Rommel’s Day of Judgment

General Rommel expected the visitors so had instructed his servant to leave the gate open. At midday, the car pulled up to his house with General Burgdorf, Chief Adjutant to Adolf Hitler and General Major Maisel, court protocol officer for the investigation into the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on the führer. Another car remained parked in the street. A servant announced the arrival of the generals to Rommel who was in the living room with his fifteen-year-old son, Manfred, then showed Maisel and Burgdorf in. Rommel asked Manfred to leave. His conversation with his visitors lasted forty-five minutes. Afterward, while the Maisel and Burgdorf paced in the garden, he went upstairs to speak to Lucy, his wife of thirty years.

He told Lucy that the generals had presented him with evidence of his part in the plot against Hitler’s life and because of that, he was to die shortly. He had been given a choice: face the people’s court or take poison that would kill him in three seconds. If he chose the latter course, his death would be announced as natural, and his family would not be harmed. Rommel made his decision immediately. He told his wife that the charges were unbelievable. He was not afraid of a trial, however, given his popularity, he was certain Hitler would never allow him to appear in a court. He explained the same circumstances to Manfred, his son. He then left with the generals in the car. Fifteen minutes later, he was dead.

Loyalty was the strongest current in the makeup of Erwin Rommel’s nature. He was entirely faithful to his wife, to whom he wrote every day while they were parted, and with the same nearly pure intensity, he was loyal to Germany, his country. David Fraser in Knight’s Cross sums up his character: “Rommel was indeed a patriot, and his character was indeed open and honest. And he was a moral man—decent, chivalrous, devoted to the people and traditional institutions of his homeland, scrupulous in his own conduct, generous, merciful and fair-minded… his temperament was far removed from that sort of commander who finds cause of exultation in the fear and suffering inflicted on the enemy. He seldom hated.”

Rommel, like all German soldiers, had sworn absolute obedience to Hitler as the constitutional leader. It went against every instinct for this honorable man to plot against the führer. It also went against his deep love of his country to see Germans lose their lives in a cause that he had become convinced was futile.

Rommel probably was aware that officers were plotting against Hitler, although likely ignorant of the details. He believed that Hitler should be removed by legal means—as if legality were ever a priority in the Third Reich—and then the new leader could negotiate a peace with the allies, saving the homeland from a devastating invasion. He was definitely guilty of defeatism, which, from a dictator’s point of view, is a crime equal to betrayal.

The coolness and calmness with which General Rommel reasoned his decision to take the lethal poison fit his character—treating it like a tactical decision during a battle after weighing alternatives. No wonder he was such a formidable opponent.

The Reich gave Rommel a grand funeral as befits a hero of a nation while the last desperate battles of the war were being fought. There was a train of 

distinguished mourners. Field Marshall von Rundstedt as Hitler’s representative laid a wreath on the grave.

Time and again in history, we are faced with the conundrum of good men fighting for a bad cause. Rommel had heard rumors about the concentration camps but imagined such activities went on behind Hitler’s back. He looked on himself as a soldier with sworn obedience to the Fatherland. That oath was sacred, and he would fulfill his duty to the best of his ability. Rommel saw the world through the prism of his own goodness. He saw soldiering through the prism of his own sense of honor. He seemed to have believed most men, politicians included, largely held the same values.

Perhaps it was a mercy Rommel was forced to commit suicide so after the war he would not be confronted with the evil he was using his immense talent and his personal moral force to further. 

I will give Lucy Rommel the last words, “Thus ended the life of a man who had devoted his entire self throughout his time to the service of his country.”