What Happened to Erwin Rommel’s Family After WW2?-ZZ – Part 2

His response became one of the most quoted lines in postwar German  politics: “All enmity must end at some point,   and I think in this case it ends with death.

” Perhaps the most striking chapter of his public life was his friendships with the sons  of his father’s wartime rivals.

He formed   a close bond with U.

S.

Army Major General  George Patton IV, stationed near Stuttgart, and with David Montgomery, 2nd Viscount Montgomery  of Alamein.

Both friendships were widely seen   as symbols of Anglo-German reconciliation  and West Germany’s integration into NATO.

In 1987, the city of Jerusalem awarded him the  Jerusalem Medal for advancing German-Israeli understanding.

In 1996, Chancellor Helmut  Kohl presented him with Germany’s highest   civilian honour, the Bundesverdienstkreuz  with star and sash.

He also received the British CBE and the French Légion d’honneur.

After retiring in 1996, Manfred wrote several books and remained active as a public speaker,  despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

He died on 7 November 2013 in Stuttgart, survived  by his wife Lieselotte and daughter Catherine.

In 2014, Stuttgart Airport was officially  renamed Manfred Rommel Airport in his honour.

Lucie and Manfred were not Rommel’s only family.

In 1913, years before  his marriage, the young lieutenant had fathered a daughter named Gertrud with Walburga Stemmer.

Rommel’s family pressured him to leave Walburga and return to his fiancée Lucie, whom he married  in 1916.

Walburga never recovered.

In 1928, the same year Manfred was born, she died.

The  official cause was pneumonia, though some family accounts suggest she may have taken her own life.

After Walburga’s death, Rommel and Lucie took in the fifteen-year-old Gertrud and helped raise her.

Lucie told Manfred she was a cousin, not an older half-sister.

Gertrud exchanged hundreds of letters  with her father during the war and knitted him the   plaid scarf he wore across North Africa, visible  in many of his most famous photographs.

She visited the family regularly and was at Rommel’s  hospital bedside after he returned ill from the   desert.

She remained close to the Rommels even  after her father’s death.

Gertrud married Josef Pan, had three children, and lived quietly in  Baden-Württemberg until her death in 2000.

Her son Josef later inherited roughly 150 of Rommel’s  letters to Walburga and made them public after his mother died, adding a deeply personal chapter to  the Rommel story that had been hidden for decades.

The story of Rommel’s family cannot be separated from the myth that formed around  his name.

Even before the war ended, both Allied   and Nazi propaganda had elevated Rommel into  something larger than a military commander.

The British called him the “Desert Fox” and treated  him as a worthy opponent.

After the war, that   image proved useful to entirely new interests.

The central figure in shaping postwar perceptions was Hans Speidel, Rommel’s former chief of staff  in Normandy.

As early as 1946, Speidel wrote that he intended to make Rommel “the hero of the German  people.

” Speidel had been part of the 20 July   conspiracy and survived the war.

In the early  1950s, as Cold War tensions escalated and West Germany prepared to rearm, Speidel promoted both  Rommel’s and his own roles in the resistance.

The strategy paid off, and Speidel became one  of the founders of the Bundeswehr and in 1957   was appointed Supreme Commander of NATO’s  Allied ground forces in Central Europe.

For the Western Allies, Rommel became what  historian Peter Caddick-Adams called the   “acceptable face of German militarism.

”  His forced death made him easy to present as a victim of the regime rather than a  participant.

The biographies, Hollywood films,   and published papers that followed in the early  1950s all reinforced this image, creating what scholars now call the “Rommel renaissance” ,  a wave of sympathetic portrayals that helped   smooth the path for West German rearmament.

Germany’s largest military base, the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks at Augustdorf, still  carries his name.

For decades after the war,   veterans of the Afrika Korps, including  former British and Commonwealth opponents, gathered annually at his grave in Herrlingen.

But recent scholarship has challenged the myth.

Historians such as Alaric Searle and  Peter Lieb have questioned the extent of Rommel’s involvement in the 20 July plot and  examined his relationship with the regime more   critically.

The debate continues: was Rommel  a reluctant soldier trapped by circumstance, or a willing participant who benefited from  the system until it turned against him?   Erwin Rommel’s death was meant to end quietly,  hidden behind a state funeral and a lie about his wounds.

Instead, it became one of the  most debated legacies of the war.

His widow   kept the truth alive.

His son built a career  that turned the Rommel name into something his father could never have imagined: a  symbol not of war, but of reconciliation.

If you found this video insightful, watch “What  Happened to Hermann Göring’s Family After WW2?” next.

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