Rommel's suicide

Around midday on Saturday 14 October 1944 a car from Berlin drew up outside the house of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at Herrlingen near Ulm. Two generals from the Army Personnel Office got out: Wilhelm Burgdorf, head of the office and, since the beginning of October, also Hitler’s chief adjutant, and his subordinate Ernst Maisel, who dealt with officers’ disciplinary matters. After a short conversation with them Rommel left his study, said goodbye to his wife and son, and, wearing his greatcoat from the Afrika Korps days and carrying his field marshal’s baton, got into the car and was driven away. A few minutes later, beyond the village, he was dead. It was soon announced that he had died suddenly of injuries sustained in Normandy.

War chronologies put it like this: Field Marshal Rommel, suspected of involvement in the bomb plot against Hitler, “voluntarily” committed suicide to save his family, and was later buried with full military honours. The dates and the gist are correct, but the word “voluntarily” needs a caveat. Rommel did not take his own life on his own initiative. On Hitler’s instructions the generals brought him a choice: a trial before the People’s Court, with a foregone verdict and reprisals against his family and associates, or poison, a state funeral and peace for his loved ones. They had the poison – an ampoule of potassium cyanide – with them. It was therefore a killing carried out on orders in the form of a forced suicide, and the “full military honours” were part of the same piece of stagecraft.

A wounded field marshal at Herrlingen

In October 1944 Rommel was a man without a post. On 17 July, three days before the assassination attempt at the Wolf’s Lair, his car was strafed by Allied fighters in Normandy. With a fractured skull and facial wounds he was taken to hospital, and in August to his home at Herrlingen, where the family had lived since the autumn of 1943. He recovered slowly, cared for by his wife Lucie and his fifteen-year-old son Manfred, who was then serving as an auxiliary with an anti-aircraft battery and was given leave to come home. Army Group B was by now commanded by Günther von Kluge, and after his suicide in August by Field Marshal Walter Model.

To the propagandists Rommel was still the “Desert Fox”, the victor of Tobruk and the most popular commander in the Reich. In the corridors of power, however, he was already under suspicion. After the failed assassination attempt the Gestapo and a special RSHA commission interrogated hundreds of those arrested, and his name came up in several statements and documents.

Incriminating testimony

In the spring and summer of 1944 the conspirators in Paris – General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commander in France, and his associate Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, a cousin of Claus von Stauffenberg – tried to win Rommel over to a plan to end the war in the west. The go-between was the chief of staff of Army Group B, Lieutenant General Hans Speidel. At the beginning of July Hofacker spoke with Rommel at his headquarters at La Roche-Guyon. What exactly they said to each other is known only from later, contradictory accounts.

After 20 July these contacts came to light. Stülpnagel, who was taken to hospital after a failed suicide attempt, is said to have uttered Rommel’s name in delirium. Hofacker, arrested in Paris and interrogated by the Gestapo, said according to surviving accounts that Rommel had been in the know and had given assurances that the conspirators could count on him “in the event of success”. The field marshal’s name was also found in the notes of Carl Goerdeler, leader of the civilian opposition, among people on whom a future government might rely. Speidel was arrested on 7 September. His case was examined by the so-called Wehrmacht Court of Honour – Field Marshals Gerd von Rundstedt and Wilhelm Keitel and Colonel General Heinz Guderian – which decided who was to be expelled from the army and handed over to a civilian court. Speidel was not expelled and survived the war. Some historians believe that his defence shifted the burden onto Rommel, though Speidel himself denied it.

A note by Martin Bormann of 28 September 1944 summarised the statements of Hofacker and others to the effect that Rommel had been “fully informed” of the plans for a coup and had declared himself ready to serve the new government. On this basis Hitler made his decision. At the beginning of October Rommel was summoned to Berlin for an alleged conference about a new posting. He declined, citing his doctors’ advice; according to his family he added in private that he would not have come back from Berlin alive. On 13 October a telephone call announced that two generals would arrive the next day – officially to discuss a new appointment.

How much did Rommel know?

Whether Rommel took part in the conspiracy remains one of the most hotly disputed questions in the history of the Third Reich. What is certain is that in the spring and summer of 1944 he regarded the war as lost and demanded that Hitler “draw the consequences”. On 15 July he wrote to him that the unequal struggle was nearing its end. His widow Lucie Rommel and his son maintained after the war that he was a soldier, not a politician, and rejected killing Hitler; he wanted rather to have him arrested and put on trial. Speidel, in a book published in 1949, portrayed him as one of the pillars of the opposition in the west, and this became the basis of the post-war “Rommel myth”.

Historians judge the matter differently. Ralf Georg Reuth and the British biographer David Fraser believe that Rommel shared Speidel’s and Hofacker’s assessment of the military situation but knew nothing of the assassination plans and was never won over to the conspiracy. Maurice Philip Remy and Gerd R. Ueberschär hold that through Hofacker he knew of the intended coup. Peter Lieb, drawing among other things on Bormann’s notes, the diary of Joseph Goebbels and remarks secretly recorded in British captivity by General Heinrich Eberbach, who claimed that Rommel had discussed removing Hitler with him, concluded that the field marshal knew of the coup and supported it, though he took no part in preparing the assassination. Others point out that Rommel was thinking above all of a separate armistice in the west so as to be able to continue fighting in the east. No one seriously claims that he belonged to Stauffenberg’s inner circle of conspirators. For Hitler, however, what was decisive was that his most famous commander had talked with men who wanted to overthrow him, and had kept silent.

14 October

The course of that day is known in most detail from Manfred Rommel’s account, written down in 1945, and from the story told by the field marshal’s aide, Captain Hermann Aldinger. Burgdorf and Maisel arrived around midday. The conversation in the study was brief. The generals set out the charges and the statements, and then Hitler’s choice. If Rommel chose a trial before Roland Freisler’s People’s Court, he would be arrested, and reprisals would fall on his family and staff. If he chose poison, he would officially die of his wounds and receive a state funeral, his wife would receive a pension, and his family would not suffer.

Rommel went upstairs to his wife and then to his son. Manfred remembered his words: “I have just had to tell your mother that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour.” His father said that Hitler was charging him with high treason; that “in view of his services in Africa” he was being allowed to die by poison, which the generals had brought with them and which took effect in a few seconds; and that if he agreed, none of the steps usual in such cases would be taken against his family. The house was being watched and cars with armed men stood in the vicinity; any attempt to flee or resist was out of the question. Rommel also knew what had befallen the families of other conspirators, who were subjected to reprisals under “kin liability” (Sippenhaft) – the arrest of wives and children.

He said goodbye to Lucie, Manfred and Aldinger, put on his leather coat from the African days, took his baton and got into Burgdorf’s car, driven by an SS driver, Heinrich Doose. A few hundred metres beyond Herrlingen, at the edge of a wood, the car stopped. Maisel and the driver walked a few paces away, while Burgdorf stayed with Rommel. When after a few minutes he called them back, the field marshal was slumped on the back seat. He had taken the cyanide. He was 52 years old.

The body was taken to the reserve hospital in Ulm, where an unsuspecting doctor still attempted resuscitation. The death certificate gave the diagnosis as a heart attack resulting from injuries sustained on the Western Front; the family were told of an embolism. Burgdorf reported to Keitel that the order had been carried out, and Hitler, who received the report in the evening, kept up the story of a natural death even among his closest entourage. The order of the day announcing the field marshal’s death stated that he had died of severe wounds suffered in a car accident while touring the front.

A funeral with honours

The death of the “Desert Fox” was announced as a national loss. Hitler ordered a day of mourning and sent the widow a telegram of condolence. The ceremony was held not in Berlin but – reportedly in accordance with Rommel’s own wishes – in nearby Ulm. On 18 October 1944 a state funeral ceremony took place in Ulm town hall. The coffin, draped in the swastika flag, was placed in the hall before a guard of honour, and the ceremony was filmed for the newsreels. Rundstedt, the most senior field marshal, spoke as Hitler’s representative. The text of the speech had been prepared in the Propaganda Ministry at the request of the High Command. In it he spoke of Rommel as a soldier imbued with the spirit of National Socialism, and ended with the words: “His heart belonged to the Führer.”

According to most accounts Rundstedt did not know the true circumstances of the death, although as a member of the Court of Honour he knew of the suspicions against Rommel. After the war he explained that had he known, he would not have taken part in the ceremony. Lucie Rommel remembered seeing an expression of contempt on the dead man’s face. After the ceremony the body was cremated and the urn buried in the cemetery at Herrlingen, today part of the town of Blaustein. A wreath from Hitler was sent to the funeral. Almost no one present knew that it had been sent by the man who four days earlier had condemned the dead man to death.

How the truth came out

The secret held only until the end of the war. The family had known from the first moment but kept silent. In April 1945 Manfred Rommel deserted from his unit, surrendered to the French and told his interrogators how his father had died. In 1945 he also wrote down an account in a letter, and the widow gave a statement to an American intelligence officer. The story of the forced suicide reached the press in 1945. At the Nuremberg trial Keitel testified that it was he who had passed on Hitler’s instructions and the documents concerning Rommel to Burgdorf. Burgdorf never stood trial – he committed suicide in the Reich Chancellery bunker on 1 May 1945.

Its place in the war

Rommel’s death was the most notorious, but not the only, case of reckoning with officers suspected of links to the conspiracy. After the trials before the People’s Court, which from August ended in death sentences, the Gestapo arrested several thousand people. Hofacker was sentenced and executed in Berlin on 20 December 1944, Goerdeler on 2 February 1945. The Rommel case showed that the regime would not shrink from killing one of its own field marshals, but was still afraid to admit publicly that it had been betrayed by a man it had itself made a hero. A trial of the Reich’s most popular commander would have undermined the legend on which propaganda based its faith in victory. That is why the crime was concealed behind a show of national mourning.

At the front Rommel’s death changed nothing – he had not commanded any formation since July. Its significance proved greater after the war. The story of the field marshal forced into suicide by Hitler became the foundation of the image of Rommel as a chivalrous, apolitical soldier and a victim of the dictator, popularised by Speidel, by Desmond Young’s book of 1950 and by the field marshal’s papers edited by Basil Liddell Hart. This image made it easier for West Germany to build the Bundeswehr: in the 1950s Speidel became one of its first generals, and later commander of NATO land forces in Central Europe. Critics call this image the “Rommel myth” and point out that for most of the war Rommel was one of Hitler’s favourite generals and enjoyed his patronage. Manfred Rommel, Lord Mayor of Stuttgart from 1974 to 1996, spoke many times about his father’s last day and opposed both his glorification and his dismissal.