The Trail of the Fox Read online

  Staubwasser politely refuses, for security reasons. Lane tightens his grip and pleads with him: “I swear I’ll never tell anyone. But when this war’s over I want to come back here with my wife and children—I want to show them where I met Rommel!”

  The records that relate Erwin Rommel’s illustrious career are now widely scattered in archives throughout the Western world. This story of the commandos, for example, is documented in the German army’s interrogations of the two British prisoners, and these interrogations are among the papers of a former German intelligence officer, stored in the Black Forest. The incident is referred to also in the shorthand notes taken on Hitler’s daily war conferences, deposited in an American university. It is recounted in the private diaries of German officers close to Rommel, and in the recollections of George Lane himself, which he wrote when he returned to England.

  To get beyond the myth-marshal of historiography and discover the true Rommel, one must search in sources such as these. The Trail of the Fox leads from vaults in West Germany to government files in Washington, from a military museum in South Carolina to presidential libraries in Kansas and Missouri, from the drawing rooms of Rommel’s surviving comrades to the musty attics with their tantalizing boxes and files of papers as yet unopened by the widows and families of the comrades who died. These records conduct us through the hills of Rommel’s native Swabia, up Alpine gorges, across the sand-swept tableland of Cyrenaica, to the tangled bocage of Normandy. Sometimes the trail grows faint, or vanishes. There are gaps in the evidence that none of the documents, memoirs or interviews can fill. Those aspects of Rommel must remain a mystery. But the trail leads eventually to a fuller understanding of this extraordinary man, and to the final mystery: why he chose to die as he did.

  IN 1944 ROMMEL was already a living legend. He was known as a great commander in the field, distinguished by that rare quality, a feeling for the battle. Bold, dashing and handsome, he was relentless in combat, magnanimous in victory and gracious to his vanquished enemies. He seemed invincible. Where he was, there was victory: he attacked like a tornado, and even when he withdrew, his enemies followed very gingerly indeed.

  What were the principal elements of the Rommel myth in 1944? The first was his romantic image—a general, small in stature, with a vulpine cunning and a foxy grin, time and time again confounding a vastly superior enemy. He was regarded as a modern Hannibal, running rings around his foes, bewildering them, demoralizing them and snatching victory after victory until force majeure obliged even Rommel to cut his losses and retreat.

  He was young for his rank, a born leader, adored by his troops. He was said to have revived a long-forgotten style of chivalrous warfare. In a war brutalized by the Nazi extermination camp and the Allied strategic bomber, Rommel’s soldiers were ordered to fight clean.

  Prisoners were taken and then treated well—he ignored Hitler’s order to execute captured members of the Jewish brigade. Private property was respected. In his files, dated October 15, 1943, is his secret instruction to all his commanders in Italy forbidding arbitrary looting, “to preserve the discipline and respect of the German Wehrmacht.”

  He rejected the use of forced labor in France—workers were to be recruited and paid in the normal way. He disregarded Hitler’s notorious “Commando Order” of October 1942, which made the execution of captured enemy commandos mandatory. When destitute Arabs were hired by the enemy to sabotage Axis installations, Rommel refused to encourage reprisals or the shooting of hostages. “It is better to allow such incidents to go unavenged than to hit back at the innocent,” he said later.

  He took no delight in the death of an enemy soldier. A Montgomery would order: “Kill the Germans wherever you find them!” An Eisenhower would proclaim: “As far as I am concerned, any soldier that is killing a German is somebody for whom I have a tremendous affection, and if I can give him something so he can kill two instead of one, by golly I am going to do it.” Rommel never descended to such remarks. He outwitted, bluffed, deceived, cheated the enemy. It was said that his greatest pleasure was to trick his opponents into premature and often quite needless surrender.

  He was, most spectacularly, a battlefield general, eagerly flinging himself into the fray, oblivious to danger. No enemy shell could cut him down, though men to his right and left were shot away; no mine could shatter his body, no bomb would fall near enough to kill him. He seemed immortal.

  So powerful was Rommel’s myth that it captivated even his enemies. The Allies unwittingly and then later deliberately publicized his invincibility—at first to explain away their own misfortunes in battle against him, then to make their victories over him seem worth that much more, and finally to conjure up a kind of anti-villain, a benign Nazi in contrast with whom the regular run of Nazis would seem all the more despicable. The time came when Rommel’s name alone was worth entire divisions. When he fell ill, his name was left on the battlefield to fight on in absentia. When the enemy realized that he was indeed gone, they anxiously speculated where the Fox could now be. The OSS files in Washington bulged with reports that “Rommel” was now commanding a secret army in Greece, in Rumania, or Yugoslavia. Or was he really in Italy, or France? Twice he received the ultimate accolade, unprecedented in Allied military history: assassins were sent to gun him down. (Each time they missed. Like Hitler himself, Rommel seemed indestructible, and believed it himself.)

  The mesmerization of the Allies was so extensive that in March of 1942 General Sir Claude Auchinleck, the British commander in North Africa, felt it necessary to warn his top officers in a memo: “There is a real danger that our friend Rommel will turn into a bogeyman for our troops just because they talk so much about him. He is not superhuman—energetic and capable though he is. And even if he were a superhuman, it would be most undesirable for our soldiers to attribute supernatural powers to him.” Four months later a copy of this admonition came into Rommel’s hands after a battle on the Egyptian frontier, and he smiled at Auchinleck’s unconvincing postscript: “I am not jealous of Rommel.” Still later, Rommel learned that Auchinleck’s successor, Bernard Montgomery, had a framed portrait of Rommel hanging in his battle trailer. Rommel, however, was never bewitched by any of his enemies. In the thousands of pages of the Rommel diaries there is not one reference to an adversary by name.

  If the enemy was enthralled by Rommel, how much more were his own people. As early as 1941, Rommel was the name on every German’s lips. No film star was ever so lionized. Generals writing to other generals kept referring to this Rommel phenomenon, in lines tinged with both admiration and rue. He won battles that other good generals would probably have lost, they granted him that. But he had learned his tactics and strategy on the battlefield, an imperfect school; for a general, combat experience was not enough. Rommel disdained the war academies and their trained and elegant products, the officers of the General Staff, and he tried to do without the skills they set such store by—intelligence, logistics, signals, personnel, operations. General Enno von Rintelen later said, scoffing, “Rommel was just not a great strategist. He lacked the General Staff training for that, and this put him at a large disadvantage.” General Gerhard von Schwerin, who fought under Rommel, said sardonically that Rommel “learned a lot by his own mistakes.” Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt spoke of him contemptuously as “just a good division commander, but no more than that.”

  Some of these criticisms were well founded; even so, they revealed underlying hostilities. Unlike many of the older General Staff officers, Rommel was for most of his career a hardy supporter of Adolf Hitler and the New Germany, and this dedication repelled them. And there was envy. Much of it was fixed upon the publicity lavished upon Rommel as Hitler’s favorite field marshal. It is true that Rommel quickly mastered the art of combat propaganda and appreciated its psychological effect on his own troops and also the enemy. “A kind of Rommel cult emerged,” a general later wrote. “He seldom went anywhere without a posse of personal photographers.” Many of the dramati
c pictures of Rommel are as carefully posed as the famous Raising the Flag on Mount Suribachi. The various tactical headquarters in Africa soon learned that one way to attract his good humor was to station men with cameras at his arrival point—even if they had no film in their cameras. This attention-seeking struck many generals as “unprofessional” and they found it galling. Among the private papers of tank expert General Heinz Guderian is a letter written from the Moscow battlefront in which he instructed his wife: “Under no circumstances will I allow any propaganda ballyhoo over me à la Rommel, and I can only strengthen you in your determination to prevent it.”

  The envy of Rommel was expressed in many forms. “Every week he used to talk on the telephone with Hitler in person,” said one general, repeating the popular allegation about Rommel, “and eagerly went over all his technical ideas with him.” In fact, Rommel phoned Hitler only once during the entire war—and was so pleased to speak with his Führer that he mentioned it in many letters afterward. Thus the envy was to some degree a product of the myth. We shall find that the jealousy of his fellow generals played a significant part in Rommel’s own tragic end. When he needed friends among his peers, there were none.

  Since Rommel’s death, his legend has grown. For many reasons, men have kept alive the fantasy image of the Fox. In postwar West Germany, the reputations of other field marshals have been allowed to lapse, as if in embarrassment or even antipathy, but Rommel’s name has been burnished. It has been given to a warship by the navy, and the army has “Rommel barracks” in many a German town. There are Rommel streets, a unique distinction for any World War II German general, and there is even an alley named after his adjutant. His former enemies the Americans produced an adulatory film, The Desert Fox, and it was exceedingly popular. There has been little effort, however, to get behind the legend and come to terms with Rommel himself: was he a Nazi, to be despised, or a hero of the anti-Hitler resistance? This is one section of the trail we must pursue.

  There is a moment in the Rommel story where he is in command of a panzer corps and has been advancing along an established, well-paved road. Suddenly he must take his entire reputation in both hands, abandon that road and plunge across a desert wilderness, uncharted and forbidding. It is like that with the trail on which we now set out. After a while we find that the legend is not enough. There follows an unknown land, into which we must now plunge.

  The Useful Soldier

  In a mid-Victorian building just off St. James’s Park in London a safe is opened and a thick brown pasteboard folder tied with string is pulled out. The cover label was printed by the presses of the Prussian War Department long before the days of Hitler. It exudes the familiar stale paper smell that excites the senses of every trained historian—not that any other historian has been allowed to set eyes on this folder before. A notation in English has been written on it: “Top Secret. Personal File of Field Marshal Rommel and a copy of his Wehrpass.” The Wehrpass, his service record book, is missing, no doubt removed by souvenir hunters. But the rest is there intact. The first documents date all the way back to March 1910: an eighteen-year-old youth, full name Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel, a sixth-former at the secondary school in the Swabian township of Gmünd, is trying to get into the army.

  ERWIN ROMMEL WAS a pale and often sickly youth. He had not set his heart on an army career. He had a mechanical bent and a vague hankering to be an aeronautical engineer. As a fourteen-year-old he, with a friend, had built a full-scale box-type glider in a field in nearby Aalen—there is a tiny, faded brown photograph of it among family papers. He proudly boasted in later years that the glider did fly, although not far.

  It was still a triumph, considering that this was 1906, the year of the first powered flight in Europe. His mother, Helene Rommel, was the daughter of a senior local dignitary, Regierungs-Präsident von Luz. Erwin took his looks from her, and adored her. His father was a schoolmaster, like his father’s father before him. Headmaster of the secondary school at Aalen, Erwin Rommel, Sr., was strict and pedantic. His short hair was slicked down to either side of a fashionable middle part and his stern pince-nez eyeglasses rode tightly on the dominating nose. The face was characterless, which even a bushy walrus moustache failed to conceal. After his death in 1913, Erwin would mainly remember that his father constantly pestered him with educational questions: “What’s the name of this building? What’s the species of that flower?” He was harsh and overbearing and once provoked Erwin’s older brother, Karl, into attacking him with a chair.

  The family diverged in their careers. Brother Karl volunteered for the army—but only so as to avoid taking his final examinations. He became an army reconnaissance pilot, and his fine photographs of the Pyramids and the Suez Canal are in the family papers. Gerhard, youngest of the Rommel brothers—and still alive today—became a struggling opera singer. All three brothers and their sister, Helene, were closer to their mother than to their father, and his early death was little loss to them.

  It was Rommel’s father, however, who prodded the reluctant Erwin into the career for which he proved so splendidly suited. In a letter he recommended his schoolboy son to the Württemberg army as “thrifty, reliable and a good gymnast.” Both the artillery and the engineers rejected young Rommel’s application, but in March 1910 the 124th Württemberg Infantry Regiment ordered him to report for a medical examination. The doctors found that he had an inguinal hernia but was otherwise acceptable. His father arranged for the necessary operation and signed the papers promising to pay for his son’s upkeep and to buy him a uniform as a Fahnenjunker, an officer cadet. On July 19, six days after leaving the hospital, eighteen-year-old Erwin joined his regiment. Soon afterward he was posted to the Royal Officer Cadet School in Danzig.

  In his personnel file are two faded sheets in Rommel’s own handwriting—at that time a regular, spiky copperplate—setting out the brief story of his own young life in so far as he believed it would interest the army:

  Aalen, March 1910.—I was born on November 15, 1891, at Heidenheim on the Brenz as the second son of the schoolmaster Erwin Rommel and his wife Helene, née Luz, both of the Protestant faith. As far as I can recall my early years passed very pleasantly as I was able to romp around our yard and big garden all day long. . . .

  I was supposed to start primary school in the fall when I was seven; but as my father was promoted to headmaster at Aalen that year and there is no primary school there, I had to acquire the necessary knowledge by private tuition in order to be able to get into the elementary school at Aalen. Two years later I entered the Latin School, and stayed there five years.

  At about this time occurred the deaths of my dear maternal grandmother and my grandfather on my father’s side as well. . . . In the fall vacation of 1907 I had the misfortune to break my right ankle jumping over a stream. But the foot was well set and it has healed satisfactorily, so that despite even the most strenuous activities I have never noticed any aftereffects. In the fall of 1908 I started in the fifth grade of the Royal Secondary Modern school at Gmünd and a year later the sixth grade, to which I still belong. The subjects that have most attracted me of late are mathematics and science.

  I have occupied my spare time with homework and reading, and apart from that with physical exercises like cycling, tennis, skating, rowing, skiing, etc. ERWIN ROMMEL

  When Rommel finished cadet school, in November 1911, the commandant wrote an evaluation of the earnest young man. In rifle and drill work, said the commandant, Rommel was “quite good.” At gymnastics, fencing and riding he was “adequate.” But, said the commandant somewhat anxiously, “he is of medium height, thin and physically rather awkward and delicate.” Still the lad was “firm in character, with immense willpower and a keen enthusiasm. . . . Orderly, punctual, conscientious and comradely. Mentally well endowed, a strict sense of duty.” Cadet Rommel was, said the commandant in prescient summary, “a useful soldier.”

  At Danzig, one of Germany’s most beautiful Hanseatic ports, the cadets wer
e obliged to attend regular formal balls in the officers’ mess—functions of stifling propriety, at which the daughters of the good Danzig citizens were invited to present themselves.

  Young Erwin’s attention was captured by a particularly graceful dancer, Lucie Mollin, a slender beauty whose father, like Rommel’s, had been headmaster of a secondary school, but was now dead; she had come to Danzig to study languages. At first she found Erwin overly serious, but soon they fell deeply in love. She was tickled by the way he sported a monocle in the Prussian fashion. (He always tucked it out of sight when a superior officer met them in the city—cadets were forbidden to wear monocles!) When Erwin received his lieutenant’s commission in January 1912, he had still not proposed to Lucie. Upon his return to Württemberg he began a daily correspondence with her—writing secretively to her in care of her local post office so that her mother could not intercept the letters. One photographic postcard to her pictures him in a straw hat at a period fashion ball. It is dated March 28, 1912. “I received your nice card from your hometown,” wrote Erwin. “I’m still waiting for the photos. I’m going to get mad at you soon if you make me wait much longer. I’m looking forward hugely to your long letter. I hope you’re going to make it really intimate.”

  The photo that Lucie sent him was a stunner. She had just won a tango competition, and her looks certainly had not let her down. All her ancestors’ Italian and Polish blood was to be seen in her finely drawn features, and one sees in the family photo album that as Lucie matured, her beauty grew as well. There is a conventional portrait of Lucie and Erwin—she in a dark, wide-brimmed hat, he in the ferocious spiked helmet of the Württemberg army.

  There is a later picture of them, Lucie by now a Red Cross nurse and Erwin with an Iron Cross pinned to his uniform. And there is the most charming picture of them all, of Lucie—by now his wife—sitting with her head demurely inclined while Lieutenant Erwin Rommel stands proudly behind her, with the suggestion of a moustache upon his lip and a rare medal for valor on a ribbon at his throat.