Rommel: The End of a Legend

by Ralf Georg Reuth

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was the most popular soldier of World War II. Under his leadership the German Afrika Korps advanced all the way to Egypt. Known as the Desert Fox, Rommel was considered invincible. That is the story told in the history books. Ralf Georg Reuth paints a different portrait of Erwin Rommel: a picture of a man who owed his fame in part to Nazi propaganda and whose role in the resistance is still unclear; the image of a soldier, who was promoted by Hitler and who continued to stay true to him until the end, when he committed suicide at the behest of his Führer. His personal fate is the mirror image of the German tragedy of that time: to have followed the Führer to the end and to believe that one had thereby done one's patriotic duty.

Genres: History, Biography, World War II, Nonfiction

235 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2004

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, it's a fast read, I guess. And it makes some interesting points about Rommel's strategy being based on a wildly inaccurate read of the grand strategic situation. Essentially, Hitler told him that North Africa was supposed to be a defensive campaign, but not why, and never told Rommel about the imminent launch of Barbarossa. So Rommel assumed if he disobeyed orders and went on a crazy attack he'd have access to all kinds of reinforcements since there were no other theaters going on (ask forgiveness rather than permission?), which, uh...well, that didn't pan out well.

And there's some good thematic takes here discussing the role of propaganda and how Rommel both courted that and was used by it, and how various parties including the Allies had a vested interest in building him up to make it an easier pill to swallow losing to him. There's also an intriguing end discussion about Rommel and July 20 : not whether he was involved, but how the mythology has evolved over time to suit the needs of various actors. At first, he definitely wasn't involved at all, because it was disgraceful to have gone against Der Fuhrer and wouldn't it be best if we all just forgot about it -- even into the postwar period. But once the Germans were back onside in NATO in the 50s, Speidel (who was Rommel's chief of staff as well as holding the top NATO ground command by then) saw value in turning him into a resistance man who saw the light and turned against Hitler -- See, Some Germans Good. And then scholarship has evolved past that now to recognizing the deep ambiguities surrounding what Rommel knew and didn't know, and when. The end line I think is well summed up by the author : "In reality Rommel was neither the one [a Nazi] or the other [a full-on July 20 conspirator]. He had intrinsically understood neither National Socialism, nor the resistance to it...He followed the Fuhrer, who had restored the self-esteem of a humiliated nation, into disaster and whilst doing so believed he was only doing his duty."

With all that said, why only three stars? Well, as mentioned this is a short book. I think it's tough to write a short book well, covering the necessary information and not getting distortions into your interpretation as you try to condense complicated things into small manageable chunks. Some authors manage it, some do not, and this one I don't think does. There's a number of glossed over points in the interest of simplicity that I think run the real risk of being distorting or misleading -- not on purpose, mind you, but because he's decided that something is only going to get a few sentences' worth of description. Hence, for example, this :

"Personnel changes at the top of the Wehrmacht became necessary when it was revealed that von Blomberg [the defence minister]'s new bride had once worked as a prostitute, and that a stable lad had accused von Fritsch [the chief of the army general staff] of homosexuality."

And that is the sum total of the entire play that this affair receives. Frau Blomberg's mother once worked as a prostitute, which I think is where this is coming from, but mostly she was guilty of taking some erotic nude photos. This was scandalous, especially as Goring had been the best man and Hitler had been at the wedding and taken photos with the couple, but it didn't necessitate a personnel change. What necessitated a personnel change was that Goring and Himmler took the information and ran it to Hitler because of private quarrels (both men probably had ambitions to take his spot), and even then Hitler -- while outraged -- mostly confined himself to "well then he'd better divorce her". It was only after Blomberg refused to do so, and Goring threatened to publish everything, that Blomberg resigned.

And the Fritsch affair was even more ludicrous -- a known liar and blackmailer [calling him a "stable lad" seems like a gross distortion of his criminal career] called in to the police and said "haha I saw this guy Frisch having THE GAY SEX a couple times in a public bathroom". Since it worked so well with Blomberg, Goring & Himmler decided to run essentially the same scheme again and make a play with this to force him to resign. Turns out Frisch is a different guy in the army, and Fritsch was totally innocent. He demanded a full court of honor to prove his innocence, and it later acquitted him, though he did not get any of his old rank back and was later killed in Poland because that demotion put him on the front line (whoopsie).

Anyway that's a lot of ink spilled over this just to say that the author's assertions about Frau Blomberg are pretty false, and those about von Fritsch are at a minimum severely lacking in context about the power struggles going on between the Party and the Army at the time. Again, I don't think it's deliberately wrong, but it's a consequence of what happens when you try to condense a big complicated subject into a one-sentence summary.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rommel was precisely the sort of general that it was easy for his opponents to appreciate.  He was tactically brilliant, behaved in a chivalrous fashion towards other leaders, and was ignorant enough about logistical matters that his victories ultimately led to bitter defeat.  In many ways, he could be compared to Confederate General Robert E. Lee as a practitioner of the flank attack and someone whose poor grasp of logistics ultimately led him to suffer defeat in support of a terrible cause.  Yet while Rommel was a successful general whose rapid rise to power ruffled the feathers of the conservative German officer corps, he was also someone whose injuries and forced death by suicide for not being aware of and reporting the plotting that was going on in his staff after a failed attempt on Hitler's life, making him somewhat of a martyr to the cause of Germans against Hitler.  This book serves as a complex piece of revisionist history, looking at Rommel from a skeptical eye seeing both the unwarranted fame he received as a result of Nazi war propaganda and also the way that defeats in war and his own mercurial temperament led him to eventual death and a posthumous reputation as a principled anti-Nazi when he was not politically skilled or astute in general.

This book is a bit more than 200 pages long and is divided into five chapters (after the introduction) that deal with different aspects of a revisionist approach to the legend of Rommel as it existed in World War II and afterwards in historiography.  The first chapter of the book looks at the background of Rommel and what it was that allowed him to rise to prominence just before World War II as Hitler's general (1), given that most of the generals at the top level of their army were lukewarm at best towards Hitler and some of them were actively hostile.  After that the author examines Rommel's career as an army commander and views his reputation and its effect on others and his strengths and weaknesses in command (2).  The author discusses Rommel's reputation as a creation of Nazi propaganda and shows how this worked against his efforts at grounding German war policy on a realistic basis (3).  The author then discusses Rommel as a victim of the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler given the complicity of his chief of staff (4) before closing with a discussion of the legend of Rommel's principled behavior in the postwar period that allowed him to be viewed (falsely) as an example of a good German (5) as well as an able and gentlemanly opponent of the allies mostly on the Mediterranean and Western fronts.

Rommel's career and reputation are ultimately complex in that Rommel was clearly excellent in some parts of the art of war (particularly tactics) while not as good in logistics and diplomacy with his Italian ally.  In addition, Rommel's reputation was built up by Goering and others in the Nazi establishment who saw him as Hitler's general, someone whose elan and dashing was a rebuke to overly conservative generals from the Wehrmacht that Hitler inherited from the Weimar Republic period.  Rommel appears not to have understood national socialism, was not particularly anti-Semitic, and appears not to have been understood and appreciated as a realist who saw quite rightly that Nazi Germany did not have the means to handle a two-front war and whose realism was consequently viewed by Hitler and his loyalists as a defeatist in consequence.  Rommel's efforts at securing peace before (and after) D-Day gave him enough credibility to be viewed as a principled opponent of Hitler's, even though he was loyal to the Fuhrer to the end, as tragic as that end was for both himself personally and his country as a whole.

[Eksded · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice and concise, a pleasant read.