LUCIA MARIA MOLLIN TRIAL

He was one of the few German commanders who disobeyed Adolf Hitler's infamous 1942 Commando Order requiring that allied commandos captured in Europe and Africa be immediately executed even if they attempted to surrender. Rommel is remembered not only for his remarkable military prowess, but also for his reputation for chivalry towards his adversaries. He was later in command of the German forces opposing the Allied cross-channel invasion at Normandy. He was the commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps and became known by the nickname “The Desert Fox” for his brilliant leadership during the tank battles he waged on behalf of the German Army in North Africa. Philip Gold who died two days after his 70th birthday in October last year.Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel in 1942.Įrwin Johannes Eugen Rommel (Novem– October 14, 1944) was one of the most distinguished field marshals of World War II. She settled here with her late husband, historian and journalist. Instead I will own to a warm personal friendship and regard with and for the US-born author who, although not Jewish, has spent about a decade living and working in Israel. Next comes Solaro’s reproduction of a photograph from Rommel: The Trail of the Fox by infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving that she uses to illustrate an affectionate – almost domestic - idyll with a vixen.But to tell more now would be to pen a spoiler. The parallels are clear.Both women survived their respective spouses by many years – and despite huge differences in status and wealth – each found herself somehow entombed in her late partner’s legacy.

LUCIA MARIA MOLLIN TRIAL

Such words, others may agree, are as fine a defence witness statement at a war crimes’ trial that anyone may offer.īut further passages prove Solaro’s tale to be yet more complex:There is the painfully wrought description of Rommel’s distraught widow, Lucia Maria Mollin, whose thickly veiled face and dignified bearing surely march us straight to that of Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s state funeral 19 years later. “Armies need private soldiers and young officers who snort and stamp and curvet like warhorses at the scent of blood and generals who, because they understand them, can restrain them. For the first and only time in my life, I stood down the part of me that even drunk with rage, knew right from wrong – and kept that faith…. So I let stand the lie that I had ordered someone else to do it. “It was the first time, the only time in my life I had indulged in the intoxication of wanton destruction for its own sake rather than in the bloodlust of close combat. “It was one of those ugly, regrettable incidents inevitable in any war. “Because I knew suicidal defiance when I saw it, so why not deliver? “I shot him down simply because he had begun to rant and, amped as I was on adrenaline and amphetamines, after three demands to surrender, the first more than courteous, I had enough. Even in the moment I knew I need not have shot him, because what is more useless than a lieutenant colonel running around the hinterlands of France without his troops? “I have never forgotten, simply locked it away. Solaro’s Rommel ponders thus five days after the Battle of Bir Hakeim and two weeks before the surrender of Tobruk:

It is rather, a strange, occasionally lyrical novella in which he is made to reflect on the worst excesses of waging war and meeting death in words reminiscent of – even quoting from – celebrated war verse. As the arguments about the prosecution of British Armed Forces’ veterans for alleged war crimes in Northern Ireland and the Middle East continue, a new work examining the disposition of the military mind becomes of crucial importance.īut Erin Solaro’s book about Germany’s World War 11 hero Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is neither another biography nor a forensic discussion of his extraordinary personality.

Lucia maria mollin