Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  That dream finally began to move closer to reality in 1861, when King Wilhelm I ascended to the Prussian throne. Unification was the overarching goal of Wilhelm’s reign, and to achieve it he was assisted by his chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, arguably the most adroit diplomat of the nineteenth century, and his army Chief of Staff, General Helmut von Moltke, who was unquestionably an operational and logistical genius. Together, the three men led Prussia to victory in three short, decisive wars—the German-Danish War against Denmark in 1865, the Seven Weeks War against Austria in 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870—which allowed von Bismarck to negotiate the assimilation of the smaller German states into a great German empire under Prussia’s leadership, a process which culminated in the proclamation in the Hall of Mirrors on January 18, 1871.

  These feats of arms gave the newborn empire military and political supremacy in Central and Western Europe, while a penchant for hard work and efficiency allowed German workers and industrialists to spawn an economy that at the time was second only to that of the British Empire. Equally impressive were the Germans’ accomplishments in science, medicine, and the arts: in the years following the proclamation of the German Empire, the world would be given the final—and best—operas of Richard Wagner, the first works of Richard Strauss, the dramas of Gerhart Hauptman, the novels of Theodor Fontane. The realm of medicine would see the development of cell theory through the work of Schwann, Schleiden, and Virchow, and the introduction of Karl Bayer’s pharmaceuticals. Science and engineering in their turn would introduce the names Benz, Röntgen, von Zeppelin, von Helmholtz, Diesel, Bosch, and Daimler to the world.

  And yet, with unification came complications: for all their achievements and abilities, the Germans felt that the other European powers weren’t giving their new nation its due respect. It was a sense of insecurity as real as it was illogical, for while the German Empire was new, the German people were not—rather, they were a familiar part of the European landscape. While the unrelieved enmity of France was an inevitable consequence of her defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, none of the rest of Europe’s powers, great or small, demonstrated anything but goodwill to the empire. Still, the Germans persisted in acting as if the rest of the European community was treating them as parvenus.

  Almost by way of reaction to this mistaken belief, the philosophies of Nietzsche and Treitschke, that of the Übermensch and the arch-nationalist, fed a growing belief among the Germans that Teutonic blood was superior, and that by right Germany was entitled to primacy of place in the world order. German diplomacy became characterized not by endeavors at cooperation and conciliation but by outright threats and blandishments of force intended to extract concession through intimidation. Barbara Tuchman succinctly described it this way: “In German practice [Theodore] Roosevelt’s current precept for getting on with your neighbors was Teutonized to, ‘Speak loudly and brandish a big gun.’”1

  It was an attitude predictably guaranteed to alienate rather than endear, and the more overtly it was displayed, the more swiftly the goodwill of Germany’s neighbors began to fade, as they began to believe that one byproduct of the easy victories of 1865, 1866, and 1871 was a form of national self-delusion regarding Germany’s proper place in the world. The frequent German assertions of superiority became ever more strident with each iteration. When the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China in 1900, the German troops dispatched by Wilhelm to relieve the besieged European embassies in what was still called Peking were charged by the Kaiser to model their conduct on Attila’s ancient Huns when they met the Chinese in combat. (It was a poor choice, as “Hun” became a pejorative that would haunt the Germans for the next half-century.) Clamoring for their “place in the sun” when Germany entered the last mad scramble for colonies in Africa and the Far East, ultranationalistic societies such as the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan German Union) and the Navy League believed that the other European powers were obligated to simply concede to Germany on demand what those nations had acquired through outpourings of blood and treasure. It appeared to her neighbors that Germany was determined to deliberately affront even those powers that had been disposed to be friendly. Beguiled by their own bluster, neither the German people nor their leaders understood the antagonisms their actions and attitudes were provoking. The only explanation that seemed acceptable to the German people was that the nations surrounding Germany were formulating a policy of political and military encirclement (Einkreisung) of Germany in order to deny the Germans their rightful place as masters of the world.

  This, then, was the Germany into which Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel was born on November 15, 1891. . . .

  He was born in the town of Heidenheim, a few miles north of the university city of Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemburg, one of the small German states that now formed the German Empire. Ulm and the towns and villages which surround it sit close to Württemburg’s eastern border, squarely in the middle of the region known as Swabia. The people there are called Swabians, and even among Germans have something of a distinct identity. For almost the whole of its history, Swabia was an agrarian region, and in the last decade of the nineteenth century, most Swabians would have cheerfully identified themselves as peasants. (“Peasant” has never been a perjorative term in German, as it means simply a farmworker, rather than holding any implication of being a dull, unlettered rube.) Swabians are often characterized as being cunning, canny, and clever. They are typically hard working, usually sensibly frugal, and often exasperatingly stubborn. In a way, Erwin Rommel would prove to be a Swabian writ large, for all of these traits he would possess in abundance.

  But his roots did not lie in agriculture. His father, also Erwin Rommel, was a one-time artillery officer who became the headmaster at the Protestant secondary school in Aalen; his mother, Helene von Lutz, was the daughter of the regierung-präsident, the head of the local government council. Helene’s somewhat distant ties to the minor nobility of Germany notwithstanding, the Rommels were a typical middle-class German family of the day: respectable, responsible, resourceful, and reverent—in the case of the Rommels, solidly if quietly Evangelische, Lutheran.

  Erwin Rommel was not born to be a soldier; that is, it is not impossible to imagine him in some dynamic career other than that of an army officer, for there was no military tradition in the Rommel family. True, there was more than enough precedent to establish that soldiering has long been a respected aspiration among the Germans. The annals of Prussia and the German states are filled with a whole litany of “vons” who have served the Fatherland ably and proudly—Mellethins, Kleists, Treskows, Rundstedts, Stübens, Schwerins, Mansteins, Stauffenbergs, Kluges, Zietens and such—but military service was not the only path for social advancement in the new German Empire, nor was the possession of a patent of nobility requisite to success. Erwin Rommel, Senior, demonstrated this when he resigned his commission as a lieutenant of artillery in the XIII (Royal Württemberg) Army Corps at the end of his obligatory service in order to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a professor. A not inconsiderable factor in his decision was that the prestige accruing to a career in education was comparable to that accorded to an offizier, while the pay was more attractive, especially for a young man in his mid-20s with a new wife and a family on the way.

  Erwin, Junior, would be the second of five children in that family, having an older sister, named Helene, and two younger brothers, Karl and Gerhard. (A third brother, Manfred, died in infancy.) Details of Rommel’s childhood are sparse; he rarely spoke of it himself, a reticence not, apparently, born of bitterness or unhappiness, but rather because it was pleasantly unremarkable. The elder Erwin Rommel was described by one would-be biographer as strict and pedantic, harsh and overbearing, the implication being that he was something of a petty tyrant. But evidence of such is absent, apart from, perhaps, that writer’s wishful thinking; it can be reasonably assumed that the elder Rommel was a typical German head-of-the-household in Wilhelmine Germany: legally, he was Herr im eigenen Hau
s—the master of his house—whose word, will, and whim were law and could not be gainsaid by anyone living under his roof. No doubt the words “Es wird um hier zu sein!” (“There will be order here!”) were heard from time to time (especially in a house with five children in it!), but even so, that is a far cry from a distant and forbidding father figure.

  In any event, the variety of careers and professions chosen by the Rommel siblings speaks against it: the aspirations which led to such choices could not have flourished in the cold and stifling regime of a petty tyrant. Erwin, Jr., of course, became a soldier—with his father’s enthusiastic blessing—while sister Helene, who would never marry, carried on the family tradition and became a teacher. Karl learned how to fly and served as a pilot in the Luftstreitkräfte, Germany’s first air force. He would serve as an advisor to the Turks in the Great War, and be awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class in the process, but eventually a severe case of malaria would cause him to be invalided out of the service before the war’s end. Gerhard, the youngest brother, became an opera singer. The same biographer asserts that Rommel was “a pale and often sickly youth,” but again, like the comments about Rommel’s father, there seems to be little to substantiate the claim. Rommel himself once remarked that “my early years passed quite happily,” and there is no reason to doubt him.2

  The handful of incidents and recollections from Rommel’s childhood and adolescence that have survived are noteworthy because they demonstrate that many of those particular personality traits and facets of character which would one day make Erwin Rommel an extraordinary wartime officer began to clearly manifest themselves during his formative years. Rommel was 12 years old when the Wright brothers flew the first successful heavier-than-air craft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, but unpowered flight—gliding—had been all the rage in Germany since before Erwin’s birth, due primarily to the pioneering aerodynamic work of Otto Lilienthal, the first truly successful designer and pilot of manned gliders. It is hardly surprising, then, to learn that when he was 14, inspired by Lilienthal’s work, Rommel and a childhood chum built a glider of their own and tested it in the open fields around Aalen. Even Rommel had to admit that it didn’t fly very far—but it did fly, which was no small feat for a pair of teenaged boys with no formal education in glider design or construction. About this same time, young Rommel purchased a motorcycle, and no sooner had he brought it home than he began to completely disassemble it, down to the last nut, bolt, washer, and screw, the better to understand how all of its various systems worked. More impressively, when he reassembled it, the motorbike ran perfectly, a remarkable display of mechanical aptitude even in a society already known for its love of and fascination with machinery.

  Incidents like these made it unmistakable to the elder Erwin Rommel that his namesake was gifted with a sharp, agile brain, and, being the schoolmaster that he was, he did his best to encourage it. He discovered that in addition to a natural talent for engineering and mechanical work, his second son shared his own talent for mathematics, and he encouraged the boy to, among other things, attempt to memorize the table of logarithms. As young Erwin approached his middle teens, when German boys traditionally begin to give serious thought to the vocations and professions they will follow as adults, he decided, for a time, to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a teacher; later, he considered engineering at the Zeppelin works at Friederichshafen. Ironically, perhaps, he would become both a teacher and an engineer during his career as a soldier, excelling at each.

  What happened next can only be attributed to the workings of fate, or perhaps destiny. As Erwin Rommel, Jr. approached his 18th birthday without having made a firm decision about a career, his father began urging him, rather forcefully, to consider a stint in the German Army. Rommel would have been subject to conscription in any case when he reached the age of 18, but whether it was because the elder Rommel simply thought that a term of military service which actually involved a degree of responsibility would be a good thing for his son, or if he saw something in young Erwin which hinted that the army might be the boy’s true calling, no one will ever know. Whatever his reasons for them, the father’s arguments must have been persuasive, for in the fall of 1910, Erwin Eugen Johannes Rommel, Junior, future field marshal, one day to be known as “the Desert Fox,” enlisted in the 124th (6th Württemberg) Infantry Regiment, part of the 26th Infantry Division, as a fähnrich (cadet ensign).3

  The terms of his enlistment were that of an advantageur, that is, an officer candidate. Originally he had hoped to become an artillery officer like his father, but after an initial interview with the commanding officer of the 49th Artillery Regiment, his application was denied, as was, surprisingly, his application to the Engineers.

  In retrospect this may well have been the decisive moment in Rommel’s career, as well as one of history’s great “what-ifs.” Had Rommel served as an artillery officer during the Great War instead of as an infantryman, would he have evolved into the dashing and dynamic officer he became—would there have been any opportunity for him to do so? Or would he have become an unimaginative plodder? Such was certainly the fate that befell Britain’s General (later Field Marshal) Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Churchill’s senior military advisor from 1941 to 1945. Brooke had been an artillery officer in the First World War, and spent as much time in the Second bewailing the need to avoid another Western Front slaughterhouse as he did expending effort to find the means of doing so. Hindsight makes it very difficult to imagine Rommel as pedantic, dull, and stodgy, but it is a fascinating alternative to consider, nonetheless.

  Having neither the desire nor the money to become a cavalryman—officers were required to purchase their own mounts and uniforms, both of which were expensive—the only choice remaining was the infantry, to which Rommel duly applied and was accepted. He completed his cadet training at the end of March 1911, his performance being good enough to earn him a posting to the Königliche Kriegsschule, a sort of finishing school for promising young officers, in Danzig. The course there lasted eight months; it was demanding, as it was meant to winnow out those who were intellectually or temperamentally unsuited for the responsibilities of leadership. Rommel had to work hard, of which he had never been afraid, and when he finished the course, his marks on his final report, while not outstanding, were uniformly good. The school’s commanding officer, in reviewing Rommel’s file, noted that the young man in question was an intense, sometimes overly serious young man, inclined to be reclusive, who neither smoked nor drank; in his opinion, Rommel had the makings of “a useful soldier,” as solid an endorsement as the German Army gave in those days. On his 20th birthday, November 15, 1911, Rommel formally graduated; the following January he was promoted to lieutenant and posted to back to Württemburg, reporting to his father’s old regiment, the 124th Infantry, posted in Weingarten.

  During his months in Danzig, Rommel gained more than a commission: he also acquired a monocle and a fiancé. The former was an affectation, the latter would prove to be the love of his life. Lucia Maria Mollin (Rommel would call her “Lucie” or “Lu” to the end of his life) was 16 years old, slender, vivacious, her dark hair and dark eyes evidence of her Polish and Italian ancestors; as graceful as she was pretty, she was a prize-winning ballroom dancer. They met at one of the formal balls regularly given by the officers’ mess at the Kriegschule to allow the cadets the opportunity to polish their social skills. For parents in Danzig’s middle class these affairs presented a chance for their young, marriageable daughters to meet young men of suitable social standing and good prospects. In this respect the Danzig Military Academy was very much like officer training schools around the world since time immemorial.

  Like Erwin, Lucie’s father was a schoolmaster, although he had died some years before their meeting. She had come to Danzig to study languages, and learned to speak Italian, French, Spanish, English, and Polish. As can be expected, she was thrilled to be seen walking out in Danzig on the arm of the d
ashing young Leutnant Rommel, although it was a source of endless amusement for her how he had to quickly pop the monocle out of his eye and into his pocket whenever they came in sight of a senior officer, in order to avoid a reprimand: junior lieutenants were forbidden to wear monocles. By the time Erwin was transferred to Weingarten, the two young people had what was called in those days “an understanding,” though exactly when it would come to fruition was vague: junior officers were forbidden by tradition from marrying before the age of 25, and after that still required permission from their commanding officers.4

  The love story between Erwin and Lucie nearly came to an end, however, before it well and truly got started, because of a romantic detour taken by Rommel while he was posted to Weingarten, one with unexpected consequences. What happened reveals much that is telling of both the character of Erwin Rommel and the innate snobbery of Wilhelmine Germany’s middle class. A pretty young fruit seller in Weingarten named Walburga Stemmer caught Rommel’s eye; Lucie Molin, more than 700 miles distant, was momentarily forgotten, and they fell in love—or at least in lust. Such a thing was unremarkable even in those days—Rommel wrote charming love letters to her, calling Walburga his “little mouse”—but what happened next had an almost soap-opera-like quality to it. Walburga became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, named Gertrude, on December 8, 1913. While middle-class Wilhelmine Germans were more relaxed about sexual intimacy outside of wedlock than were, say, their English Edwardian contemporaries, they were every bit as strict about paternal responsibility.