This is an 'open source' film about Germany and the blame for the war, this time favouring Germany, including a lot of errors.

YouTube tells me "Dieses Video ist in Deinem Land nicht verfügbar"
(This video is not available in your country)
:D

(it certainly is, all over the web)
Maybe will wtach it, but not today.

Everything can be available if ya want :D

^it can - it is also obvious, with the historical footage and music of the time, in which direction the film points.

However, watched the first two parts. I knew of Locarno, and France's behaviour, but there's an awful lot i was not taught at school. Not another direction, just nothing. So was this just a product of the re-education project ?
Vendor, did you see the film ? What do you think ? :hmmm:

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.

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.


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.

I've only seen parts, and it's not enough to make an overall assessment, but I'll see more in the future.

@Jmc247 excellent analysis, thanks a LOT !
And I did not know this David Irving thing -

German officers or better the whole military had to vow their oath to Hitler, not to Germany. Hitler knew exactly why he demanded this.

When it was obvious that Germany was threatened to lose the war (although a lot of people said it was lost when England declared war, including my father), the military could then have made an effort for a truce, which was impossible as long as Hitler refused - until the Allies met, in Berlin.

Thanks and greetings,
and welcome to Subsim :sunny:
Catfish

And here I was reading this thread and thinking that you've turned a corner. Nope. Even in a thread that was actually pretty good, underneath you're the same old angry Skybird. :down:

@jmc247,Very good,and welcome to SubSim :sunny:

Thanks for the welcome everyone.

You are correct, Hitler had too much power over the German officer corps because of the loyalty oath they swore to him personally for Rommel to be able to personally effect a surrender of all German forces in France in the Summer of 1944 to end the war nearly a year early and get the Western Allies to occupy all of central Europe... as long as Hitler was living that is.

The British from wiretapping various generals conversations did know exactly what Rommel was trying to do in France before the end of the war and said so at the time.

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Welcome to SUBSIM jmc247.

Very interesting posts. :salute:

http://www.psionguild.org/forums/ima...es/welcome.gif

Thanks for the welcome again. I long like to play cat and mouse games between u-boats and warships.

My feeling about the movie can best be summed up by this reviewer who points out not only Rommel's family was enraged, but one of the historians hired for the film resigned in disgust over the film relying so much on the history written by a Holocaust denier.

As one can guess my main focus is learning and teaching history. It was nice to be able to include a picture of a guided missile destroyer in construction in my first post on a historical matter. Here was the finished product... it met its end in 1999 after a few decades of service.

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

Obviously, its hard for people living today who have only a general view of the things Rommel did during the war to understand the man and why he isn't a post war creation and a 'myth' as the makers of this film and other people today say he was.

His biggest contribution to Germany though failing to end the war in 1944 under more favorable conditions for his country was he treated the French very well as occupation commander at a very critical time compared to German occupation commanders elsewhere. Becase he refused to treat the French as slaves and made a massive stink to prevent future massacres like the SS carried out against the French in 1944 killing over 600 civilians he avoided a French uprising at that critical time like the Poles did in 1944. German forces in response would have followed Hitler's orders to burn down French cities and the relationship between France and Germany would have been cold as ice for decades after the war. The French would probably delay the creation of West Germany for many years and then do all they can to veto West Germany being allowed to have a military. It would have effected French and German relations for generations.

Instead you have a military occupation commander who actually was nice enough to the French people after his car was shot up the French resistance found him and brought him to a French doctor who saved his life... at least for a couple months until he was suicided by his own government.

After his death even in the middle of the most ugly war Europe has had since the 30 years war the Western Allies from Churchill, to American commanders, to Rommel's main British opponent paid tribute to him publicly.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...isc/Monty2.png

The problem people in Germany and elsewhere have today with him is they unlike the people then didn't see the things Rommel was doing throughout the war to protect civilians and to keep it from becoming a war with hate like the war in the East became by burning Hitler's illegal orders and doing everything he could to minimize and leash the number of Waffen SS forces in his areas of operations.

Its hard from a modern context to understand how a man who got his Iron Cross in WW1 for out of fear of his troops being boxed in leading a fanatical bayonet attack on French forces, personally bayonetting two soldiers, shooting two others with his side arm and then getting shot in the leg running away could also be fanatically opposed to killing POWs and civilians. The only way to think about it in my view is that he had an iron clad sense of what is right and wrong in war and was not going to let anyone get him to do things he didn't believe were morally acceptable in a time of war. His reaction to recieving Hitler's Commando Order is an example of that.

Rommel was one of the 12 recipients of Hitler's infamous, illegal Commando Order issued on 18th October 1942. This order to senior commanders ordered the immediate execution of all Allied Commando troops irrespective of circumstances of combat or capture. On receipt of the order Rommel called his Staff Officers together and invited them to each individually read the order. He then took it and instructed them that under no circumstances was this order ever to be put into effect by men under his command, he then burnt the order in front of them commenting as he did so - "And thus, in such a fashion is infamy dealt with".

The other 11 recipients of the had no problem with following it. And, that sums up the difference between Rommel and other German commanders during the war. He did what he could to keep it a clean war against the Americans and British unlike the Generals in the East who followed Hitler's illegal orders and helped to turn it into a very dirty war. He also did what he could to protect Jews and civilians in general in his area of operations and he did care more about Germany and its future then his own life. Rommel being too liked by the Anglo-Americans helped Himmler convince Hitler that he was a traitor who needed to die so he paid a high price for being too nice.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...7/Misc/him.png

So what was he a hero or villain? I think people should view him as just a man who served his country in two World Wars and tried to do what he thought was best for his country and what he believed was honorable and right during two horrible world wars no matter what the cost to himself.

Right now I feel bad for Manfred Rommel over this whole conflict with the film. The man served his country all his life in and out of politics, he knew what kind of man his father was and was told all his life no matter where he went be it England, France, the U.S., or even Israel about how his father treated them and their POWs or civilians with honor during the war and protected them. Now at the end of his life as he is dying of Parkinson's his own people decide to turn the image of his father upside down and depict him as either a coward, a puppet or a monster.

That according to his daughter has really effected him emotionally as he nears death (he can't walk anymore) as that isn't the man that tought him about what is right and wrong, kept him from joining the Waffen SS, was willing to kill himself against his Catholic beliefs to keep him and his mom from going to a concentraton camp or the person who taught him to ride a bicycle or took him to the beach.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...isc/Rommel.jpg

If I could tell Manfred something before he dies it would be that a few wars are etched in the collective memory of civilization for all time (and I am certain WW2 will be one of those wars) and certain leaders in those wars are remembered for thousands of years. The wars that ended the Roman Republic are an example of that with Pompey, Caesar, Anthony, Cleopatra and Augustus being remembered around the world to this day.

500 years from now or hell even 2000 years from now after we are long dead, unless humanity wipes itself out there is no doubt in my mind that three Germans from the war will be etched into the collective memory of civilization. Hitler of course, Himmler as Germany's warrior for genocide and mass murder and Rommel as Germany's respected honorable warrior. Only few military or political leaders get the honor or infamy of being etched in history and I would tell Manfred that his father I believe will be one of those leaders and regardless of what people in Germany are saying about him now and showing him as today it won't be what people are saying about him and showing him as a hundred years from now.

I like this guy. He can stay.

The quality of your research and your presentation is remarkable. Well done that man. :yep:

Agreed. Excellent reading jmc247. :up:

You know I found that Ruskies
 

You know I found that Ruskies feel that Rommel was way over rated by the West. They basically chased my butt off a forum they held in about 2002. But I always liked the way Rommel fought in North Africa (in the early part) on a shoestring and captured British supplies. I liked the way he was always at the front much of the time (like some SS Brigadeführer or something). He was also quite an officer from WWI as you all know.

I suppose my real favorite was Erich von Manstein. There were times - after the Stalingrad pocket fell to the Russians, that Manstein was able to hold a very thinly held front in the face of 6 to 8 odds against his 1. And these were real combat odds, not just a larger number of soldiers and material. Of course he had to fight Hitler to do what he was doing. Manstein did his feat while maintaining true fluid Panzer tactics. Of course Hitler wanted his soldiers to hold static villages and towns as fortresses while fighting to the last bullet and drop of blood. But somehow Manstein did what he did best - in spite of big fights with his Boss.

Of course another reason I liked Manstein, I only read his book about 3 years ago. But prior to that I had issued my V-Mod for SH3 in early 2006. In V-Mod I had the Germans win the war so that I could generate new reasons for spreading their bases all over the World (such as in Chile). I did this by having Hitler invade England in spite of losses - treating the invasion as he later treated Russian fronts. It also gave me an excuse to revamp the German strategy from hitting British Supply convoys to mainly going after war ships, as well as making humongous patrols from southern Chile to Alaska and back.

Manstein did a small aside in his book (maybe two pages) to speak about what theoretically would have happened had Hitler been gutsy and invaded England. Nearly everything Manstein outlines - such as for example the Brits falling back to Canada to harass Germany's hold on European sea lanes with Britain's Navy in hit and run attacks - were things I described as a backdrop for V-Mod. I am egotistical enough to have changed my most favored WWII German officer from Rommel to Manstein just because of that.

Personally I doubt that 2000 years from now anyone will give Himmler a second thought. There were many butchers in history and few ever make memory lane for the average Joe. And while short empires like that of Alexander the Great are well remembered, the 12 year empire of Hitler will not be well recalled since he left no cities named: Hitlerzandria.

In my humble opinion Karl Donitz may be remembered along with his use of U-boats as a major historical event in warfare.

Rommel was a true soldiers general he was always leading from the front line
like a true general should.He was a true professional and being an officer was what he did best.That being said he did not enjoy warfare unlike many other famous generals like Patton or Montgomery.

If I where a nations leader I would want a general like Rommel a man unafraid to disobey foolish orders.

I disagree that Hitler or any major person connected to him will be forgotten anytime soon.

@jmc247! Interesting Articles, :up:

They certainly are :yep:

hey jmc, impressive first posts! I actually read through all of it. Also welcome :salute: glad to see there are still people who use this crazy concept of sources. :)

Can't tell much about the film, as I haven't seen it yet. Just a little personal anecdote. My old neighbor was a vet who first served on the Eastern Front, later served in North Africa and France. He became a pacifist after his WW2 experiences, pretty understandable in my eyes. He never said anything bad about Rommel - though he had much contempt for most of the rest of the leadership.