The Trail of the Fox Read online

  One might say that Manfred had inherited and employed the strategy of the indirect approach many years before his father first used it to brilliant effect in his own campaigns.

  When Manfred was seven, his father took him to the academy for his first ride on a horse; it was done in secret, for Lucie believed the child was too young to ride. His feet were tucked into the stirrup straps, since his legs were too short to reach the stirrups. The horse bolted and dragged the boy for a hundred yards by one leg. Manfred’s head was gashed, and Rommel was horrified. He pressed a coin into the boy’s hand. “If you tell your mother you fell downstairs, when you get home, you can keep this!” At home the wound was bathed in iodine. Manfred howled with pain. Rommel furiously demanded his money back—but Manfred was a good Swabian and had already tucked the coin away. Colonel Rommel did not let him ride again.

  Very early in my researches, I turned to the thousands of letters exchanged between Rommel and Lucie during their years together. The letters had been taken from the family by the Americans in 1945 but were eventually returned intact—except for a few written early in 1943, in which Rommel, somewhat prematurely, questioned the ability of certain U.S. generals. I learned that the letters are now in an archive in Germany—but closed until the coming century. Then I discovered that the Americans had made a microfilm copy, and that it was in the National Archives in Washington. But this copy was locked away too. No one was allowed to see it. I appealed to Lucie. She gave me a handwritten letter of access, and the officials in Washington finally produced the film from their safe.

  Erwin’s letters display what had by now become large, flourishing penmanship. He dashed them off once and sometimes twice a day on whatever paper came to hand in his office or battle headquarters. Lucie’s are carefully composed in a tight and regular hand. Her later letters were typewritten; her former manservant Rudolf Loistl told me, “She was a real night bird. I used to hear her typing until two or three in the morning, letters to him.” Her letters show shrewdness and perception unusual for a soldier’s wife. Although she was initially a rather more uncritical admirer of Adolf Hitler than her husband, some of her letters after 1939 show that nonetheless she was concerned about Germany’s future.

  Erwin’s letters sometimes disappoint. Their language is often dull; their grammar is unsteady; they are repetitive and even philistine. His only cultural reference in them is to a visit to the ballet (it had bored him). He was in fact a single-minded army officer, wrapped up in army life. Theodor Werner, his aide in the First World War, writes: “There wasn’t much talk on his staff. I can’t recall that there was ever any discussion of religion or philosophy.” Yet their value as biographical documents is undeniable. There are snap judgments on contemporaries, there are lines written with casual disregard for secrecy. Above all, they are reliable as source material where, for instance, war diaries are not. Diaries can always be backdated or altered to their authors’ advantage, but letters once consigned to the mailbox are beyond the correcting hand guided by hindsight.

  To read everything that a man writes over thirty years to his wife is to gain some insight into that man’s soul—his inner torments and ambitions, his moods and intimate beliefs. The sheer frequency with which certain ideas recur in Rommel’s letters is a guide to his inner imperatives. The letters show him well endowed with all the traditional Swabian characteristics—thrift, frugality, homesickness, loyalty, industry. They show him hungry for responsibility and greedy for medals and acclaim. Rommel relished rivalry and made no attempt to set aside old feuds or restore broken friendships. He bore a fashionable contempt for the privileged classes and the nobility. When he learned in 1939 of an embezzlement scandal involving an aristocratic cavalry captain, Rommel triumphantly wrote to Lucie: “And he had married a countess too! C——now agrees that my views on the aristocracy have proved more accurate than his own.”

  It was September 1936 before Hitler really noticed Rommel. He had been attached to Hitler’s escort for the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, a fairly routine job which made Rommel responsible for little more than security arrangements. One day Hitler decided to go for a drive, and instructed Rommel to ensure that no more than half a dozen cars followed. At the appointed hour Rommel found the road outside Hitler’s quarters seething with ministers, generals, gauleiters and their cars, all jostling for a place in Hitler’s excursion. Rommel let the first six pass, then stepped into the road and halted the rest. The party notables loudly swore at him. “This is monstrous, colonel, I intend to report this to the Führer.” Rommel replied that he had stationed two tanks farther down the road to block it. Hitler sent for Rommel that evening and congratulated him on executing his orders so well.

  Another matter soon brought Rommel to Hitler’s attention again. While senior instructor of the A Course at Potsdam, Rommel had taken his lecture notes, dramatically rewritten them in the present tense, edited them into a taut, exciting book and submitted it to a local publisher, Voggenreiter’s. It appeared early in 1937 as Infanterie Greift an [The Infantry Attacks]. Hitler certainly read it, and it was probably one of the best infantry manuals ever written. It attracted wide acclaim and went into one edition after another. Rommel confessed to his fellow instructor, Kurt Hesse, “It’s astounding, the money there is to be made from such books. I just don’t know what to do with all the cash that’s flooding in. I can’t possibly use it all, I’m happy enough with what I’ve got already. And I don’t like the idea of making money out of writing up how other good men lost their lives.”

  For tax reasons too, the royalties were an embarrassment. In 1976 the Stuttgart revenue office returned his old tax files to the family—and these indicate just how he contrived to conceal his considerable literary income from the Reich fiscal authorities. Perhaps it was sheer innocence, but more probably it was the foxy cunning that marked Rommel out even among Swabians: he simply directed Voggenreiter’s to pay to him each year only 15,000 Reichsmarks from the accumulating fortune and to keep the rest on account for him, gathering interest. On his tax returns, Rommel declared only the 15,000 Reichsmarks.

  As Rommel’s book became a best seller, Germany’s youth came to worship him, and he liked it. “Working with the lads here is a real joy,” he had written to his adjutant from Dresden in 1931. His views about youth were conservative. Once he told an army officer he met skiing in the mountains, “I regard it as my job to combat the mood of modern youth—against authority, against their parents, against the church and against us too.” This sort of attitude won favor with the Inspector of War Schools, Lieutenant General Georg von Küchler, who wrote a report noting that Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Rommel was “a senior instructor with a particularly powerful influence on youth.” Somebody’s ears evidently pricked up at this last sentence, because in February 1937 Rommel was assigned an unusual new job—the War Ministry’s special liaison officer to Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth.

  At twenty-nine, Schirach was leader of 5,400,000 boys. His organization gave them sport, culture and the Nazi philosophy. The War Ministry had decided that they must receive paramilitary training too. Had not the Battle of Königgrätz been won in the classrooms of Prussia’s elementary schools? The Führer himself had written in Mein Kampf, “The army is to be the ultimate school for patriotic education,” and had stated, “In this school the youth shall turn into a man.”

  The liaison was doomed to failure. Schirach was eleven years younger than Rommel, handsome and westernized (his mother was American). Rommel was so Prussian that Schirach was astounded to hear him talk in the Swabian tongue when they first met in April in the Youth leader’s lakeside home. “Rommel stayed to supper,” Schirach recalled. “My wife drew his attention to the beautiful view onto the Bavarian mountains from our window. This cut no ice with him. ‘Thank you, but I’m very familiar with mountains,’ he said, without even so much as glancing out of the window. Henriette had unintentionally given our guest his cue, because Rommel had received the Pour le Méri
te in 1917 for storming some mountain or other in the Julian Alps. He now held forth on this for two hours. I found his story quite interesting, but to Henriette all such military matters were anathema and she nearly fell asleep.” A month later Schirach reluctantly introduced Rommel to 3,000 Hitler Youth leaders during a camp at Weimar.

  At about this time Rommel produced a startling plan: the Wehrmacht’s young bachelor lieutenants should be brought in to train the Hitler Youth. Schirach said he strongly doubted that young army officers had nothing better to do with their free weekends than drilling hordes of boys in how to stand at attention. Rommel replied, “They will just be ordered to.” Schirach fobbed him off. “Rommel was put out by this,” said Schirach. “He then journeyed up and down the country a lot, speaking to my Hitler Youth leaders. The content of his speeches was always the same, how he had stormed Monte Mataiur. . . . Willing to hero worship though they were, my more intelligent leaders took umbrage and protested to me. Rommel, moreover, was propagating some kind of premilitary education, which would have transformed my Hitler Youth into some kind of junior Wehrmacht.”

  Rommel himself virtually admitted as much in a private letter to a general in August 1938: “In my view postenlistment training should be left mostly to those SA [Brownshirt] leaders whose own service record shows they are well prepared for the nation’s greatest testing time—by which I mean war.”

  Schirach’s bitterness toward Rommel did not lessen. At a gala theater performance he sat in the first row and put Rommel in the second. Rommel pointedly moved forward into an empty seat next to him, loudly announcing: “I represent the Wehrmacht, and in this country the Wehrmacht comes first.” The chief of the Wehrmacht’s national defense branch, Alfred Jodl, sadly noted in his diary that Schirach was “trying to break up the close cooperation initiated between the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth by Colonel Rommel.”

  Eventually, Schirach succeeded. But the clash with Hitler’s favorite, Schirach, did not blight Rommel’s career. On the contrary, he was suddenly selected to act as temporary commandant of the Führer’s headquarters. At Munich on September 30 the Great Powers had forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany the disputed Sudeten border territories, and Hitler had decided to tour the ancient German cities there. Rommel’s job would be to command the military escort. For an ambitious officer, the posting was a godsend—it catapulted him into the very highest company overnight. In Washington, D.C., in the captured albums of Hitler’s personal photographer, are prints showing Rommel and SS chief Heinrich Himmler sharing a table in Hitler’s special train, laughing uproariously.

  These bloodless Nazi victories impressed Rommel as they did millions of other Germans. He saw for himself the liberated German communities of Asch, Eger and Carlsbad turning out in their thousands to cheer the Führer. Twice—in Austria in March and now here in September—the “man of action” had been proved right and the General Staff pessimists confounded. It is a certainty that by 1938 Hitler was a man greatly to Rommel’s own liking. While many of his brother officers still hesitated to commit themselves to the Nazi philosophy, Rommel’s conversion was undoubtedly complete. Even in private postcards to his friends, he now signed off: “Heil Hitler! Yours, E. Rommel.”

  In January 1937 and again one year later he had attended nine-day Nazi indoctrination courses for the Wehrmacht. After listening to Hitler speak in secret in the Big Hall of the War Ministry on December 1, 1938, Rommel approvingly noted down two sentences that had particularly struck him: “Today’s soldier must be political, because he must always be ready to fight for our new policies”; and, “The German Wehrmacht is the sword wielded by the new German Weltanschauung [philosophy of life].” The extent of his dedication to Nazi ideals is evident, for instance, from the report he submitted to Berlin a few days later, after lecturing in various Swiss cities on his war exploits at the invitation of Swiss army officers. “Although Swiss army officers emphasized in conversation with me their desire for independence and the need for a national defense,” Rommel wrote, “they show that they are strongly impressed by the momentous events in Germany. The younger officers, particularly, expressed their sympathies with our New Germany. Individuals among them also spoke with remarkable understanding of our Jewish problem.”

  A new posting awaited him now that Hitler had annexed Austria: commandant of the officer cadet school at Wiener Neustadt, near Vienna. He arrived on November 10, 1938—the day after an orgy of anti-Jewish looting and destruction in the Reich. He, Lucie and Manfred lived in a charming bungalow in a large garden not far from the Maria-Theresia Academy, the mighty castlelike structure that housed the school. Rommel’s ambition was to make this the most modern Kriegsschule in the Reich.

  Distant though he was from Berlin, he could not escape the pull exerted from Hitler’s Chancellery. Twice in March 1939 the Führer again sent for him to command his mobile headquarters—during the occupation of Prague on the fifteenth, and once again on the twenty-third when Hitler sailed into the Baltic port of Memel to supervise its “voluntary return” by Lithuania to Germany.

  The invasion of Prague in mid-March showed Rommel that Hitler had physical courage, and that impressed him. The elderly Czech president Emil Hacha—who, under threat of air bombardment, had signed the invitation to the Wehrmacht to invade—was still in Berlin when Hitler left for the frontier. Rommel met him in a blizzard at the Czech border. The SS escort was late, but the panzer corps commander, General Erich Hoepner, proposed nonetheless that Hitler drive on into Prague to show who was now the boss. Himmler and the other generals were horrified at the idea. Rommel later bragged to his friend Kurt Hesse, “I am the one who persuaded Hitler to drive on—right to Hradcany Castle—under my personal protection. I told him he had no real choice but to take that road right into the very heart of the country, the very capital, to the citadel of Prague. To a certain extent I made him come with me. He put himself in my hands, and he never forgot me for giving him that advice.”

  That night Rommel wrote to Lucie from Prague, “All’s well that ends well. Our bigger neighbors are putting a very sour face on things.” This was a reference to Poland and France, who had both lost Czechoslovakia as an ally. Rommel added: “Thank goodness you packed enough warm underwear for me.”

  Hitler now raised claims on Poland, too, for the return of former German territories. At first Rommel was confident that Hitler would get his own way. But as he followed in the Nazi newspapers the growing clamor against Poland—the reports of border “incidents”—and saw Poland’s intransigence, he realized that Hitler was going to have to invade. It would be idle to pretend that Rommel did not share the relish with which virtually every red-blooded German army officer looked forward to attacking Poland. His own affection for the disputed city of Danzig was as strong as Lucie’s. It had been German when they met there and fell in love and for centuries before, becoming a “free city” only after World War I. Rommel did not expect it to be a long war.

  Early in August 1939 he was given a typhus vaccination, which confirmed his expectations. On August 22 he was summoned to Berlin and briefed about the new job awaiting him. “My guess was right,” he tersely informed Lucie on a postcard postmarked Berlin. He was to command the Führer’s war headquarters during the attack on Poland.

  Hitler’s General

  “I LEFT THE Reich Chancellery as a brand new general, wearing a brand new general’s uniform,” Erwin Rommel proudly wrote to Lucie.

  He had formally reported to Hitler as commandant of the Führer’s headquarters at 3:45 P.M. on August 25, 1939. Berlin sweltered in a heat wave. Just forty-three minutes earlier, Hitler had stepped out of a conference with foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and announced that he was going to attack Poland at dawn.

  At 4:45 P.M., on Hitler’s orders, Rommel started his escort battalion moving toward Bad Polzin, a little railroad town in Pomerania, not far from the Polish frontier, where Nazi troops were massing for the attack. The battalion had a total of sixteen officer
s, ninety-three noncommissioned officers and 274 enlisted men. It was equipped with four 37-millimeter antitank guns, twelve 20-millimeter flak (antiaircraft) guns and other weapons.

  He wrote ingenuously that day to Manfred, now eleven: “What do you make of the situation?” His next letters laid bare his own robust optimism: he believed that the war would last only fourteen days; that Hitler was doing what was best for Germany; that Britain and France would keep out—and that even if they did not, Germany could easily deal with them too. Perhaps he was dazzled by his own promotion; in fact, Hitler had instructed that Rommel’s promotion should be backdated to June 1, a great sign of his favor. “I find that very decent,” Rommel wrote, and displayed a sneaking pleasure that Schoerner, his rival from the Italian campaign, had been promoted only to “honorary” colonel. A proud letter composed two weeks later tells much about his character: “I’m together with the F[ührer] very often, even in the most intimate discussions. It means so much to me that he confides in me—far more than being promoted to general.”