The Trail of the Fox Read online

  When Rommel arrived at Bad Polzin that evening, he learned that the Reich Chancellery had phoned an hour before: the invasion of Poland had been suddenly postponed. Rommel was baffled. We now know that during the afternoon all Hitler’s political assumptions had proved wrong. Britain had firmly ratified its treaty with Poland, and Italy had refused to declare war at Germany’s side. For a week there was an extraordinary stalemate, while Hitler hedged and hesitated. Rommel’s troops helped local farmers with the harvest while he and many other generals chafed at the bit. He flew to Berlin on the twenty-seventh to find out what was happening.

  “Apart from the privilege of lunching at the Führer’s table, there was little new,” he confided to Lucie. “The troops are waiting impatiently for the order to advance, but we soldiers must just be patient. There are some snags, and they’ll take some time to straighten out. The Führer will obviously reach whatever decision is proper.” Four days later Rommel went farther than that: “I’m inclined to believe it will all blow over and we’ll end up getting back the [disputed Polish] Corridor just as we did the Sudeten territory last year. If the Poles, British and French really had the guts to act, then these last few days were far and away the best time for them to do so.” Later that day, August 31, 1939, he added, “Waiting is a bore, but it can’t be helped. The Führer knows what’s right for us.”

  Almost at once the telephone call came, ordering him to stand by. That evening, the phone rang again in the railroad station waiting room where he had set up his office. “The invasion begins tomorrow, 4:50 A.M.”

  Thus the Second World War began. Nobody, least of all Erwin Rommel, could foresee that the military operations that began on September 1, heralded by a ranting and self-justificatory Reichstag speech by the Führer, would inexorably involve one country after another; would last six years; would leave 40 million dead and all Europe and half Asia ravaged by fire and explosives; would destroy Hitler’s Reich, ruin the British Empire and end with the creation of new weapons, new world powers and a new lawlessness in international affairs.

  Rommel wrote excitedly next day, “What do you make of the events of September 1—Hitler’s speech? Isn’t it wonderful that we have such a man?” But Lucie’s feelings were mixed—part those of a woman, wife and mother, part those of a fanatical follower of Hitler who now asked her friends and visitors, “Do you too say a prayer for the Führer every night?” “Despite everything,” she wrote to Erwin on September 4 from Wiener Neustadt, “we were all hoping to the very end that a second world war could be avoided—we all hoped that reason would prevail in Britain and France. . . . Now the Führer has left last night for the Polish front. May the dear Lord protect him, and you too, my beloved Erwin.” She mentioned that she had discussed Hitler’s speech with all her friends and shopkeepers, and all agreed that he had done the only proper thing. “All of them beg me to ask you to plead with him not to expose himself to unnecessary dangers. Our nation cannot possibly afford to lose him. One shudders at the very thought!”

  At 1:56 A.M. on September 4, Hitler’s special train—it was incongruously code-named Amerika; nobody knows why—pulled into the railroad station.

  Fifteen minutes later Heinrich, the headquarters train of Himmler and the senior Nazi ministers, also arrived. Rommel’s troops put on their “Führer’s HQ” brassards. A security cordon was thrown around the station, and the antiaircraft guns were manned.

  Rommel had expected Hitler to pay only a formal courtesy visit to the front. But the Nazi dictator stayed for three weeks. Almost every day he climbed into an armored half-track and drove forward—through forests still infested with Polish snipers, along roads blazing with the wreckage of Poland’s antiquated army, to the very banks of the San to watch his storm troops force the river crossing.

  Rommel’s eyes also were everywhere, watching, assessing, absorbing—learning the paraphernalia and techniques of a kind of warfare unknown to him during his own exploits, such as the employment of fast-moving tank units and assault troops and the use of dive bombers in close support.

  One after the other, Hitler’s secret predictions to his staff were dramatically fulfilled. Britain and France had so far not fired one shot for Poland, just as he had maintained.

  “I think the whole war will peter out, once Poland is done for—and that won’t be long now,” wrote Rommel on the sixth. Three days later he stuck his neck out farther: “I think I’ll be home before winter. The war’s going just the way we planned, in fact it’s exceeding even our boldest expectations. . . .

  “The Russians will probably attack Poland soon. Two million men! . . . Every evening there’s a long war conference here. I’m allowed to attend it and even chip in from time to time. “It’s wonderful to see the firmness in the way [Hitler] deals with problems.” “The Führer’s in the best possible mood,” he wrote just after they had visited the Warsaw front. “I have quite frequent chats with him now, we are on quite close terms.”

  By September 19 it was virtually all over. Hitler ceremonially entered Danzig and broadcast to the Reich—and to the world—from the port’s Artushof Guildhall building, erected by German craftsmen in the fourteenth century. “Today sees our entry into magnificent Danzig,” Rommel jotted down. “The Führer will be speaking to the entire world. I was able to talk with him about two hours yesterday evening, on military problems. He’s extraordinarily friendly toward me . . . I very much doubt that I will still be at the Kriegsschule much longer, when the war is over.”

  When Hitler visited the Polish port of Gdynia, there was an incident that knocked the first nail into Rommel’s coffin. After a desperate battle, the last Polish stronghold had just fallen and Hitler’s party decided to drive down to the water’s edge. The street was narrow, and the descent was steep. Again playing the role of traffic controller, Rommel brusquely ordered: “Only the Führer’s car and one escort car will drive down. The rest wait here!” As at Nuremberg he stepped into the road to make sure his order was obeyed. The third car moved forward, then halted. Rommel could see in it the burly Nazi Party Chief, Martin Bormann. Bormann gesticulated and shouted but Rommel refused to budge. “I am headquarters commandant,” he announced. “This is not a kindergarten outing, and you will do as I say!” Bormann purpled under the snub and waited five years to take his revenge.

  In his exuberance over victory, Rommel turned a blind eye to the grimmer aspects of Poland’s defeat. On the eleventh, he blandly observed that there were masses of Poles everywhere in plain clothes: “Most are probably soldiers who have managed to organize civilian clothes after the tide of battle turned against them. They’re already being rounded up by our police and deported.” A few days later he amplified this observation: “Guerrilla warfare won’t last much longer in Poland. All able-bodied men are being rounded up and put to hard labor under our supervision.” The fate of the Poles once deported did not occur to him.

  Once Lucie wrote asking him to trace a particular Pole who had vanished. Erwin replied that the inquiry must go through proper Party channels. “I’m getting similar requests every day.” On September 14, he did visit her uncle, a Polish Catholic priest, Edmund Roszczynialski, somewhere in the “liberated” Corridor. After that the priest vanished without a trace. This time Rommel did write, on May 1, 1940, to Himmler’s adjutant for information. Months later an SS letter informed “General Frommel” in cold terms that all inquiries about the priest had drawn a blank. “The possibility must be faced that he has fallen victim to the vagaries of war or to the cruel winter.” In fact the priest was probably liquidated like thousands of other Polish intellectuals by the SS “task forces,” a horror of which Rommel learned only four years later.

  By September 23, 1939, Poland was nearly finished. Only Warsaw was still holding out, under terrific Luftwaffe and artillery bombardment. “The Führer’s in a relaxed mood,” Rommel contentedly informed Lucie. “We eat at his table twice a day now—yesterday evening I was allowed to sit next to him. Soldiers are worth some
thing again.” But his rise in Hitler’s esteem attracted the envy of the dictator’s staff, and Colonel Rudolf Schmundt—three years Rommel’s junior and Hitler’s chief Wehrmacht adjutant—made no secret of it. Rommel returned with Hitler to Berlin on the twenty-sixth and confided to Lucie next morning: “At present, relations with Schmundt are strained. Don’t know why: apparently my position with F [ührer] is getting too strong. Not impossible that a change will be insisted on from that quarter. . . . Of course I want to know just where I stand. I’ve no desire to be pushed around by younger men.”

  He went on leave to Wiener Neustadt with his family. On October 2 he flew to Warsaw to prepare Hitler’s victory parade. After the brief respite with Lucie, the Polish capital was a horrifying, stinking nightmare. He returned to Berlin and dined that evening with Hitler at the Chancellery. “Warsaw has been badly damaged,” Rommel wrote to Lucie. “One house in ten is burst to a shell. There are no shops left. Their showcases are smashed, the shopkeepers have boarded them up. There has been no water, power, gas or food for two days. . . . The main streets were blocked off by barricades, but these stopped all civilian movement too and often exposed the public to a bombardment from which they then couldn’t escape. The mayor puts the dead and injured at 40,000. . . . The people are probably relieved we’ve come and put an end to it all.”

  After the army’s two-hour victory parade on the fifth—the newsreels show General Rommel standing right in front of Hitler’s tribune—he returned to the boredom of barracks life in Berlin. Next day Hitler again made a “fabulous speech” to the Reichstag, this time formally offering peace to Britain and France (now that Poland no longer existed). Rommel was confident that he would soon be back with Lucie. “I’m glad to say that H[itler]’s speech is being openly discussed in Paris and London,” he wrote on the eighth. “The neutrals are in favor. I attended Hitler’s conference for an hour and a half yesterday. The Führer’s in good spirits and quite confident.” That was the conference where Hitler announced that—if he attacked the West—he would invade Belgium too, to keep the war well away from his vital Ruhr factories. Rommel began to feel the cold, but hesitated to ask Lucie to send his winter coat to Berlin in case he was suddenly moved elsewhere. On the ninth he wrote, “Apart from the Führer’s war conference, which is always highly interesting and lasts anything up to two hours, there’s nothing doing here. We’re still waiting for the other side to decide, in the light of Hitler’s speech.”

  All Hitler’s hopes of a peaceful settlement with Britain and France had gone. When a time bomb—planted by an eccentric clockmaker, Georg Elser—exploded in November a few feet from where Hitler had only just delivered a speech, he blamed the perfidious British. “That Munich bomb attempt has only redoubled his resolve,” Rommel wrote his wife. “It is a wonderful thing to see.” He was aghast that Hitler’s security staff had not protected the dictator better. “Five feet of rubble covers the spot where the Führer spoke last night. That’s how violent the explosion was. If the bomb attempt had really succeeded—it just doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  By late November 1939, the General Staff were dragging their feet over Hitler’s idea of attacking the Western powers at such a numerical disadvantage. Rommel had no doubt that Hitler was right, but other generals lacked this confidence. On November 23, Hitler summoned his senior generals to the Chancellery and gave them the rough edge of his tongue. He was highly critical of the generals and downright abusive about the General Staff. Rommel relished every word. Afterward he related it all to Lucie: “I witnessed yesterday’s big speech to the military commanders and their chiefs of staff. The Führer didn’t mince his language. But it seemed to me to have been highly necessary, because when I speak with my fellow generals I rarely find one who supports him body and soul.”

  This mutual admiration between Hitler and Rommel explains how Rommel now got the new posting that he did. In October he had hinted that he would like to command a division. The chief of army personnel suggested that a mountain division at Innsbruck or Munich would be appropriate, in view of Rommel’s famed exploits. Rommel, however, asked Hitler for something better—indeed, the best: a real panzer division. The army personnel chief refused. Rommel, he pointed out, was only an infantry officer and knew nothing about tanks. Hitler overruled him, and on February 6, 1940, Rommel received a telegram telling him to report four days later to Bad Godesberg on the Rhine, where he was to take over the Seventh Panzer Division.

  At seven A.M. on the tenth Rommel was looking from his train window at the fast-flowing Rhine. A few hours later his new officers were parading before him. Unlike any other general they knew, Rommel had greeted them with “Heil Hitler!” But that was just the beginning. He announced that he would tour their sector next morning—ignoring their protests that it was Sunday.

  He found that instead of the usual two tank regiments, the division had only one, the Twenty-fifth Panzer. To his surprise he also learned that of this regiment’s 218 tanks, over half were lightly armored and of Czech manufacture. The men of the division were largely from Thuringia, a province not noted for producing soldiers of great promise. Rommel would have until the spring to lick them into shape.

  He briefly reported back to Hitler at midday on February 17, and later he wrote to Lucie: “Jodl [Hitler’s chief strategic adviser] was flabbergasted at my new posting.” Hitler had handed him a farewell gift, a copy of Mein Kampf inscribed, “To General Rommel with pleasant memories.” Then they had gone in to luncheon with four other generals, all newly appointed corps commanders. Hitler began to talk about the notorious Altmark incident, in which a British destroyer party had just raided an unarmed German vessel in Norwegian waters, knowing it to be carrying hundreds of British captives. The Nazi press was shrieking vengeance for this violation of neutral waters, but within the Chancellery walls, Hitler now praised Britain’s bold act. “History judges you by your success or failure,” he pontificated. “That’s what counts. Nobody asks the victor whether he was in the right or wrong.”

  Before Rommel returned that evening to his new division, he called on his publisher in Potsdam and collected ten copies of Infanterie Greift an, for his subordinates to read. This was one clue to how he proposed to use his tanks in the coming battles—adventurously, like an infantry commander on a storm troop operation. Years later one corps commander, Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, recalled a second clue—a snatch of playful conversation he had overheard while waiting in line in the Chancellery for Hitler to appear that forenoon. Rommel had asked Rudolf Schmidt—who had been his commanding officer in the Thirteenth Infantry Regiment—in a loud stage whisper, “Tell me, general, what’s the best way to command a panzer division?”

  Schmidt growled back: “You’ll find there are always two possible decisions open to you. Take the bolder one—it’s always best.”

  Spook Division

  SIX O’CLOCK ON a blustery February morning in 1940. It is still dark, but the solitary stocky figure of a man nearly fifty is jogging methodically along a narrow woodland path near Godesberg. His clenched fists are held close to his chest, in the manner of a long-distance runner. From the Rhine comes the distant hooting of passing barges.

  This is General Erwin Rommel, the new commander of the Seventh Panzer Division, determined to regain his physical fitness after six fat and lazy months as a member of Hitler’s entourage. During the Polish campaign he noticed the first heart complaints, and once he felt distinctly faint. He has told nobody but Lucie. She has sent him a big packet of Lecithin medicine—but jogging is his tonic: ten minutes every morning he runs a mile like this, as shock treatment for his slumbering frame, or as he himself puts it, “To fight back the inner Schweinehund in me that pleads, ‘Stay in bed—just another fifteen minutes!’”

  As he trots back through the barracks gates it is ten past six. “I don’t suppose I’ll find many men anxious to follow my example,” he writes to Lucie later this day. “Most of my officers are very comfortably inclined. And some ar
e downright flabby.”

  ROMMEL’S ARRIVAL had electrified the division. His first act as commanding officer was to send his regimental commanders on leave. “I won’t be needing you until I’ve learned the ropes myself.” At five to seven each morning his Mercedes rolled out of the barracks, taking him to his troops. He listened to the German and foreign newscasts on the car radio at seven, and again at twelve-thirty, when he returned for lunch. He felt fit and on top of his job, and he began to throw his weight around. On February 27 a battalion commander displeased him. Rommel dismissed him and had him on his way within ninety minutes. “Word of this rapid firing will soon get around,” he wrote, “and some of the others will pull their socks up.”

  Politically, too, the division’s officers did not come up to scratch. When a top Nazi was attached to his staff, Rommel observed: “It’s no skin off my nose. I won’t need to watch my tongue, but some of the others will have to be on guard. Seems that National Socialism is still a bit of a stranger to the folks around here.” The Nazi official was Karl-August Hanke, thirty-six, one of the senior aides of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. He was assigned as a lieutenant to Rommel’s staff. Rommel put him in a Panzer IV tank, the most modern he had. A number of other Nazis were also sent to him, including Corporal Karl Holz, chief editor of the anti-Jewish tabloid Der Stürmer. The arrival of these men, all in their mid-forties, raised eyebrows at Godesberg.

  His main striking force was the Twenty-fifth Panzer Regiment, for which Berlin had given him Colonel Karl Rothenburg, a tough ex-police colonel who had, like Rommel, won the Pour le Mérite as a company commander in 1918. At forty-four, he was one of Germany’s finest tank regiment commanders. Like Rommel, he figured that he had escaped death so many times that he was already living on an overdraft of life. He was the kind of man who knows no fear because death holds no terrors for him. He met his death the next year on the Russian front.