Erwin Rommel's legend as the Desert Fox was partly built by propaganda on both sides
Erwin Rommel became a larger-than-life figure in Nazi and Allied propaganda alike, and after the war a clean, apolitical commander was a useful image for rearming West Germany. Historians now argue over how much of that portrait is real and how much is what they call the Rommel myth.
Rommel was born on 15 November 1891 in Heidenheim, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, the son of a former artillery lieutenant. He joined an infantry regiment at 18 and, at officer school in Danzig, met Lucia Mollin, whom he married in 1916. His First World War record was remarkable. At Caporetto in October 1917 his detachment of about 150 men used the mountain terrain to get behind Italian positions, taking 9,000 prisoners and 81 guns in three days; soon afterwards an entire Italian division surrendered to his much smaller force at Longarone.
Those exploits won him the Pour le Mérite and helped pioneer infiltration tactics, sometimes called Blitzkrieg without tanks. In the chaos after 1918 he avoided force where he could, negotiating the return of communist-held Lindau rather than storming it, which one historian praised as unusually moderate. His 1937 book Infantry Attacks became a bestseller that influenced many armies, and Hitler owned a copy.
Hitler later chose him to command his escort battalion, and by 1938 Rommel was drifting into uncritical acceptance of the regime. He led the 7th Panzer Division into France in 1940, but it was North Africa, commanding German and Italian troops, that made him famous as the Desert Fox. British opponents credited him with chivalry, and the phrase war without hate stuck to the desert campaign, though some historians dismiss it by pointing to crimes against North African Jews, while others find no clear evidence he knew of them.
In 1944 he commanded against the Allied landings in Normandy. Implicated in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler, he was offered suicide or a show trial, and took cyanide on 14 October 1944. The regime staged a state funeral, blaming wounds from an air attack on his car. His former chief of staff Hans Speidel later helped bring West Germany into NATO.
Source: Erwin Rommel
