The Death of Erwin Rommel: Ten Minutes, a Cyanide Capsule and the Lie Hitler Told Germany

5 hours ago

16 min read

At about midday on 14 October 1944, a dark green car with Berlin number plates pulled up at the gate of a villa in Herrlingen, a small village in the hills just west of Ulm. Two generals got out. One of them was carrying a letter from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Between them they were also carrying poison.

Inside the house was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, the most famous soldier in Germany and a household name even in Britain. Within the hour he'd be dead on the back seat of that car. Four days later Hitler sent a wreath to his funeral and the German people were told their hero had died of his war wounds.

How Germany's most celebrated commander ended up being killed by his own side, and how much he actually deserved the noble reputation that's followed him ever since, is a much messier story than the films let on.

Quick Answers

• How did Rommel die? He took a cyanide capsule in a car just outside Herrlingen on 14 October 1944, after two of Hitler's generals gave him the choice between suicide and a trial before the People's Court.

• Why was he forced to kill himself? Plotters interrogated after the failed 20 July bomb attack on Hitler named him, and the regime didn't want to put the country's favourite war hero in the dock.

• Was he part of Operation Valkyrie? He knew men at the heart of the conspiracy and seems to have backed removing Hitler from power, but most historians think he was against killing him and had no part in planning the bomb.

• Did the Allies respect him? Yes, to a remarkable degree. Churchill praised him in the House of Commons in 1942, though recent research suggests the "chivalrous desert war" story was partly built after the fact.

• Did he share Hitler's beliefs? He never joined the Nazi Party, but he admired Hitler for years, owed his career to him and served the regime loyally until it turned on him.

Who Was Erwin Rommel?

Rommel was born in Württemberg in 1891 and, unlike most of the generals he'd end up outranking, he came from a family with very little military tradition. His father was a school headmaster. As a teenager young Erwin built a full-size glider and took a motorbike apart and put it back together again, and when his grades ruled out university his father nudged him towards the army. The artillery and the engineers both turned him down, so in 1910 he joined the infantry as an officer cadet, as History.com points out.

He had a ferocious First World War. In September 1914, out of ammunition, he charged three French soldiers with a bayonet and took a bullet in the thigh for his trouble. He was hit again in Romania in 1917. It was the same war in which a young Austrian corporal was running messages on the Western Front, and supposedly being spared by a British private, a story we've picked apart here.

By 1940 Rommel was commanding the 7th Panzer Division in France, and in February 1941 he was sent to North Africa to stop the Italians collapsing. He did a lot more than that. He chased the British back hundreds of miles, earned the nickname the Desert Fox and, after he took Tobruk in June 1942, Hitler made him a field marshal. Joseph Goebbels, the man behind the Nazi propaganda machine, turned him into a superstar. In a 2020 lecture in Heidenheim, historian Wolfram Wette noted that a Gallup poll at the time reportedly ranked Rommel as the second best known German in the world, behind only Hitler himself.

Did Rommel Believe in the Same Things as Hitler?

This is the bit that the old "good German" legend tends to skip over. Rommel never joined the Nazi Party, and that fact gets wheeled out a lot. But he was, in the words of historian Sönke Neitzel writing for the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Hitler's favourite general.

He welcomed Hitler coming to power in 1933, hoping it would restore the army and the nation. In 1937 he became the War Ministry's liaison to the Hitler Youth, though he clashed with its leader Baldur von Schirach and was moved on within a year. In October 1938 Hitler personally picked him to command his escort battalion, and Rommel rode with him into the Sudetenland and then into Prague in March 1939. He led the same unit during the invasion of Poland. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum points out, Hitler took a personal interest in his career, and Rommel wrote that the Führer was "extraordinarily friendly to me".

He called Hitler the unifier of the nation, signed his letters "Heil Hitler!", sat through Nazi indoctrination courses and owned a signed copy of Mein Kampf. Neitzel also notes that he cheered the 1938 removal of the army chiefs Blomberg and Fritsch and described the Wehrmacht as the sword of the new German worldview. Wette goes further, pointing out that in the early 1920s Rommel helped organise the so-called Black Reichswehr, the shadowy paramilitary groups that were openly hostile to the Weimar Republic.

So was he a true believer? Historians genuinely don't agree. The USHMM sets out three camps: those who see him as deeply complicit, those who think he went along grudgingly or out of political naivety and those who argue that many generals weren't convinced Nazis at all but shared enough goals with the regime to serve it happily. One historian quoted by History.com went as far as calling him a deeply convinced Nazi. The late American historian Martin Blumenson, on the other hand, argued that he was never tainted by Nazism at all. Most writers land somewhere in between: a hugely ambitious soldier who cared more about his career than about what the regime was doing behind the lines.

Rommel, the Holocaust and North Africa

There's no evidence Rommel was a committed antisemite, and he refused several criminal orders that other generals carried out without blinking, including orders to execute captured Black soldiers and Free French fighters. He also ignored Hitler's order to shoot captured Allied commandos.

But the war he was fighting had a darker plan riding on its back. The SS set up a unit, sometimes called Einsatzgruppe Egypt, which was to follow the Afrika Korps into Cairo and Palestine and murder the Jewish population there. Its commander was Walther Rauff, the man who'd helped design the mobile gas van, and in 1942 Rauff met Rommel's staff to prepare. The USHMM says there's no record of what Rommel thought of the plan, but he knew planning was underway. Wette puts the intended victims at around 700,000 North African Jews. It only failed because the Axis lost at El Alamein.

Smaller detachments did murder Jews in North Africa, and Jews were used as forced labourers on Axis defence works. Wette also flags an order Rommel signed as commander in northern Italy in 1943, the same autumn Hitler had Mussolini sprung from the Gran Sasso, which he describes as contrary to international law and similar in tone to the criminal orders issued by German generals on the Eastern Front.

And then there are the mines. Rommel's engineers laid vast "devil's gardens" of mines around El Alamein, possibly 20 million or more by some estimates. Egyptian figures cited by Wette record around 3,300 people killed and 7,500 maimed since the 1980s alone, decades after the last Panzer left the desert.

Was Rommel Respected by the Allies?

Massively, and it started at the very top. On 27 January 1942, with the Eighth Army still reeling, Winston Churchill stood up in the House of Commons and described Rommel as a very daring and skilful opponent and, "may I say across the havoc of war, a great General". Praising the enemy's commander in the middle of a losing campaign was an extraordinary thing for a wartime prime minister to do.

By that summer, with Tobruk gone and Rommel about 60 miles from Alexandria, the respect had curdled into something closer to obsession. The International Churchill Society records him exclaiming "what else matters but beating him?" before he flew to Cairo in August 1942 to sack Auchinleck and bring in Alexander and Montgomery.

Auchinleck had already tried to tackle the Rommel problem head on. In 1942 he ordered his officers to "stop altogether talking of Rommel", worried that the German had become a sort of bogeyman to the troops. That order has long been held up as proof of the gentlemanly, mutually respectful desert war. A 2025 paper by Martin Samuels in the journal War in History argues the opposite: there was nothing friendly about Auchinleck's intent, Nazi propagandists including Goebbels seized on the order, and Rommel's legend among British troops owed as much to what was happening in London as to anything he did in Libya.

There were genuinely decent moments, though. In November 1941 British commandos raided a villa at Beda Littoria in Libya in an attempt to kill or capture him during Operation Flipper. Rommel wasn't even there, as bad weather had held him up, and the raid's leader, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Keyes, was shot dead. Rommel ordered that Keyes be buried with full military honours, sent his own chaplain to take the service and had photos of the funeral and the grave sent to Keyes's parents in Britain.

Patton and Montgomery both spoke of him with respect too, and Rommel returned the compliment. After the war the admiration turned into a full-blown industry. Desmond Young's biography came out in 1950 and was turned into the 1951 Hollywood film The Desert Fox, starring James Mason, which showed Rommel as a brilliant soldier who doubted Hitler and joined the plot to kill him. The University of North Carolina's film archive describes it as an influential contribution to the post-war Rommel myth. With the SS producing monsters like Oskar Dirlewanger, a decorated army field marshal who fought "clean" in the desert was exactly the sort of German the new West Germany, and its new allies, wanted to celebrate.

The Spitfire on the Road to Vimoutiers

By 1944 Rommel was in France, in charge of the Atlantic Wall and then of Army Group B fighting the Allied invasion in Normandy. On 17 July his big open staff car was heading along the road near Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery, between Vimoutiers and Livarot, when it was spotted by Flight Lieutenant Charley Fox of 412 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force.

Fox and his wingman dived and fired. The driver was fatally wounded, the car crashed off the road and Rommel suffered a fractured skull. Fox later said he had no idea who was in the car, only that it was a large black open car with no camouflage. The Americans claimed one of their P-47 pilots got him, but German reports said a Spitfire did it, and flight logs show only Fox's group was in the right place at the right time. Fox, who died in 2008, had mixed feelings about it, wondering whether Rommel might have ended the war early if he'd stayed on his feet.

Three days later, while Rommel lay in hospital with his head bandaged, Claus von Stauffenberg's briefcase bomb went off at the Wolf's Lair.

How Involved Was Rommel in Operation Valkyrie?

This is the question that's been argued about for 80 years, and the honest answer is: more than the Nazis admitted at his funeral, less than his post-war admirers claimed.

Here's what we know. In February 1944 the mayor of Stuttgart, an old comrade from the First World War, urged Rommel to act against the Nazi leadership. In April 1944 Hans Speidel became Rommel's chief of staff, and Speidel, according to the German Resistance Memorial Center, had been involved in plans to assassinate Hitler since spring 1943. Rommel also met Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commander in France and a key Stauffenberg ally, at a country house outside Paris in May. Nobody knows what was said.

Both men told their commander, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, about the talks. Rundstedt wouldn't join in but wouldn't get in the way either, telling them they were young and should do it themselves. On 9 July Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, Stauffenberg's cousin and Stülpnagel's right-hand man, visited Rommel at his headquarters in the château at La Roche-Guyon. Again there are no notes, but later interrogations suggest Rommel told him he'd serve a new government.

On 15 July Rommel sent Hitler a blunt memo warning that the Normandy front could only hold for another two or three weeks and that Hitler needed to draw the political conclusions. He then sounded out his own field commanders about whether they'd back him in removing Hitler, and several said yes, including the SS general Sepp Dietrich, once commander of Hitler's own bodyguard. His superior, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, reportedly sat on the memo for about two weeks.

What Rommel thought should happen to Hitler is where the evidence goes in every direction:

• Hans Speidel said in 1949 that Rommel wanted Hitler arrested and put on trial, not killed.

• General Heinrich Eberbach, secretly recorded in British captivity, claimed Rommel had told him Hitler needed to be killed.

• Waffen-SS general Wilhelm Bittrich said in a 1978 interview that Rommel would serve a new leadership only if no attempt was made on Hitler's life.

• Lucie Rommel, his widow, said publicly in the summer of 1945 that her husband had nothing to do with 20 July.

Carl Goerdeler, the civilian leader of the conspiracy, had pencilled Rommel in as a possible figure in a post-Hitler Germany. But the plotters themselves were never sure they could count on him. Wette's verdict is that Rommel wasn't part of the resistance, but he knew something of it and didn't betray anyone. The USHMM calls him sympathetic but neither a central player nor willing to take decisive action. And to muddy things further, on 1 October 1944, two weeks before his death, Rommel wrote Hitler a letter defending his record in the West and reaffirming his loyalty.

Either way, he was never a resister in the way that Sophie Scholl or the teenage Edelweiss Pirates were. He was a senior general who could see the war was lost and wanted out, and that was more than enough to get him killed.

How the Net Closed Around Him

After the bomb failed, the Gestapo went to work on everyone connected to the plot. Stülpnagel tried to shoot himself, blinded himself instead and, according to one account, was heard calling out Rommel's name in his delirium. Hofacker was tortured and is widely thought to have named him. Speidel was arrested on 7 September and, as Neitzel notes, told his Gestapo interrogators that Rommel had known about the plot.

Rommel was by then recovering at home in Herrlingen, effectively under house arrest. His son Manfred later said his father spoke of fearing for his life and had spotted Gestapo men hanging around near the house, so it was put under guard. In August Keitel summoned him to Berlin. Rommel phoned to say he was too ill to travel, and was told that General Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hitler's chief adjutant, and General Ernst Maisel of the Army Personnel Office would come to see him instead. He suspected exactly what that meant.

14 October 1944: Rommel's Last Day

Manfred Rommel was 15 and serving as an anti-aircraft auxiliary nearby. He got leave to go home that weekend and arrived at 7am, in time for breakfast. Afterwards father and son went for a walk in the garden, and Rommel told him two generals were coming at noon. They'd either be bringing a new command on the Eastern Front or he'd be put before the People's Court. Manfred asked whether he'd take a command in the East. In his own account of that morning, he remembered his father saying he would.

Shortly before twelve, Rommel changed out of the civilian jacket he'd been wearing over his riding breeches and put on his old Afrika Korps tunic, his favourite uniform because of its open collar. At around noon the car with Berlin plates stopped at the gate. Burgdorf and Maisel came in and asked to speak to the field marshal alone. Manfred and Rommel's aide, Captain Hermann Aldinger, an old friend from the First World War, left the room. Manfred went upstairs to find a book.

Burgdorf had Keitel's letter. It cited the testimony of Speidel, Stülpnagel and Hofacker and offered two options. Rommel could answer the charges before the People's Court, where Roland Freisler's judges were sending conspirators to the gallows almost daily. Or he could do the honourable thing. If he chose suicide, his death would be put down to his wounds, he'd get a state funeral and his family and staff would be left alone.

Accounts of how Rommel reacted are contradictory, and they come almost entirely from people with reasons to shade the truth. Maisel later claimed Rommel admitted he'd forgotten himself and said he'd accept the consequences. Other accounts have him denying everything and calling himself the victim of an intrigue. One story has him telling the generals he'd loved the Führer and still did.

What isn't in doubt is what happened next. Rommel went up to his wife Lucie's room and told her he'd be dead in a quarter of an hour. Then he found Manfred. He told his son that it was hard to die at the hands of your own people, that he'd been accused of treason and that the generals had brought poison which would kill him in seconds. If he took it, the usual reprisals against families wouldn't happen. Manfred asked whether they could fight their way out. His father told him there was no point: they had almost no ammunition, and one death was better than everyone being killed in a shootout. He made Manfred promise to keep silent, because the whole deal depended on secrecy.

Aldinger was ready to fight too, and Rommel refused him as well. Instead he gave his aide his instructions. A call would come from the Wagnerschule hospital in Ulm saying the field marshal had suffered a brain seizure on the way to a meeting. Aldinger was to accept it. Rommel asked for a state funeral in Ulm. Then he checked his watch and said they'd given him only ten minutes.

Manfred helped his father into his leather coat. Rommel wondered aloud whether to take his wallet, which had 150 marks in it, and Aldinger told him gently that it didn't matter any more. On the way out Rommel's young dachshund jumped up at him, and he asked Manfred to shut the dog in the study so it wouldn't follow. Villagers were standing along the road. At the gate Burgdorf greeted him formally as Herr Field Marshal. An SS driver held open the car door.

Rommel tucked his field marshal's baton under his left arm, shook hands with Manfred and Aldinger and got into the back of the car without looking round. Burgdorf and Maisel sat on either side of him.

What Happened in the Car

The road out of Herrlingen climbs a steep hill and runs through thick forest before opening out into tree-lined fields. A few hundred metres from the house, at the edge of the woods, the car pulled over. Gestapo men who'd come down from Berlin that morning were waiting nearby with orders to shoot Rommel and storm the house if he resisted.

From here every version is second hand or self-serving. Manfred was later told that Maisel and the driver got out, leaving Rommel alone with Burgdorf. One account has Burgdorf pacing beside the car for about five minutes before signalling to the others. Maisel insisted after the war that he wasn't in the car when Rommel died and that it was all Burgdorf, which was very convenient, as Burgdorf had killed himself in Berlin in May 1945 and couldn't argue.

The SS driver said he walked away for about ten minutes and came back to find Rommel slumped on the back seat, his cap and baton fallen from him, "sobbing" in his death throes. The writer of this HistoryNet account of Rommel's last day doubts the detail, since that sort of cyanide capsule usually kills in around three minutes. He also points out that the cap and baton didn't simply drop from his hands. Post-war interviews suggest the Nazis kept them as trophies on a desk at Hitler's headquarters, where Burgdorf showed them off to visitors. Aldinger managed to get them back for the family in November 1944.

About twenty minutes after the car drove off, the phone rang in the villa. It was the hospital in Ulm, as promised.

The Lie Hitler Told Germany

At the hospital a doctor named Friedrich Breiderhoff was ordered to examine the body. In a statement he gave to police in Cologne in 1960, he said the Nazis made him go through the motions of trying to revive Rommel, for show, while threatening him with a gun. He found the empty cyanide capsule but was forced to record a heart attack. No autopsy was carried out.

The official announcement said Rommel had died of the injuries he'd suffered on 17 July. Hitler declared a day of national mourning and ordered a funeral with full military honours. On 18 October Rommel's coffin lay in state in the council chamber of Ulm town hall, draped in flags and surrounded by laurel, with four generals standing guard. Crowds turned out to pay their respects. Hitler didn't come.

Instead he sent Rundstedt, the same man who'd told Rommel to go ahead and do it, with a wreath. Rundstedt's eulogy praised Rommel as an officer formed in the spirit of National Socialism and ended with the line that "his heart belonged to the Führer".

Rommel was cremated and buried in the cemetery at Herrlingen, under a headstone shaped like an Iron Cross. The secret held for months. When the US Army paper Beachhead News finally reported how he'd really died, on 2 May 1945, it was in the same issue that announced the death of Hitler.

What Happened Afterwards

Lucie and Manfred survived the war, which was exactly what Rommel had bought with his life. By the time the surviving Nazi leadership were being examined at Nuremberg, Lucie had made a public statement insisting her husband had nothing to do with the plot. Speidel, the man whose interrogation helped seal Rommel's fate, escaped his captors days before the end of the war and went on to become one of the chief architects of the Rommel-the-resister story. Manfred became a CDU politician and served as mayor of Stuttgart from 1975 to 1996.

Today a memorial stone stands at the spot on the Helfensteinweg outside Herrlingen where the car stopped. Two German army bases and a string of streets still carry Rommel's name. In his home town of Heidenheim, a heroic monument put up by veterans in 1961 now shares its space with a counter-monument by sculptor Rainer Jooss, unveiled in 2020, showing a victim of a landmine, the shadow of which falls across the old memorial. It's probably as fair a summary of Rommel's legacy as you'll get: a brilliant, ambitious soldier who served a criminal regime faithfully, saw too late where it was heading and was killed by it for daring to say so.