I just now saw this. I think the article is much worse now. It fixed some problems and added even more, and needs a huge overhaul. The current structure is bizarre. The recent changes go way beyond the stated useful notes purposes to clear up misconceptions and presents only one (disputable) point of view, and goes into very long-winded tangents that summarize one particular book on Rommel much more than summarizing Rommel himself. Someone said "A brief paragraph that casts a more skeptical light on his record should not be a problem." But a dozen paragraphs and 2 entire folders setting up strawmen (very few people actually believe he was nigh-omnipotent) is what we ended up with. In fact the viewpoint espoused uses criticisms that are just as simplified and cliched as the fanboi point of view is.
May I ask what you believe are:
1. "The one (disputable) point of view" of the article?
2. The "criticisms that are just as simplified and cliched as the fanboi point of view"?
3. The "one particular book on rommel" that most of the article is a summary of?
4. The peer-reviewed cultural historians who allege that Rommel is not popularly thought of as being highly competent and honourable?
If you would like to set aside some time to exchange articles, and presumably drafts, in a dedicated session then a time between eight and twenty hours' from now would be best for me. Only one of the university libraries in my city has a strategic studies faculty, so there is a good chance that I will be unable to check or scan physical books for you. However, our article access is very good so if you could privilege those in your response then we should have enough to work with.
EDIT: We are fortunate in having a historian who specialises in cultural 'memory' of the Nazizeit, so if you'd prefer a later sit-down session (next Sunday at the same times works for me) or a correspondence then I could literally walk into his office on Tuesday/Wednesday and ask him what we should be looking at.
Edited by MAI742 Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. — Mark Twain
Three years and some months late, but this article desperately needs a rewrite from the ground up.
1. If the Nazi regime had such an iron-clad grip on the media, how could all adult Germans know what was happening in the concentration camps? The Allies had access to the same media outlets the Germans did (Nazis weren't exactly shy about sharing their propaganda) and they had no idea how bad it was until the war was practically over.
2. For one thing, the idea that Rommel had no involvement at all in the 20 July Plot (despite apparently knowing about it) is unlikely. Quite a bit of evidence (actual documents and statements from the people involved, not just the opinions of historians long after the fact) suggests he was involved to some extent, though perhaps not in the actual assassination part.
3. That, I don't know, but it does sound like a very skewed account.
4. Except the vast majority of what I've found that isn't hyperbolic says he's a good but flawed man working for an unjust cause. At the worst, he's naive and lacking in long-term planning and logistics skills. The last part almost makes his repeated successes on the battlefield more impressive. Competence largely depends on what your measuring and how. His ability to regularly pull off the impossible certainly speaks to a high level of competence in something.
The article is a massive wall of text that seems determined to paint Rommel and all of WWII Germany in the worst light possible. It feels more like a rant than a proper article.
Was Rommel a shining beacon of chivalry in the all-consuming darkness of Nazi Germany? No.
Did he commit war crimes? Also no.
Was he complicit in war crimes? Only by loose association and only if advising Italian authorities to do what was necessary to prevent riots, leaving to tend to his own duties, and then the Italians raping and pillaging can be considered 'implicitly condoning their actions.' Or if you consider his success making various war crimes possible enough to convict. Please note that such an attitude falls under the "just as simplified and cliched as the fanboi point of view" heading.
Did he treat prisoners of war fairly? With one possible exception (and shooting an belligerent prisoner in the middle of a war-zone doesn't sound all that unreasonable to me), looks like the answer is yes, which is more than can be said for many German officers. Heck, he refused to comply with orders to flat-out execute Jewish PO Ws.
He also protested the use of slave labor in the building of the Atlantic wall, and may have helped save thousands of lives.
Was he racist? Try pointing to someone in the 1940s who wasn't. He didn't seem to care much about whether someone was Jewish or not, his own chief-of-staff was part Jewish and bisexual, but he did seem to have a low opinion of blacks. Not even close to unusual for the time and place.
Was he flawed? Of course.
Was he the incompetent, social-climbing war criminal this article seems desperate to paint him as? No.
As someone that curiously came to read the entry on Rommel and some fictional depictions after some reading on him through other sources... Holy shit, this entire page is biased as fuck. What the poster above said is true. I could only get to the paragraph where it implies that everything about Rommel is a fabrication from German propaganda to entirely check out. Even revisionists agree that his morality is ambiguous and it's hard to separate the man from the myth. I would rather we have an entry that acknowledges those views rather than the current essay that just demonizes him.
This entire article needs a re-write. Erwin "lel what the fuck are logistics" Rommel was a great colonel but a terrible general. He ignored orders to defend Libya and instead went rampaging into Egypt, hideously overstretching his supply lines and diverting much-needed supplies from the Eastern Front to a strategic backwater. In addition, he had no objections to the formation of Einsatzgruppen Egypt and his main campaign resulted in the Axis losing control of North Africa as well as 200,000 troops captured.
Edited by TheD3rp Hide / Show Replies
As long as you can cite objective biographies (and not your own research)...go ahead. Just try and keep it brief because remember this is about how Rommel is seen in fiction and not as he really was. A brief paragraph that casts a more skeptical light on his record should not be a problem.
I personally never bought the Rommel cult mostly because I despise the idea of "good Nazis"...I don't think it was remotely possible for anyone to be "good" in any meaningful sense in that era.
The article on Useful Notes defines their purpose as follow:
"The purpose of [these] is threefold:
1. To debunk common media stereotypes. 2. To help you understand some media better. 3. To educate, inform, and sometimes entertain."
On those grounds I think that the Rommel article really could use an overhaul because it does not clearly distinguish between who Rommel really was and how German and Anglo-American propaganda (and media treating that propaganda as fact) portrayed him. Also it could be funnier.
Likewise we also don't distinguish between the actual role played by the Italians and the portrayal of the Italians in German and Anglo-American memoirs and propaganda (and media treating them as truth). Hell, if it wasn't for the Italians then Rommel's forces would've remained encircled, what, twice? Three times? And that's not even getting into what they did to African civilians considered threats to Italian national security.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. — Mark Twain
My apologies for being so abrupt! In my defense I had just gotten up and hadn't had any coffee yet, though that doesn't excuse it.
Re: buying into the Rommel cult... I wonder, was it doomed from the start? If Anti-Semitism could not survive acknowledgement of The Holocaust, how on earth did knowledge of The Holocaust co-exist with 'The Clean Wehrmacht' for two decades? (not rhetorical questions, I genuinely have no clue on either count)
And how much of it, I wonder, comes from the old tradition of praising your enemies - and making yourself look good by comparison? We have an article around here somewhere saying that there is a long tradition of that in European culture, dating back to the Romans...
Edited by MAI742 Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. — Mark Twain
It has to do with people not identifying, or refusing to identify, with the true victims of warfare. You see this in The American Civil War where for nearly a century (and still ongoing) people promoted this idea of the Confederates as noble warriors and soldiers. Robert E. Lee was the American Rommel and there was this huge cult around him which greatly exaggerated his martial prowess while downplaying and ignoring his crimes.
After the end of World War II, the German public needed to separate Hitler from the rest of the state, since Hitler had become anathema so the noble Wehrmacht, the good Nazi Rommel, the Valkyrie plotters (one of whom was an Einsatzgruppen soldier) became heroes. It's fairly recently that The Holocaust achieved universal, global consciousness and then the Cold War happened, and those events have had a devastating impact on historical memory in Europe.
However, there is an ancient martial tradition of praising your enemies and making yourself look good...it suited the English to praise Rommel as a Worthy Opponent against whom their actions in North Africa, considerable as it is, looks better and more triumphant. And yeah it dates back to the Romans.
Never thought of it like that, but you're far from the only one to do so it seems. Came across some academic arguing a related case (that The Lost Cause prepped the US for The Honourable Soldiers of the Waffen-SS) a couple hours back.
Makes you wonder who exactly was saying all this 'the Wehrmacht was nice' stuff (apart from ex-Wehrmacht people themselves). I'm only familiar with Liddel-Hart, really, but I can't imagine that he reached a huge audience in the USA.
Oh, plus there was that new biography of von Manstein which came out a few years ago by some guy who decided not to focus on his politics. Which is a bit of a conscipicuous ommission, as far as biographies go.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. — Mark Twain
The epitome of the noble Waffen-SS is when Ronald Reagan put that wreath of flowers at the Bitburg cemetery. For most Americans, the Wehrmacht and the Eastern Front wasn't something they cared about because it was the Commies' problems, so I'd say there was indifference and ignorance more than actual malice. For them in The '50s onwards, it was about attacking Nazis, removing the Commies out of the history books. The '50s was the high point of Erwin Rommel hagiography, what with movies like Desert Fox and so on. But I don't think it's necessarily having to do with agenda because in a certain sense the World War II era has passed into the realm of myth, that the conflicts were larger than life, battles like El Alamein or Omaha Beach becoming the New Iliad and so on. So this mythification, which is understandable in the wake of any major conflict, helped Rommel's posthumous reputation. And obviously for West Germany it was important they cling and create new symbols since most of West Germany's bureaucracy, personnel, corporations were glove-in-fist with the Nazis, so percieved dissidents like Rommel became valuable. The idea that they should identify with the Jews, the Communists, the people actually persecuted and brutalized by the regime took a while for the BDR to accept and internalize...as evidenced by incidents like the RAF terrorism of the Seventies who won popularity because they targeted reconstructed ex-nazis.
There is one interesting American movie about the Wehrmacht made in The '50s, A Time to Love and A Time to Die by Douglas Sirk, and that director was himself a German emigre to Hollywood (he had a really tragic personal life see his page). That movie is fairly critical of the Wehrmacht glorification. The plot is a furlough for a Wehrmacht officer and it opens with him and his buddies killling soldiers via firing squad and the rest of the film is him touring wartorn Germany with low rations, amoral characters and actual psychopaths (there's also a love story because this is Hollywood). But it's a rare corrective in that decade.
This discussion appears to be more suited for the forums.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
You have to remember that the Bundeswehr still names stuff after Rommel and his son was a (arguably) competent and successful mayor of Stuttgart for ages (mayors in Germany usually win reelection until death or senility makes it unfeasible), so many Germans (particularly conservatives) don't want to hear the name besmirched, either by war crimes being brought up or by Rommel's competence being called into question...
It is also worth pointing out that we picture of a 'Clean Wehrmacht' was less prevalent in academic circles (where many documents highlighted the crimes of the Wehrmacht early on) and more in the public opinion. Remember several millions of Germans served in the army and its feasible to believe that many of them never comitted a crime (which would still leave millions of culprits. Of course they don't want to admit that they served an inherently evil organisation and neither do many of their children wanted to see it that way.
The recent changes go way beyond the stated useful notes purposes to present only one point of view, and goes into very long-winded tangents that summarize one particular book on Rommel more than Rommel himself. " A brief paragraph that casts a more skeptical light on his record should not be a problem." But a dozen paragraphs and 2 entire folders setting up strawmen is what we ended up with.
I think that Lord Gro, Jhonny, and I have improved this article a great deal in the past 24 hours in line with the criticisms outlined by The D3rp and Julian Lapostat this March. I thank you all for your contributions, and ask if anyone has any further criticisms - however minor.
Edited by MAI742 Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. — Mark Twain Hide / Show Replies