Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  This is no small point, for von Hofacker’s “evidence” has long put forward as the foundation for Hitler’s belief that Rommel had been part of the assassination conspiracy, and thus led directly to the Führer’s demand that the field marshal make the choice of taking his own life or facing Freisler and the Volksgerichtshof. Instead, the von Hofacker material would do no more than provide the pretext through which, two months later, Rommel would be presented with that choice as a consequence of actions which, to Adolf Hitler, constituted an entirely different form of treason.

  NONE OF THIS was known to Rommel, isolated as he was in his villa in Herrlingen. When he arrived there on August 8, Lucie and their butler, Rudolf Loisl, were unable to hide their shock at his appearance; taking a perverse pleasure in their discomfiture, Rommel grinned at them and declared, “So long as I don’t have to carry my head under one arm, things can’t be all that bad.” Captain Herman Aldinger, a lifelong friend of Rommel who had served under him in France and North Africa, was also there to greet him: with a bit of discreet string-pulling he had been posted to Herrlingen as Rommel’s aide. Similarly, Manfred was transferred from his duties with a Luftwaffe antiaircraft battery to a temporary “staff” position with his father; when he arrived home, he found the elder Rommel in his study, a black patch covering his left eye, his face still showing evidence of the damage done on July 17. The father decided to be forthright with the son, informing Manfred that he was still unsteady on his feet, suffered from severe headaches, and his left eye was still not working properly. “But it will get better,” he assured the young man.313

  In the days and weeks that followed, Rommel spent endless hours in candid conversations with Lucie and Manfred. He made no attempt to disguise his bitterness at Hitler’s repeated interference with the defense against the Allied bridgehead on Normandy, remarking that “My functions . . . were so restricted by Hitler that any sergeant major could have carried them out. He interfered in everything and turned down every proposal we made. . . . If we pulled a division out, Hitler ordered us to send it straight back. Where we ordered ‘Resistance to the last round’ it was changed from above to ‘Resistance to the last drop of blood.’ When Cherbourg finally surrendered, they sent us a court-martial adviser. That was the sort of help we got.”314

  Now more than ever it seems, Rommel was convinced that the war must be brought to an end—immediately—telling Manfred, “There is no longer anything we can do. Every shot we fire now is harming ourselves, for it will be returned a hundred-fold. The sooner it finishes the better for all of us.” With Model now in command of Army Group B and his command staff broken up, Rommel no longer received the courtesy briefings he had been given in France. Given all that he already knew, however, he found little reason to believe that the situation would—or could—improve in France: as Rommel saw it, the Wehrmacht’s collapse was irrecoverable; all that remained to be decided was whether or not Germany would lose the war faster than the Allies could win it. (As events turned out, Rommel underestimated the resiliency of the German Army, at least in the short term. As the Allies began to outrun their supplies in September 1944, their advance slowed, allowing Model time to establish defensive lines on the Rhine River in the north and the Westwall—what the Allies called the “Siegfried Line”—in the south. In the long term, of course, even despite the Ardennes offensive in December, Germany’s last great offensive of the war, the Wehrmacht’s situation was indeed hopeless.)315

  Some news of events in France reached Herrlingen, of course, though not always in a timely manner. For some weeks Rommel was aware that von Kluge had disappeared, apparently in mid-August, but it would be close to the end of September before he learned his fellow field marshal’s true fate. Manfred found his father sitting in the study, ashen-faced, having read a dispatch just delivered by courier. “Von Kluge is dead,” Rommel announced. “We now know what happened to him. Hitler sacked him and gave orders for him to return to the Reich. On the way he poisoned himself in his car. . . .” He never gave any indication to Manfred, however, as to whether or not he saw von Kluge’s fate as significant to himself, or if it disturbed him in any way.316

  Rommel was disturbed by the fact that his house was under surveillance, by either the SS or the Gestapo, and he was openly suspicious of their purpose. He was taking daily walks in the woods near his house as part of his rehabilitation; Manfred always accompanied him as his father at times was still unsteady on his feet. It was just before setting out on one of these excursion that Rommel suddenly announced: “Look here, Manfred, it’s possible that there are certain people round here who would like to do away with me, quietly and without too much fuss, by an ambush in the wood, for instance. But I don’t intend to let it put me off my walk. So for the time being, we’ll take pistols. You can have my 8mm. These individuals don’t hit anything with their first shots. If shooting does start, the thing to do is to fire blind towards where it’s coming from, and they’ll almost always go for cover or aim badly.” There would be no gun battles in the forest near Herrlingen, but the entire Rommel household was left feeling distinctly uneasy knowing that their every move was being watched.317

  What Rommel did not know—could not know—was that by the end of September he had fallen completely from Hitler’s favor. Rommel had always been noted for being blunt and outspoken in his opinions—after the Allies were securely ashore in Normandy, he became increasingly indiscreet in voicing them, especially his belief in the need to make a separate peace in the West. It was impossible for the Führer to have been unaware of what Rommel was saying—indeed, Rommel had voiced exactly such sentiments directly to Hitler on more than one occasion—and had Rommel not been taken out of action by an RAF fighter he would have soon been relieved as commander of Army Group B, most likely by Model. Rommel’s pessimism had been rapidly nearing the point of being out-and-out defeatism, in which case he had to go, lest his attitude begin to permeate his entire command; other generals had already relieved for less blatant offenses. Serendipitously, from Hitler’s perspective, the Royal Air Force solved the problem before it became necessary for him to act.

  Initially, the Führer saw no reason to take any further steps against Rommel—the severity of the field marshal’s injuries had completely marginalized him, and Hitler could always claim that lingering side-effects and complications rendered Rommel permanently incapable of accepting a new command. Jodl offered an indirect confirmation of this when he noted in his diary that “The Führer is now looking for a new Commander-in-Chief West. He plans to question [Rommel] after his recovery, and then quietly order him to retire.” But Rommel proved a tougher bird than Hitler had imagined him to be, and as he recovered, there was no doubt that he was lucid and becoming increasingly fit, which presented a problem for the Führer. Even where he to remain assigned only to the pfficers’ reserve, a pool of senior officers without a current command assignment, Rommel, by dint of his stature and reputation within the Wehrmacht, would remain a focal point for aggressive, independent-minded officers who, under Rommel’s influence, might come to share his pessimism and be inclined to act on it.318

  By this time, late in the summer of 1944, Adolf Hitler was already deeply lost in an increasingly murky world of delusion and paranoia, where strategic realities no longer signified for him, and he increasingly believed in the validity of his own propaganda. No matter how severe the defeats that were inflicted upon his armies, east or west, he remained convinced that his soon-to-be-unleashed “wonder weapons” would miraculously turn the tide against the Soviets and the Allies and present Germany with ultimate victory. The cause of National Socialism was righteous, and destiny, which was becoming Hitler’s new touchstone, would never allow him to go down to defeat. He regarded anyone who did not share in his confidence as having succumbed to pessimismus und defätismus—pessimism and defeatism—and increasingly he began to regard both as verräterischen—treasonous. Those members of his staff and entourage who were not already utter sycophants qui
ckly transformed themselves into enthusiastic “yes men,” while field commanders learned to “adjust” their reports in order to make them more palatable to the Führer—and less hazardous to themselves. For someone who had outlived their usefulness to Hitler, as Rommel evidently had done, repeatedly declaring that the only way to save Germany was to make peace regardless of the political consequences, was downright foolhardy.

  Rommel, though, had never been particularly good at keeping his mouth shut, especially where his opinions about Adolf Hitler’s strategic decisions were concerned, ever since El Alamein; in Normandy he had become even more outspoken, and now in convalescence, he showed no inclination toward restraint. What Rommel had repeatedly attempted to do was tell Adolf Hitler the truth: that the war was lost, and Hitler’s duty as the leader of the German nation was to make the best possible peace, no matter what the personal cost. But by the summer of 1944 truth was something that Adolf Hitler had little if any interest in hearing, let alone accepting; in the last year of the Third Reich, speaking truth to power almost invariably held fatal consequences for the speaker. The same day that Speidel was arrested, September 7, Rommel received an unexpected visitor, Karl Strölin, who had been a key member of von Stauffenberg’s plot but whose complicity was never discovered by the Gestapo. Strölin, who of course knew that Rommel had not been a part of the conspiracy, was startled to see a pistol sitting on the field marshal’s desk, and asked Rommel why it was there. Rommel replied rather cryptically, “I’m not afraid of the English or the Americans, only of the Russians—and the Germans.” When Eugen Maier, the local Party boss, called on Rommel a few days later, he confided to the field marshal that the senior SS officer in Ulm had been overheard openly stating that Rommel no longer believed in Germany’s ultimate victory.319

  “Victory?” Rommel was incredulous. “Why don’t you just look at the map? The British are here, the Americans here and the Russians here. What is the use of talking about victory?” Maier retorted by saying that what was needed was faith in the Führer. Rommel in reply made no effort to hide his derision.

  “That damned fool! You can’t have any faith in him at all! Since I saw the Führer in November 1942 I’ve come to realize that his mental faculties have steadily declined.”320

  Maier begged Rommel to show a little more discretion, saying, “You should not say things like that, Field Marshal—you will have the Gestapo after you, if they are not after you already.” Unknown to Rommel, Maier was being disingenuous: when he returned home, he wrote a detailed account of his conversation with Rommel and forwarded it to his boss, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary. This incident was, apparently, the last straw for Hitler: the time had finally arrived for him to settle his score with Rommel.321

  The upshot came on October 4, 1944, when the case of General Hans Speidel was presented to the Ehrenhof der Wehrmacht, the German Army’s Court of Honor; while it was Speidel’s fate which was supposedly being decided, the appropriate decision by the Court could provide a suitable pretext for Hitler to move against Rommel. A board of army officers, all of generalleutnant rank or higher, the Court of Honor was a curious relic of German military tradition and the diabolical deal done by the Reichswehr in the wake of the Night of the Long Knives. Among the conditions laid down in exchange for the pledge of support which the army offered Hitler was a stipulation that, as they had been since the days of Frederick the Great, officers, whether active duty or retired, were subject only to military law, and not to any civilian legal authority—including the Gestapo. In extraordinary circumstances where it was deemed appropriate to consider remanding an army officer to civilian authorities, the Court of Honor would render a judgment of the evidence against the accused officer: if it was sufficiently damning, the accused would be expelled from the army and thus subject to civilian justice. For those officers accused of being complicit in the July 20 attentat, expulsion from the army assured that they would stand “trail” in the Volksgerichtshof, with almost certain execution by hanging to follow. A distinctly Nazi twist to these Court of Honor proceedings was that the court was required to consider only evidence against the accused as presented by the Gestapo, but was never permitted to view the evidence itself; the veracity of the Gestapo’s evidence could not be questioned, no defense of any kind was permitted, and accused officers were not allowed to appear before the court. Thus the court’s only function was to decide if the Gestapo’s version of the evidence was sufficient to warrant expulsion of the accused from the ranks of the offizierkorps and the Wehrmacht.

  Sitting in judgment of Speidel were Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, known to his fellow officers as Lakeitel—the Lackey—for his fawning devotion to the Führer, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, General Karl-Wilhelm Specht, and Lieutenant General Heinrich Kirchheim. The case against Speidel, presented to them by Kaltenbrunner, hinged on the question of what Speidel knew about the conspiracy and to whom—if anyone—he spoke of it. According to Kaltenbrunner, von Hofacker had met with Speidel on July 9 at Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche Guyon and discussed the pending assassination attempt; later that same day, Kaltenbrunner claimed, Speidel spoke with Rommel at length on the subject. When the charge had been put to him prior to the Court of Honor proceedings, Speidel did not deny that either conversation took place; he insisted, however, that he had discharged his moral and legal responsibilities by providing Rommel, his superior, with the information passed on by von Hofacker; the implication, strongly inferred by Kaltenbrunner, was that Rommel, for whatever reasons of his own, had failed to inform Berlin.

  The Erhenhof reached its decision fairly quickly, and imparted a curiously Solomonic air to it. The charge of treason—by way of not alerting the Gestapo to his conversation with von Hofacker—was “not proven;” however, that was not, technically, the same thing as an acquittal: while having informed Rommel of what had been said by von Hofacker may have fulfilled Speidel’s obligations under army regulations, he had failed in his moral duty to inform Berlin directly. For this, Speidel was discharged, though not expelled, from the army; and though it kept him out of the clutches of Freisler and the Volksgerichtshof, it did not keep him out of Gestapo custody—he would spend the next seven months in prison, eventually being liberated by the advancing Allies at the end of April 1945. For Rommel, however, the consequences of the court’s verdict was far more immediate and catastrophic. A message from Keitel was delivered to Rommel on October 7, directing him to report to the O.K.W. in Berlin, where information would be awaiting him of the details of his new command posting; a special train would be laid on to bring him to the capital from Ulm. Upon reading the message, Rommel snorted and said to Manfred, “I’m not that much of a fool. We know these people now. I’d never get to Berlin alive.” He said much the same thing to his former naval aide, Admiral Ruge, now in an enforced retirement of his own, who came calling on 11 October: “I should not go to Berlin, I would never get there alive. I know they would kill me on the way and stage an accident.” He confided the same thing to his neurologist, Professor Albrecht, who immediately certified Rommel as being unfit to travel.322

  When he called Berlin to inform Keitel of Dr. Albrecht’s determination, Rommel was shunted over to General Wilhelm Burgdorf, the chief of the Army Personnel Office. Burgdorf pressed Rommel to come to Berlin, but the field marshal was adamant. He asked Burgdorf point-blank why it was necessary for him to do so; Burgdorf repeated that it was imperative that Keitel discuss Rommel’s new assignment with him personally. Rommel continued to demur and eventually rang off; the uneasiness and foreboding he had first felt when he saw the watchers in the woods grew more sharply defined. On October 13, Rommel and Lucie drove into Ulm to pay a call on Oskar Farny, a longtime friend and comrade from the Great War, and onetime Reichstag deputy. In his own way as outspoken as Rommel about ending the war, Farny expected to be arrested at any moment—indeed two of his closest associates were taken into custody by the Gestapo while he
and Rommel talked—but he was certain that Rommel’s reputation and popularity would insulate him from any reprisals.

  “You’re wrong,” Rommel told him, “Hitler wants to get rid of me and he’ll leave no stone unturned to do it.”323

  As if in confirmation of Rommel’s words, when he and Lucie returned home, their butler, Rudolf Loisl, informed the field marshal that in his absence General Burgdorf had called again, with a message that on the morrow, between noon and 1:00 P.M., two general officers from Berlin would be calling on Rommel.

  The first visitor to the Rommel household on October 14 was no visitor at all—Manfred, who had returned to duties as a Luftwaffe auxiliary at the beginning of October, had been given a few days’ leave from his antiaircraft battery. Rushing back to Herrlingen, he arrived home early in the morning, just as his father was sitting down to breakfast. Rommel, though happy to see his son once again, was characteristically blunt, telling Manfred that “At twelve o clock today two Generals are coming to see me to discuss my future employment. So today will decide what is planned for me; whether a People’s Court or a new command in the East.”

  “Would you accept such a command?” Manfred asked, either having misunderstood the first part of his father’s statement, or else choosing to ignore it.