Rommel - the General Who Plotted Against Hitler

It is October 1944 and Nazi Germany’s enemies are at its borders, ready to invade. A car is parked on a quiet country road as two senior German army officers seem to have a quiet conversation in the back seat. A few metres away, another officer is standing by a tree, smoking a cigarette, checking his watch.

One of the officers in the back of the car falls forwards and the other man in the back seat makes a sign to the smoking officer who comes over, puts his cigarette out and looks at the fallen man’s face. He is dead; his face shows the pain he felt from the cyanide pill he has just taken. Without another word, the officer gets into the driving seat and heads back to the dead man’s country house. This was not just any officer, he was seen by all sides in the war as the best general of his day; and, in evil times, he had a reputation as a good man. He was Erwin Rommel.

Born into a lower middle class family in the south of Germany, Rommel went into a military academy at the age of eighteen to please his father. He preferred to be an engineer. He had only been in the army two years when, in 1914, the First World War started in which Germany and Austria, along with Turkey, fought against Russia, France, Britain and Italy. Rommel was sent to Italy to fight in the mountains. He won the two highest medals in the war and showed he was not only brave but a natural leader of men.

The war ended badly for Germany and the country had to agree to have only a very small army. Rommel was one of the few officers who kept his job. This was clearly because of his excellent service in the war. In every other way, Rommel was not the typical German officer of those days. Almost all the others were upper-class or aristocrats from the biggest and most powerful area in Germany, Prussia, in the north. Any promotion or recognition for Rommel would come from his own efforts and not from his social class.

In the First World War, tanks and aeroplanes were used for the first time. In many ways, neither of these new technologies was used well. A British officer, Basil Liddell Hart, wrote a brilliant book on how to use tanks in battle and in war as a whole. Almost no British officer read even a page of this book. Rommel read it from cover to cover more than once.

He also read and thought about the correct use of planes in war, especially when working with soldiers on the ground – this is known as ‘tactical air support’. And, it wasn’t too long before Rommel got the chance to try some of these new ideas in practice. Hitler, the German leader from 1933 to 1945, started to make war in Europe from about 1939.

Rommel fought in the invasion of Poland but was noticed more the following year, 1940, during the German attack on France that summer. He showed his special understanding of battlefield tactics, especially in the new tank battles.

He became a hero in Germany and he began to be well-known around the world. However, his real fame would come in North Africa, from 1941 to 1943.

Deserts are mostly flat and treeless with very few or no rivers. This kind of land allows tanks to move in any direction they like, as far as they like. Tank warfare, where there are few rules and constant changes, is like ships fighting at sea. Rommel showed, time after time, that he was the master of this kind of fighting. Even his enemies, the British, admired him. They called him the ‘Desert Fox’.

The desert war changed direction many times: from east to west and east again, along the North African coast. In the end, the Germans and Italians lost. Rommel was never outfought, outthought or outmanoeuvred but he just couldn’t get enough petrol for his tanks, food for his soldiers or bullets for the machine guns. Despite his defeat, his fame as the best general of the war was not lost.

In early 1944, he was in France to prepare the German defences against the British, Canadian and U.S. armies getting ready to come over from England and land on the French beaches. It was a quiet job for Rommel, at least until the attack came, and left him time to become part of a plot to get rid of Hitler. The conspirators were mostly military officers tired of Hitler’s bad decisions and refusal to take advice. They were also tired of seeing so many of their soldiers dying for no reason. Germany was certain to lose the war. Rommel was invited to join the plot, mostly to serve in an important position in the new government. A man like Rommel, very popular with Germans of course, and respected around the world, would be a great help in peace talks.

Rommel wanted to arrest Hitler and put him on trial but the others insisted on putting a bomb next to Hitler at a meeting. Things did not go as they planned and Hitler survived. In the few hours when many people thought Hitler was dead, the conspirators made it clear how they would run Germany and, when Hitler took control again, they were all arrested and tortured.

Several people gave Rommel’s name. His part in the plot was certain but Hitler and the Nazis faced a dilemma: if they held a trial and then executed Rommel with the other conspirators, this would make them unpopular with the German public. So, two officers were sent to Rommel’s country house. They explained the situation to Rommel and gave him a hard choice. He could go on trial, be found guilty (no-one was ever innocent) and executed. His wife and family would be sent to a prison camp. Or, he could take a cyanide pill, the government would say it was a heart attack or something like that and his family would keep its property and Rommel’s generous pension.

For Rommel, there was no real choice and he joined the two officers in their car and went for a quiet drive...