Erwin Rommel
Erwin Rommel commanded in North Africa, built the Atlantic defences, and was made to kill himself in 1944. Born in 1891 in Württemberg, a schoolmaster's son with no military family, he went into the infantry rather than the staff track and fought in the First World War in Romania and Italy, where at Longarone and Matajur in 1917 he took thousands of prisoners with a handful of men by moving fast through gaps rather than attacking positions frontally. He wrote it up as Infantry Attacks in 1937, which became a standard text and brought him to Hitler's notice. He commanded the 7th Panzer Division in France in 1940 and moved so fast that his own headquarters could not locate him, which is where the ghost division nickname comes from. He was sent to Libya in February 1941 with a small force to stop an Italian collapse, attacked immediately against orders, and spent two years running a campaign of manoeuvre with chronically inadequate supply — Tobruk taken in June 1942, then stopped at Alam Halfa and beaten at El Alamein, where he was on sick leave when the attack came. His reputation for chivalry rests on real evidence: he refused the commando order and the orders to kill Jewish prisoners in his theatre, and no war crimes were charged against his command. He was wounded by a strafing aircraft in Normandy in July 1944. Implicated in the July plot, he was offered poison and a state funeral or a trial and reprisals against his family, and took the first. His reputation was useful to everyone after the war. The British had built him up to explain their defeats, the West German army needed a general who had not been a Nazi, and the family's account of the death was accepted quickly. The scholarship since has complicated the picture without demolishing it.
- Lived: 1891 CE – 1944 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: field_marshal, military_leader
