Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, known to the British as the Desert Fox, was one of the most famous generals of World War II. He was a brilliant tactician who, with meager resources, turned the war in North Africa in favor of the Axis after the Italians had suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of a numerically inferior British Empire adversary in 1940 and 1941.
The Desert Fox was respected not only by his own Africa Corps soldiers and Italian allies, but held in equal respect by the British, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, and Polish soldiers who campaigned against him. He was rightly identified as one of the Allies' most dangerous opponents.
No matter how honorable the war in the Western Desert appeared in comparison to other theaters, the British wanted Rommel dead. Commando operations were launched to eliminate him, but they failed largely because of incompetence and poor intelligence gathering. Rommel was also nearly killed or captured several times in desert battles, as he was often right up at the front directing events in person.
A favorite of Hitler, Rommel had once commanded the Führer's escort unit during the invasion of Poland in 1939. He was a favorite of the National Socialists because of his humble origins as the son of a schoolmaster, when most of Germany's other generals came from the Junker landowning class or high aristocracy. Rommel, however, became increasingly disillusioned with Hitler as a military strategist and would eventually flirt dangerously with the military resistance to Hitler, a resistance that plotted the Führer's assassination.
Rommel eventually found himself on the defensive, faced with the renewed advance by British forces from the east led by General Bernard Montgomery and by the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa to the west, Operation Torch. German forces were eventually pushed into Tunisia and slowly overwhelmed.
Following the defeat of German and Italian forces in North Africa in May 1943, Rommel, who had actually left Africa in March exhausted and dispirited by the long chain of victories that had morphed into defeats, was reassigned to Italy. He later helped disarm the Italian Army after Italy changed sides.
In November 1943, Rommel was assigned to the Western Front's most important sector, Northwest France, where a massive Allied invasion was expected in a few months' time. Hitler appointed Rommel Inspector of the Western Defenses, but his recommendation on how to counter an invasion ran contrary to those of the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.
Rommel wanted to hold the powerful Panzer divisions close to the coastal defenses, believing that because of superior Allied air power the Germans had to hit the Allies hard as they landed, instead of holding back the panzers for a later assault further inland, a powerful pincer assault favored by von Rundstedt. Rommel believed that Allied aircraft would not permit the Panzer divisions to mass for an assault. Rundstedt disagreed, as he feared the panzers would be very vulnerable to Allied naval bombardment.
The question of who was right has rumbled on in historical circles since World War II and will continue for decades to come. Rommel was at least able to overhaul the static defenses of the Atlantic Wall, making the coast a more challenging prospect for Allied attackers.
Hitler couldn't make up his mind whether to follow Rommel's or von Rundstedt's plan, leading to a useless compromise and a division of command that weakened the German front. Hitler and his staff believed that the Allies would take the shortest route to France and land in the Pas-de-Calais region, whereas Rommel supported the idea of invasions at both Pas-de-Calais and the beaches of Normandy.
Unfortunately for Rommel, when D-Day commenced on June 6, 1944, Hitler believed it to be a feint to draw away German armor, with the real target being the Pas-de-Calais. By the time it was realized that Normandy was the only invasion, Hitler's refusal to allow the speedy movement of Panzer divisions to Normandy, coupled with the holding of panzers already in theater well back from the coast, meant that the Allies secured beachheads from which they could not be dislodged.
Interestingly, one armored division, the 21st Panzer, had been permitted to be close to the coast as a sop to Rommel. This division launched an immediate counter-attack on D-Day and actually drove through to the coast, coming to a halt between the British beach at Sword and the Canadian beach at Juno. Without support, the panzers were forced to withdraw.
The 21st Panzer's aggressive advance seemed to prove Rommel's theory of holding the tanks close to the beaches, but this remains very debatable. Rommel's next idea was to pull German forces well back from the rapidly expanding Allied beachhead and, instead of feeding infantry and Panzer divisions into the fight piecemeal, regroup and re-engage later from a position of strength. Von Rundstedt agreed, but Hitler did not.
A despairing and frustrated Rommel, the master of the war of movement, saw Germany's best remaining forces being ground away in a war of attrition it couldn't win. The Panthers in particular were unable to mass for proper attacks due to relentless Allied fighter-bomber attacks, precisely as he had warned in 1943. Rommel continued to try to direct the Battle of Normandy as best he could.
Little did he realize that Allied fighter-bombers, the bane of the German armor in Normandy, would also pose a direct threat to the Desert Fox himself. On July 17, 1944, Rommel had attended a meeting with SS Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich of the 1st SS Panzer Corps located at Livarot. Rommel was driving back to his own headquarters in a castle at La Roche-Guyon.
Normandy had become so dangerous that any German vehicular movement led to Allied fighter-bomber attacks. Rommel's Horch staff car was a prized target, one of several staff vehicles driving around Normandy that afternoon, which were also attacked, causing confusion as to which Allied pilot actually shot up Rommel's car.
Rommel's staff car traveled unescorted, and Rommel, as was his habit from North African days, sat in the front passenger seat next to his driver, Unterfeldwebel Daniel. Riding in the back of the open-top car were three members of his staff: a sergeant bodyguard and two staff officers.
An Allied fighter, normally identified as a Spitfire flown by either Squadron Leader Chris Le Roux, a South African ace commanding No. 602 City of Glasgow Squadron, Royal Air Force, or by the appropriately named pilot Charlie Fox of No. 412 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, attacked Rommel's staff car, chasing it down the road and hitting it with cannon fire.
Rommel's driver was mortally wounded, and Rommel himself was either thrown out of the car during the shooting or jumped out at speed to avoid the shells ripping through the Horch. The car veered into trees and crashed. The location of the crash was the small village of Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery, another strange name coincidence considering Rommel's greatest nemesis in the desert and in Normandy was British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
Rommel was quickly rescued and rushed for treatment. It appeared at the time that his injuries would prove fatal. The left side of his face was torn up from glass fragments and contact with the road surface, and he had four skull fractures. Incredibly, Rommel pulled through and was hospitalized in Germany before undertaking a convalescent period at home in Ulm.
Just three days after Rommel's brush with death in Normandy, Colonel Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg succeeded in planting a bomb in the conference hut at Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters, the Wolf's Lair. The subsequent explosion nearly killed Hitler and killed or injured many of his staff and generals attending the daily military briefing.
A coup was then attempted in Berlin, codenamed Operation Valkyrie, led by von Stauffenberg and a group of fellow plotters on the assumption that Hitler was dead. When he was not, and once the Führer's survival became obvious, the coup collapsed and the leaders were arrested and summarily shot.
What followed was a very extensive Gestapo investigation into the German officer corps that resulted in thousands being arrested, interrogated, or tortured, and many sentenced to death by kangaroo courts, from field marshals to lowly subalterns. Rommel's name soon came up, and the Gestapo looked hard at the field marshal, Germany's greatest military hero, recuperating at home with his wife and son.
So what was the evidence against Rommel? Once Hitler's favorite, Rommel was noted by several leading German officers who survived the war, or in papers only discovered by accident in 2018, making comments suggesting that Hitler had to be removed in order for Germany to find a way out of the war.
Incredibly, photos were found in 2018 of Rommel meeting with anti-Hitler officers in Germany and in France, the latter on May 15, 1944. A leading plotter was Rommel's own chief of staff, General Hans Speidel, who had joined Rommel's staff on April 15, 1944, and introduced Rommel to General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, another resistance leader.
It appears that Rommel was not in favor of killing Hitler, wanting him placed on trial for his crimes, and feared murder might have led to civil war in Germany. But how many of these secret conversations and meetings became known to the Gestapo?
Rommel couldn't take part in the July plot due to his injuries from the car crash. If Rommel's car hadn't been shot up, it appears that he had the tacit support of most important Western Front commanders, including von Rundstedt, to end hostilities with the Western Allies. If Hitler had been killed on July 20, would Rommel have assumed overall command in the West and perhaps come to some kind of cease-fire with the Western Allies in France? None of this is clear, except that Rommel and many other senior generals were by now completely opposed to Hitler's conduct of the war in the West.
Rommel was first implicated by General von Stülpnagel, who muttered the word "Rommel" in a delirious state following a failed suicide attempt. Another plotter, Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, mentioned Rommel's name under torture. Even worse, the man who had led the civilian element of Operation Valkyrie, Carl Goerdeler, had even written Rommel's name down on a list of prospective post-Hitler Reich presidents, although Rommel was probably not informed of this.
All the various fragments of incriminating evidence against Rommel were presented to Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, who wasted no time in presenting this information to Hitler. With Rommel's home in Ulm under Gestapo surveillance, the Army was ordered to form a court-martial board to pronounce sentence upon the field marshal without his knowledge.
Incredibly, one of those on the court-martial was Field Marshal von Rundstedt, who had probably secretly supported Rommel's stand against Hitler's mismanagement of the Western Front and perhaps Hitler's removal. Another was Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's pet soldier, and Colonel General Heinz Guderian, who would also come increasingly into conflict with Hitler, this time over the Eastern Front, and General Heinrich Kirchheim, whom Rommel had relieved of his command after the Battle of Tobruk in 1941.
Although the evidence against Rommel was examined, and the head of the Reich Main Security Office, SS Obergruppenführer Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, assumed Rommel's guilt beyond any detailed real evidence, Rommel was found guilty. But this case was a tricky one. Under normal circumstances, Rommel would have appeared before Roland Freisler's People's Court to be harangued and mocked without any defense until sentenced to death.
But the Nazis knew that the German public would be horrified by such a spectacle, as Rommel was a national hero. Dr. Goebbels, Hitler, and the other senior Nazis feared his appearance would damage the regime's standing. Better Rommel was handled quietly.
Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel, both Hitler loyalists, were dispatched from Hitler's headquarters to Rommel's home on October 14, 1944. In private, Rommel was given three appalling options.
Option one: go with them to Berlin and defend himself before Hitler, who had already signed off on his death. Option two: be arraigned before the People's Court, the outcome being a death sentence, with his family also arrested and sent to a concentration camp and his staff arrested, tortured, and probably executed. Option three: commit suicide now.
If he chose the latter option, he would be accorded a state funeral, the story being that he had succumbed to the wounds he had received in Normandy. His family would not be touched and his reputation would remain intact. Also, his family would receive his full field marshal's pension.
Faced with such a dilemma, Rommel chose to protect his family. He told his wife and son what was going to happen and paid them a difficult farewell.
The car was driven by one of Hitler's drivers from the Reich Chancellery motor pool, SS-Stabsscharführer Heinrich Doose. A short way out of Ulm, Doose pulled the car over and got out, joined by General Maisel. General Burgdorf stayed in the rear with Rommel, handing him a glass ampoule of cyanide.
Rommel crunched the ampoule between his teeth and expired soon after. The three men then drove his body to an army field hospital, telephoning Frau Rommel to inform her of her husband's death ten minutes later. Hitler ordered a day of national mourning, and there followed a state funeral in the town of Ulm. The Gestapo then cremated Rommel's body to destroy any evidence of the real cause of death. Rommel was then buried in Herrlingen, close to Ulm.
The men who carried out Hitler's instructions regarding Rommel met different fates. General Burgdorf shot himself in Hitler's bunker on May 2, 1945, shortly before it was captured by the Soviets and two days after Hitler's own suicide. General Maisel survived the war, being released from U.S. captivity in 1947. He died in Bavaria in 1978, aged 82.
SS driver Heinrich Doose took part in the breakout from Hitler's bunker on May 1, 1945. He was later captured and interrogated by the Americans concerning Rommel's death. His ultimate fate is unclear.
If Rommel hadn't been injured in Normandy, would his involvement in the July plot have been decisive? He had the respect of a large part of the German Army and people and would have been the highest-profile resistor. Could his involvement have fully galvanized the other Western Front commanders to get behind the coup? These are intriguing historical questions that will continue to trigger lively debate.