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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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Jan 27, 2016 - 03:47pm PT
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Though this would be cool to post for all the history buffs :)
Death of Rommel - The DesertFox
August 17, 1944 : Field Marshal Walther Model had arrived to replace Field Marshal von Kluge - his sudden appearance was the first notice the latter had of his dismissal. Kluge was told by Hitler to leave word as to his whereabouts in Germany—a warning that he had become suspect in connection with the failed July 20 coup by Colonel Stauffenberg. The next day Kluge wrote a long letter to Hitler and then set off by car for home. Near Metz he swallowed poison.
His farewell letter to the Fuehrer was found in the captured German military archives.
"When you receive these lines I shall be no more … Life has no more meaning for me … Both Rommel and I … foresaw the present development. We were not listened to … I do not know whether Field Marshal Model, who has been proved in every sphere, will master the situation in France … Should it not be so, however, and your cherished new weapons not succeed, then, my Fuehrer, make up your mind to end the war. The German people have borne such untold suffering that it is time to put an end to this frightfulness … I have always admired your greatness…. If fate is stronger than your will and your genius, so is Providence … Show yourself now also great enough to put an end to a hopeless struggle when necessary …"
Hitler read the letter(according to the testimony of Jodl at Nuremberg), in absolute silence and handed it to him(Jodl) without comment. The turn of Field Marshal Rommel, the idol of the German masses, came next...
The Fuehrer realized, as Keitel later explained to an interrogator at Nuremberg, “that it would be a terrible scandal in Germany if this well-known Field Marshal, the most popular general we had, were to be arrested and haled before the People’s Court.” So Hitler arranged with Keitel that Rommel would be told of the evidence against him and given the choice of killing himself or standing trial for treason before the People’s Court. If he chose the first he would be given a state funeral with full military honors and his family would not be molested. Thus it was that at noon on October 14, 1944, two generals from Hitler’s headquarters drove up to the Rommel home, which was now surrounded by S.S. troops reinforced by five armored cars. The generals were Wilhelm Burgdorf and his assistant in the Army Personnel Office, Ernst Maisel...
After Burgdorf and Maisel arrived it soon became evident that they had not come to discuss Rommel’s next assignment. They asked to talk with the Field Marshal alone and the three men retired to his study.
“A few minutes later,” Manfred Rommel later related, “I heard my father come upstairs and go into my mother’s room.” Then:
We went into my room. “I have just had to tell your mother,” he began slowly, “that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour … Hitler is charging me with high treason. In view of my services in Africa I am to have the chance of dying by poison. The two generals have brought it with them. It’s fatal in three seconds. If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family … I’m to be given a state funeral. It’s all been prepared to the last detail. In a quarter of an hour you will receive a call from the hospital in Ulm to say that I’ve had a brain seizure on the way to a conference.”
Rommel, wearing his old Afrika Korps leather jacket and grasping his field marshal’s baton, got into the car with the two generals, was driven a mile or two up the road by the side of a forest, where General Maisel and the S.S. driver got out, leaving Rommel and General Burgdorf in the back seat. When the two men returned to the car a minute later, Rommel was slumped over the seat, dead. Fifteen minutes after she had bidden her husband farewell, Frau Rommel received the expected telephone call from the hospital. The chief doctor reported that two generals had brought in the body of the Field Marshal, who had died of a cerebral embolism, apparently as the result of his previous skull fractures.
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Adventurer
Mountain climber
Virginia
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Jan 27, 2016 - 04:23pm PT
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I was in the US Army and stationed in Stuttgart, Germany in the late 1960's. At that time, Manfred Rommel (son of the WW2 Field Marshall) was the Mayor of Stuttgart. He was a decent guy who did a lot to improve German-American relations in the decades immediately following the war.
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