, through whom they hoped to negotiate with the Western Allies, that Rommel could not be counted on for support.[153]

Rommel opposed assassinating Hitler. After the war, his widow maintained that Rommel believed an assassination attempt would spark a civil war.[154] Historian Ian Beckett argues that "there is no credible evidence that Rommel had more than limited and superficial knowledge of the plot" and concludes that Rommel would not have acted to aid the plotters on 20 July,[148] while Ralf Georg Reuth contends that "there was no indication of any active participation of Rommel in the conspiracy".[155] Historian Richard J. Evans concluded that he knew of a plot, but was not involved.[156]

What is not debated are the results of the failed bomb plot of 20 July. Many conspirators were arrested, and the dragnet expanded to thousands.[157] Consequently, it did not take long for Rommel to come under suspicion, beginning with evidence the SS obtained from Stülpnagel who mentioned Rommel in delirium after his suicide attempt.[158][159][160][161] Rommel's name also came up in confessions by Stülpnagel's personal adviser, Caesar von Hofacker, and was included in Goerdeler's papers on a list of potential supporters.[162][163] The author and cinematographer Maurice Philip Remy [de] discovered a memo from Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, dating from 28 September 1944 in which the Chief of the Party Chancellery, and Personal Secretary to Hitler, stated that "former General Stülpnagel, former Colonel Hofacker, Kluge's meanwhile executed nephew Lieutenant-Colonel Rathgens and other defendants still alive gave all testimony that Field-Marshal Rommel was indeed in the picture; Rommel agreed that he would be at the new government's disposal after a successful plot".[164]

According to eavesdropped conversations between German generals in British captivity, edited by the historian Sönke Neitzel, General Heinrich Eberbach, the former commander of the 5th Panzer Army, claimed on 14 September 1944 that Rommel had told him in Normandy, just a few days before the plot, that Hitler and his entourage would have to be killed, if there was any chance for Germany to bring the war to a satisfactory end.[165] Summarising the most recent findings on Rommel's role in the 20 July plot, Peter Lieb concludes that:[166]

[Rommel] did not play any role in the operational preparations for the plot against Hitler and we do not know which post he was supposed to assume after a successful coup. Hence, the Field-Marshal was definitely not part of the most inner circle of the 20 July plotters. At the same time, however, he was more than just a mere sympathiser and paid for this with his life. He consequently deserves a firm place in the military resistance against Hitler to a greater extent than it has recently been acknowledged in academia and in public.[166]

Maurice Remy thinks that the emphasis should be on his plan for a separate peace with the West (his intention was not to continue Hitler's murderous war in the East, but to prevent disasters that might happen to Germany if the Soviet army arrived), which was devised with concrete details and carried out at great personal risk.[167]

Analysis of motivations edit

Rommel was an ambitious man who took advantage of his proximity to Hitler and willingly accepted the propaganda campaigns designed for him by Goebbels.[97] He sought to level the playing field for non-nobles, and also supported militarism and a strong German Empire,[168][169] while treating people only according to their merits.[170] He did not display hatred to people of noble descent, and in fact was a throwback to the medieval knight in his personal traits, appearing well-versed in the ancient customs of chivalry,[171][172][173] which helped to attract admiration from the British who saw in him a romantic archetype.[174] Rommel classed himself as a traditionalist regarding military ethics and a modernist regarding warfare techniques.[175] Citino believes that under the modern veneer, Rommel's story (as well as his style of warfare, including the negative points) was actually the last manifestation of an older Prussian tradition which began with Georg von Derfflinger, in which the lowly outsider (he was not Prussian by birth) chose to serve the Prussian king, in whom alone he put his trust and in whose service he was willing to attract the ill will from all the other powerful people, as had Seydlitz and Ziethen. (Reuth also comments that Rommel tended to blame the people around Hitler for all the bad of the regime while seeing Hitler, the sender of criminal orders, as the source of all that was good).[176][177] Certain authors remark that he also sought military glory and personal recognition, most of all from Hitler on whom, according to Watson, Rommel projected his idea of the German people's will.[168][n 16]

 
Rommel posing for a propaganda photo in North Africa. According to Klaus Naumann, "Rommel was used by the Nazi regime to create a myth. He tolerated this since he had a strong dose of personal ambition and vanity."[97]

A number of contemporaries noted Rommel's vanity. In the memorandum regarding Rommel's betrayal, Martin Bormann remarked, "He had himself photographed from dawn to dusk ... He is so vain he does not wear glasses". (Rommel was near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other.)[178] Historian Samuel Mitcham however, noted that Martin Bormann had held a grudge against the Generalfeldmarschall as far back as 1939.[179] Some modern authors, such as Storbeck, are more sympathetic. He states that Rommel's perceived vanity developed as a reaction to the pressure aristocratic and high-bourgeois colleagues put on him.[180] The psychologist Norman F. Dixon remarks that although Rommel showed towards Hitler an admiration that later faded, he did not display the urge to submit himself to higher authority or powerful father figures, considering that had he been such a person, he would not have been so outspoken or risked himself in the struggle against people like Himmler, Keitel or Jodl.[181] Showalter comments that Rommel was a man who brought his work home, but not to the point of obsession with personal promotions, considering he had spent no effort in building a social circle (his wife was the person who determined their family's social agenda and the guest list, and the circle she chose was not wide nor prominent).[182]

Messenger points out that Rommel had many reasons to be grateful to Hitler, including his interference to arrange for him to receive command of an armoured division, his elevation to the status of a national hero, and continued interest and support from the dictator. Remy states that the attachment to Hitler went much deeper than any gratefulness could explain, and that Hitler had become Rommel's source of motivation.[183] Some, like Randall Hansen,[184] highlight the similarities in background and personality that facilitated the rapport between the two, while others, like Richard Overy, state that Rommel's main appeal to Hitler was that he was everything Hitler was not,[185] while the political scientist Roland Detsch, in a review of Maurice Remy's book, comments that despite Remy's efforts, the strange relationship remains hard to understand.[186] Wolfram Pyta remarks that Hitler did not compete with Rommel for the war leader image because the two complemented each other perfectly. They were similar in the sense that they were the only ones with a cultural presence and objects around whom German society's grand narrative was being built, thus Rommel was the only German general who would have been capable of challenging Hitler's rule, had he ever crossed the Rubicon from his "apolitical-to-the-core" military world and developed a serious, critical view of Hitler's political dealings. However, Rommel himself had fallen for Hitler's charisma almost until the end.[187] Peter Lieb opines that the relationship between Rommel and Hitler is overrated—they liked each other but the relationship became worse and worse since the end of 1942 when Rommel began to see the consequences of Hitler's disastrous leadership as well as recognize the criminal character of the regime. According to Lieb, historians should focus more on Goebbels, whose propaganda built up Rommel.[188] Italian generals considered Rommel apolitical, too: According to Scianna, when Badoglio took over Italy in 1943, the Allies became hopeful that a similar development would happen in Germany with Rommel as head of the new regime, but captured Italian generals rebuked this pipe-dream, telling them that Rommel, unlike other German generals, did not care about politics.[189]

Caddick-Adams writes that Rommel was a "complicated man of many contradictions",[190] while Beckett notes that "Rommel's myth ... has proved remarkably resilient" and that more work is needed to put him in proper historical context.[148] Zabecki concludes that "the blind hero worship ... only distorts the real lessons to be learned from [his] career and battles",[191] and Watson notes that the legend has been a "distraction" that obscured the evolution of Rommel as a military commander and his changing attitudes towards the regime that he served.[192]

John Pimlott writes that Rommel was an impressive military commander who richly deserved his reputation as a leading exponent of mobile warfare, hampered by factors he could not control, although he usually accepted high risks and could become frustrated when forced on the defensive. On the other hand, Pimlott criticises Rommel for only disagreeing with Hitler for strategic reasons and, while accepting that Rommel did give chivalrous tone to his battles in Africa, he points out that this should not be used to ignore the responsibility Rommel must bear for promoting the Nazi cause with vigour.[193] The same sentiment is held by Williamson Murray and Alan Millett who opine that Rommel, contrary to allegations that he was only a competent tactical commander, was the most outstanding battlefield commander of the war, who showed a realistic strategic view despite holding minimal control over strategy. They point out that, "like virtually the entire German officer corps", he was a convinced Nazi.[194] While some, like Scianna, are more critical towards his strategical decisions but also dismiss negative myths such as Rommel's abandonment of his allies.[195]

Cornelia Hecht, the author of the 2008 exhibition named Mythos Rommel and a book of the same name, explains that despite extensive research, it is hard to see who Rommel really was under all the layers of the myth.[196] She comments that she would not describe Rommel as a resistance fighter, although he did support the assassination attempt.[197] Patrick Major describes Rommel as someone who went along with the regime as long as it served his needs, a "fellow traveler rather than a war criminal".[198] Summing up Rommel's career in a 2012 interview with Reuters, the historian Sönke Neitzel states:

On the one hand he didn't commit war crimes that we know of and ordered a retreat at El Alamein despite Hitler's order. But he took huge German casualties elsewhere and he was a servant of the regime. He was not exactly a shining liberal or Social Democrat. Mostly, he was interested in his career.[66]

Historian Reuth observes that the modern German image of Rommel (a result of the Historikerstreit in the 1980s and debates on war guilt during the 1990s), as represented most notably by Maurice Rémy, is that of both a National Socialist and a hero of the Resistance. Reuth argues that "Rommel was neither one nor the other. He had understood neither National Socialism, nor the resistance to it. Like millions of Germans he followed Hitler into disaster and whilst doing so he believed he was only doing his duty."[199]

Historiography edit

Although the author David Irving and his works have now become controversial for his denial of the Holocaust, he is recognised as the historian who started the re-evaluation of Rommel. He was the first historian to gain access to a large number of Rommel's private letters, and his well-substantiated findings questioned Rommel's image as a "chivalrous resistance fighter".[6][200] This biography, however, has been criticized by other authors Dowe and Hecht for manipulation and misrepresentation of primary sources, and even invention of verbatim quotations with the aim of portraying Hitler in a better light.[201]

Works such as the 2002 documentary Mythos Rommel by Remy, and the book of the same name, and the 2004 book Rommel: Das Ende einer Legende (published in English in 2005 as Rommel: The End of a Legend) by German historian Ralf Georg Reuth, furthered the discussion on both Rommel and his myth.[5] In the continued debate on Rommel and his legacy, Christopher Gabel criticises the documentary Rommel's War (made by historians Jörg Müllner [de] and Jean-Christoph Caron) for using false analogy to prove that Rommel was a war criminal by association, without providing any evidence even of Rommel's knowledge about crimes in his areas of operation.[202] According to Matthias Stickler, attacks on Rommel's integrity and attempts to link him to war crimes, which were started by the "journalist side" in the 1990s, have been largely repudiated by serious research despite having been repeatedly rehashed and refreshed by some authors and their epigones. Stickler gives recognition to both Remy and Reuth for offering possible explanations for Rommel's character evolution.[203]

Numerous English-speaking authors use the "Rommel Myth" ambiguously, like Bruce Allen Watson who states that "the masks he wore reflected the genuine plurality of the man",[204] or Jill Edwards, who notes that, below all the layers historians have removed and added to, what remains seems enough to qualify Rommel as, if controversial, a great captain.[205] Others who mention and depict the myth as a phenomenon that is either hard to ascertain or has a core that reflects reality include Pier Paolo Battistelli,[n 17] Randall Hansen,[207] Ian Baxter,[208] T.L. McMahon,[209] Brighton,[210] Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck,[91] Charles F. Marshall,[211] Majdalany,[212] Latimer,[213] and Showalter.[214]

A German author who uses the word Mythos in a critical manner is Ralph Giordano,[n 18] who describes the phenomenon as one of the "Falsehoods of Tradition" in his book of the same name, which depicts how the image of Rommel has been a major basis for the warrior cult of the Bundeswehr.[216] Sir David Hunt describes himself as being critical towards the Rommel mythology. While he has "the highest praise for his character", his impression of Rommel as a commander is a dashing cavalryman who gambled deep and lost in the end. Other authors who present popular narratives on Rommel as a misguided or deliberately falsified myth include James Sadkovich, who criticises both Rommel's supposed genius and his treatment of his Italian allies,[217] and: James Robinson,[19] Martin Kitchen,[218] Alaric Searle,[75] Robert Citino,[219] Ralf Georg Reuth,[21] Kenneth Macksey.[220]

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Terry Brighton: "It was suggested that the problem was not an inadequate army but the predominance of upper-class officers in senior posts, and that "If Rommel had been in the British Army he would still have been a sergeant." Churchill, fighting for his survival, deflected attention from the failings of British generals by stressing the extraordinary qualities of their opponent: "We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.""[1]
  2. ^ Niall Barr: "... came to fame in a theatre which held almost no strategic interest for Hitler whatsoever."[17] Martin Kitchen: "German historians have largely ignored the North African campaign, not only because it was peripheral ..."[18] James Robinson: "German thinking was disinterested with an expanded strategic purpose in North Africa and Rommel knew it."[19]
  3. ^ Peter Caddick-Adams: "Rommel's advances over the winter 1941–42 became a very useful distraction away from Germany's failure before Moscow."[26]
  4. ^ Quote from one of Rommel's letters, January 1942: "The opinion of me in the world press has improved."[35]
  5. ^ Peter Lieb: "Hitler was well aware that it would be unwise ... to link the downfall of Army Group Africa to the name of Rommel, the child of Joseph Goebbel's propaganda machinery."[40]
  6. ^ Martin Kitchen: "Early biographies, such as that by Desmond Young, were positively adulatory."[18]
  7. ^ Patrick Major: "Young had relied extensively on interviews with the Field Marshal's surviving widow, son and former comrades so that the positive picture that emerged is perhaps hardly surprising. Yet the overall effect bordered on hagiography."[59]
  8. ^ Major writes, quoting Liddell Hart: "'went to see it in a very critical frame of mind, from past experience of "Hollywood" handling of history', but 'was pleasantly surprised'".[68]
  9. ^ Charles F. Marshall: "With the German press showering him with encomiums, rumours about the Swabian’s past appeared overnight like mushrooms, both in Germany and outside. Every day brought new ones: He had been a bricklayer and early comrade of Hitler; he had been a street-corner bully; he had been a policeman between the two wars and had studied at Tuebingen University; he had been a swashbuckling storm trooper and one of the first adherents of the Führer."[85]
  10. ^ Kitchen: "The North African campaign has usually been seen, as in the title of Rommel's account, as 'War without Hate', and thus as further proof that the German army was not involved in any sordid butchering, which was left to Himmler's SS. While it was perfectly true that the German troops in North Africa fought with great distinction and gallantry, ... it was fortunate for their subsequent reputation that the SS murderers that followed in their wake did not have an opportunity to get to work." Kitchen further explains that the sparsely populated desert areas did not lend themselves to ethnic cleansing; that the German forces never reached Egypt and Palestine, which had large Jewish populations; and that, in the urban areas of Tunisia and Tripolitania, the Italian government constrained the German efforts to discriminate against or eliminate Jews who were Italian citizens.[89]
  11. ^ Spiegel Online: "Gentleman warrior, military genius. The legend of Erwin Rommel, the German Field Marshal who outfoxed the British in North Africa, lives on."[90]
  12. ^ Robert Citino: "His career had been based solely on Hitler's favor, and we might reasonably describe his attitude toward the Führer as worshipful."[22] Peter Caddick-Adams: "As is now clear, Rommel had been very close to Hitler and the Third Reich ..."[104]
  13. ^ Robert Citino: "His disinterest in the dreary science of logistics, his love of action, his tendency to fly off to wherever the fighting was hottest—all of these qualities ... are problems in a commander under modern conditions, and they all contributed materially to the disaster that ultimately befell him and his army in the desert."[22]
  14. ^ According to David T. Zabecki, Rommel's insubordination also played a role, leading to a calamitous misuse of resources when Rommel went over the head of his superior, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, to appeal directly to Hitler to approve an assault on Egypt instead of occupying Malta, as Kesselring and OKW were planning.[101]
  15. ^ Klaus Naumann: "Rommel's way out in Africa—bypassing the chain of command by seeking direct access to Hitler—must never be taken as an example to be followed." Naumann states that, as "one of the battle-proven principles", "unity of command must be preserved". Rommel did not follow this principle, which allowed him to achieve some tactical victories, but this contributed to eventual operational and strategic failure in North Africa. [126]
  16. ^ Klaus Naumann: "Rommel was used by the Nazi regime to create a myth. He tolerated this since he had a strong dose of personal ambition and vanity."[97]
  17. ^ Battistelli: "The myth of Erwin Rommel – the 'Desert Fox' – has proved to be particularly long lasting. There are many historical issues surrounding his true merits as a military commander and the extent of his actual involvement in the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and yet on close inspection he comes across as a simple, straightforward man whose talents and character ensured his success in the very particular circumstances that arose throughout his career."[206]
  18. ^ Giordano: "Another brick is broken out of the mendacious myth of the legendary "Desert Fox" and alleged resistance fighter against Hitler, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel ..."[215]

Citations edit

  1. ^ Brighton 2008, p. 115.
  2. ^ a b c Young 1950, p. 26.
  3. ^ Rommel 1982, p. xv.
  4. ^ a b Major 2008, p. 523.
  5. ^ a b c Beckett 2014, pp. 1–2.
  6. ^ a b Lasserre 2014.
  7. ^ Pyta 2015, p. 502.
  8. ^ Echternkamp 2010, p. 114.
  9. ^ Knopp 2013.
  10. ^ Mass 2006, p. 254.
  11. ^ Watson 1999, pp. 157–158.
  12. ^ a b c d Caddick-Adams 2012, pp. 471–472.
  13. ^ Beevor 2012, pp. 89–90.
  14. ^ "Der Mann wusste, dass der Krieg verloren ist". Frankfurter Allgemeine (in German). 3 November 2012. Retrieved 15 June 2016.
  15. ^ Caddick-Adams 2012, pp. 210–211.
  16. ^ Watson 1999, pp. 158–159.
  17. ^ Barr 2014, p. 60.
  18. ^ a b Kitchen 2009, p. 9.
  19. ^ a b Robinson 1997.
  20. ^ Watson 1999, p. 159.
  21. ^ a b Reuth 2005, p. 124.
  22. ^ a b c d e f g Citino 2012.
  23. ^ Kubetzky 2010, p. 316.
  24. ^ The Cairns Post 1941.
  25. ^ Reuth 2005, pp. 136–139.
  26. ^ a b c Caddick-Adams 2012, p. 471.
  27. ^ a b Reuth 2005, pp. 141–143.
  28. ^ a b Watson 1999, pp. 166–167.
  29. ^ Schrijvers 1997, pp. 63–64.
  30. ^ a b Deuel 1943, p. 72.
  31. ^ Goldschmidt Waldeck 1943, p. 25.
  32. ^ Holles 1945, p. 227.
  33. ^ Atkinson 2013, p. 358.
  34. ^ Strawson 2013, p. 124.
  35. ^ a b c Reuth 2005, p. 144.
  36. ^ Reuth 2005, p. 148.
  37. ^ Reuth 2005, pp. 144–146.
  38. ^ Reuth 2005, pp. 150–152.
  39. ^ a b Reuth 2005, pp. 154–158.
  40. ^ Lieb 2014, p. 113.
  41. ^ Lieb 2014, pp. 113–115.
  42. ^ a b Lieb 2014, pp. 117–118.
  43. ^ Lieb 2014, p. 120.
  44. ^ Reuth 2005, p. 159.
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  • Time (1951). "Armored Knight". Time. Vol. 57, no. 4.
  • Watson, Bruce Allen (1999). Exit Rommel: The Tunisian Campaign, 1942–43. Westport, CN: Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-0-275-95923-4.
  • Watson, Bruce Allen (2006). Exit Rommel: The Tunisian Campaign, 1942–43. Westport, CN: Stackpole Books. ISBN 978-0-8117-3381-6.
  • Wette, Wolfram (2007). The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02577-6.
  • Young, Desmond (1950). Rommel: The Desert Fox. New York: Harper & Row. OCLC 48067797.
  • Zabecki, David T. (2016). "Rethinking Rommel". Military History. Herndon, VA. 32 (5): 24–29.
  • Zabecki, David T. (2016a). "David Zabecki's response to Bob Frazier's letter". Readers' Letters. Military History. Retrieved 3 March 2016.

Further reading edit

  • Arquilla, John (1996). From Troy to Entebbe: Special Operations in Ancient and Modern Times. University Press of America. p. 218. ISBN 978-0-7618-0186-3.
  • Bartels, Hans-Peter (19 November 2017). "Kein Pomp. Keine Helden. Nirgends Pracht". Die Welt. Retrieved 8 April 2018.
  • Däniker, Gustav; Keren, Michael; Sylvan, Donald A. (2002). International Intervention: Sovereignty Versus Responsibility. Psychology Press. p. 117. ISBN 978-0-7146-5192-7.
  • Hecht, Cornelia; Häußler, Johannes; Linder, Rainer, eds. (2008). Mythos Rommel. Stuttgart: Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg. ISBN 978-3-933726-28-5.
  • Lieb, Peter (2012). "Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin (1891–1944)". The Encyclopedia of War.
  • Zaloga, Steven (2013). The Devil's Garden: Rommel's Desperate Defense of Omaha Beach. Stackpole Books. ISBN 978-0-8117-5277-0.

External links edit

  • Myth of 'humane' Nazi Erwin Rommel debunked: 2008 The Daily Telegraph news report on "The Rommel Myth" exhibition. Images from the exhibition as they appeared in the book In Detail, Exhibitions and Displays.
  • "Defeating the Desert Fox": Video on YouTube, via the official channel of The National WWII Museum; session by Nigel Hamilton at the 2012 International Conference on World War II
  • "Erwin Rommel: The Hero of the Clean Wehrmacht", via Die Welt (in German)

March 17, 2024
rommel, myth, rommel, legend, phrase, used, number, historians, common, depictions, german, generalfeldmarschall, erwin, rommel, apolitical, brilliant, commander, victim, nazi, germany, presumed, participation, july, plot, against, adolf, hitler, which, rommel. The Rommel myth or the Rommel legend is a phrase used by a number of historians for the common depictions of German Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel as an apolitical brilliant commander and a victim of Nazi Germany due to his presumed participation in the 20 July plot against Adolf Hitler which led to Rommel s forced suicide in 1944 According to these historians who take a critical view of Rommel such depictions are not accurate The description of Rommel as a brilliant commander started in 1941 with Rommel s participation as a component of Nazi propaganda to praise the Wehrmacht and instill optimism in the German public It was picked up and disseminated in the West by the British war time press as the Allies sought to explain their continued inability to defeat the Axis forces in North Africa the genius of Rommel was used by dissenters to protest against social inequality within the British Army and by leaders like Churchill to reduce class tensions n 1 Following the war the Western Allies and particularly the British depicted Rommel as the good German and our friend Rommel adhering closely to the tenets of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht His reputation for conducting a clean war was used in the interests of West German rearmament during the Cold War and the reconciliation between the former enemies the United Kingdom and the United States on one side and the new Federal Republic of Germany on the other The 1950 biography Rommel The Desert Fox and the 1953 publication of The Rommel Papers added to the myth which has proven resilient to critical examination This reevaluation has produced new interpretations of Rommel including his relationship with Nazism his abilities as an operational and strategic level commander and his role in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler Historians and commentators conclude that Rommel remains an ambiguous figure not easily definable either inside or outside the myth Contents 1 Terminology 2 Origins 2 1 In Nazi and Allied propaganda 2 2 Military reverses 2 3 Post war 3 Foundational works 3 1 Five Graves to Cairo film 3 2 Rommel The Desert Fox 3 3 The Desert Fox film 3 4 The Rommel Papers 3 5 Uncritical accounts 4 Elements of the myth 5 Reevaluation 5 1 Relationship with National Socialism 5 2 Operational and strategic level commander 5 3 Role in the 20 July plot 5 4 Analysis of motivations 6 Historiography 7 See also 8 Notes 9 Citations 10 Bibliography 11 Further reading 12 External linksTerminology editEarly authors such as Desmond Young and Basil Liddell Hart mention the Rommel legend in their respective books Liddell Hart described British efforts to make counterpropaganda against Rommel s military reputation while showing respect to his conduct of war Thus the British commanders and headquarter staffs were compelled to make strenuous efforts to dispel the Rommel legend 2 3 As early as 1950 the 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein s former deputy referred to the myth in an article titled The Rommel Myth Debunked where he aimed to address perceived misconceptions regarding the fighting in the North African Campaign 4 As used by German authors Mythos Rommel roughly translated into English as Rommel myth is a neutral description as can be seen in works by historians such as Peter Lieb 5 The term recognizes per Lieb that Rommel is and remains a Mythos He could not be stuck in a single drawer At any rate one should decide for oneself whether one sees him as a role model or not 6 German authors who use the word Mythos in this neutral manner include Maurice Philip Remy de Wolfram Pyta de 7 Jorg Echternkamp 8 Guido Knopp 9 and Sandra Mass 10 Origins editThe origins of the myth can be found first in Generalfeldmarschall Rommel s drive for success as a young officer in World War I and then in his popular 1937 book Infanterie Greift An Infantry Attacks which was written in a style that diverged from the German military literature of the time The book became a bestseller and was supposedly read by Adolf Hitler 11 12 Historian Antony Beevor places the start of the Rommel legend on 13 May 1940 during the Battle of France when Rommel s troops crossed the Meuse under fire and established bridgeheads at Houx and Dinant 13 According to Hans Ulrich Wehler the original reason that led to Rommel s high reputation in foreign countries was that people in Allied countries heard that he treated the captured soldiers well 14 In Nazi and Allied propaganda edit See also Nazi propaganda and British propaganda during World War II nbsp Rommel at the Paris victory parade June 1940 Rommel had access to Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels via Karl Hanke who served under Rommel in 1940 15 Rommel s victories in France were featured in the German press and in the February 1941 film Sieg im Westen Victory in the West in which he personally helped direct a segment reenacting the crossing of the River Somme 16 Rommel s victories in 1941 were played up by Nazi propaganda even though his successes in North Africa were achieved in Germany s least strategically valued theatre of the war 12 n 2 In November 1941 Joseph Goebbels head of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda wrote about his intention to have Rommel elevated to a kind of popular hero Rommel with his innate abilities as a military commander and love of the spotlight was a perfect fit for the role Goebbels designed for him 12 In North Africa Rommel received help in cultivating his image from Alfred Ingemar Berndt a senior official at the Reich Propaganda Ministry who had volunteered for military service 20 Seconded by Goebbels Berndt was assigned to Rommel s staff and became one of his closest aides Berndt often acted as liaison between Rommel the Propaganda Ministry and the Fuhrer Headquarters He directed Rommel s photo shoots and filed radio dispatches describing the battles 21 22 In the spring of 1941 Rommel s name began to appear in the British media In the autumn of 1941 and early winter of 1941 1942 he was mentioned in the British press almost daily The Daily Express and The Cairns Post wrote No von nonsense about Erich nor the code of conduct such as it was that most Prussian officers have honoured in war He is a gangster general trained in a harder school than Chicago He was Hitler s thug organiser before he came to power So Erich became leader of the S S Black Guard Hitler s private army which executes his private revenges and guards his person When at last Poland made a stand for democracy it was Rommel who led a panzer corps against the Polish horse cavalry with conspicuous gallantry Later in France Hitler made him a Knight of the Iron Cross for breaking through the Maginot Line at Maubeuge with the 7th Armoured Division True French resistance was almost at an end then but Erich was entitled to his decoration too 23 24 Toward the end of the year the Reich propaganda machine also used Rommel s successes in Africa as a diversion from the Wehrmacht s challenging situation in the Soviet Union with the stall of Operation Barbarossa 25 26 n 3 The American press soon began to take notice of Rommel as well following the United States entry into the war on 11 December 1941 writing that The British admire him because he beat them and were surprised to have beaten in turn such a capable general 27 General Claude Auchinleck distributed a directive to his commanders seeking to dispel the notion that Rommel was a superman 28 The Battle of Kasserine Pass during the Tunisian Campaign intensified the GIs admiration towards Rommel The cult of personality was so strong that according to Peter Schrijvers for the remainder of the war German POWs would part with pictures of Rommel as reluctantly as GIs were eager to get them 29 While Allied troops respected Rommel civilians held the widely accepted negative image of Rommel s origin and his connection with the Nazis 30 As described by Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck who debunked the invented story and The New York Times in 1943 It has been said that Rommel started his career as a Hitler hoodlum and owes his quick rise to his early collaboration with Himmler 30 31 This line of propaganda perpetuated until the war ended 32 According to Atkinson to counter the perverse chivalry war without hate in Rommel s words that Rommel promoted the British and American authorities instituted hate training and tried to raise the eagerness to kill the enemies by stressing enemy brutality as well as spattering slaughterhouse blood in assault training courses 33 General John Strawson notes the same difference in attitudes to war between the leaderships of the two sides 34 The attention of the Western and especially the British press thrilled Goebbels who wrote in his diary in early 1942 Rommel continues to be the recognised darling of even the enemies news agencies 35 Rommel was pleased by the media attention both domestic and foreign often discussing it in letters to his wife 35 n 4 Hitler took note of the British propaganda as well commenting in the summer of 1942 that Britain s leaders must have hoped to be able to explain their defeat to their own nation more easily by focusing on Rommel 36 Rommel was the German commander most frequently covered in the German media and the only one to be given a press conference which took place in October 1942 22 37 The press conference was moderated by Goebbels and was attended by both domestic and foreign media Rommel declared Today we have the gates of Egypt in hand and with the intent to act Keeping the focus on Rommel distracted the German public from Wehrmacht losses elsewhere as the tide of the war began to turn He became a symbol that was used to reinforce the German public s faith in an ultimate Axis victory 38 Military reverses edit In the wake of the British victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 and other military reverses the Propaganda Ministry directed the media to emphasise Rommel s invincibility The charade was maintained until the spring of 1943 even as the German situation in Africa became increasingly precarious In May 1943 to ensure that the inevitable defeat in Africa would not be associated with Rommel s name Goebbels had the Supreme High Command announce that Rommel was on a two month leave for health reasons 39 n 5 Instead the campaign was presented by Berndt who resumed his role in the Propaganda Ministry as a ruse to tie down the British Empire while Germany was turning Europe into an impenetrable fortress with Rommel at the helm of this success After the radio program ran in May 1943 Rommel sent Berndt a case of cigars as a sign of his gratitude 39 nbsp One of the many Nazi propaganda photographs of Rommel s inspection tours along the Atlantic Wall Although Rommel then entered a period without a significant command 41 he remained a household name in Germany synonymous with the aura of invincibility 42 Hitler then made Rommel part of his defensive strategy for Fortress Europe Festung Europa by sending him to the West to inspect fortifications along the Atlantic Wall Goebbels supported the decision noting in his diary that Rommel was undoubtedly the suitable man for the task The propaganda minister expected the move to reassure the German public and at the same time to have a negative impact on the Allied forces morale 42 In France a Wehrmacht propaganda company frequently accompanied Rommel on his inspection trips to document his work for both domestic and foreign audiences 43 44 In May 1944 the German newsreels reported on Rommel s speech at a Wehrmacht conference where he stated his conviction that every single German soldier will make his contribution against the Anglo American spirit that it deserves for its criminal and bestial air war campaign against our homeland The speech led to an upswing in morale and sustained confidence in Rommel 45 When Rommel was seriously wounded on 17 July 1944 the Propaganda Ministry undertook efforts to conceal the injury so as not to undermine domestic morale Despite this the news leaked to the British press To counteract the rumours of a serious injury and even death Rommel was required to appear at a press conference held on 1 August On 3 August the German press published an official report that Rommel had been injured in a car accident Rommel noted in his diary his dismay at this twisting of the truth belatedly realising how much the Reich propaganda was using him for its own ends 45 Post war edit Quoting Correlli Barnett The Desert War entered the British folk memory a source of legend endlessly re written as both history and fiction the historian Lucio Ceva argues that even though the myth was of British origin it found its reflections in post war West Germany 46 The historian Peter Caddick Adams suggests that following his forced suicide Rommel emerged as the acceptable face of German militarism the good German who stood apart from the Nazi regime 47 The ground was thus fertile for the myth to be reborn after the war in the interest of the program of the German rearmament and the Allied West German reconciliation 26 48 After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 it became clear to the Americans and the British that a German army would have to be revived to help face off against the Soviet Union Many former German officers including Adolf Heusinger and Hans Speidel who had served on Rommel s staff in France were convinced that no future West German Army would be possible without the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht In October 1950 at the behest of West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer a group of former senior officers produced the document that later became known as the Himmerod memorandum Intended as both a planning and a negotiating tool the document included a key demand for measures to transform domestic and foreign public opinion with regards to the German military 49 50 Foundational works editRommel s former enemies especially the British played a key role in the manufacture and propagation of the myth 12 51 The German rearmament was highly dependent on the moral rehabilitation that the Wehrmacht needed The journalist and historian Basil Liddell Hart an early proponent of these two interconnected initiatives provided the first widely available source on Rommel in his 1948 book on Hitler s generals updated in 1951 Portraying Rommel as an outsider to the Nazi regime in the 1948 edition Liddell Hart concluded the 1951 text with comments on Rommel s gifts and performance that qualified him for a place in the role of the Great Captains of history 52 Five Graves to Cairo film edit The 1943 movie Five Graves to Cairo directed by Billy Wilder was the only wartime movie that featured a German general as a major character According to Battistelli Erich von Stroheim s portrayal of Rommel might have been far from reality but it certainly contributed to give rise to Rommel s myth 53 In June 1943 the magazine Life comments It will not win any Academy awards but is an important film for it re introduces Erich von Stroheim as the screen s arch villain in a Prussian uniform this time portraying the Nazi s much touted Field Marshal Rommel Forgetting his early caricatures of pompous Prussians he plays Field Marshal Rommel with much finesse shows him to be human as well as cunning brutal and vain 54 The film exploits one of the standard wartime German stereotypes that of the cold ruthless aristocratic Junker officer 55 portraying Rommel as a Wilhelmine officer complete with duelling scars and unbending authority 56 Film historian Bernard F Dick remarks that Stroheim s Rommel already had sympathetic traits too considering Rommel himself was a person screenwriters found hard to vilify or caricaturize 57 Rommel The Desert Fox edit Main article Rommel The Desert Fox The other foundational text was the influential and laudatory 1950 biography Rommel The Desert Fox by Brigadier Desmond Young 58 5 n 6 Young had served in North Africa in the Indian Army in a public relations capacity and was once taken prisoner by Rommel s troops 58 Young interviewed Rommel s widow extensively and worked with several individuals who had been close to him including Hans Speidel with Liddell Hart also supporting the project Speidel had already written in 1946 that he planned to turn Rommel into the hero of the German people to give them a positive role model Rommel was a suitable candidate since the manner of his death had led to the assumption that he had not been a supporter of Nazism Young subscribed to this view subtly conveying that Rommel served the regime but was not part of it 48 59 The result was predictably positive bordering on hagiography according to the historian Patrick Major 59 n 7 The reception of The Desert Fox in Britain was enthusiastic the book went through eight editions in a year 60 Young s biography was another step in the development of the Rommel myth with Rommel emerging as an active if not a leading plotter Speidel contributed as well starting from the early 1950s to bring up Rommel s and his own role in the plot thus boosting Speidel s suitability for a future role in the new military force of the Federal Republic the Bundeswehr and then in NATO 61 The book was not without its detractors The review in Time magazine noted the legendary status Rommel had achieved in his lifetime and quoted another review that described Rommel as the British army s favorite German general The Time reviewer concluded that the book was just this side of hero worship Quoting Ernest Bevin a noted Labour politician it alluded to the book being an example of the trade union of generals in action Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck in a foreword to the book honoured Rommel as a soldier and a man and Field Marshal Archibald Wavell included him among the chosen few among the very brave the very true The reviewer noted the obvious admiration Young had for the German generals and that the book may well have been written by one 62 Richard Crossman a Labour MP objected to the portrayal of Rommel as an anti Nazi writing 63 As a nation we deceive ourselves into believing that there are two sorts of Germans the Good German and the Bad German The Bad Germans are Nazis militarists anti democratic and perpetrators of atrocities The Good Germans are peace loving democrats and real gentlemen Ergo since Rommel was a clean fighter he must have been anti Nazi and men like him would make good allies of democracy against the Russians The historian Hugh Trevor Roper commented that the danger now is not that our friend Rommel is becoming not a magician or a bogy man but too much of a hero He pointed out Rommel s early proximity to Hitler he described Rommel as representative of the connection between Nazism and the Wehrmacht and the support that the German officer corps offered for Hitler s politics and Hitler s war 64 The Desert Fox film edit Main article The Desert Fox The Story of Rommel The 1951 film The Desert Fox The Story of Rommel based on Young s biography portrayed Rommel in a sympathetic way as a loyal humane soldier and a firm opponent to Hitler s policies 65 The film played up Rommel s disputed role in the conspiracy against Hitler 66 while omitting Rommel s early association with the dictator 65 Writing in The Daily Telegraph under the title Rommel A Flattering and Unconvincing Portrait the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who had served in intelligence in North Africa during the war commented that the film represented a tendency towards collective schizophrenia whereas chivalry towards a captured brigadier is in no wise incompatible with a foreign policy of perfidy and the brutal disregard for all the elementary decencies of civilised behaviour 63 Critical and public response in the U S was muted but it was a commercial success in Britain along with a less known 1953 film The Desert Rats where James Mason reprised his portrayal of Rommel 67 The film received nearly universally positive reviews in Britain while protests at the cinemas broke out in Vienna and Milan Liddell Hart watched the film with a group of high ranking British officers and reported being pleasantly surprised 68 n 8 Patrick Major argues that the desert war indeed proved a suitable space to effect the reconciliation among the former enemies The British popular history focused on that theatre of war almost to the exclusion of all others He states that The Desert Fox had a catalytic effect in creating an image of the German armed forces that would be acceptable to the British public Rommel was thus successfully integrated into the myth of the clean Wehrmacht 60 Petra Rau argues that Mason s Rommel Contrasting with Five Graves to Cairo Rommel here was presented as representation of British virtues and thus a sympathetic figure like other Good Germans in popular culture is not portrayed as representative of Germans but rather an exceptional case who was surrounded by real Nazis 69 The Rommel Papers edit nbsp British historian B H Liddell Hart s introduction to The Rommel Papers drew comparisons between Rommel and Lawrence of Arabia two masters of desert warfare 70 Main article The Rommel Papers 1953 saw the publication of Rommel s writings of the war period as The Rommel Papers edited by the British journalist and historian B H Liddell Hart the former Wehrmacht officer Fritz Bayerlein who served on Rommel s staff in North Africa and Rommel s widow and son The volume contained an introduction and commentary by Liddell Hart 71 The historian Mark Connelly argues that The Rommel Papers was one of the two foundational works that led to a Rommel renaissance and Anglophone rehabilitation the other being Young s biography 71 The book contributed to the perception of Rommel as a brilliant commander in an introduction Liddell Hart drew comparisons between Rommel and Lawrence of Arabia two masters of desert warfare 70 Meanwhile Liddell Hart had a personal interest in the work by having coaxed Rommel s widow to include material favourable to himself he could present Rommel as his pupil when it came to mobile armoured warfare 72 Thus Liddell Hart s theory of indirect approach became a precursor to the German blitzkrieg lightning war The controversy was described by the political scientist John Mearsheimer in his work The Weight of History who concluded that by putting words in the mouths of German Generals and manipulating history Liddell Hart was in a position to show that he had been at the root of the dramatic German successes in 1940 73 Uncritical accounts edit The trend continued with other uncritical biographies such as Rommel as Military Commander 1968 by the former British soldier and author Ronald Lewin and Knight s Cross A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel 1994 by the former British general David Fraser 74 75 These works focused on Rommel s military career depoliticising it and presenting him strictly as a soldier 76 In another work on the North African campaign the 1977 The Life and Death of the Africa Korps Lewin wrote that it was necessary to assert that the purity of the desert purified the desert war while Fraser focused on Rommel s battlefield performance and described him as a hero 76 Fraser s biography remains a work of high reputation 77 78 79 with Pier Paolo Battistelli praising it for the outstanding handling of the issue of Rommel s myth as well as his life and career in general 80 However the work has been criticised by historian Mark Connelly as encapsulat ing the post 1945 hagiographic approach Connelly offers the example of Fraser s description of Rommel as one of the great masters of manoeuvre in war whose personality transcends time and cuts like a sabre through the curtains of history 81 The historian Patrick Major points out that a recent work the 2002 book Alamein War Without Hate by Colin Smith and John Bierman borrowed the name of Rommel s posthumous memoirs for its subtitle 76 Connelly includes works by Sir John Squire and General Sir John Hackett in the uncritical tradition 82 In contrast German biographies such as by the journalist Wolf Heckmann were far less sympathetic 82 Elements of the myth editSome early authors who wrote about Rommel during the war and post war biographers use the word legend or myth when describing various pieces of propaganda and rumours that the Nazi government and the Allied press spread about the life and character of Rommel These rumours usually ignored his middle class background and highlighted his connection with the lower classes and his early adherence to National Socialism or Hitler using several invented anecdotes 2 83 84 n 9 The most notable of these according to Charles F Marshall was that Rommel was a storm trooper which was designed by Nazi propaganda to show what heights a storm trooper could claim and promote the impression of Rommel as an ardent Nazi supporter at the same time that several American encyclopaedias still published a decade after the war 86 nbsp An iconic picture of Rommel as the Common Man helping to free up his staff car alongside his men 87 According to the historian Mark Connelly Young and Liddell Hart laid the foundation for the Anglo American myth which consisted of three themes Rommel s ambivalence towards Nazism his military genius and the emphasis of the chivalrous nature of the fighting in North Africa 71 Their works lent support to the image of the clean Wehrmacht and were generally not questioned since they came from British authors rather than German revisionists 88 n 10 The leading German news magazine Der Spiegel describes the myth as Gentleman warrior military genius 90 n 11 According to Watson the most dominant element in the Rommel myth is Rommel the Superior Soldier the second being Rommel the Common Man and the last one Rommel the Martyr 87 Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck writing in 1943 also takes note of the image of the general who fought with common soldiers with an indelible youthfulness and apparent invulnerability 91 Historian Sandra Mass considers the Rommel myth a hero cult a synthesis of old and new hero cults and traditions culled primarily from Germany s largely imaginary colonial past in particular the proletarian hero cult originally represented by Carl Peters and the bourgeois one represented by Paul von Lettow Vorbeck Rommel as portrayed by this hero cult was both chivalrous and ruthless young and old harsh and gentle strong and righteous 92 Calder Duffy and Ricci opine that Rommel s military brilliance provoked a masochistic tendency to romanticise a worthy opponent that because he was skilled at his profession he must have been an anti Nazi hero 93 94 Reevaluation editPost 1990s scholarship examined Rommel s attitude towards National Socialism his performance as a military commander his role in the 20 July plot and his motivations leading to a more diverse range of interpretations of Rommel and the elements of the myth citation needed Relationship with National Socialism edit See also Nazism and the Wehrmacht nbsp Adolf Hitler accompanied by Rommel far left inspects the troops in Goslar 1934 This was the first meeting between the two men 95 Rommel was not a member of the Nazi Party 96 However like other Wehrmacht officers he welcomed Hitler s seizure of power 97 98 During his time in Goslar he clashed with those Sturmabteilung SA men who attacked the Jews and others who supported them Rommel thus showed sympathy towards Hitler s elimination of the SA believing the worst was now over although he opined that in the future the Fuhrer should learn to see his own true strength and refrain from such illegal processes 99 100 Remy dated Rommel s support for Hitler as 1935 noting a speech in which Rommel praised Hitler for restoring the Germans self respect and establishment of the way towards an honourable and righteous peace as well as efforts in alleviating the disadvantaged people s problems 99 The historians Ralf Georg Reuth David T Zabecki Bruce Allen Watson and Peter Caddick Adams state that Rommel was one of Hitler s favorite generals and that his close relationship with the dictator benefited both his inter war and war time career 101 102 98 Robert Citino describes Rommel as not apolitical and writes that he owed his career to Hitler to whom his attitude was worshipful while the historian Charles Messenger describes Rommel s growing admiration towards Hitler following the invasion of Poland 22 103 n 12 Speaking at The National WWII Museum s 2012 International Conference on World War II the author Nigel Hamilton referred to Rommel as quite a Nazi 105 This sympathy did not extend to the Party though In this regard he was similar to many other Wehrmacht soldiers who with encouragement from Hitler erroneously believed the army to be the most important element of the regime 106 Rommel showed particular resentment towards the SA and later the SS for their brutality and absorption of resources and personnel 100 The historian Alaric Searle recasts Rommel s early involvement with the Nazi regime including his role as a liaison between Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht Young s biography had described Rommel s role in strictly military terms and alluded to a falling out between him and the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach on ideological grounds In fact Rommel had twice proposed a plan that would have subordinated Hitler Youth to the army removing it from the NSDAP control That went against Schirach s wishes resulting in Rommel s quiet removal from the project Searle describes as patently false another of Young s assertions namely that Rommel first became close to Hitler because Hitler had read Infantry Attacks and wanted to meet the author in the fall of 1938 This casts doubt on the rest of Young s narrative as it pertains to Rommel s relationship with the dictator 107 Searle writes that by this time Like many other front line officers with little awareness of the military planning underway Rommel was simply trying to carry out his orders 107 Remy points out that the incident of Rommel using tanks to protect a journey of Hitler which has been used by Reuth and Irving to prove that Rommel came to Hitler s attention in 1936 actually happened in 1939 In 1936 according to Remy Rommel was only a part of the elaborate spectacle that welcomed Hitler and there was no evidence for the interaction between the two 108 nbsp Rommel to the right of Hitler from the perspective of the camera in Poland September 1939 During the campaign Rommel enjoyed close proximity to the dictator 109 Searle argues that Rommel not only found favor with the Nazi regime but was delighted with the preferential treatment he was receiving including access to Hitler during the 1939 invasion of Poland During the campaign Rommel served as commander of the Fuhrerbegleitbrigade battalion tasked with guarding Hitler and his field headquarters He attended Hitler s daily war briefings and had opportunities for one on one conversations with the dictator which he proudly reported in letters to his wife In a sign that he lost touch with reality as Searle puts it Rommel wrote to his wife in October 1939 from the devastated Warsaw where he was organising a victory parade There has been no water no power no gas no food for two days They have erected numerous barricades which blocked civilian movement and exposed people to bombardments from which they could not escape The mayor estimated the number of the dead and injured to be 40 000 The inhabitants probably drew a breath of relief that we have arrived and rescued them 109 110 In 1939 Rommel received a promotion from Hitler to the rank of Generalmajor ahead of more senior officers Showalter notes that even at this early stage Hitler already regarded Rommel as a model for the fusion of Germany s new and old orders 111 With an intervention by Hitler Rommel was subsequently able to obtain command of an armoured Panzer division despite having been turned down by the army s personnel office which had offered him command of a mountain division Rommel s unprofessional conduct was noted by his fellow officers and added to his growing reputation as one of Hitler s favoured commanders 98 101 After the Fall of France Rommel sent to him a specially prepared diary on the 7th Division and received a letter of thanks 112 Unknown to Rommel though Hitler had barely looked at his diary and the letter was written by an adjutant Remy remarks that by this time Hitler still did not treat Rommel as a significantly important person 113 When Rommel was being considered for appointment as Commander in Chief of the Army in the summer of 1942 Goebbels wrote in his diary that Rommel is ideologically sound is not just sympathetic to the National Socialists He is a National Socialist he is a troop leader with a gift for improvisation personally courageous and extraordinarily inventive These are the kinds of soldiers we need 102 nbsp Rommel and Hitler in 1942 According to Rick Atkinson Rommel was known as the Fuhrer s marshal 114 Rommel exercised an almost hypnotic influence on Hitler according to Albert Kesselring 115 and another colleague called him the Fuhrer s marshal American writer Rick Atkinson concludes that Rommel was loyal in his own fashion and as beguiled by Hitler as steel filings by a magnet Hitler was a bulwark against bolshevism Rommel had told staff officers 114 Despite this intimate relationship he was not provided with basic information on Germany s strategic plan Rommel did not know that smashing the Soviet Union and major territorial acquisitions in the East would be the cornerstone of this plan Nor did Rommel realise that Hitler saw no conflict of interest between Germany and the maritime power Great Britain which he hoped to make an ally 116 He also had only a week s warning before the launch of Case White at the start of 1943 117 Messenger argues that Rommel s attitude towards Hitler changed only after the Allied invasion of Normandy when Rommel came to realise that the war could not be won 103 Historian Thomas Vogel opines that Rommel was not a Nazi if one uses the definition the Nazis themselves used considering that although he did everything in his power to make his country strong again he showed no support towards the racial policies or other aspects of the regime 118 119 Operational and strategic level commander edit British military and political figures contributed to the heroic image of the man as Rommel resumed offensive operations in January 1942 against the British forces weakened by redeployments to the Far East Speaking in the House of Commons Churchill addressed the British defeats and described Rommel as an extraordinary bold and clever opponent and a great field commander 28 27 The trend continued after the war following the publication of The Desert Fox which also portrays staff officers like Wilhelm Keitel Alfred Jodl and Franz Halder who opposed Rommel on strategic issues as having ulterior motives in smearing him 2 Former military opponents in Britain described Rommel as a brilliant commander and a resistance fighter the good German with one senior military figure comparing Rommel to legendary military leader Belisarius The praise led Bernard Montgomery s former deputy Brian Horrocks to argue in his 1950 article The Rommel Myth Debunked that the Eighth Army beat Rommel s Afrika Korps fair and square 4 In 1977 Martin van Creveld started the reevaluation of Malta s impact on supply situations 120 and concluded that Rommel was largely responsible for his supply problems caused by overextended supply lines which prevented the Afrika Korps from receiving the supplies that the Italians were able to provide in adequate numbers According to Creveld the capacity of Libyan ports were too small and the distances to be overcome too great for Rommel to advance a more ambitious plan than Hitler s original one of defending a limited area 121 Certain modern historians such as Larry T Addington Niall Barr and Robert Citino are skeptical of Rommel as an operational let alone strategic level commander They point to Rommel s lack of appreciation for Germany s strategic situation his misunderstanding of the relative importance of his theatre to the German High Command his poor grasp of logistical realities and according to the historian Ian Beckett his penchant for glory hunting 122 22 Citino credits Rommel s limitations as an operational level commander as materially contributing to the eventual demise of the Axis forces in North Africa 22 n 13 Meanwhile Addington focuses on Rommel s disobedience and struggle over the North Africa strategy whereby his initial brilliant success resulted in catastrophic effects for Germany in this theatre of war 123 The historian Geoffrey P Megargee refers to Rommel as a talented tactical leader but points out his playing the German and Italian command structures against each other to his advantage Rommel used the confused structure of the OKW Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht the OKH Supreme High Command of the Army and the Comando Supremo Italian Supreme Command to disregard orders that he disagreed with or to appeal to whatever authority he felt would be most sympathetic to his requests 124 Rommel often went directly to Hitler with his needs and concerns taking advantage of the favoritism that the Fuhrer displayed towards him and adding to the German High Command s distrust of him 125 Military practitioners have also questioned Rommel s abilities at the operational level While nearly all acknowledge Rommel s excellent tactical skills and personal bravery many officers came to accept that Rommel was possibly the most overrated commander of an army in world history writes U S major general and military historian David T Zabecki of the United States Naval Institute quoting the opinion of Wolf Heckmann Zabecki notes that Rommel s brilliant tactical moves were logistically unsustainable which eventually led to a strategic defeat 101 n 14 General Klaus Naumann who served as Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr agrees with Charles Messenger that Rommel had challenges on the operational level and states that Rommel s violation of the unity of command principle bypassing the chain of command in Africa was unacceptable 126 n 15 Some historians such as Zabecki and Peter Lieb also take issue with Rommel s absence from Normandy on the day of the Allied invasion 6 June 1944 He had left France on 5 June and was at home on the 6th celebrating his wife s birthday Rommel planned to proceed to see Hitler the next day to discuss the situation in Normandy 101 127 128 Zabecki calls his decision to leave the theatre in view of an imminent invasion an incredible lapse of command responsibility 101 More sympathetic authors point out complex situations that Rommel had to face Brian Hanley from USNI s Editorial Board of Directors comments that Rommel was beaten the moment he arrived in Africa considering the Allied troops outnumbered the Afrika Korps and they worked under a much more straightforward chain of command while orders sent from Berlin to North Africa were rarely kept confidential Hanley sees Rommel turning German and Italian military authorities against each other as turning liabilities into advantages and that he repeatedly created operational miracles that made a strategic investment in the Africa theatre attractive in 1942 Also according to Hanley if Rommel stood still his enemy s strength would accumulate while his own depending on an uncertain supply line would diminish thus he needed the British stocks of supply to deal with his logistical problems 129 Daniel Allen Butler writes that if Rommel was not a formally trained strategist he developed himself into one becoming able to grasp strategic opportunities that others missed Starting as a compulsive commander who imperilled his command and his superiors plans in Africa he realized that his opponent s army was the main objective and not the mere holding of territory Butler writes that it was unfair to blame Rommel considering that he had been kept ignorant of Operation Barbarossa Butler also questions the need to obey his superiors higher strategy considering that Hitler never had a coherent grand strategy 130 Reinhard Stumpf de opines that Rommel actually had approval of his German and later Italian superiors including Hitler and the High Command in conducting the Afrika Korps as a mobile striking force and for his offensives With such a weak force he came to depend on an automaticity that required constant successful attacks that ceased to function once he gradually lost equipment superiority air cover and good intelligence which in combination with good leadership allowed the possibility to offset numerical inferiority to some extent This applied also in the case of Malta even if the island had been captured the army s condition would not have been improved immediately but holding the ground meant Rommel would lose the initiative forever 131 According to Maurice Remy Rommel should not be blamed regarding strategic matters considering Hitler and Mussolini had prepared the African offensive strategy from the beginning despite the warnings of Brauchitsch and Halder regarding the planned invasion of Russia that Rommel was not informed of As the African campaign progressed Rommel became aware of the strategic and supply situation but his superiors among them Kesselring continued to ask him to advance further and promise that the supplies would reach the battlefield in time Like Hanley and Stumpf Remy saw Rommel s successes as working against him his superiors assumed that despite his constant requests for more forces and supplies he could manage with the minimum 132 Remy also opines that Rommel s plan for the defence of the Atlantic coastline was the correct one although he too made a mistake in seeing Calais as the main landing zone 133 Others like Stroud Krause and Phillips opine that even Rommel s recklessness and disobedience during the invasion of France benefitted the German cause while rescuing Hitler s mercurial objectives and inventing the actual application of Blitzkrieg lightning war and it was Hitler who downgraded strategic victory to operational victory 134 135 According to Alan J Levine contrary to the allegation that he was only a genius tactician without a good grasp of logistics Rommel was a clearer thinker than most of his colleagues shown by his judgements on developing situations and although he was the most defeatist German general there was a serious qualification to his pessimism and he was capable of displaying a surprising amount of energy in building the Normandy defense at the same time 136 MacGregor Knox whose works draw largely on Italian sources opines that rather than technical and expertise weaknesses effectiveness in war ultimately depends on culture the command style and ethos which in turn breed technological imagination and force structure He points out that the few Italian mobile units fighting together with the Afrika Korps benefitted from working under Rommel who helped them cope with rapidly changing situations in a war without fixed fronts despite interference from Ettore Bastico 137 Marvin Knorr expresses a sympathetic view of Rommel s attitude to the General Staff saying that their attitudes towards officers of middle class like him made it understandable that he was wary about them and worried that the officers they sent to him would report on him or try to take over Despite this he came to trust and depend on these staff officers like Friedrich von Mellenthin and Siegfried Westphal who in turn proved their talent and loyalty 138 Rick Atkinson acknowledges Rommel s audacity tactical brilliance and personal style also noting that he had an uncanny ability to dominate the minds of his adversaries 139 Some authors like Stumpf and Lewin opine that while Creveld s statistics regarding the losses of supplies are not wrong and that the vast distances were a big problem the failure of the seaborne supply lines was still a deciding factor because operationally effective supplies often failed to arrive at decisive moments of the campaigns 140 141 Douglas Austin points out that the overall port capacity at Tobruk and Benghazi was actually sufficient and that the recently published Enigma intercepts show that it was the bulk losses at sea and not unloading or getting the supplies to forward areas that had the greater impact on Rommel s decisions as well as those of other German commanders like Kesselring 142 Levine dismisses poor port capacity and lack of transport vehicles as the Afrika Korps crucial weaknesses citing evidences gathered on British intelligence by Hinsley and Bennett 143 Others point out Rommel s dependence on captured resources as compensation for the unstable supply lines and unfulfilled promises by 1942 85 of his transport were captured vehicles 144 145 Butler opines that the myth of Rommel s bad logistical management is the result of rumours started by Halder 145 Lieb also opines that while his harshest critics who mostly came from the General Staff often said that Rommel was overrated or not suitable for higher commands envy was a big factor here Simon Ball also notes that this was the single group of people in the postwar West who had an interest in denigrating Rommel who had never been one of them while he opines that various elements in English and German post war government and military circles had an interest in praising him as well 146 147 Role in the 20 July plot edit Main article 20 July plot The extent of Rommel s involvement in the military s resistance against Hitler or 20 July plot is difficult to ascertain as people most directly involved did not survive and limited documentation of the conspirators plans and preparations exists Thus Rommel s participation remains ambiguous and the perception of it largely has its source in subsequent events especially Rommel s forced suicide and the post war accounts by surviving participants 148 According to a post war account by Karl Strolin the Oberburgermeister of Stuttgart at that time he and two other conspirators Alexander von Falkenhausen and Carl Heinrich von Stulpnagel began efforts to bring Rommel into the anti Hitler conspiracy in early 1944 149 On 15 April 1944 Rommel s new chief of staff Hans Speidel arrived in Normandy and reintroduced Rommel to Stulpnagel 150 Speidel had previously been connected to Carl Goerdeler the civilian leader of the resistance but not to the plotters led by Stauffenberg and only came to the attention of Stauffenberg due to his appointment to Rommel s headquarters The conspirators felt they needed the support of a field marshal on active duty and gave instructions to Speidel to bring Rommel into their circle 151 Speidel met with former foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath and Strolin on 27 May in Germany ostensibly at Rommel s request although the latter was not present Neurath and Strolin suggested opening immediate surrender negotiations with the West and according to Speidel Rommel agreed to further discussions and preparations 152 However around the same time the plotters in Berlin were not aware that Rommel had reportedly decided to take part in the conspiracy On 16 May they informed Allen Dulles through whom they hoped to negotiate with the Western Allies that Rommel could not be counted on for support 153 Rommel opposed assassinating Hitler After the war his widow maintained that Rommel believed an assassination attempt would spark a civil war 154 Historian Ian Beckett argues that there is no credible evidence that Rommel had more than limited and superficial knowledge of the plot and concludes that Rommel would not have acted to aid the plotters on 20 July 148 while Ralf Georg Reuth contends that there was no indication of any active participation of Rommel in the conspiracy 155 Historian Richard J Evans concluded that he knew of a plot but was not involved 156 What is not debated are the results of the failed bomb plot of 20 July Many conspirators were arrested and the dragnet expanded to thousands 157 Consequently it did not take long for Rommel to come under suspicion beginning with evidence the SS obtained from Stulpnagel who mentioned Rommel in delirium after his suicide attempt 158 159 160 161 Rommel s name also came up in confessions by Stulpnagel s personal adviser Caesar von Hofacker and was included in Goerdeler s papers on a list of potential supporters 162 163 The author and cinematographer Maurice Philip Remy de discovered a memo from Martin Bormann the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery dating from 28 September 1944 in which the Chief of the Party Chancellery and Personal Secretary to Hitler stated that former General Stulpnagel former Colonel Hofacker Kluge s meanwhile executed nephew Lieutenant Colonel Rathgens and other defendants still alive gave all testimony that Field Marshal Rommel was indeed in the picture Rommel agreed that he would be at the new government s disposal after a successful plot 164 According to eavesdropped conversations between German generals in British captivity edited by the historian Sonke Neitzel General Heinrich Eberbach the former commander of the 5th Panzer Army claimed on 14 September 1944 that Rommel had told him in Normandy just a few days before the plot that Hitler and his entourage would have to be killed if there was any chance for Germany to bring the war to a satisfactory end 165 Summarising the most recent findings on Rommel s role in the 20 July plot Peter Lieb concludes that 166 Rommel did not play any role in the operational preparations for the plot against Hitler and we do not know which post he was supposed to assume after a successful coup Hence the Field Marshal was definitely not part of the most inner circle of the 20 July plotters At the same time however he was more than just a mere sympathiser and paid for this with his life He consequently deserves a firm place in the military resistance against Hitler to a greater extent than it has recently been acknowledged in academia and in public 166 Maurice Remy thinks that the emphasis should be on his plan for a separate peace with the West his intention was not to continue Hitler s murderous war in the East but to prevent disasters that might happen to Germany if the Soviet army arrived which was devised with concrete details and carried out at great personal risk 167 Analysis of motivations edit Rommel was an ambitious man who took advantage of his proximity to Hitler and willingly accepted the propaganda campaigns designed for him by Goebbels 97 He sought to level the playing field for non nobles and also supported militarism and a strong German Empire 168 169 while treating people only according to their merits 170 He did not display hatred to people of noble descent and in fact was a throwback to the medieval knight in his personal traits appearing well versed in the ancient customs of chivalry 171 172 173 which helped to attract admiration from the British who saw in him a romantic archetype 174 Rommel classed himself as a traditionalist regarding military ethics and a modernist regarding warfare techniques 175 Citino believes that under the modern veneer Rommel s story as well as his style of warfare including the negative points was actually the last manifestation of an older Prussian tradition which began with Georg von Derfflinger in which the lowly outsider he was not Prussian by birth chose to serve the Prussian king in whom alone he put his trust and in whose service he was willing to attract the ill will from all the other powerful people as had Seydlitz and Ziethen Reuth also comments that Rommel tended to blame the people around Hitler for all the bad of the regime while seeing Hitler the sender of criminal orders as the source of all that was good 176 177 Certain authors remark that he also sought military glory and personal recognition most of all from Hitler on whom according to Watson Rommel projected his idea of the German people s will 168 n 16 nbsp Rommel posing for a propaganda photo in North Africa According to Klaus Naumann Rommel was used by the Nazi regime to create a myth He tolerated this since he had a strong dose of personal ambition and vanity 97 A number of contemporaries noted Rommel s vanity In the memorandum regarding Rommel s betrayal Martin Bormann remarked He had himself photographed from dawn to dusk He is so vain he does not wear glasses Rommel was near sighted in one eye and far sighted in the other 178 Historian Samuel Mitcham however noted that Martin Bormann had held a grudge against the Generalfeldmarschall as far back as 1939 179 Some modern authors such as Storbeck are more sympathetic He states that Rommel s perceived vanity developed as a reaction to the pressure aristocratic and high bourgeois colleagues put on him 180 The psychologist Norman F Dixon remarks that although Rommel showed towards Hitler an admiration that later faded he did not display the urge to submit himself to higher authority or powerful father figures considering that had he been such a person he would not have been so outspoken or risked himself in the struggle against people like Himmler Keitel or Jodl 181 Showalter comments that Rommel was a man who brought his work home but not to the point of obsession with personal promotions considering he had spent no effort in building a social circle his wife was the person who determined their family s social agenda and the guest list and the circle she chose was not wide nor prominent 182 Messenger points out that Rommel had many reasons to be grateful to Hitler including his interference to arrange for him to receive command of an armoured division his elevation to the status of a national hero and continued interest and support from the dictator Remy states that the attachment to Hitler went much deeper than any gratefulness could explain and that Hitler had become Rommel s source of motivation 183 Some like Randall Hansen 184 highlight the similarities in background and personality that facilitated the rapport between the two while others like Richard Overy state that Rommel s main appeal to Hitler was that he was everything Hitler was not 185 while the political scientist Roland Detsch in a review of Maurice Remy s book comments that despite Remy s efforts the strange relationship remains hard to understand 186 Wolfram Pyta remarks that Hitler did not compete with Rommel for the war leader image because the two complemented each other perfectly They were similar in the sense that they were the only ones with a cultural presence and objects around whom German society s grand narrative was being built thus Rommel was the only German general who would have been capable of challenging Hitler s rule had he ever crossed the Rubicon from his apolitical to the core military world and developed a serious critical view of Hitler s political dealings However Rommel himself had fallen for Hitler s charisma almost until the end 187 Peter Lieb opines that the relationship between Rommel and Hitler is overrated they liked each other but the relationship became worse and worse since the end of 1942 when Rommel began to see the consequences of Hitler s disastrous leadership as well as recognize the criminal character of the regime According to Lieb historians should focus more on Goebbels whose propaganda built up Rommel 188 Italian generals considered Rommel apolitical too According to Scianna when Badoglio took over Italy in 1943 the Allies became hopeful that a similar development would happen in Germany with Rommel as head of the new regime but captured Italian generals rebuked this pipe dream telling them that Rommel unlike other German generals did not care about politics 189 Caddick Adams writes that Rommel was a complicated man of many contradictions 190 while Beckett notes that Rommel s myth has proved remarkably resilient and that more work is needed to put him in proper historical context 148 Zabecki concludes that the blind hero worship only distorts the real lessons to be learned from his career and battles 191 and Watson notes that the legend has been a distraction that obscured the evolution of Rommel as a military commander and his changing attitudes towards the regime that he served 192 John Pimlott writes that Rommel was an impressive military commander who richly deserved his reputation as a leading exponent of mobile warfare hampered by factors he could not control although he usually accepted high risks and could become frustrated when forced on the defensive On the other hand Pimlott criticises Rommel for only disagreeing with Hitler for strategic reasons and while accepting that Rommel did give chivalrous tone to his battles in Africa he points out that this should not be used to ignore the responsibility Rommel must bear for promoting the Nazi cause with vigour 193 The same sentiment is held by Williamson Murray and Alan Millett who opine that Rommel contrary to allegations that he was only a competent tactical commander was the most outstanding battlefield commander of the war who showed a realistic strategic view despite holding minimal control over strategy They point out that like virtually the entire German officer corps he was a convinced Nazi 194 While some like Scianna are more critical towards his strategical decisions but also dismiss negative myths such as Rommel s abandonment of his allies 195 Cornelia Hecht the author of the 2008 exhibition named Mythos Rommel and a book of the same name explains that despite extensive research it is hard to see who Rommel really was under all the layers of the myth 196 She comments that she would not describe Rommel as a resistance fighter although he did support the assassination attempt 197 Patrick Major describes Rommel as someone who went along with the regime as long as it served his needs a fellow traveler rather than a war criminal 198 Summing up Rommel s career in a 2012 interview with Reuters the historian Sonke Neitzel states On the one hand he didn t commit war crimes that we know of and ordered a retreat at El Alamein despite Hitler s order But he took huge German casualties elsewhere and he was a servant of the regime He was not exactly a shining liberal or Social Democrat Mostly he was interested in his career 66 Historian Reuth observes that the modern German image of Rommel a result of the Historikerstreit in the 1980s and debates on war guilt during the 1990s as represented most notably by Maurice Remy is that of both a National Socialist and a hero of the Resistance Reuth argues that Rommel was neither one nor the other He had understood neither National Socialism nor the resistance to it Like millions of Germans he followed Hitler into disaster and whilst doing so he believed he was only doing his duty 199 Historiography editAlthough the author David Irving and his works have now become controversial for his denial of the Holocaust he is recognised as the historian who started the re evaluation of Rommel He was the first historian to gain access to a large number of Rommel s private letters and his well substantiated findings questioned Rommel s image as a chivalrous resistance fighter 6 200 This biography however has been criticized by other authors Dowe and Hecht for manipulation and misrepresentation of primary sources and even invention of verbatim quotations with the aim of portraying Hitler in a better light 201 Works such as the 2002 documentary Mythos Rommel by Remy and the book of the same name and the 2004 book Rommel Das Ende einer Legende published in English in 2005 as Rommel The End of a Legend by German historian Ralf Georg Reuth furthered the discussion on both Rommel and his myth 5 In the continued debate on Rommel and his legacy Christopher Gabel criticises the documentary Rommel s War made by historians Jorg Mullner de and Jean Christoph Caron for using false analogy to prove that Rommel was a war criminal by association without providing any evidence even of Rommel s knowledge about crimes in his areas of operation 202 According to Matthias Stickler attacks on Rommel s integrity and attempts to link him to war crimes which were started by the journalist side in the 1990s have been largely repudiated by serious research despite having been repeatedly rehashed and refreshed by some authors and their epigones Stickler gives recognition to both Remy and Reuth for offering possible explanations for Rommel s character evolution 203 Numerous English speaking authors use the Rommel Myth ambiguously like Bruce Allen Watson who states that the masks he wore reflected the genuine plurality of the man 204 or Jill Edwards who notes that below all the layers historians have removed and added to what remains seems enough to qualify Rommel as if controversial a great captain 205 Others who mention and depict the myth as a phenomenon that is either hard to ascertain or has a core that reflects reality include Pier Paolo Battistelli n 17 Randall Hansen 207 Ian Baxter 208 T L McMahon 209 Brighton 210 Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck 91 Charles F Marshall 211 Majdalany 212 Latimer 213 and Showalter 214 A German author who uses the word Mythos in a critical manner is Ralph Giordano n 18 who describes the phenomenon as one of the Falsehoods of Tradition in his book of the same name which depicts how the image of Rommel has been a major basis for the warrior cult of the Bundeswehr 216 Sir David Hunt describes himself as being critical towards the Rommel mythology While he has the highest praise for his character his impression of Rommel as a commander is a dashing cavalryman who gambled deep and lost in the end Other authors who present popular narratives on Rommel as a misguided or deliberately falsified myth include James Sadkovich who criticises both Rommel s supposed genius and his treatment of his Italian allies 217 and James Robinson 19 Martin Kitchen 218 Alaric Searle 75 Robert Citino 219 Ralf Georg Reuth 21 Kenneth Macksey 220 See also editControversy over Erwin Rommel as Bundeswehr s role model The Myth of the Eastern Front Speer myth Waffen SS in popular cultureNotes edit Terry Brighton It was suggested that the problem was not an inadequate army but the predominance of upper class officers in senior posts and that If Rommel had been in the British Army he would still have been a sergeant Churchill fighting for his survival deflected attention from the failings of British generals by stressing the extraordinary qualities of their opponent We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us and may I say across the havoc of war a great general 1 Niall Barr came to fame in a theatre which held almost no strategic interest for Hitler whatsoever 17 Martin Kitchen German historians have largely ignored the North African campaign not only because it was peripheral 18 James Robinson German thinking was disinterested with an expanded strategic purpose in North Africa and Rommel knew it 19 Peter Caddick Adams Rommel s advances over the winter 1941 42 became a very useful distraction away from Germany s failure before Moscow 26 Quote from one of Rommel s letters January 1942 The opinion of me in the world press has improved 35 Peter Lieb Hitler was well aware that it would be unwise to link the downfall of Army Group Africa to the name of Rommel the child of Joseph Goebbel s propaganda machinery 40 Martin Kitchen Early biographies such as that by Desmond Young were positively adulatory 18 Patrick Major Young had relied extensively on interviews with the Field Marshal s surviving widow son and former comrades so that the positive picture that emerged is perhaps hardly surprising Yet the overall effect bordered on hagiography 59 Major writes quoting Liddell Hart went to see it in a very critical frame of mind from past experience of Hollywood handling of history but was pleasantly surprised 68 Charles F Marshall With the German press showering him with encomiums rumours about the Swabian s past appeared overnight like mushrooms both in Germany and outside Every day brought new ones He had been a bricklayer and early comrade of Hitler he had been a street corner bully he had been a policeman between the two wars and had studied at Tuebingen University he had been a swashbuckling storm trooper and one of the first adherents of the Fuhrer 85 Kitchen The North African campaign has usually been seen as in the title of Rommel s account as War without Hate and thus as further proof that the German army was not involved in any sordid butchering which was left to Himmler s SS While it was perfectly true that the German troops in North Africa fought with great distinction and gallantry it was fortunate for their subsequent reputation that the SS murderers that followed in their wake did not have an opportunity to get to work Kitchen further explains that the sparsely populated desert areas did not lend themselves to ethnic cleansing that the German forces never reached Egypt and Palestine which had large Jewish populations and that in the urban areas of Tunisia and Tripolitania the Italian government constrained the German efforts to discriminate against or eliminate Jews who were Italian citizens 89 Spiegel Online Gentleman warrior military genius The legend of Erwin Rommel the German Field Marshal who outfoxed the British in North Africa lives on 90 Robert Citino His career had been based solely on Hitler s favor and we might reasonably describe his attitude toward the Fuhrer as worshipful 22 Peter Caddick Adams As is now clear Rommel had been very close to Hitler and the Third Reich 104 Robert Citino His disinterest in the dreary science of logistics his love of action his tendency to fly off to wherever the fighting was hottest all of these qualities are problems in a commander under modern conditions and they all contributed materially to the disaster that ultimately befell him and his army in the desert 22 According to David T Zabecki Rommel s insubordination also played a role leading to a calamitous misuse of resources when Rommel went over the head of his superior Field Marshal Albert Kesselring to appeal directly to Hitler to approve an assault on Egypt instead of occupying Malta as Kesselring and OKW were planning 101 Klaus Naumann Rommel s way out in Africa bypassing the chain of command by seeking direct access to Hitler must never be taken as an example to be followed Naumann states that as one of the battle proven principles unity of command must be preserved Rommel did not follow this principle which allowed him to achieve some tactical victories but this contributed to eventual operational and strategic failure in North Africa 126 Klaus Naumann Rommel was used by the Nazi regime to create a myth He tolerated this since he had a strong dose of personal ambition and vanity 97 Battistelli The myth of Erwin Rommel the Desert Fox has proved to be particularly long lasting There are many historical issues surrounding his true merits as a military commander and the extent of his actual involvement in the anti Hitler conspiracy and yet on close inspection he comes across as a simple straightforward man whose talents and character ensured his success in the very particular circumstances that arose throughout his career 206 Giordano Another brick is broken out of the mendacious myth of the legendary Desert Fox and alleged resistance fighter against Hitler Field Marshal Erwin Rommel 215 Citations edit Brighton 2008 p 115 a b c Young 1950 p 26 Rommel 1982 p xv a b Major 2008 p 523 a b c Beckett 2014 pp 1 2 a b Lasserre 2014 Pyta 2015 p 502 Echternkamp 2010 p 114 Knopp 2013 Mass 2006 p 254 Watson 1999 pp 157 158 a b c d Caddick Adams 2012 pp 471 472 Beevor 2012 pp 89 90 Der Mann wusste dass der Krieg verloren ist Frankfurter Allgemeine in German 3 November 2012 Retrieved 15 June 2016 Caddick Adams 2012 pp 210 211 Watson 1999 pp 158 159 Barr 2014 p 60 a b Kitchen 2009 p 9 a b Robinson 1997 Watson 1999 p 159 a b Reuth 2005 p 124 a b c d e f g Citino 2012 Kubetzky 2010 p 316 The Cairns Post 1941 Reuth 2005 pp 136 139 a b c Caddick Adams 2012 p 471 a b Reuth 2005 pp 141 143 a b Watson 1999 pp 166 167 Schrijvers 1997 pp 63 64 a b Deuel 1943 p 72 Goldschmidt Waldeck 1943 p 25 Holles 1945 p 227 Atkinson 2013 p 358 Strawson 2013 p 124 a b c Reuth 2005 p 144 Reuth 2005 p 148 Reuth 2005 pp 144 146 Reuth 2005 pp 150 152 a b Reuth 2005 pp 154 158 Lieb 2014 p 113 Lieb 2014 pp 113 115 a b Lieb 2014 pp 117 118 Lieb 2014 p 120 Reuth 2005 p 159 a b Reuth 2005 pp 159 161 Ceva 1990 pp 97 98 Caddick Adams 2012 pp 471 473 a b Searle 2014 p 9 Smelser amp Davies 2008 pp 72 73 Wette 2007 pp 236 237 Reuth 2005 p 2 Searle 2014 pp 8 27 Battistelli 2012 p 116 MOVIE OF THE WEEK Five Graves to Cairo LIFE Vol 14 no 24 14 June 1943 p 47 Retrieved 16 March 2019 Cocks 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2009 pp 189 190 Lieb 2014 Showalter 2006 p 264 Hanley 2008 p 180 Butler 2015 pp 281 346 383 405 550 552 Boog et al 2001 pp RA1 PR18 Remy 2002 pp 52 59 84 111 116 Remy 2002 pp 262 273 Krause amp Phillips 2006 pp 175 179 Stroud 2013 pp 33 34 Levine 2007 pp 14 15 Knox 2000 pp 2 3 10 29 116 118 Knorr 2015 p 79 Atkinson 2002 pp 318 319 Lewin 1998 p 26 Boog et al 2001 p 839 Austin 2004 p 20 Levine 1999 p 184 Hartmann 2011 p 138 a b Butler 2015 p 259 Wiederschein Harald 22 June 2018 Der Mythos vom Wustenfuchs Wie ritterlich kampften Deutsche und Briten wirklich FOCUS Retrieved 16 March 2019 Ball 2016 p 92 a b c Beckett 2014 p 6 Shirer 1960 pp 1031 1177 Hart 2014 pp 142 150 Hart 2014 pp 139 142 Hart 2014 p 146 Hart 2014 pp 145 146 Hart 2014 p 140 Reuth 2005 Evans 2009 p 642 Hart 2014 p 152 Blumenson 2001 p 375 Brighton 2008 p 160 Butler 2015 p 528 Foster Tony 2000 Meeting of Generals iUniverse p 433 ISBN 978 1 4697 1390 8 Hart 2014 pp 141 152 Reuth 2005 p 183 Remy 2002 p 277 Neitzel 2005 p 137 a b Lieb 2013 p 343 Remy 2002 p 358 a b Watson 1999 p 169 Coetzee 2013 p 286 Remy 2002 pp 24 75 90 Barnett 1989 p 293 Brighton 2009 p 250 Augstein Franziska 17 May 2010 Offizier mit Leib und Ledermantel Suddeutsche Zeitung Archived from the original on 11 December 2016 Hansen 2014 pp 46 47 Connelly 2009 p 107 Reuth 2005 p 28 Citino 2007 p 118 Remy 2002 p 336 Mitcham Samuel W 1984 Triumphant Fox Erwin Rommel and the Rise of the Afrika Korps Storbeck Siegfried F 4 December 2013 Erwin Rommel Bitte mehr Sachlichkeit Erwin Rommel Please more objectivity IF Zeitschrift fur Innere Fuhrung Bundeswehr Archived from the original on 28 August 2016 Retrieved 30 June 2016 Dixon 2016 p 381 Showalter 2006 p 123 Remy 2002 p 90 Hansen 2014 p 48 Fischer 2014 Detsch 2002 Pyta 2015 pp 498 502 503 Kellerhoff Sven Felix 25 October 2018 Erwin Rommel stand auf der Seite des Widerstandes welt de Retrieved 29 October 2018 Scianna 2018 p 137 Caddick Adams 2012 pp 485 486 Zabecki 2016a Watson 1999 pp 162 163 Pimlott 2014 pp 8 106 220 Murray amp Millett 2009 pp 100 101 Scianna 2018 p 145 Sonnberger 2008 Brunner Tobias 14 October 2014 70 Todestag von Erwin Rommel Nazi General oder Widerstandskampfer WEB DE Retrieved 14 September 2016 Major 2008 p 534 Reuth 2005 p 222 Von Fleischhauer Jan Friedmann Jan 29 October 2012 Die Kraft des Bosen Der Spiegel Vol 44 Archived from the original on 11 December 2016 Retrieved 30 May 2016 Dowe amp Hecht 2016 pp 129 160 Gabel 2014 p 202 Stickler 2005 pp 189 208 Watson 2006 p 181 Edwards 2012 p 181 Battistelli 2012 p 4 Hansen 2014 pp 46 48 Baxter 2014 p 58 McMahon 2014 p 97 Brighton 2009 p 390 Marshall 1994 p 169 Majdalany 2003 p 32 Latimer 2002 p 27 Showalter 2006 p 200 Giordano 2010 p 286 Giordano 2000 pp 314 394 423 Sadkovich amp Hixson 2003 pp 238 267 Kitchen 2014 p 84 Citino 2007 p 117 Macksey 1979 p 216 Bibliography editAddington Larry H 1967 Operation Sunflower Rommel Versus the General Staff Military Affairs 31 3 120 130 doi 10 2307 1984650 JSTOR 1984650 Atkinson Rick 2002 An Army at Dawn New York Picador ISBN 978 0 8050 8724 6 Atkinson Rick 2013 The Guns at Last Light New York Henry Holt ISBN 978 0 8050 6290 8 Austin Douglas 2004 Malta and British Strategic Policy 1925 43 Routledge p 20 ISBN 978 1135769383 Ball Simon 2016 Alamein Great Battles Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 150462 4 Barnett Correlli 1989 Hitler s Generals Grove Press ISBN 0802139949 Barr Niall 2014 Rommel in the Desert 1941 In I F W Beckett ed Rommel Reconsidered Mechanicsburg PA Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 1462 4 Battistelli Pier Paolo 2012 Erwin Rommel Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN 978 1 78096 471 3 Baxter Ian 2014 Afrika Korps Pen and Sword ISBN 978 1 84415 683 2 Beckett Ian 2014 Introduction In I F W Beckett ed Rommel Reconsidered Mechanicsburg PA Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 1462 4 Beevor Antony 2012 The Second World War New York Back Bay Books ISBN 978 0 316 02374 0 Blumenson Martin 2001 Heroes Never Die Warriors and Warfare in World War II Cooper Square Press ISBN 978 0 8154 1152 9 Boog Horst Rahn Werner Stumpf Reinhard Wegner Bernd 2001 Germany and the Second World War Volume 6 The Global War OUP Oxford p 839 ISBN 978 0191606847 Brighton Terry 2008 Masters of Battle Monty Patton and Rommel at War New York Viking ISBN 978 0 670 91691 7 Brighton Terry 2009 Patton Montgomery Rommel Masters of War Crown Archetype ISBN 978 1 4001 1497 9 Butler Daniel Allen 2015 Field Marshal The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Havertown PA Oxford Casemate ISBN 978 1 61200 297 2 Caddick Adams Peter 2012 Monty and Rommel Parallel Lives New York The Overlook Press ISBN 978 1 59020 725 3 Calder Angus 2012 The People s War Britain 1939 1945 Random House pp 242 265 304 524 564 ISBN 978 1 4481 0310 2 Ceva Lucio 1990 The North African Campaign 1940 43 A Reconsideration In John Gooch ed Decisive Campaigns of the Second World War Abingdon Taylor amp Francis ISBN 978 0 7146 3369 5 Chambers Madeline 2012 The Devil s General German film seeks to debunk Rommel myth Reuters Archived from the original on 11 December 2016 Retrieved 8 February 2016 Citino Robert 2007 Death of the Wehrmacht The German Campaigns of 1942 University Press of Kansas Archived from the original on 6 October 2016 Citino Robert 2012 Rommel s Afrika Korps HistoryNet Archived from the original on 11 December 2016 Retrieved 3 March 2016 Coetzee Daniel 2013 Philosophers of War The Evolution of History s Greatest Military Thinkers ABC CLIO ISBN 978 0 313 07033 4 Connelly Mark 2014 Rommel as icon In I F W Beckett ed Rommel Reconsidered Mechanicsburg PA Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 1462 4 Connelly Owen 2009 On War and Leadership The Words of Combat Commanders from Frederick the Great to Norman Schwarzkopf Princeton Princeton University Press ISBN 978 1 4008 2516 5 Creveld Martin van 1977 Supplying War Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 052121730X Detsch Roland 2002 Die andere Wahrheit context politik wissenschaft kultur Archived from the original on 11 December 2016 Retrieved 30 May 2016 Deuel Wallace R 1943 A Model Teuton MEET MR BLANK By R G Waldeck 179 pp New York G P Putnam s Boris Mr Blank The Model Teuton The New York Times Book Review Vol II Arno Press Retrieved 14 September 2017 Dick Bernard F 2015 The Star Spangled Screen The American World War II Film University Press of Kentucky ISBN 978 0 813 14895 3 Dixon Norman F 2016 On the Psychology of Military Incompetence Basic Books ISBN 978 0 465 09780 7 Dowe Christopher Hecht Cornelia 2016 Von Mythen Legenden und Manipulationen David Irving und seine verzerrende Deutungen von Erwin Rommel Hans Speidel und Casar von Hofacker In Haus der Geschichte Baden Wurttemberg ed Verrater Vorbilder Verbrecher Kontroverse Deutungen des 20 Juli 1944 seit 1945 Frank amp Timme GmbH pp 129 160 ISBN 978 3732902767 Duffy James P Ricci Vincent L 2013 Target Hitler The Many Plots to Kill Adolf Hitler Enigma Books ISBN 978 1 936274 03 1 Echternkamp Jorg 2010 Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen der Zweite Weltkrieg C H Beck ISBN 978 3 406 59314 7 Edwards Jill 2012 El Alamein and the Struggle for North Africa International Perspectives from the Twenty first Century Oxford University Press ISBN 978 977 416 581 8 Evans Richard J 2009 The Third Reich at War New York Penguin ISBN 978 0 14 101548 4 Fischer Thomas 2014 Rommel und Hitler SWR Retrieved 30 May 2016 Fraser David 1993 Knight s Cross A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel New York HarperCollins Retrieved 23 April 2016 Friedmann Jan 23 May 2007 World War II New Research Taints Image of Desert Fox Rommel Spiegel Online Archived from the original on 11 December 2016 Retrieved 4 March 2016 Gabel Christopher 2014 Great Commanders Illustrated Edition Pickle Partners Publishing ISBN 978 1 78289 446 9 Giordano Ralph 2000 Die Traditionsluge vom Kriegerkult in der Bundeswehr Kiepenheuer amp Witsch ISBN 978 3 462 02921 5 Giordano Ralph 2010 Mein Leben ist so sundhaft lang ein Tagebuch Kiepenheuer amp Witsch ISBN 978 3 462 04240 5 Goldschmidt Waldeck Rosie 1943 Meet Mr Blank The Leader of Tomorrow s Germans G P Putnam s sons Hachten Wee Patricia Wee Robert James 2004 World War II in Literature for Youth A Guide and Resource Book Scarecrow Press ISBN 978 0 8108 5301 0 Hamilton Nigel 2012 Defeating the Desert Fox The National WWII Museum Retrieved 8 October 2016 Hanley Brian 2008 Planning for Conflict in the Twenty first Century Greenwood Publishing Group ISBN 978 0 313 34555 5 Hansen Randall 2014 Disobeying Hitler German Resistance After Valkyrie New York Oxford University Press p 48 ISBN 978 0 19 992792 0 Hart Russel A 2014 Rommel and the 20th July Bomb Plot In F W Beckett ed Rommel Reconsidered Mechanicsburg PA Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 1462 4 Hartmann Bernd 2011 Panzers in the Sand The History of Panzer Regiment 5 1942 45 Vol II Stackpole Books p 138 ISBN 978 0811744324 Holles Everett 1945 Unconditional Surrender Howell Soskin p 227 Kitchen Martin 2009 Rommel s Desert War Waging World War II in North Africa 1941 1943 Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 50971 8 Kitchen Martin 2014 A World in Flames A Short History of the Second World War in Europe and Asia 1939 1945 Routledge p 84 ISBN 978 1 317 90094 8 Knopp Guido 2013 Hitlers Krieger C Bertelsmann Verlag ISBN 978 3 641 11998 0 Knorr Major Marvin Jr 2015 The Development Of German Doctrine And Command And Control And Its Application To Supporting Arms 1832 1945 Pickle Partners ISBN 978 1 78625 062 9 Knox MacGregor 2000 Hitler s Italian Allies Royal Armed Forces Fascist Regime and the War of 1940 1943 Cambridge University Press p 116 ISBN 978 1 139 43203 0 Krause Michael D Phillips R Cody 2006 Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art Government Printing Office ISBN 978 0 16 072564 7 Kubetzky Thomas 2010 The mask of command Bernard L Montgomery George S Patton und Erwin Rommell LIT Verlag Munster ISBN 978 3 643 10349 9 Lasserre Caroline 8 July 2014 Rommel ist und bleibt ein Mythos Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Archived from the original on 11 December 2016 Retrieved 3 August 2016 Latimer Jon 2002 Alamein Cambridge MA Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 01016 1 Levine Alan J 2007 D Day to Berlin The Northwest Europe Campaign 1944 45 Stackpole Books ISBN 978 1 4617 5085 7 Levine Alan J 1999 The War Against Rommel s Supply Lines 1942 1943 Praeger p 183 ISBN 978 0275965211 Lewin Ronald 1998 1968 Rommel As Military Commander New York B amp N Books ISBN 978 0 7607 0861 3 Lieb Peter 2013 Erwin Rommel Widerstandskampfer oder Nationalsozialist PDF Vol 61 Degruyter pp 303 343 doi 10 1524 vfzg 2013 0015 S2CID 147061655 a href Template Cite encyclopedia html title Template Cite encyclopedia cite encyclopedia a journal ignored help Lieb Peter 2014 Rommel in Normandy In Beckett I F W ed Rommel Reconsidered Mechanicsburg PA Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 1462 4 Luvaas Jay 1990 Liddell Hart and the Mearsheimer Critique A Pupil s Retrospective PDF Strategic Studies Institute Retrieved 8 February 2016 Macksey Kenneth 1979 Rommel Battles and Campaigns Arms amp Armour Press ISBN 978 0 85368 232 5 Maier Manfred 2013 Vortrag Manfred Maier zu der Geschichte des Heidenheimer Rommeldenkmals In Geschichtswerkstatt Heidenheim ed Vorlage fur die Arbeitsgruppe Umgestaltung des Rommel Denkmals p 49 Majdalany Fred 2003 The Battle of El Alamein Fortress in the Sand University of Pennsylvania Press pp 31 32 ISBN 978 0 8122 1850 3 Major Patrick 2008 Our Friend Rommel The Wehrmacht as Worthy Enemy in Postwar British Popular Culture German History Oxford University Press 26 4 520 535 doi 10 1093 gerhis ghn049 Marshall Charles F 1994 Discovering the Rommel Murder Mechanicsburg PA Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 4278 8 Mass Sandra 2006 Weisse Helden schwarze Krieger zur Geschichte kolonialer Mannlichkeit in Deutschland 1918 1964 Bohlau Verlag Koln Weimar pp 249 252 258 294 301 ISBN 978 3 412 32305 9 McMahon T L 2014 Operational Principles The Operational Art of Erwin Rommel and Bernard Montgomery Pickle Partners ISBN 978 1 78289 742 2 Mearsheimer John 1988 Liddell Hart and the Weight of History Ithaca NY Cornell University Press ISBN 978 0 8014 2089 4 Megargee Geoffrey P 2000 Inside Hitler s High Command Lawrence Kansas University Press ISBN 0 7006 1015 4 Messenger Charles 2009 Rommel Leadership Lessons from the Desert Fox Basingstoke NY Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978 0 230 60908 2 Murray Williamson 1995 Knight s Cross A Life of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel by David Fraser The Journal of Military History Virginia Military Institute and the George C Marshall Foundation 59 2 345 346 doi 10 2307 2944594 ISSN 1543 7795 JSTOR 2944594 Murray Williamson Millett Allan Reed 2009 A War To Be Won fighting the Second World War Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 04130 1 Murray Williamson 2011 Military Adaptation in War With Fear of Change Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 1 139 91586 1 Naumann Klaus 2009 Afterword In Charles Messenger ed Rommel Leadership Lessons from the Desert Fox Basingstoke NY Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978 0 230 60908 2 Neitzel Sonke 2005 Abgehort Deutsche Generale in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft 1942 1945 Berlin Propylaen ISBN 978 3 548 60760 3 Pimlott John ed 2014 1994 Rommel In His Own Words London Amber Books ISBN 978 1 78274 190 9 Pyta Wolfram 2015 Hitler Der Kunstler als Politiker und Feldherr Eine Herrschaftsanalyse Siedler Verlag ISBN 978 3 641 15701 2 Rau Petra 2013 Our Nazis Edinburgh University Press pp 132 134 ISBN 978 0748668663 Retrieved 8 February 2019 Remy Maurice Philip 2002 Mythos Rommel Munich Ullstein ISBN 3 548 60385 8 Reuth Ralf Georg 2005 Rommel The End of a Legend London Haus Books ISBN 978 1 904950 20 2 Robinson James R 1997 The Rommel Myth Military Review 77 5 Archived from the original on 8 March 2016 Rommel Erwin 1982 1953 Liddell Hart B H ed The Rommel Papers New York Da Capo Press ISBN 978 0 306 80157 0 Sadkovich James J Hixson Walter L 2003 Of Myths and Men Rommel and the Italians in North Africa 1940 1942 chapter The American Experience in World War II The United States in the European theater Taylor amp Francis pp 238 267 ISBN 978 0 415 94033 7 Scianna Bastian Matteo 2018 Rommel Almighty Italian Assessments of the Desert Fox during and after the Second World War Journal of Military History 82 1 125 146 Retrieved 8 May 2019 Schrijvers Peter 1997 The Crash of Ruin American Combat Soldiers in Europe during World War II Springer ISBN 978 1349145225 Searle Alaric 2014 Rommel and the rise of the Nazis In Beckett I F W ed Rommel Reconsidered Mechanicsburg PA Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 1462 4 Shirer William L 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich New York Simon and Schuster ISBN 978 0 671 62420 0 Showalter Dennis E 2006 Patton And Rommel Men of War in the Twentieth Century 2006 ed New York City New York Berkley Books ISBN 978 0 425 20663 8 Smelser Ronald Davies Edward J 2008 The Myth of the Eastern Front The Nazi Soviet War in American Popular Culture New York Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 83365 3 Sonnberger Heike 2008 Ausstellung entzaubert Wustenfuchs Rommel Die Welt Retrieved 15 June 2016 Stickler Matthias 2005 Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel Ein Mythos im Zwielicht In Matthias Stickler Verena Spinnler eds Portraits zur Geschichte des deutschen Widerstands Leidorf pp 189 208 ISBN 978 3896468383 Strawson John 2013 If By Chance Military Turning Points that Changed History Pan Macmillan p 124 ISBN 978 1 4472 3553 8 Stroud Rick 2013 The Phantom Army of Alamein The Men Who Hoodwinked Rommel A amp C Black ISBN 978 1 4088 3128 1 The Cairns Post 9 September 1941 Gangster goes to war Hitler s white hope The Cairns Post Retrieved 14 September 2017 Time 1951 Armored Knight Time Vol 57 no 4 Watson Bruce Allen 1999 Exit Rommel The Tunisian Campaign 1942 43 Westport CN Praeger Publishers ISBN 978 0 275 95923 4 Watson Bruce Allen 2006 Exit Rommel The Tunisian Campaign 1942 43 Westport CN Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 3381 6 Wette Wolfram 2007 The Wehrmacht History Myth Reality Cambridge MA Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 02577 6 Young Desmond 1950 Rommel The Desert Fox New York Harper amp Row OCLC 48067797 Zabecki David T 2016 Rethinking Rommel Military History Herndon VA 32 5 24 29 Zabecki David T 2016a David Zabecki s response to Bob Frazier s letter Readers Letters Military History Retrieved 3 March 2016 Further reading editArquilla John 1996 From Troy to Entebbe Special Operations in Ancient and Modern Times University Press of America p 218 ISBN 978 0 7618 0186 3 Bartels Hans Peter 19 November 2017 Kein Pomp Keine Helden Nirgends Pracht Die Welt Retrieved 8 April 2018 Daniker Gustav Keren Michael Sylvan Donald A 2002 International Intervention Sovereignty Versus Responsibility Psychology Press p 117 ISBN 978 0 7146 5192 7 Hecht Cornelia Haussler Johannes Linder Rainer eds 2008 Mythos Rommel Stuttgart Haus der Geschichte Baden Wurttemberg ISBN 978 3 933726 28 5 Lieb Peter 2012 Rommel Field Marshal Erwin 1891 1944 The Encyclopedia of War Zaloga Steven 2013 The Devil s Garden Rommel s Desperate Defense of Omaha Beach Stackpole Books ISBN 978 0 8117 5277 0 External links editMyth of humane Nazi Erwin Rommel debunked 2008 The Daily Telegraph news report on The Rommel Myth exhibition Images from the exhibition as they appeared in the book In Detail Exhibitions and Displays Defeating the Desert Fox Video on YouTube via the official channel of The National WWII Museum session by Nigel Hamilton at the 2012 International Conference on World War II Erwin Rommel The Hero of the Clean Wehrmacht via Die Welt in German Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Rommel myth amp oldid 1210662872, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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