This week in the War, 9–15 October 1944: Death of Erwin Rommel

This week in the war, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel died by suicide. The Gestapo believed that Rommel was complicit in the July Bomb Plot to assassinate Hitler. Postwar investigations suggest that this was likely true, although the evidence is not completely conclusive.

On 14 October 1944, at Adolf Hitler’s command, Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel came with a cyanide capsule to Rommel’s home in Herrlingen, near to Ulm, in southern Germany. To save his family and staff from arrest and persecution, Rommel chose to take the cyanide, as ordered.

The Nazis kept the true reason for Rommel’s death quiet, claiming that he had died as a result of being wounded. (He had been badly injured when his staff car was strafed by an Allied plane.) He was granted a state funeral, which was held in Ulm.

So ended the field marshal who had led the Afrika Korps to victory in North Africa, who had narrowly missed assassination by a British SAS team, and who had organized Hitler’s Atlantic Wall defenses against the Allied invasion of northern France.