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<\/a>The last ride of Erwin Rommel, 18 October 1944, Ulm, southern Germany [Bundesarchiv Bild 183 J30704\/ CC-BY-SA 3.0]<\/p><\/div>This week in the war, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel died by suicide. The\u00a0Gestapo believed that Rommel was complicit in the July Bomb Plot<\/a> to assassinate Hitler. Postwar\u00a0investigations suggest that this was likely true, although the evidence is not completely conclusive.<\/p>\n On 14 October 1944, at Adolf Hitler’s command, Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Ernst Maisel\u00a0came 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.<\/p>\n The Nazis kept the true reason for Rommel’s death quiet, claiming that he had died as a result of\u00a0being wounded. (He had been badly injured when\u00a0his staff car was strafed by an Allied plane.) He was granted a state funeral, which was held in Ulm.<\/p>\n So ended the field marshal who had led the Afrika Korps<\/a> to victory in North Africa, who had narrowly missed assassination<\/a> by a British SAS team, and who had\u00a0organized Hitler’s Atlantic Wall <\/a>defenses against the Allied invasion of\u00a0northern\u00a0France.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week in the war, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel died by suicide. The\u00a0Gestapo believed that Rommel was complicit in the July Bomb Plot to assassinate Hitler. Postwar\u00a0investigations suggest that this was likely true, although the evidence is not completely conclusive. … Continue reading