Rommel: The End of a Legend

The legend of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel—the “Desert Fox”—is threefold: he was a simple soldier who did his duty and knew nothing about Nazism; he was a commander of superlative talent who ran rings around the British in North Africa in 1941–42; and he was a leader of the resistance to Hitler who gave his life to the cause after the failure of the July 1944 plot. In this lucid, exemplary volume, Ralf Georg Reuth shows that all three of the above assumptions are false and reveals the truth in a brilliant book that exposes the self-serving role of the Cold War West in promoting the Rommel legend.

Under Rommel’s leadership the German Afrika Korps advanced all the way to Egypt. Known as the “Desert Fox,” Rommel was considered invincible. That is the story told in the history books. Ralf Georg Reuth paints a different portrait of Erwin Rommel: a man who owed his fame in part to Nazi propaganda and whose role in the resistance is still unclear; the image of a soldier who was promoted by Hitler and who continued to stay true to him until the end, when he committed suicide at the behest of his fuhrer. His personal fate is the mirror image of the German tragedy of that time: “to have followed the fuhrer to the end and to believe that one had thereby done one’s patriotic duty.”

Ralf Georg Reuth was the editor of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels.