Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Officers and men were to be thoroughly trained in not only the skills required of their current postings, but also to be prepare to take command of at least the next higher unit—i.e., privates could take command of squads and platoons, platoon sergeants would be competent to command companies, battalion commanders to lead regiments or even brigades, as need be. Von Seeckt had no illusions that, at a strength of 100,000 men of all ranks, the Reichswehr would be able to defend Germany from a foreign attack; he was confident, however, that in the event of a national emergency, young German men in the tens of thousands would willingly, even eagerly, answer a call to the colors to provide the manpower with which a much, much larger army would be swiftly created. The officers, NCOs, and other ranks and men of the Reichswehr would provide the knowledge of strategy and tactics, along with the specialized, technical skills needed to properly employ modern weapons. Unspoken by anyone but understood by all was the assumption that, in the event of a war, the Freikorps would serve as the immediate ready reserve for the Reichswehr, buying time for those eager young men to be properly trained before being packed off to do battle. The Stahlhelm Bund der Frontsoldaten (“Steel Helmet League of Frontline Soldiers”), yet another unofficial nationalistic paramilitary organization composed of former soldiers, could have readily provided another half-million experienced men.

  At the same time, while von Seeckt was prepared to speak candidly of his plans for the Reichswehr to anyone who would listen—and there were many, many Germans so willing, while the Allies seemed determined to turn a deaf ear to the general—he held the officers and men of his tiny army to very high standards of conduct. They were, he declared, expected to set an example for all German men—indeed, for all German people—by their conduct, deportment, speech, and above all, character.

  If fate once again calls the German people to arms, and who can doubt that day will come, then officers should not have to call on a nation of weaklings, but of strong men ready to take up familiar and trusted weapons. The form these weapons take is not important as long as they are wielded by hands of steel and hearts of iron. So let us do our utmost to ensure that on that future day there is no lack of such hearts and hands. Let us strive tirelessly to strengthen our own bodies and minds and those of our fellow Germans. . . . It is the duty of every member of the general staff to make the Reichswehr not only a reliable pillar of the state, but also a school for the leaders of the nation.37

  An apt student of history, von Seeckt repeatedly made the point to his officers that since the fall of Rome Western civilization had known far more years of war than of peace; in this he was not a warmonger of any shade, but a supreme realist. Peace was always the most desirable state of affairs between nations, he believed, but he also doubted that a perpetual, worldwide peace between modern, industrial nations was something which mankind could ever achieve. “My own training in history,” he wrote, “prevents me from seeing in the idea of permanent peace anything more than a dream whereby it remains an open question whether one can consider it, in Moltke’s phrase, a ‘good dream’ or not.” War at some point then being inevitable, the Germans would have to defend themselves; therefore, it was the duty, he held, of every German soldier—officer or ranker—to be as thoroughly prepared to fight as he could make himself.38

  An essential part of that preparation was, as von Seeckt saw it, the requirement that Reichswehr officers be more than mere military martinets: intelligence and imagination were often as valuable in war as rifles and artillery. In many ways he set the bar himself: polite, thoughtful, and reserved—in utter contrast, say, to the boorish, crude, and obstreperous Ludendorff—his education and experience were quite broad. He spoke English and French fluently, art, science, and culture found their way into his conversation as frequently as did military matters, and before the Great War he had traveled widely in Africa and India; he knew Europe as well as he knew the back of his hand. He was also a keen student of modern technology and its applicability to warfare. While he was determined to see the regimental traditions of the old Imperial Army maintained by the battalions of the Reichswehr, von Seeckt was equally intent on assuring that the intellectual traditions of the new German Army were firmly rooted in the twentieth century.

  The training standards were high and exacting. Von Seeckt himself wrote several of the manuals which laid down tactical and operational doctrines for the Reichswehr: “Leadership and Combined Arms Combat,” “Training of the Rifle Squad,” “Individual Training with the Light Machine Gun,” “Training Regulations for the Infantry.” The necessity of combined arms tactics was continually emphasized, along with the idea that every unit commander understand the larger operational goal of his parent unit, because he “will oftentimes be obliged to act upon his own initiative . . . during the course of the engagement. . . . Quick decision and clear desire of the leaders guarantee to us the advantage in an encounter.” Von Seeckt also foresaw the need for Reichswehr soldaten to be prepared to fight against weapons which Germany had been forbidden to possess: during the 1920s mocking photos would often appear in the foreign press showing the Reichswehr on maneuvers with motorcars bearing placards announcing that they were tanks and soldiers standing by wooden logs pretending to be heavy artillery. Such displays were taken as proof that the teeth of the German Army had once and for all been well and truly pulled—a perception encouraged in Berlin. What such supercilious commentators failed to see was that what the Reichswehr was accomplishing made actually possessing such weaponry unnecessary, at least for the moment: it was creating in its officers and men the ability to think of how to defend against such weapons—and how to employ them when the time came for Germany to rearm herself. Von Seeckt was assuring that even though the Reichswehr could not field modern weapons, that would not mean the Reichswehr would not know how to use them.39

  It was into this professional world that Erwin Rommel was accepted on October 1, 1920, when he was posted as a company commander, Reichswehr Infantry Regiment 13, based in Stuttgart. He would remain there, an infantry captain, for the next nine years. It was hardly durance vile, however: in many ways, the nine-year interlude as a company commander was almost a lark for Rommel. Von Seeckt had little use for officers who were merely intellectuals—a role to which Rommel never pretended—but he was determined that Reichswehr officers be intelligent, inquisitive, and energetic—all characteristics which Rommel possessed in abundance. As von Seeckt expected his officers to develop a mastery of all the tools of warfare, mechanical and mental, Rommel was able to give free rein to his fascination with engineering and his gift for tinkering with machinery. One of the first tasks he set about for himself was to learn everything he could about internal combustion engines, a skill which would pay unanticipated dividends in the future.

  For Rommel, the return to the familiar routine of garrison duty was reassuring. The transition from war to peace for him had been not been violent, but it had been unsettling. Released from the Army of the Kingdom of Württemburg when the monarchy was dissolved, he was accepted into the Vorläufige Reichswehr that temporarily replaced the now-defunct Imperial Army. One of his first postings was command of the 32nd Internal Security Company, in Friedrichshafen on the Bodensee—Lake Constance—a motley collection of ratings and petty officers from the old Imperial Navy who had little to do, and whose food and living conditions were poor. The sailors were in a mutinous mood, sullen, uncooperative, and resentful of being placed under an army officer, openly mocking of Rommel for wearing his decorations, including his Pour le Mérite. Rommel, for whom the camaraderie of the bivouac and the battlefield had erased any sense of superiority that his commission might once have imparted, replied while fighting at the front, he had at times prayed to Almight God to spare the men of the German Navy. “My prayers were heard,” he declared, “because here you are!” It was a response at once ingenuous and disarming, but it worked: disciplinary problems among the sailors in Rommel’s charge declined dramatically.40

  With civil distu
rbances occurring all over Germany at the time, Rommel found himself ranging to and fro, being called out to variously put down riots in Westphalia, in the south of Bavaria near the Swiss border, and within Württemberg itself. He was keen on keeping violence and the use of force against civilians to a minimum, usually doing his best to find a way to diffuse a tense situation through the sheer force of his personality. He wasn’t adverse to using force to impose order when confronted with ugly, threatening crowds, but he was loathe to resort to lethal force; in an incident in Münsterhausen, he used fire hoses in a manner similar to the way he had employed machine guns in Romania and Italy to disperse an angry mob. Despite his relative youth—he was not yet 34—years of leading soldiers in combat had imbued Erwin Rommel with a considerable command presence, and he put it to good use. Alternately authoritative, conciliatory, cajoling, or persuasive as need be, he was able to avoid embroiling himself in the sort of bloodshed that was becoming all too common across Germany. It was undeniably his good fortune that he was never required to cooperate with any of the Freikorps, who had already acquired a reputation for extraordinary ruthlessness in dealing with those whom they regarded as enemies; Rommel was not asked to compromise his moral compass. Many of his fellow officers would not be able to make the same claim, with tragic consequences for themselves and Germany two decades hence.

  Rommel had remained with the army when the Vorläufige Reichswehr was reorganized as the Übergangsheer, and was one of the first junior officers to apply for admission to von Seeckt’s Reichswehr. With the dissolution of the Imperial Army, the pool of officers from which the Reichswehr could choose its cadre was large: while more than a quarter of the German Army’s regular officers had been killed in Great War (nearly 12,000 out of 46,000), the Reichswehr had only 4,000 postings for commissioned officers under the terms of the Versailles treaty. This, of course, ideally suited von Seeckt’s purposes, with his emphasis on quality personnel, allowing him to select only the best candidates available: there would be no deadwood among the Reichswehr’s officer corps. With his outstanding combat record and his awards for bravery, Rommel was a natural choice, and was one of the first candidates selected; the result was his posting to the 13th Infantry Regiment.

  Now that he was back in Germany, and in a secure employment situation, Erwin and Lucie had the time—whenever duty did not take him out of Württemberg—and opportunity to begin to create a home for themselves in Stuttgart. It was during the years in Stuttgart that Rommel learned how to be a husband and, in due course, a father. There had been precious little time to spend with Lucie during the war, so that, when he returned home in November 1918, although they had been married for over two years, they were in a very real sense newlyweds. Rommel, conscious of the obligation he had made before the war, saw to it that Walburga Stemmer was brought into the household, along with little Gertrude, who was now six; Walburga was presented as Rommel’s cousin. Apparently no one inquired too closely about Gertrude’s actual status—in the years that immediately followed the war, there was a heartbreaking number of young widows with small children, and it can be comfortably assumed that such a circumstance was implied to explain the presence of Walburga and her daughter under Erwin and Lucie’s roof.

  If Erwin had changed during the war—the overly serious and self-important post-adolescent had been superceded by a usually cheerful, occasionally thoughtful, always self-confident adult— the same can also be said of Lucie. No longer the just striking woman-child of the days in Danzig when she won Erwin Rommel’s heart, she had grown into a lovely young woman in the full bloom of her beauty; during Erwin’s absence during the war she developed a very firm, almost domineering personality, and she ran the Rommel household with a whim of iron. Erwin remained smitten—he would do so for the rest of his life—and happily jumped to do Lucie’s bidding whenever she called for him.

  Rommel’s service in the Great War had seen a remarkable degree of activity and action, and the experience imparted a certain restlessness that became an inescapable part of him—even away from his company, he seemed to have a compulsive need to always be doing something. The Bodensee became a frequent excursion destination for Erwin and Lucie: he was a strong swimmer and an avid boater. Lucie, though taken with the scenery, was less enthusiastic about both: she once told him “I swim just about as well as a lead duck!”, a claim which was apparently borne out when she capsized her boat and Erwin had to rescue her. She enjoyed skiing far more, although she also had her limits there: she would tire far more quickly than her husband, whose years with the Württembergische Gebirgsbataillon had left him a skilled skier with enormous stamina. On one skiing outing, Lucie decided she’d had enough and plopped down in the snow, refusing to budge unless it was to return to the warmth of the ski lodge. Unimpressed, Erwin told her “You’d best get up—I don’t recommend death by freezing!” Lucie was adamant, however, and Rommel was compelled to concede and call it a day.

  Rommel would spend four years as the officer commanding an infantry company in II Battalion of the 13th Reichswehr Regiment; on the surface quite a comedown for a captain who as an oberleutnant had been commanding detachments that at times were near battalion strength. But such an appearance would have been deceiving: while he was performing the duties of a company commander, Rommel was being taught the fundamentals of battalion and regimental command, in accordance with von Seeckt’s organizational doctrine for the Reichswehr. In the autumn of 1924, he was moved over to the staff of II Battalion, there to learn the nuts and bolts of battalion operations and begin preparing himself for battalion—and eventually, regimental—command. After three years on the battalion headquarters staff, he was given command of the unit’s machine-gun company, a posting he would hold until October 1929. Regimental records show that Rommel quickly became highly proficient at not merely employing heavy machine guns, but actually firing and maintaining them—unlike most prewar officers, he was never afraid to get his hands dirty.

  All of this presents Rommel as being a somewhat one-dimensional individual, so thoroughgoing a soldier that there was little room or time in his life for anything unrelated to the profession of arms, and, objectively, such a depiction would be true—to a degree. He was the consummate professional soldier, who had very little enduring interest in disciplines or pursuits which lacked a relevance or applicability to some aspect of military life. Even his holidays had military overtones: sometime during his posting in Stuttgart, Rommel acquired a motorcycle and sidecar, and in the summer of 1927, he and Lucie set off for Italy, where he retraced his footsteps during the Caporetto campaign. Never the soul of tact, while visiting Longarone, he let it be known that he had led the German soldiers who had taken the town and forced the surrender of an entire division of Italian infantry; he was asked to leave in short order.

  All of which can be said to superficially bear out the description of Rommel afforded him by Ronald Lewin as being “dour, self-reliant, and unsophisticated.” And yet that is an unbalanced, oversimplistic depiction of the man. There are far too many photographs taken throughout his life of a grinning Rommel for there to be any justification for calling him dour, and while he was indeed self-reliant, that was a characteristic he developed on the battlefields of the Great War, where life-and-death decisions had not lent themselves to rapid resolution by higher authority. As for being unsophisticated, that was exactly the sort of soldier which von Seeckt prized most highly, the sort of soldier not given to over-elaborate dialectics and rationaization, but a man who saw and understood his duty and set about to fulfill it to the best of his ability. And yet, while he took an unmistakable pride in his wartime accomplishments and clearly loved—and thrived on—the military life, he was no warmonger. “Thoughtful” and “philosphical” are two words which are rarely associated with Erwin Rommel, but whenever he was asked about the Great War, he would always describe it as a foolish endeavor, a folly that should never be repeated. Though he might have been a highly skilled practitioner of warfare, it was
not something he loved.41

  No doubt part of that attitude was shaped by one of the happiest events of Rommel’s life: on December 24, 1928, his first—and only—child with Lucie was born, a son, Manfred. The boy would be a source of joy to Rommel for the remainder of his life, and while the elder Rommel never surrendered one iota of his authority as the father figure—this was Germany, after all—nowhere in Manfred’s recollections of his father would there be memories of the elder Rommel being harsh, condescending, or patronizing. Manfred would eventually prove to be as headstrong as his father, and their occasional clashes of will would be memorable, for Rommel could be a demanding father and Manfred would, inevitably, fail to meet all of his father’s expectations, but his love for Manfred would never be conditional.

  Manfred’s birth overshadowed and eventually eclipsed a singularly unhappy event that had occurred in the Rommel household two months earlier. In October, Walburga Stemmer died unexpectedly at the age of 36. The cause of death was recorded officially as pneumonia; 75 years later, her grandson, Josef Pan, would claim that she had actually committed suicide. Before Manfred was born, he asserted, Walburg clung to the hope that somehow Rommel would eventually choose to leave Lucie and return to her; the imminent arrival of a child with Lucie removed all such hope, and Walburga ended her life by taking poison. While such a scenario is not entirely implausible, it remains pure hearsay: all of the principals are now dead, and apart from Walburga’s death certificate, no documentary evidence of any kind exists. Gertrude, though, would remain a welcome member of the Rommel household until she reached adulthood, and would visit her father whenever possible when he was home on leave. Manfred would grow up believing her to be his older cousin.

  In many ways, Rommel treated his son as he did one of his young recruits: inexperienced, unfocused, wanting for shaping and molding, requiring that combination of sternness and camaraderie which builds mutual trust, and above all, in need of an example. Rommel would sometimes be exasperated and frustrated by Manfred, an intelligent lad who possessed a very independent mind and who proved when necessary that he could be every bit as stubborn as his father. Like fathers everywhere, Erwin Rommel had perhaps overly ambitious hopes for his son: years later, Manfred would recall that his father “had three ambitions for me: he wanted me to become a fine sportsman, a great hero, and a good mathematician. He failed on all three counts.” More important would be the fact that although Rommel would be largely absent physically during some of the most critical years of Manfred’s youth, the son would remember that the father had been able to impart enduring life lessons, not only through his words, but through his deeds.42