The Trail of the Fox Page 4
In his later published account of the battle of Longarone, Rommel romanticized. There he described how he himself had swum the icy Piave at the head of his Abteilung. Yet there can be no doubt of his own physical courage in battle, even if these 1917 victories over the Italians were purchased relatively cheaply. In the ten-day battle ending in the Italians’ humiliating defeat at Longarone, Sproesser’s entire battalion lost only thirteen enlisted men and one officer (he fell off a mountain). At Longarone, Rommel captured 8,000 Italians in one day. Not for another quarter century would Rommel really meet his match.
One month later, the Kaiser gave him the tribute he ached for, the matchless Pour le Mérite. The citation said it was for breaching the Kolovrat line, storming Mataiur and capturing Longarone. Rommel preferred to attribute it to Mataiur alone—unless he was in Italian company; then he took a certain sly pleasure in saying he won it at Longarone. Rommel was never diplomatic.
After that he always wore the distinctive cross on a ribbon around his neck. But he sensed the envy that his fellow officers felt about it. He told his old school friend Hans Seitz years later, “You can’t imagine how jealous the officers are of my Pour le Mérite. There’s no spirit of comradeship at all.”
There weren’t many men entitled to wear the medal—a Maltese Cross of dazzling electric-blue enamel trimmed in gold, on a black and silver ribbon. Most of them—men like air heroes Ernst Udet, Werner Mölders, and Baron von Richthofen—became legends in their own lifetime.
Where is Rommel’s medal now? In a little village office in Swabia is a cheap metal cupboard, pretentiously described as the Rommel Archives. The archives are opened only one day a year, October 14. The day I visited, it was October 16. But they opened it for me all the same, showed me the contents and asked me to lock up before I left. I found a few letters, photograph albums, and other memorabilia.
On the cupboard floor was a dusty cardboard box. In it was the Pour le Mérite, its enamel slightly chipped where once it struck an asphalt road. In the same box was a high-peaked cap. A pair of yellowing Perspex goggles. Three glass bottles filled with desert sands of different colors. And a khaki sleeve brassard, with a silver palm tree motif and one word: “Afrika.”
The Instructor
ERWIN ROMMEL had gone briefly on leave to Danzig late in 1916, and there he had married his Lucie. She was twenty-two, dark-eyed and lithe. He had just turned twenty-five, was upright, fair-haired and jerky. After his return to the battlefield their correspondence resumed—in fact, they kept up a daily correspondence throughout their marriage, whenever they were apart. He was deeply dependent on her emotionally, and he yearned for home life with her.
When he returned from the First World War, Lucie was no longer a girl but already a woman of resolute character, with a direct gaze and handsome features. Gone was the delicate ballroom bloom of Danzig. She still liked to laugh, long and loud, but she was not easygoing. She completely dominated Erwin. He adored her. “It was wonderful to see how much Erwin fussed around her,” one of her women friends recalls. “His favorite phrase seemed to be, ‘Whatever you say, Lucie!’” Toward the end Lucie became something of a virago. If she cast out a friend, all her other friends had to ostracize that woman, too. Rommel indulged her, but in 1944, as we shall see later, it had the most unforeseen consequence for him when Lucie picked a row with the wife of his chief of staff.
THE FIRST World War ended with Rommel twenty-seven and an army captain. He had been posted early in 1918 to the staff of an army corps, and this brief experience of paper work had cured him of any desire to become a staff officer. The rigors of war had made a tough and wiry man of him. He was stocky now and no longer a weakling. He offset his shortness by a parade-ground voice and manner, reverting to the lisping Swabian dialect only when among friends.
Germany in 1918, after its collapse, was in the throes of upheaval—political, social and economic. Bands of Communists and revolutionaries roamed the streets. The armies had marched back into Germany following the armistice in good order, and the new republic turned to the army officers to restore stability. In March 1919, Rommel found himself sent to Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance to command Number Thirty-two Internal Security Company, a truculent bunch of Red sailors who jeered at his medals and refused to drill. He soon licked them into shape. His file shows that in the spring of 1920 he was also involved in “operations against rebels in Münsterland and Westphalia,” and his adjutant Ernst Streicher has described one episode in which Rommel used fire hoses like machine guns against revolutionaries storming the town hall of Gmünd, dampening their violent ardor.
He was in fact very lucky to be able to stay in the army; many officers were being let go. A civilian existence would have been unthinkable for Rommel. The army was his life. The few existing photographs of him in plain clothes show him an awkward, shambling misfit, a figure somewhat reminiscent of a smalltime hoodlum. Without that uniform, helmet and, above all, the blue enamel medal, he was not one tenth the man.
In these last years before Hitler, the German army was in the doldrums, but Rommel was busy. On October 1, 1920 he went to Stuttgart to command a rifle company in an infantry regiment—part of the tiny army permitted to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. He stayed a company commander in Stuttgart for the next nine years, expanding his knowledge of the art of war. He studied the heavy machine gun, becoming proficient at firing and dismantling it. He learned all there was to know about the internal combustion engine. He also found time to teach his riflemen the social graces, even organizing dances. He acquired a dog, started a stamp collection, resumed his painful attempts to learn the violin and pulled a motorcycle apart and put it together again. He showed his men how to build a ski hut in the mountains and how to make a collapsible boat. Rommel put a lot of emphasis on sports.
Lucie, too, was forced to join in some of these arduous endeavors with him. She lamely protested, “I swim just about as well as a lead duck!” He nearly lost her when she capsized a boat. On one occasion he took her skiing, but she sat down stubbornly in the snow and moaned about the cold. Erwin called back to her, “You’d better get up—I don’t recommend death by freezing.”
She stayed put, so he had to give in and let her ride back down the mountain. And so went the early years of the marriage and Rommel’s early career—the uneventful 1920s. In 1927 he sat Lucie on the pillion seat of his motorcycle and took her around the scenes of his war exploits in Italy. But German officers were not popular there; his camera aroused hostility in Longarone and he was asked to leave. After that trip Lucie was allowed a respite, because she was expecting a child. The baby was born in December 1928, a boy. Rommel called him Manfred and had great hopes for him.
In Rommel’s confidential personnel file are several of the annual evaluations of him written by his superiors with ponderous Teutonic thoroughness. How different his personality at this time seems from that of his later years. In September 1929 his battalion commander described him as “a quiet, sterling character, always tactful and modest in his manner.” He went on to laud Rommel’s “very great military gifts,” particularly his sure eye for terrain. “He has already demonstrated in the war that he is an exemplary combat commander. He has shown very good results training and drilling his company. . . . There is more to this officer than meets the eye.” The officer suggested that Rommel might make a good military instructor. This advice was heeded.
On October 1, 1929, Rommel was posted to Dresden’s School of Infantry.
A junior instructor, he concentrated on turning out lieutenants who would make good company commanders. “I want to teach them first how to save lives,” he would say. This was one lesson Rommel had learned from the war: he wanted different kinds of commanders from those who had so callously sent good men to their slaughter. “Shed sweat—not blood,” was another of his maxims; he wanted the lieutenants to realize the value of proper digging in.
Here at Dresden he ran into Ferdinand Schoerner, his old rival from the
Italian campaign, who had infuriated Rommel by winning the Pour le Mérite for the capture of Hill 1114. Schoerner was also an instructor now, and a favorite of the school’s commandant, who, like Schoerner, was a Bavarian. Schoerner often played practical jokes on Rommel, who did not always know how to reply. One of Schoerner’s frequent pranks was to plant silver cutlery from the mess in the pockets of guests at formal banquets and watch their embarrassment when the spoons and forks fell out. Rommel, when it happened to him, was not amused. Their rivalry persisted to the end. It was generally friendly, and once, after Schoerner had made a name for ruthlessness bordering on brutality in the Crimea in 1944, Rommel solicitously took him aside and candidly urged him to try a different method. Schoerner won Hitler’s last major victory against the Russians, in 1945, and to him went an unusual posthumous “distinction.” On his death as a field marshal in 1974 the West German government secretly circularized all offices, forbidding any tokens of respect. How different from the case of Rommel, as we shall see.
Rommel was one of the most popular instructors at Dresden. As a virtuoso at small-scale wars in difficult terrain, he lectured on the system he had used to heat the bunkers in the Argonnes forest and his cunning employment of machine guns in the mountain warfare in Rumania and Italy. He never spoke more than ten minutes without sketching an illustration and projecting it onto a screen for the cadets to see. When other lecturers tried it, the cadets dozed off in the darkness. One instructor complained at having been allotted the difficult Monday morning slot. Rommel volunteered to fill it—“I can guarantee they won’t fall asleep on me!”
Most popular of all was his talk on Mataiur—the battle around which his whole young life revolved. Another instructor wrote years later, “You can understand Rommel only by taking his storming of Mount Mataiur into account. Basically he always stayed that lieutenant, making snap decisions and acting on the spur of the moment.” In a confidential report in September 1931 the school commandant wrote on Rommel: “His tactical battle lectures, in which he describes his own war experiences, offer the cadets not only tactical but also a lot of ideological food for thought. They are always a delight to hear.” A year later the senior instructor added: “He is a towering personality even in a milieu of hand-picked officers. . . . A genuine leader, inspiring and arousing cheerful confidence in others. A first-rate infantry and combat instructor, constantly making suggestions and above all building up the cadets’ characters. . . . Respected by his colleagues, worshipped by his cadets.”
In October 1933 he moved up to a battalion command in Goslar, in the Hartz mountains of central Germany. The Third Battalion of the Seventeenth Infantry Regiment was a Jäger battalion—literally “hunters,” but in fact a rifle battalion distinguished by a traditional service color of green instead of white. Rommel, however, insisted that all his officers should learn to hunt and shoot, until stalking and killing became second nature to them. Here, in the forests with horse and gun, he spent two of his happiest years since the war. From the start he outclassed all his men in toughness. On the day he had arrived at his new command, his officers had tried to deflate him by inviting him to climb and ski down a local mountain. He did so, three times; when he invited them to a fourth ascent, they blanched and declined. “Head and shoulders above the average battalion commander in every respect,” was how the regiment’s commander appraised him in September 1934. A year later his successor wrote of Rommel, now a lieutenant colonel: “His Jäger battalion is in fact the ‘Rommel battalion.’ He is preeminently qualified to be a regional commander or senior instructor.”
It was at Goslar in 1934 that Rommel had his first incidental meeting with the man who was to be his destiny, Adolf Hitler. The Nazis had swept to power in January 1933 on a rising tide of unemployment and militant unrest. Within a year, by radical reforms and revolutionary economic measures, Hitler had cured most of the economic troubles and restored the country’s lost national pride. He secretly assured his generals that the German army’s famed strength would be restored and that a campaign of imperial conquest in the east would be launched when he was ready. Thus he won the generals’ support. Just how he captured the colonels’ too is evident from Rommel’s case.
Rommel was virtually nonpolitical. If anything, he leaned toward the socialists, the typical reaction of a combat soldier to the callous upper classes whom he blamed for the horrors of the battlefield. (At home once, his son, Manfred, asked what war was like. By way of answer Rommel deftly sketched a surrealist scene of ruined horses, broken trees, mud and slaughter.) As he was also a patriot, the appeal of the Nazis was strong. Most of their radical slogans left him unmoved. When Manfred once pointed to the hooked nose of the Goslar battalion’s medic, one Doctor Zechlin, and innocently asked, “Papa, is he a Jew?” Rommel was highly indignant. Like most of his brother officers, he loathed the brown-shirted bullies of Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung, the SA—the private army of two million men who had strutted and persecuted as they policed the Nazi rise to power. The regular army, of only 100,000 professional soldiers, had good cause to fear the SA now that Hitler was in power: there were signs everywhere by early 1934 that Röhm was preparing a take-over. Rommel could see the SA’s preparations right under his nose in Goslar. Then—in the notorious Night of the Long Knives in June 1934—Hitler struck: he massacred Ernst Röhm and many of his unsavory cronies. The entire army hailed Hitler’s strike with relief, and Rommel was relieved, too, although to his adjutant he privately expressed criticism of the actual massacre. “The Führer did not have to do that,” he said. “He doesn’t realize how powerful he is, otherwise he could have exercised his strength in a more generous and legitimate way.”
Still, according to Manfred his father’s tolerant attitude toward the Nazis—to put it no higher—can be traced back to that date. Manfred was only six at the time, but his father obviously discussed it quite openly with him in later years. Lucie’s letters show that she came to admire Hitler with an almost religious fervor, while Erwin’s stolid prose betrays at most an initial gratitude for the esteem in which Hitler held the army, followed by admiration for his incisive leadership—as shown against the SA—and his military “genius.”
I tried hard to establish the date of their first meeting—Hitler and Rommel. In his early biography of Rommel, Brigadier Desmond Young ascribed it to September 1935, but all the sources, including Young agree that the occasion was when Hitler came to Goslar to meet a farmers’ delegation before the annual Harvest Festival, a huge open-air rally of a million farm workers from all over Germany. My researches indicated that they in fact met on September 30, 1934—from Martin Bormann’s diary we know that there was no other date when Hitler visited Goslar at a time when Rommel still commanded the Jäger battalion. I put the question to Manfred the next time I visited him. Manfred said, “I think I can settle that right away.” He went upstairs and returned with a framed photograph of the event. It bore the pencil inscription: “1934.” It shows Hitler inspecting the battalion’s guard of honor at the Kaiserpfalz castle, with Rommel’s surprisingly small figure at his side. Rommel is wearing a steel helmet that looks as large as a coal scuttle, and polished riding boots. Their meeting was in fact only formal, and we have no evidence of Rommel’s impressions that day.
One year later, in 1935, he was posted to Potsdam, the cradle of Prussian militarism. “I have been earmarked as a full-blown instructor at the new Potsdam school of infantry,” he wrote delightedly to Lucie. “Top secret! So make tracks for Potsdam! But keep it under your hat!”
The Kriegsschule was alive with activity. In March of 1935 Hitler had defiantly proclaimed the expansion of the Wehrmacht and the reintroduction of conscription. Thousands of new army officers were undergoing training. Two hundred at a time, the cadets marched into the academy’s Hall of Field Marshals and listened spellbound to Rommel’s lectures, while the oil paintings of forty German and Prussian field marshals looked down approvingly from the walls.
Rommel emphasized th
e need for physical fitness. When Cadet Hellmuth Freyer—asked for his views in 1937—respectfully submitted: “Two hours’ early morning PT is too much, we are too tired afterward to follow the lectures properly,” Rommel barked at him to be about his business. Most of the cadets liked his style and individuality. They adored his disrespectful attitude toward the red-trousered General Staff officers. “Those men are like marble,” he told Kurt Hesse, who lectured on the history of Prussia. “They are smooth, cold, and black at heart.” When his cadets quoted Clausewitz at him—Clausewitz was the staff officers’ military gospel—Rommel would snap back: “Never mind what Clausewitz thought, what do you think?” His idol was Napoleon, a man of action. As a lieutenant he had bought an engraving of Napoleon on Saint Helena, gazing out to sea, and hung it on the wall. It took Lucie to bring a portrait of a German military hero, Frederick the Great, into their matrimonial home.
Erwin and Lucie lived very quietly near the Potsdam academy and did not mingle with Berlin society or the new elite. Unlike other war heroes, Rommel did not frequent the luxurious restaurants such as the leather-paneled Horcher’s. He kept fit, went riding, practiced his hobbies. He memorized the table of logarithms, no small feat as mathematicians well know, and could thus perform astounding mental calculations like extracting the seventeenth root of any given number. He tried to interest Manfred in mathematics too; indeed, he spent the last days of his life vainly trying to explain differential calculus to his willfully uncomprehending son. “My father,” says Manfred now, “had three ambitions for me: he wanted me to become a fine sportsman, a great hero and a good mathematician. He failed on all three counts.”
Rommel naturally tried out his own dogmas on Manfred. “Courage is easy,” was one of them. “You just have to overcome fear for the first time.” Manfred still winces when he recalls how his father tried that idea on him when he was eight. “I found myself marching gamely at his side to the Potsdam swimming pool,” Manfred said, “clutching his hand, with a big rubber swimming ring under my other arm. He made me go up to the top diving board and told me to jump. That’s when I discovered there’s a big difference between theory and practice. My father had collected all his cadets to watch. I said, ‘I’m not going to jump.’ He asked why not, and I shouted back down to him, ‘Because I value my life. I can’t swim.’ My father reminded me that I was wearing the ring. ‘What if the ring bursts,’ said I, and my father reddened and shouted back that then he would jump in and save me. ‘You’re wearing riding boots!’ I pointed out, and he replied that he would take them off if the need arose. ‘Take them off now,’ I challenged him. My father looked around at all the cadets, and refused. So I climbed back down the ladder.”