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I second Claudio’s

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NEPTUNE the great wrote:

Favorite general is Erwin Romell (Also known as the dessert fox)

K.Rokossovski wrote:

NEPTUNE the great wrote:

Favorite general is Erwin Romell (Also known as the dessert fox)

Yeah, he could eat like a kilo of Tiramisu, two banana splits and an entire plum pudding after his steak. His favorite was Poire Belle Hélène though.

Carking the 6th wrote:

K.Rokossovski wrote:

NEPTUNE the great wrote:

Favorite general is Erwin Romell (Also known as the dessert fox)

Yeah, he could eat like a kilo of Tiramisu, two banana splits and an entire plum pudding after his steak. His favorite was Poire Belle Hélène though.

Did you meet him in the battlefield before he died or something?

NEPTUNE the great wrote:

Favorite general is Erwin Romell (Also known as the dessert fox)

Nah, he was executed by Hitler after being framed as part of Operation Valkyrie

He was forced to kill himself or be killed. Still, he fought for the Nazis, and you have to accept that he did his very best to support the killing of thousands of civilians, and gave all his experience and knowledge to such a terrible cause for years. It was likely he had at least some knowledge of camps, and like everyone at the time saw the direct racism against Jews and Slavs coming from German leadership. All that really combines to undoubtedly make him a rather bad person, to be honest. Even if he was just following orders, that’s not a perfect excuse. Wouldn’t call him an evil person, maybe, but definitely had a negative effect on humanity.

It was like this, you shoot yourself with honor or we shoot you with dishonor

Very few Army Generals apart from the SS knew about the KILLING of Jews and Slavs, tho they knew they were being imprisoned. I consider him one of the better German Generals.

TheZhukov wrote:

It was like this, you shoot yourself with honor or we shoot you with dishonor

Very few Army Generals apart from the SS knew about the KILLING of Jews and Slavs, tho they knew they were being imprisoned. I consider him one of the better German Generals.

Even ignoring all of this, he got innocent people killed and helped the Nazis. Fact is that this can’t be ignored. He was a terrible influence on the world, regardless of what he believed. If he truly was a brave and great human being, then he would have betrayed the German government in North Africa and joined the allies. That’s not calling him a coward, I doubt many others would either, but point is that his actions were bad, and he did bad. Regardless of his personality (which is ambiguous and doesn’t seem fully like propaganda may have said) he was working for Nazis, and practically a Nazi.

These are very difficult things to judge from our armchairs. You could also argue that he was a classic and perfect "soldier", in the sense that he did his job (soldiering) and kept out of politics; just like we assume a perfect soldier should do or we would soon have a military junta in power everywhere. Another thing that speaks for him is that he served in Africa and the Western front, while the bulk of the atrocities and war crimes were executed in the East (though that may be considered an issue of magnitude, not principle).

It is also worth noting that the British troops in the desert called him the "Gentleman General" and that he issued several orders to his troops that they should observe the Geneva conventions about warfare, and personally intervened when they didn't.

The German people as a whole had a mindset at the time that we cannot truly comprehend today. For example, Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (recommended reading for anyone interested in the subject) paints a bleak picture of the dehumanization of Jews (and other "target groups") that had soaked deeply into society as a whole. The killing of Jews wasn't even based in hatred, it was considered a nasty job which simply had to be executed, similar to cleaning sewers. Sure, you would expect leaders like Rommel to follow their own moral compass anyway; but such individualism (which ALSO required personal bravery!) was scarce in a society that was based on hive-mind thinking. It is very hard to blame the upper cadre of the Wehrmacht especially for failing to resist, branding individuals to be "evil" or "bad", when you could also argue that an entire generation had gone cuckoo.

TheZhukov wrote:

Nah, he was executed by Hitler after being framed as part of Operation Valkyrie

Very true. I doubt that many others would have taken actions different from him in our positions, me included. Germany at this point had gone do insane that it’s a miracle that managed to become the country that it is today. He did help the British in the sense that they used him on propaganda, blaming his genius for their defeats rather than their own incompetence he often took advantage of, among other things.

Problem is that whenever you discuss his legacy, is that you have to accept the fact that forced or not, apolitical or not, superior humans treatment or not, his military prowess led dunkurk and the invasion of France, led to death of thousands across Europe and Africa that w may have no happened. Rommel the man is far more ambiguous, and very likely would have been a pretty decent person had he not been born on possibly the worse place to become a general in during the 30-40’s. But Rommel the general directly influenced history and did his very best to successfully help the Nazi leadership complete their goals (and it was likely he didn’t partake in the attempted assasination of Hitler). He’s also been used by some to absolve the Wehrmacht of their crimes, blaming the SS alone, which is a myth.

His legacy was very dark, and he helped very terrible things to happen. Whenever thinking about him, that does have to be accepted. Still, not gonna blame someone for liking historical figures if you’re solely basing it off their personality and military stuff, and know that he even if he wasn’t in the party and may have been more moderate, was still for all intensive purposes a Nazis.