Hello,
is it me or it’s verry complicated? Sometime,you’ll see nazi apologist (or wehraboo) go on about how rommel was clearly anti nazi but it seem that his role in the consiracy wasn’t that big and his participation feel more opportunistic than anything to me ,also I tend to think they are way better example for anti nazism in the Wehrmacht than rommel since the guy commaned hitler bodyguard and sympathised with hitler
I’m kinda confused about this: if you’re talking to a Nazi apologist, and they’re talking about Rommel and saying he’s a anti-Nazi hero? I’d think if they were actually Nazi apologists they’d hate Rommel’s guts, wouldn’t they?
Also Rommel is a good example. Like, if you’ve ever seen Downfall, Hitler had his good side, a gentle side something that when you follow a man you want to beleive is the real them, that that bit of decency and kindness and understanding you see is the real them and any bad stuff is contingency and necessity. It’s easier for outsiders to make moral judgments, because they weren’t there, they didn’t see these people with their own eyes, shake their hands, hear reassurances from the their lips.
I’ve been trying to write an alt history for decades now, and having created a fictional German character, who’s existence and memory goes back to well before the first world war, I can only say there’s a huge grieving process in turning against Hitler. There’s anger and resentment towards the Allies for deliberately starving their children to death and leaving Bolshevism in Russia as a gaping wound and daring to call the Germans barbarians. It breeds tightness an ethnic solidarity to unhealthy levels because the group is undergoing deligimzation, possibly as a prelude to destruction in one form or another.
After being accused of being evil incarnate for the entirety of World War I and for years afterward, it creates disbelief that there could be any truth in the accusation. When the enemy lies, slanders, false flags, etc without consequence and without any concern for the truth, when thy speak the truth, they are rightly not believed.
To realize, yes this time the German system IS as evil as depicted in the last war, to think a land of Beethoven and Goethe, the best scientific establishment of the 20th century, a superpower economy built in only 40 years, could be capable of all the vile things the Nazis did, well, there’s a mourning that has to be done and most people cannot bear the shame and agony of being betrayed by a system they put EVERYTHING into.
I’ll give you an RL example that involves me. This is an interview with Daniel Ellsberg in 2018 on nuclear war planning in 2018:
I saw this clip over a year ago and I’m still in grief over it. And this was something that was never carried out, but to think ANYONE in MY government would plan to inflict 100 holocausts in Asia, let alone pre-emptively, and whether or not China actually declared war in the United States is so devastating it could easily make one suicidal.
We should not lose sight of these men, trapped for years and decades in slimy, corrupt systems seeing so much petty, self-aggrandizing crap by bureaucrats, petty officials, and always lying politicians they couldn’t see Hitler for who he was. The moral compromises necessary to work in any large organization dumb us to the poisons of men, it’s the cost of doing business.
Most people who want to condemn the Officer class as a whole, don’t really understand how painful, gut-wrenchingly painful it is to wake up and understand with clarity what has been done in your name by some of the worst people imaginable. It’s sorta like cutting off your own hand
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nazi apologist like rommel because he help them defend the Wehrmacht (also I forgot about the white rose omvment)and I tend to prefer canaris as anti nazi +I feel like he’s often overrated (for me he was a good general when it come to tactics, but not really with logisitic( though overrall german logisitic wasn’t great)
Well, as far as Rommel goes, what could he have done to be a better logistician? Before I was run out by a horrible mod who accused me of being a Wehrboo at every point, one website I was on the basic consensus was that Rommel should have known his role and stayed inside Lybia because it was impossible to take Egypt and Germany could only lose which is extremely myopic.
See there’s two things Rommel COULD have done to shore up his logistics: Invade Malta, which he PLEADED for in 42 and I believe in 41 as well, and was denied both times OR the German high command could have sent him a boatload of railroad workers and engineers and built a huge rail system from Tripoli to Benghazi and expanded it to Tobruk, but no one ever considers this, except for me playing Civ 2 scenarios.
The German rail service was borderline incompetent in maintaining and rerunning the Soviet rail system, I can’t imagine what the east front would look like with a decent chunk of them in Libya. Cause the raillines in Libya were more or less non-existent.
In practice Rommel would have needed to do both to have any chance of taking Egypt if the Middle East Command rallied after losing at El-Alemein (which wa going to happen as it’s the only access to Egypt on the coastal road). And neither of these efforts would ever be put into practice by high command.
There are generals who had no understanding of logistics in Russia, but it was less lostics of feeding the army and more of understanding how to cripple the Soviet Union through Stategetic materials. The Prussian way of war was always death or glory cause Prussia lacked the depth for a long war and always had until unification, so the notion of systemically reducing a nation by seizing resource hubs never occurred to them.
The Prussians and thus Germans were never good at long term wars, but then again neither were the French until 1917 or so.
But if you see other ways Rommel could have realistically done better at his logistics train given the attitudes of his superiors, I’m all ears.
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as I said ,german logisitic wasn’t great (and even without rommel,they would have run into supply line problem)