‘Our Friend Rommel’: The Wehrmacht as ‘Worthy Enemy’ in Postwar British Popular Culture*
University of Reading
p.major{at}reading.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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This piece examines the British reception of the biography of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel by the British author Brigadier Desmond Young, upon which was based the Twentieth Century-Fox movie The Desert Fox (Hathaway, 1951). British newspaper reviewers showed a love-hate relationship towards the memory of the late Wehrmacht Field Marshal. For some, such as former opponent Claude Auchinleck and military historian Basil Liddell Hart, Rommel was a talented field commander and resistance martyr, tangled up in the 20 July 1944 conspiracy against Hitler, for which he had been forced to commit suicide; for others, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and Richard Crossman, he was an unthinking collaborator who had betrayed the Führer only when the war had turned against the army. The author argues that the book and film set the precedent for the cultural rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht on screen, not only in English-speaking countries, but in West Germany too. Moreover, Anglo-American military histories and films tended to depoliticize and remilitarize the Wehrmacht even more than West German productions. Other films considered include The Battle of the River Plate (Powell and Pressburger, 1956), Ill Met by Moonlight (Powell and Pressburger, 1957) and Ice Cold in Alex (Thompson, 1958). The author argues that the postwar ‘clean hands’ myth-making surrounding the Wehrmacht was performed not only by the West German film industry but by a transnational cultural division of labour which suited the needs of the Western alliance during Cold War rearmament and West German reintegration into the international community.
Keywords: Rommel, Desert Fox, Wehrmacht, war film, Basil Liddell Hart
* I would like to thank the British Academy for funding the research for this article.