TOM UTLEY: Gott im Himmel! A top university whose staff have never even heard of Rommel

  • A quote by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel caused outrage when was shared by Exter University because the former military man was known as Hitler's favourite
  • However, students who kicked up a fuss have been criticised for not knowing their history because by 1944 Rommel once plotted to assassinate Hitler 
  • When he was found out Rommel saved his family from death by agreeing to swallow cyanide at Hitler's orders, on the condition they would be allowed to live

Field Marshall Erwin Rommel 1891-1944. A University apologised for sharing his quotes - but why?

Field Marshall Erwin Rommel 1891-1944. A University apologised for sharing his quotes - but why?

What in God’s name is going on at Britain’s supposedly finest universities, once famed worldwide as centres of academic excellence, enlightenment and independent thought?

I ask because of this week’s furore over an email sent to students at Exeter — one of the 24-strong Russell Group of Britain’s most highly rated seats of learning — containing ‘motivational quotes’ intended to lift their spirits and spur them on.

Among them was what you or I may think the thoroughly sensible observation: ‘One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles.’

This sounds to me like jolly good advice — not just for Exeter students, but for all sorts of people such as die-hard Remainers, who cluck on endlessly about footling obstacles to Brexit, while shutting their eyes to the magnificent opportunities opening up to us.

But it was not the content of this innocuous quote that caused all the fuss. Rather, it was the fact that the words cited were spoken by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who has sometimes been referred to as ‘Hitler’s favourite general’. 

The Forum Exeter University. Top Russell Group university employees have come under fire after sharing a quote from one of Hitler's favourite men - but they are under more fire for their apology 

The Forum Exeter University. Top Russell Group university employees have come under fire after sharing a quote from one of Hitler's favourite men - but they are under more fire for their apology 

Apology

Enough to say that when a student spotted the attribution, all hell broke loose. In the inevitable Twitterstorm that followed, the Exeter authorities issued a grovelling apology, explaining that the staff member who had drafted the email, after searching for inspirational messages on Google, ‘did not recognise the name’.

Said a university spokesman: ‘This was a genuine error and in no way intentional. We apologise unreservedly for any offence caused.’ A staff member added: ‘We will put processes in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.’

Gott im Himmel! (As the war mags I read in my childhood might have put it.) Yes, Exeter certainly owes an apology — if not for bombarding students with patronising emails, intended to motivate them, then most definitely for employing a staff member who had never heard of Rommel.

But I reckon the university should also apologise profusely to the Field Marshal’s surviving family members for suggesting that this brave and honourable soldier was so far beyond the pale that nothing he ever said should be allowed to reach the eyes or ears of today’s sensitive students.

The ignoramus who drafted the email is clearly not the only member of staff at Exeter who doesn’t know the first thing about Rommel.

Staff at Exeter University were clearly unaware of the life and death of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

Staff at Exeter University were clearly unaware of the life and death of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

So let me offer those apologetic academics a brief history lesson.

For a start, the World War II general popularly known as the Desert Fox (or ‘Der Wustenfuchs’ to his own side) was ‘a great field commander’ and an ‘extraordinarily bold and clever opponent’. Don’t take my word for it. This was the judgment of Sir Winston Churchill, speaking in the Commons debate after the fall of Tobruk in the North African campaign.

Highly decorated in the 1914-18 War, and the author of a best-selling book on military tactics, Rommel also had a widely attested reputation as a humane officer, who spoke his mind to superiors, showed consideration towards subordinates and on the whole treated prisoners of war decently.

True, in common with enormous numbers of his fellow Germans, he backed Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. And like so many others, he was at first mesmerised by the dictator, who in turn befriended him and talked him up as a war hero and role model for the country’s youth.

Rommel was never a member of the Nazi Party, however, and many have testified (though this has been disputed) that he was not much interested in politics. As far as I’m aware, though I stand to be corrected, there is no evidence at all that he ever shared Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism or any of the rest of his repugnant ideology.

But it’s the circumstances of the Desert Fox’s death that set him farthest apart from the great mass of lesser Germans, who were prepared to follow their Fuhrer to the end. For whatever he may have thought of Hitler in the early days, by 1944 Rommel was implicated in the July 20 plot to assassinate him. 

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was liked by Hitler - but history has proven, Rommel did not like him back 

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was liked by Hitler - but history has proven, Rommel did not like him back 

Cyanide

When the plot failed and the charges were laid before him, he was given three choices. He could answer personally to Hitler or face trial by the People’s Court — either of which would have meant all-but-certain execution not just for him but for his wife and son and others close to him. Or else he could commit suicide, with the promise that the manner of his death would be hushed up and he would be given a hero’s funeral.

Having secured assurances that his family and staff would be protected if he took his own life, he swallowed the cyanide pill handed to him by Hitler’s messengers.

And this is the man whose memory Exeter University finds so offensive that it feels it must apologise for quoting him? They don’t feel like that about him in modern, liberal Germany, where the Desert Fox is one of the very few prominent figures in the Third Reich who is remembered without shame.

To this day, the German army’s largest military base, at Augustdorf, carries the proud name of the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks.

Yes, of course, it is possible to argue that if Rommel had been more successful in his defence of the Normandy coast against the D-Day landings, and Germany had won the war, countless more victims would have suffered from Hitler’s vile regime.

But then the same goes for all the millions who wore German uniform between 1939 and 1945. Is Exeter planning to ban its staff from quoting anything any of them ever said? 

Manfred Rommel (R), son of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, at Northolt aerodrome, with General Fritz Bayerlein, his father's former Chief of Staff. Rommel's family were allowed to live when he took his own life

Manfred Rommel (R), son of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, at Northolt aerodrome, with General Fritz Bayerlein, his father's former Chief of Staff. Rommel's family were allowed to live when he took his own life

Terror 

Like so many people of my post-war generation, lucky enough to be British, I’ve often asked myself whether I would have had the guts to stand up against Hitler if I’d had the deep misfortune to have been a German of fighting age in the Thirties and Forties.

I’d love to think that the answer is Yes. In my dreams, I would have offered sanctuary to Jews and plotted against the Nazis — or at the very least, I would have refused to fight.

Yet in my heart of hearts, I know damn well that I would have lacked the moral and physical fibre to do any of these things. Instead, I would have fallen in with the overwhelming majority, putting on the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine or the Wehrmacht (please, God, not the Gestapo or the SS!), raising my arm obediently in the Hitler salute and going into battle for the forces of evil against the liberal democracy I love.

No, it takes a very special sort of courage to break from the herd — nowhere more so than in a terrifying dictatorship like the Third Reich, where the penalties for dissent were the concentration camp, torture and death. I know, to my shame, that I lack it. Rommel had it in spades.

Yet here are the staff of one of our leading universities, grovelling in terror and insulting the memory of a brave man by issuing abject apologies for quoting him, when they face nothing more frightening than a Twitterstorm.

But then what better can we expect of an academic world in which they’re tearing down statues and turning pictures to the wall at the slightest hint of students’ disapproval of the subjects depicted?

They’ll be burning books next. And just in case nobody’s told them, that’s what the Nazis did.

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