Why Erwin Rommel is the Opposite of Every Other WW2 General

The directive was straightforward. Any Allied Commando captured anywhere in uniform or out, was to be handed over to the SD and shot. No surrender, no prisoner status, no trial. Only 12 copies of the order were distributed inside the Vermacht. RML received his and had it destroyed at his direction. This is not a postwar story told by his admirers.

 It surfaced at Nuremberg in the documentary record around the orders’s enforcement and non-inforcement. RML did not pass the order down to his subordinate units. He did not enforce it in his theater. When George Lane and Roy Waldridge were captured on that French beach in 1944, the standing instructions said Gestapo and a bullet.

 RML sent them to friend prison and from there to a regular officer’s camp. Both men outlived the war by decades. Compare him to his peers. Field marshal Albert Kessler’s command executed commandos under that same order. After the war, Kessler was tried for it and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, but the legal finding was clean.

 The commando order had been enforced in his theater. It was not enforced in Roml’s. That is the foundation the legend was built on. It is not made up. Not every Vermacht commander did this. Most enforced the order without flinching. RML destroyed his copy and walked away from it. Stay with that for a second because everything that comes next depends on you believing the man was genuinely unusual before you see how the unusual man got turned into a saint.

To understand why burning that order stood out, look at who was holding the pen. RML was not Prussian, not aristocracy, not general staff. He was the son of a school master from Heidenheim, a small town in southern Germany. He came up through the infantry inside the German officer corps of the early 20th century.

 That combination, small town, non- noble, infantry, put him on the outside of every important room before he ever saw combat. Then he saw combat, and the outside started to matter a lot less. Rewind to 1915. Near Apront in the Argon Forest, a young infantry left tenant crawled roughly a hundred yards through French barbed wire alone, took four bunkers, held them against a battalion counterattack, and withdrew with his men intact.

 Two years later at Caparetto on the Italian front, he captured something close to 9,000 Italian soldiers with a unit that should not have been able to capture 900. Imperial Germany awarded him the poor merit. The previous recipients of that medal were almost exclusively generals and senior staff officers.

 RML was a left tenant when he received it. Then in February 1940, with no armor experience, none at all, and against the explicit written recommendation of the chief of the army personnel office, who wanted him given a mountain division more suited to his infantry background, RML was handed the seventh Panza Division. The man with no tank training was given Germany’s most modern weapon.

 He was an outlier in his own army before he was a legend in anyone else’s. That distinction matters more than it sounds. It is part of why he was so useful later to people who needed a face and part of why the face was so convincing. In May and June of 1940, the seventh panza moved through northern France. so fast that the German high command sometimes didn’t know where it was.

Inside the Vermacht, the unit picked up a nickname. Die Gishbenster Division, the Ghost Division. In a matter of weeks, it captured roughly 30,000 prisoners, 257 artillery pieces, 458 armored vehicles, and more than 1,500 trucks at a cost a fraction of what other Panza divisions paid for less ground. Those numbers are not interpretation.

They are pulled from his own afteraction reports filed at the time. In February 1941, he was sent to Libya. The German job there was to stabilize a collapsing Italian line in North Africa. Defend no more. RML disobeyed the standing order, attacked within days of stepping off the plane in Tripoli, and pushed the British back to the Egyptian frontier inside a few weeks.

June 21st, 1942. Towuk fell. 33,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers surrendered in a single engagement. Hitler promoted him to General Feld Marshall. He was the youngest field marshal in the German army. The British called him the desert fox. They weren’t being sarcastic. January 27th, 1942, 5 months before tobuk fell.

Winston Churchill stood at the dispatch box in the House of Commons during a vote of confidence debate. The eighth army was losing in North Africa. The British public wanted to know why. And Churchill in front of Parliament on the record said this about the man beating his own army.

 We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us. And may I say, across the havoc of war, a great general. across the havoc of war. A great general said in public from the floor of the Commons about an enemy officer who was at that moment driving British troops backwards across an entire continent. This is the legend at its altitude.

 Sell it to yourself completely because the next part of this video only works if you do. Everything you just heard is true. He really did burn the commando order. The Ghost Division really did move that fast. Churchill really did stand in Parliament and call him great. The tea with George Lane really happened. None of that is being walked back.

 What follows is what almost nobody learns. By July 1942, while RML’s Panza army Africa was pushing across the Egyptian desert toward Alexandria and the Suez Canal, the SS had already assembled a separate unit. It was called Inzat Commando Egypt, Task Force Egypt. 24 men in total. The commander was SS Oashm Banfura Vultar Ralph, the same officer who had previously overseen the development of mobile gas vans on the Eastern Front.

 The unit was staged in occupied Athens, equipment loaded, transport arranged, awaiting deployment orders. Its purpose documented by the German historians Klaus Michael Malman and Martin Chupers from the surviving German archives was to follow RML’s army into mandatory Palestine and Egypt and carry out the final solution against approximately half a million Jews living in the region.

 The operational plan included recruiting local collaborators among Arab populations to extend the killing far beyond what 24 men could do alone. The unit was loaded and ready to move. It never deployed at all. The reason it never deployed is not that RML refused to allow it. There is no documented contact between RML and Ralph’s unit.

 There is no surviving evidence that RML even knew the operation existed. The reason it never deployed is that RML lost the second battle of Elamine. 11 days of fighting, October to November 1942. The Panzer army was broken, the advance reversed, and the corridor from Athens to Cairo to Jerusalem closed behind him as he retreated.

 His clean reputation in real and measurable part is a downstream effect of his military defeat. The Holocaust did not reach Cairo because RML could not. The opposite of every other general framing requires him not to have won. Hold the shape of this carefully. The unit existed. The plan existed. The operational corridor existed.

 The killings would have proceeded with local recruitment regardless of whether RML personally raised an objection because he was never asked. What kept the operation off the map of the war’s completed atrocities was the British 8th Army at Elamine, not the field marshal whose advance the Anzat commando was waiting to follow. It was prepared and he lost.

 That is the whole point. The opposite of every other general label did not build itself. As early as 1941, before Tobuk, before the major desert victories, before most of what people now remember when they hear the name, Hitler personally instructed Joseph Gerbles to elevate RML into a popular hero. It was a propaganda ministry decision signed off at the very top.

 RML was one of only two soldiers Hitler ever picked out this way for hero treatment. The other was Edoard Detle, the snow hero of the Norwegian and Finnish campaigns, and almost no one remembers his name today. Gerbles obliged on RML. The 1941 documentary film Zeie Investon, Victory in the West, featured RML personally reenacting his 1940s river crossing for the camera in uniform on location.

By early 1942, Gerbles was writing in his own diary that RML continues to be the recognized darling of even the enemy’s news agencies. That last part is the key. The British press picked the myth up and ran with it. Partly because losing to a tactical genius was an easier story to print at home than losing to the Vermacht.

A genius is exceptional. A genius is rare. A genius implies that your own side is otherwise winning and just unlucky to be opposite one particular man. The Desert Fox label served British morale at the same time it served German morale which is one of the reasons it spread the way it did. It spread too fast.

 And by the summer of 1942, the British General Claude Olench, Raml’s actual opposite number and commander of the 8th Army, issued a written order to his officers, instructing them to, in his own words, stop altogether talking of RML. Inside British units, the cult of personality had become a measurable morale problem. Soldiers were attributing every German tactical move to one man as if the Vermach was unbeatable wherever he stood and beatable wherever he didn’t.

The Vermact had successfully exported a hero through enemy lines. Three regimes built this man. Nazi Germany built him first deliberately on Hitler’s order. The British press built him second accidentally because it solved a public relations problem. Postwar West Germany built him third on purpose because they needed one.

 Three motives, one legend, and the first author was Gerbles. The legend reached its tidiest version in the suicide October 14th, 1944. Around noon, a dark green staff car with Berlin number plates stopped outside Rammel’s villa in Herlingan. The small town where he had moved his family to recover from a strafing run head injury earlier that summer.

 Two emissaries from Hitler stepped out. Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Misel. They went inside. The offer they brought was binary. RML was suspected of involvement in the July 20th bomb plot against Hitler. He could swallow the cyanide capsule they had brought with them, receive a state funeral with full honors, and his wife Lucy and his 15-year-old son Manfred would be left alone.

Or he could face the Volksar to the people’s court with the show trial, the dishonor, and the standard Nazi reprisals against his family. He had 45 minutes to decide. He changed into his Africaore tunic. He told Manfred in the words Manfred later wrote down, “I have just had to tell your mother that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour.

” The capsule was fatal in 3 seconds. He was dead by roughly 12:15 p.m. The legend reads this as proof he opposed Hitler. The narrower historical finding from Britannica, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from the German historian Peter Leeb is more careful than that. RML sympathized with removing Hitler from power.

 He opposed assassination as a method. He was likely not directly inside the July 20th plot itself. the line between sympathy and conspiracy matters and the documentary record places him on the sympathy side. And according to post-war testimony from the men who escorted him to the car, testimony reported in secondary sources with provenence that cannot be independently confirmed.

 What he said on his way out was, “I love the furer and I love him still.” Treat that line as reported, not certain. But even the most charitable reading of his death is narrower than the legend wants it to be. Even his suicide gets retroactively cleaned. Beyond politics, even the pure generalship is contested. The US Army War Colleg’s Military Review and the Israeli military analyst Martin Vanceld, neither of them apologists, neither of them propagandists, converge on the same critique.

 RML’s tactical brilliance, the kind that produced the Ghost Division sprint across France and the fall of Tobuk, masked a serious negligence at the operational level. logistics, field sanitation, the unglamorous parts of running an army that win wars when the tactical genius runs out. At points during the North African campaign, up to roughly half of the Africa Corps was incapacitated by preventable disease.

Primarily dissentry and infectious hepatitis traceable to field sanitation, his command did not enforce. By 1942, close to half of RML’s transport fleet consisted of captured British and Commonwealth trucks because he had outrun his own German supply chain so badly that he was driving on enemy vehicles to keep moving forward.

 He personally drove a captured British AEC Dorchester command vehicle that his staff nicknamed Mammoth. Mammoth because his own German staff car could not keep pace with the front he himself was running. Earlier during the 1940 France campaign, he had a habit of raiding adjacent division supply dumps without authorization to fuel his own advance.

His commanding officer at the time, General Herman Hoth, considered court marshalling him for it before the victories arrived and made the question moot. A great tactician perhaps a great general in the full operational sense the US war college means the word disputed by the professional soldiers who would most want him to be one.

So the argument over RML is not a closed historical question. It is a live one being run right now. Two Bundesv barracks in modern Germany still bear his name. The Field Marshall Raml Barracks in Augustdorf in North Rin West Failia. The Raml Caserna in Dawnstat in Bonverberg less than an hour’s drive from where he killed himself.

 In 2017, German Defense Minister Ursula Vonda Lion ordered a formal review of all Vermat era barracks names after a series of farright Nazi memorabilia incidents inside the modern Bundesphere forced the question into the open. The RML barracks survived the review. In 2020, the city of Hedenheim, RML’s birthplace, dedicated a new sculpture next to the original 1961 Raml Denkm.

 The granite monument that veterans associations had erected in his honor 60 years earlier. The new sculpture by the artist Raina Yos is a small fragile bronze figure of a landmine victim. It stands at the foot of the warrior monument and casts its shadow upward onto it. The original monument did not come down. A second one was added beside it to argue with it.

The German Bundistag has commissioned formal expert opinions on whether RML still qualifies as a traditions wording military figure literally worthy of tradition. In the technical sense, German military law uses the word for soldiers whose legacy the Bundesphere is permitted to honor. The opinions are split.

 The fight over whether Irwin RML is the opposite of every other Nazi general is being relitigated on paper in German city council meetings and parliamentary committees. right now as you watch this, the most successful propaganda of the war. So, was he the opposite of every other World War II general in specific documented narrow ways? Yes, he destroyed the commando order in his theater.

 The tea with Lane and Woolridge happened. He kept the SS Einat’s commandos out of his immediate operational area in North Africa, even if there is no evidence he knew about the worst of what they were prepared to do. He did not denounce officers he suspected of being in the July 20th plot. But the totalizing label, the opposite of every other World War II general, was authored by Gerbles in 1941, ratified by the British press by 1942, defended by his former chief of staff, Hanspidel inside the new Bundesv in the 1950s and cemented by cold war politics

that needed a good German to make West German rearmament palatable to the rest of NATO. to he is the only Nazi general most people can name. He is the only one whose name still requires a defensive footnote on a German barracks wall in the 21st century. That is not an accident of decency. That is the longest running propaganda operation the Vermacht ever produced.

And the campaign that started in Elm Gerbles’s diary in 1941 is the reason this video had to be made. 85 years later. The end screen has more videos like this one.