German defence minister praises Rommel, Hitler’s “favourite general”
By
Johannes Stern
20 June 2017
Last Saturday, speaking at the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen announced that the Army would keep the name of the barracks. “The Rommel Barracks has been so named consciously on an anniversary of the resistance. And that shows that Rommel also had his role in the resistance,” she told media representatives. It had therefore been decided not to rename the barracks.
Von der Leyen’s announcement on the so-called Day of the German Armed Forces shows the true mindset that prevails at the top of the Defence Ministry. Following the uncovering of a neo-Nazi terrorist cell in the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) at the beginning of May, von der Leyen had been compelled to make some critical remarks about the all-too-obvious continuity of military traditions from Hitler’s Wehrmacht to today’s Bundeswehr. She was enthusiastically praised for this, especially by the Left Party.
From the beginning, the announcement by the minister of defence to rename some barracks and to remove Wehrmacht memorabilia was hypocrisy. It was a nod towards the anti-militarist sentiment in the population and merely served to downplay the extent of the right-wing conspiracy in the army. Now, von der Leyen has decided it is time to go on the offensive. Of all of Germany’s war-time generals, she has chosen to line up behind the one who was carefully built up in the Third Reich through Goebbels’s propaganda ministry to become Hitler’s most famous “war hero”.
Von der Leyen’s claim that Rommel was part of the resistance to Hitler is absurd. Before Rommel clashed with Hitler over military matters at the end of the war, and was driven to commit suicide, he was…