SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - German film looks at ties between Rommel and Hitler

Hello everyone, I used to be a big fan of both tank games and ship vs u-boat battles, and reciently I have been getting back into it which drew me here.

I studied Rommel in depth including from the primary sources at the time and his life is a very interesting story. I watched the German film on him and can only say that what they created was an interesting character, but it is nothing like Erwin Rommel. It was also clear watching it they used the work of David Irving a Holocaust denier that wrote a book on Rommel that he admitted he wrote to Neo-Nazis so that they could look up to Rommel again and not see him as a traitor to Hitler.

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Originally Posted by Skybird (Post 1956247)

In the end, Rommel may have been a noble man or not, but he was naive, and he definitely played for the wrong team. And by wrong I do not mean just "loosing team", but I mean the moral side of the whole mess that the Nazi regime was. If Wehrmacht generals would have rebelled against Hitler and his regime and would have taken out, both Germany and Europe would have been saved from many more millions of people getting killed and cities destroyed. For not having helped in trying to achieve that, Rommel does not deserve the respect that is being payed to him in other countries.

We are responsible for our obedience. Back then. And in wars of today.

Rommel was disconnected from the horror that was going on in Eastern Europe having never served there and spending two years fighting in Africa.

After he returned home and got out of the hospital in mid 1943 he started hearing stories about SS death squads going around Eastern Europe killing people on mass. He talked about this with his son Manfred Rommel in December of 1943 when Manfred decided he wanted to join the Waffen SS.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...scan0002-1.jpg

Karl Strolin a WW1 friend who had become Mayor of Stuttgart after the first World War and was a member of the Nazi Party and deported Jews to Poland had turned against the leadership of the party and in early 1944 he told Rommel of the death camps in the East.

Rommel's response to Strolin was 'what does one do if ones government itself becomes criminal'.

Rommel before knew the Nazi party was mistreating and oppressing Jews, but not mass murdering them. How do we know that? Rommel is on paper from 1937-1944 writing letters protesting the treatment of Jews and even talked to Hitler in person about bringing Jews into the German government in the early 40s. So, we have a pretty good view of the evolution on his understanding of how the Jews were being treated at various times and it didn't always match reality.

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During Rommel's time in France, Hitler ordered him to deport the country's Jewish population; Rommel disobeyed. Several times he wrote letters protesting against the treatment of the Jews.

Also, during the construction of the Atlantic Wall, Rommel directed that French workers were not to be used as slaves, but were to be paid for their labour. Nazi party officials in France reported that Rommel extensively and scornfully criticised Nazi incompetence and crimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel

Rommel always hated the SS even back to 1934 when he held up a military parade because he refused to have his troops march with them. He viewed them as more loyal to the Nazi Party then to Germany which is why he did everything he could to keep them out of Africa. He also kept Islamic Extremists from killing Jews in his areas of operations. There was 100,000 Jews in Libya and a little over 100,000 in Tunisia before the war and there was the same number in both countries after the war. Almost all of them left for Israel after the state was created and to honor Rommel and all he did to keep them alive they made his son the honorary Guardian of Jerusalem.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1.../Rommelson.png

Keep in mind he also told Hitler to piss off when he ordered him in 1944 to deport the Jews of France to Poland.

As for the final months of his life. He spent his days preparing for the Allied invasion of France. At this point in time he knew the war was long since lost, but he believed that if he kicked ass at the beaches he could sit down with his old frenemies Monty and Ike get a much better peace deal out for Germany. At this point in time he believed that the Nazi Party needed to be overthrown, but Hitler needed to be made to stand trial for his crimes in order to break the image of him in the minds of the German people as a great and honorable man.

The Allies invaded Normandy as we all know and for a number of reasons his hopes of doing well enough to achieve something short of unconditional surrender were dashed.

At this point Rommel came to the view that Hitler had to be killed in order for him to be able to surrender all German forces in the West so that the Western Allies get to Germany before the Soviet's as he believed if the Soviet's took Germany it would be the end of the country.

the British after nearly 70 years declassifing their secret audio recordings that they knew a month before Rommel was killed that he was telling other generals in France that Hitler had to be killed. A short preview from an hour long National Geographic TV special they made on the topic is in the You Tube link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SF...c&feature=plcp

The documentary shows he knew everything about the July Plot at that point and supported it as the only way left to save Germany.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...c/IMG_0791.jpg

But, one has to understand in order for the plan to work it had to be the July Plotters who kill Hitler and he had to be the one as a Field Marshal to pull a Lee at Appomattox and surrender German forces in the West so that the war ends in the fall of 1944 with Western Allied forces occupying all of central Europe.

Bad luck intervened and July Plotter's bomb failed to kill Hitler and Rommel's car was strafed by a plane three days before the attack and he was put out of commission.

After the war Germans were quite divided about the July Plotters. To be blunt much of German society in the early Cold War considered the attempt to kill Hitler dishonorable or high treason. The U.S. and the U.K. wanted Rommel to be an apolitical military symbol to support German re-armament during the Cold War so they decided to promote the middle ground notion that Rommel supported overthrowing the Nazi Party, but wanted Hitler tried not murdered outright. That was in fact his position at one time, but the Western Allies knew even a month before Rommel was suicided that his position evolved to fully supporting the July Plot.

The attempt mainly in Germany to alter the history of Rommel to turn him into nothing more then a mindless puppet of Hitler, who didn't do significant things to prevent the deaths of innocent civilians and Jews in his areas of operations, and who never turned against Hitler goes back to the fact that the Western Allies turned him into a symbol for West Germans to believe that their is honor in having a military and that includes a Navy. Hell, the U.S. built the guided-missile destroyer Rommel for West Germany.

But, the Cold War is over and the attempt in Germany by various factions to make Rommel into a mindless loser and puppet is based on the desire of aspects of German society to support the complete demilitarization of Germany by trying to destroy one of the very few remaining positive military symbols Germans had.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...47/Misc/w2.jpg

Erwin Rommel was many things, but he was no weak willed puppet as the film shows. How many men would dare scream at Hitler in person telling him the war is lost and "Do you really believe you can win this". How many would burn Hitler's orders to kill POWs and deport Jews? How many would tell other generals that Hitler must be killed knowing the cost of high treason is not only death for you, but the usual procedure is consignment of your family to a concentration camp?

If you want a film on the real Rommel he would actually be a fair bit more brutal and tough then we saw in the film. This is a man who in battle could be very fanatical far more then shown on the film, but had a strong view civilians were not to be harmed intentionally in war. His response to the SS massacre of civilians in France in the film was a joke. In reality after he found out about the massacre his response was not impotent shock it was outrage and he confronted Hitler personally and demanded that Himmler's dogs be leashed and that the officer who ordered the massacre be put on trial by him.

Don't get me wrong the character in the film was interesting and somewhat sympathetic as victim and a weak and cowardly man, but as a depiction of Erwin Rommel it was far off the mark intentionally so to send a political message. There are positive and negative messages to be had about Rommel's actions in service to Germany from before WW1 to 1944, but this film made the critical error of having a political point and then designing the character around that point and cherry picking their history from weak and discredited sources including from a Holocaust denier to make it fit.

Instead they should have looked at the solid facts of his history and you could find alot of interesting negative and positive messages from that and go from there. Like how his personal ambition to rise to the top of the German Army and love of combat helped to cloud his better judgement for some time about the real nature of the regime he was serving. That would be an interesting film with a somewhat anti war message that at least would be true to Rommel as a historical figure. However, any film on him shouldn't leave out the side who cared more about Germany then his own life and had no fear of anyone and was more then willing to tell Hitler to piss off to his face when asked to deport the Jews from his area of operations or to kill POWs.