Conflict on German Rommel film

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

Rommel film criticised for depicting general as ‘Nazi war criminal’ …

Wednesday 21 September 2011

A German film about second world war general Erwin Rommel has been criticised by members of the soldier’s family, who say it depicts him as a Nazi criminal who was in thrall to Hitler. …

But the new film, produced for the German TV channel SWR, suggests Rommel’s attitude to the Nazis was ambiguous at best and has prompted an angry reaction from the general’s family. They say advance publicity for the film depicts Rommel as “an upstart, a favourite of Hitler and a Nazi war criminal”.

See also British daily The Independent on this:

The SWR’s production is the latest attempt by German film makers to provide a realistic assessment of Rommel. A television documentary on the general aired by the ZDF public broadcasting channel four years ago claimed to have exposed the “myth” that Rommel fought a clean war in the North African desert.

Entitled Rommel’s War, the documentary claimed that he played a key role in Hitler’s attempt to export the Nazi Holocaust to the Middle East. It revealed that the SS had orders to “destroy Jewry in the Arab World” and had set up special “Sonderkommando” extermination units to follow in the wake of the Afrika Korps. “With his victories, Rommel was simply preparing the way for the Nazi extermination machine,” insisted the documentary’s author, the historian Jörg Müllner.

However, post-war Germany cherished the notion of the chivalrous “Desert Fox”. In 1970, the then West German navy had no qualms about naming a destroyer after him.

See for the more critical view on Rommel also (in German) in German weekly Der Spiegel. And Spiegel article in English here.

From The Local in Germany:

Fashion firm Hugo Boss, long rumoured to be Adolf Hitler’s favourite tailor, has published a report on its less than laudable record during the Third Reich.