Rommel, Erwin

Rommel, Erwin (1891–1944), German general.Born in Germany, Rommel served with distinction in World War I, winning the coveted Pour le Mérite medal. Rising from infantry captain in 1918 to general during the interwar years, the author of a best‐selling book on infantry warfare, and increasingly an admirer and favorite of Adolf Hitler, Rommel commanded the Führer's headquarters in the Polish campaign of 1939. As commander of the Seventh Panzer Division in World War II, he then performed brilliantly in France in 1940, and commanded the Afrika Korps from February 1941 to March 1943 in the North Africa Campaign. Having achieved the position of a highly decorated and much admired field marshal, Rommel was finally defeated by Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery at El Alamein, and was recalled from his post before his corps were wiped out in May. In July 1944, Rommel was put in charge of German forces along the “Atlantic Wall” in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. He disagreed with his superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rund stedt, advocating impregnable beach defenses rather than reliance upon a mobile reserve to repel the threatened Allied amphibious invasion. The Germans tried to do both. Following the successful Allied invasion of Normandy, Rommel was severely wounded in an aerial attack in mid‐July. Partly implicated in the plot against Hitler, Rommel committed suicide on 14 October to avoid trial and was buried with military honors as a German hero.

Like many of his generation, Erwin Rommel was a gifted, ambitious, patriotic, and politically naive officer. As long as Hitler seemed to offer him personal glory and to lead Germany toward national greatness, Rommel followed him enthusiastically. Belatedly recognizing the looming catastrophe, Rommel halfheartedly communicated with the conspirators. Made into an immensely popular figure of German soldiering by Nazi propaganda, Rommel was preserved from the humiliating fate of the more decisive plotters. For several decades after World War II, Rommel's reputation as a brilliant tactician, the “Desert Fox,” and a staunch anti‐Nazi made him into something of a cult figure among military historians in Britain and the United States. More recent studies have shown him to have been much more typical of the majority of the Wehr macht's generals who knowingly employed their professional skills in the service of an odious regime. He remains a partly tragic, partly pathetic figure who played a major role in Hitler's savage war on civilization. Rommel lacked the strength and courage to act decisively against the regime even when it had clearly become both militarily and morally bankrupt.
[See also Germany, Battle for; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

Desmond Young , Rommel, 1965.
David Irving , The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field‐Marshal Erwin Rommel, 1978.

Omer Bartov