Hitler Murdered His Own Field Marshal

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[00:00:00]A quarter past noon, October 14th, 1944.

[00:00:04]A small house at the edge of a forest in Herrlingen, a village in Württemberg, southern Germany. Birch leaves yellowing. A woman setting the table for lunch. A green Opel sedan pulls up the gravel drive. Two German generals step out. General Wilhelm Burgdorf, deputy chief of the army personnel office, and Major General Ernst Maisel. Burgdorf is carrying a leather briefcase. Inside the briefcase, historians like David Fraser and Maurice Remy have reconstructed it from the surviving testimony of Rommel's son, his adjutant, and the Burgdorf court-martial files, sits a small glass capsule, a cyanide capsule. Inside the house, the man they have come to see, 52 years old, General Field Marshal, former commander of the Africa Corps, former commander of Army Group B, the most famous German general of the Second World War, the man whom even Winston Churchill had called in the Commons in 1942, a great general, is wearing his brown Africa Corps tunic. Across the room sits his wife of 28 years, Lucia.

[00:01:09]Their 15-year-old son, Manfred, is in the next room. Burgdorf, very stiffly, requests a private conversation. Rommel takes him into the upstairs study. The conversation lasts perhaps 10 minutes.

[00:01:24]When Rommel comes out, Manfred Rommel, who would later become Lord Mayor of Stuttgart, and who recounted what followed many times before his death in 2013, described his father as gray, composed, quiet. In the bedroom, Rommel says something very quietly to Lucia. He says it again to Manfred. He puts on his greatcoat. He picks up his marshal's baton. He walks down the gravel drive.

[00:01:50]He gets into the back of the green Opel sedan. The Opel drives perhaps a kilometer up the road into the woods at the edge of the village and stops. 20 minutes later the Opel is back. Burgdorf is alone in the backseat. Rommel is on a stretcher. He is dead. Welcome back to Dog Tags Tales, the channel where we tell the stories the wars almost forgot.

[00:02:15]Today's story is about Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, the most admired German general of the Second World War, and the strange, slow, unbearable way he died by his own hand under armed escort on a Saturday afternoon in a forest at the edge of his own village. Time and place, Heidenheim an der Brenz, Württemberg, November 15th, 1891.

[00:02:41]Rommel was born into the Swabian middle-class. His father, Erwin Sr., was a school teacher, eventually a school principal. His mother, Helene, came from a family of Württemberg civil servants. The house was modest, bookish, not military. There were no Rommels in the Prussian officer corps. There were no estates. There were no aristocratic von particles. The family pronounced their surname the South German way, softly, almost without the second M.

[00:03:13]Rommel was, by every account, an unremarkable child, poor athlete, an average student, a small, pale, quiet boy. The historian Daniel Allen Butler, in his 2015 biography Field Marshal, traces a key childhood detail at 14.

[00:03:32]Rommel built a working glider with his older brother Karl. He spent hundreds of hours on the design. The aviation industry was not yet what it would become, but the discipline of the workshop, the focus on the small mechanical detail, the refusal to give up, these became, the historian David Fraser argues in his Pulitzer Prize finalist 1993 biography Knight's Cross, the architecture of Rommel's mind for the rest of his life. He entered the Royal Württemberg Officer Cadet School in 1910, a regional school, not the Prussian elite. He was commissioned a lieutenant in 1912. He led an infantry platoon into the First World War in August 1914, age 22. His First World War record alone would have made him famous. France in 1914, Romania in 1916, the Italian front in October 1917, in the great Austro-German offensive at Caporetto. Rommel, by then a Hauptmann commanding a mountain detachment, captured the strategic peak of Mount Matajur with 150 men. He took 9,000 Italian prisoners and 81 guns in 52 hours with three German dead. The Kaiser, in early 1918, awarded him the Pour le Mérite, the Blue Max, Imperial Germany's highest decoration. Rommel was 26 years old. The award was almost never given to a junior officer. It was given to him. He spent the interwar years as a small unit infantry instructor.

[00:05:06]He wrote a book, Infantry Attacks, published 1937, which became, ironically, an obsessive study text for American General George S.

[00:05:14]Patton, who would face Rommel's army across the desert sand a decade later and quote phrases from the book in his diary as he did so. Time and place.

[00:05:23]Western Belgium and northern France. May and June 1940. When Hitler invaded the Low Countries and France, Rommel, by then a major general, having served briefly as the commander of Hitler's personal escort battalion in the early months of the war, was given the 7th Panzer Division. What followed in 6 weeks is one of the most studied campaigns in 20th century military history. Rommel's division crossed the Meuse against Allied resistance, broke into open country, and drove west and south at a speed no army had previously believed possible. The 7th Panzer was so mobile, so far ahead of the German command situation maps, that the Wehrmacht radio operators could not always locate it. The French press and German press alike began calling it the Gespenster Division, the Ghost Division.

[00:06:13]The campaign made Rommel famous. He had, and this is documented by, among others, the British historian Peter Caddick Adams in his 2012 book Monty and Rommel, a personal habit of carrying a Leica camera and photographing every sector of his advance. Some of those photographs, taken by his own hand from his command vehicle in May and June 1940, are still circulated in modern military history textbooks. The photograph of him standing in front of a French town hall, hands on hips, signed surrender documents fluttering on the steps. The photograph of his half-track crossing a pontoon bridge over the Somme. The historian Dennis Showalter, who taught military history at Colorado College for 40 years, argued in a 2009 essay that Rommel was, even in 1940, the first general of the modern war who instinctively understood the role of media, of image, of personal presentation. He was, Showalter wrote, the first European general to understand himself in real time as a brand. This would matter terribly in 1944.

[00:07:19]Time and place. Tripoli, Italian Libya.

[00:07:22]February 12th, 1941.

[00:07:25]The Italians had begun the North African campaign in September 1940 by invading British-held Egypt. By December, they had been routed by a much smaller British force under General Richard O'Connor. The Italian colonial empire in North Africa was about to collapse entirely. Hitler reluctantly, and against his strategic preferences, agreed to send a small German blocking force to Libya to prop up the Italians.

[00:07:52]He chose Rommel to command it. He sent two divisions. He instructed Rommel to hold Tripolitania and stand on the defensive. He did not authorize an offensive. Rommel arrived in Tripoli on February 12th.

[00:08:07]He immediately, against the orders of the German High Command, attacked. What followed was 28 months of seesaw warfare across more than 1,500 km of North African coastline. Rommel was, by the standards of modern operational art, a tactical genius and a strategic gambler. He took Benghazi. He took Tobruk.

[00:08:30]He drove the British back to the Egyptian frontier, then back into Egypt, then to a small railway halt 100 km from Alexandria called El Alamein. He was promoted General Feldmarschall on June 22nd, 1942, at 50, the youngest field marshal in the Wehrmacht. The historian Maurice Remy, who wrote the 2002 German biography Mythos Rommel, and who interviewed many surviving members of Rommel's staff, documents that the promotion was made by Hitler personally, by handwritten note, the day Tobruk fell. Rommel had, by sheer operational audacity, by personally leading from the front, by tolerating impossible levels of casualties in his own staff, become Germany's most celebrated soldier. He was also, by mid-1942, exhausted. His digestive system had collapsed under the desert food. His blood pressure was dangerous.

[00:09:26]He was running operations on three or four hours of sleep in 50-degree heat with chronic dysentery. He flew home to Germany in September 1942 for medical leave. In his absence on October 23rd, 1942, the British Eighth Army, now commanded by a small, sharp-tongued, religious teetotaler named Bernard Law Montgomery, attacked. The Second Battle of El Alamein lasted 12 days. The British outnumbered the Germans and Italians roughly two to one in men, two to one in tanks, three to one in artillery, and infinitely in air superiority. Rommel, recalled mid-battle by Hitler, flew back to take command. He arrived to find his army being ground apart. He attempted withdrawal. Hitler issued by radio the famous Sieg oder Tod, victory or death, order, instructing the Panzer Army Afrika to hold its position regardless of cost.

[00:10:22]Rommel, field marshal, commander on the ground, watching his army die, initially obeyed. After a day, he disobeyed. He withdrew anyway. Six months later, on May 13th, 1943, what was left of Rommel's old army surrendered in Tunisia. Rommel was no longer with it.

[00:10:42]He had been ordered home by Hitler in March, ostensibly for health reasons, in fact to remove him from a campaign that was now clearly lost. Time and place, the northern French coast, December 1943 to June 1944.

[00:10:58]In November 1943, Hitler appointed Rommel Inspector of the Atlantic Wall, the system of bunkers, beach obstacles, and minefields the Germans were attempting to build along the entire western coast of occupied Europe. By January 1944, Rommel had been formally given command of Army Group B, responsible for the defense of northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

[00:11:22]Rommel's strategic conviction in early 1944, expressed in memoranda preserved at the Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv in Freiburg, was unambiguous. The Allies must be defeated on the beaches in the first 24 hours of an invasion or the war was over. He flooded coastal fields.

[00:11:41]He ordered the construction of millions of beach obstacles, the so-called Rommel's asparagus, angled steel poles designed to wreck gliders and landing craft. He fortified the Atlantic Wall as it had never been fortified before. His superior Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt disagreed. Rundstedt's view, supported by Panzer General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, was that the Panzer reserves should be held inland, deep enough to be invulnerable to naval gunfire, and committed only after the Allies had revealed their main effort.

[00:12:14]Hitler, between them, compromised, denying Rommel direct control of the Panzer reserves, but giving him control over coastal divisions. This dispute, later analyzed by historians like Peter Caddick-Adams in his 2019 book Sand and Steel, shaped what happened on June 6th.

[00:12:31]Rommel was not at his command post on D-Day.

[00:12:35]He was on leave in Germany, in Herrlingen with Lucia, for her birthday on June 6th.

[00:12:41]Hitler, in Berchtesgaden, refused to release the Panzer reserves until afternoon. By the time the Panzers moved, the beachheads were established.

[00:12:51]By July 17th, 6 weeks after D-Day, Rommel was driving back to his headquarters at La Roche-Guyon when his staff car was strafed in open country by a low-flying RAF Spitfire. The driver was killed. Rommel suffered fractures of the skull and significant cerebral hemorrhage. He was carried unconscious to a German military hospital. He survived. He was sent home eventually to Herrlingen to recuperate. He was at home in his upstairs study on July 20th, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a briefcase bomb in Hitler's headquarters at the Wolfsschanze and the assassination plot Operation Valkyrie collapsed. What did Erwin Rommel know about the July 20th plot? This is the most contested question in his biography. Three answers exist in the historiographical record.

[00:13:43]The orthodox answer, the one most commonly given by Rommel's wife, his son, his adjutant, and most Anglophone post-war historians, is that Rommel knew of resistance discussions, sympathized with the conviction that Germany must surrender, and supported the conspirators' political aims, but specifically opposed Hitler's assassination, preferring instead an arrest and a public trial.

[00:14:04]His son Manfred, in interviews from the 1970s through the 2000s, was insistent on this distinction. The skeptical answer, advanced most aggressively by the historian Maurice Remy and by the post-war German historian Wolfgang Müller, is that the orthodox account was constructed in the 1950s by Rommel's family and his former officers to rehabilitate his reputation. There is, the skeptics argue, no contemporary written evidence that Rommel committed himself to the resistance. The verbal testimony comes overwhelmingly from people with strong incentives to portray him as a resister. The third answer, held by historians like Peter Lieb of the German Bundeswehr Center for Military History, is that the truth is unknowable because Rommel was a man who, like many senior Wehrmacht officers, balanced loyalties he could not reconcile and who very proudly never made even to himself the kind of clean decision the post-war narrative attributes to him. The records that might have settled the question were either destroyed in 1945 or never written down at all.

[00:15:05]What we know, what is documented in the trial records of the People's Court, is that under interrogation, two of the conspirators, Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel and Caesar von Hofacker, named Rommel as having had knowledge of the plot. Hofacker was Rommel's distant cousin. The Gestapo's investigative file, recovered after the war, contains transcripts of these statements. The file is not complete. The interrogations involve torture. The reliability of the named others under interrogation is, the historian Joachim Fest argued in his 1994 book Plotting Hitler's Death, fundamentally compromised. But, the file went to Hitler's desk in early October.

[00:15:47]Hitler, who throughout 1944 had become incrementally and then completely paranoid, had a problem. Rommel was a national hero. He could not be publicly arrested. He could not be publicly tried. The execution of Germany's most popular general would not strengthen the regime. It would shatter it. So, Hitler chose instead what historians like Daniel Allen Butler describe as the most extraordinary blackmail of the entire Nazi era. The two generals, Burgdorf and Maisel, who arrived at the Hurlingen house at noon on October 14th, brought with them a verbal proposal from the Fuhrer. The historian David Fraser reconstructs the conversation from Manfred Rommel's testimony, from Burgdorf's later court-martial deposition, and from the surviving correspondence of Rommel's adjutant Hermann Aldinger. Option one, Rommel could face the People's Court, Volksgerichtshof, on charges of high treason. Conviction was certain.

[00:16:46]Execution was certain.

[00:16:48]His wife and son and elderly mother would be subject to Sippenhaft, the Nazi practice of arresting and imprisoning the relatives of traitors. His estate would be confiscated.

[00:16:59]His name would be erased from the regimental honor rolls. Option two, Rommel could swallow a cyanide capsule that Burgdorf had brought with him.

[00:17:08]He would be reported as having died of complications from his July wounds. He would receive a state funeral with full military honors. His family would be left alone. His pension would be paid.

[00:17:22]His name would be preserved. The decision was given to him in his upstairs study. He had perhaps 10 minutes. He came downstairs. He told Lucia what was happening. He told Manfred. He went out to the Green Opal.

[00:17:37]In the woods 1 km up the road with Burgdorf and Maisel watching, he swallowed the capsule. The historian Maurice Remy, working from the deposition of the SS driver who was at the wheel, places the time of death at 13:25.

[00:17:53]The German radio announcement, broadcast the following day, said that Field Marshal Rommel had succumbed to a brain embolism resulting from the wounds received in his July car accident. Hitler ordered a full state funeral. Field Marshal Rundstedt delivered the eulogy. The funeral was filmed for newsreel. Lucia and Manfred stood blank-faced behind the coffin. It was one of the most successful pieces of mortuary theater the Third Reich ever produced. The truth, which had been known immediately to Lucia and Manfred and Aldinger and probably a dozen others, would not become public until after the German surrender when Manfred, then 16 and a Wehrmacht prisoner of the Americans, told the story to his interrogators in May 1945. What is the legacy of Erwin Rommel? For most of the postwar period, particularly in West Germany, in Britain, and in the United States, Rommel was remembered as the good German general. The clean Wehrmacht officer. The chivalrous desert warrior.

[00:18:54]The man who defied Hitler. The non-Nazi who served reluctantly the Nazi state.

[00:19:00]This image, historians call it the Rommel myth, was constructed deliberately. It was constructed by Rommel's family, by his former adjutants, by his postwar biographers, most influentially the British historian Desmond Young whose 1950 book Rommel the Desert Fox was filmed in 1951 with James Mason in the title role. It was constructed by the post-war West German government which needed clean military heroes to anchor the legitimacy of its new Bundeswehr and it was constructed perhaps most importantly by the post-war American military establishment which needed a respectable German general it could quote in textbooks and study at staff colleges. Beginning in the 1980s German historians began to challenge the myth. The most influential challenger was Wolfram Wette whose 2002 book The Wehrmacht history myth truth argued with extensive documentary evidence that the entire post-war narrative of the politically clean Wehrmacht was a fabrication that the Wehrmacht was deeply complicit in the crimes of the regime and that Rommel's reputation was a particularly potent specimen of this rehabilitation industry. The historian Sönke Neitzel in his 2011 book Soldaten built around secret recordings of Wehrmacht officer prisoners in British captivity extends the critique. Rommel did not participate in the Eastern Front. He did not run a death camp. He did not on the available evidence personally order specific war crimes.

[00:20:29]He also Neitzel insists served Adolf Hitler with energy conviction and pride for almost the entire arc of his career and his early 1944 communications with Hitler include effusive expressions of personal loyalty that are difficult to read in any other way than at face value. The most balanced modern view held by historians like Peter Caddick Adams Daniel Allen Butler and the German historian Cornelia Heckscher is that Rommel was an extraordinarily competent operational commander a man of personal bravery a soldier whose battlefield ethics across both World Wars were unusually scrupulous and at the same time a man who rose because he was useful to the Nazi state and who served that state with full knowledge of the regime he was strengthening until the very last months of the war when watching the strategic catastrophe and the moral catastrophe unfold simultaneously he began perhaps to step back. Whether that stepping back was real or partial or imaginary is the question his death answered ambiguously on October 14th, 1944.

[00:21:32]He could have refused the cyanide. He could have demanded the trial. He took the capsule.

[00:21:39]His son Manfred Rommel who lived until 2013 said many times that he believed his father took the capsule less to save himself than to save his family and that in that final calculation his father had been a soldier and a husband and a father in roughly that order. It is for what it is worth perhaps the most honest verdict any of us are likely to render.

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