Plausability and Effects of Rommel Defecting

Hey! These are my ancestors you are talking about!

In north central Indiana there was a enclave of Swabian emigrants, in Benton & Warren counties among others. In Oxford Indiana 'Rommel Park' is named after on of the local families who trace back to a cousin of Irwin Rommels father who emigrated in the later 19th Century. & yes eve today its possible to detect a peculiar handling of the consonants in the speech of the old families in Benton county who have German surnames.

Well, I personally like Swabans, they have an un-aristocratic different way of talking and thinking about the world that one could see in listening to the old speeches of Einstein and Rommel talking about things.
 

TFSmith121

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Well, he did have some distant relatives in the Allied armies:

I just have a question- could Rommel, after the assasination attempt on Hitler, have escaped to Allied lines? Would the Allies have accepted such a defection? Was it out of character for Rommel to do that? If he did defect, what would be the effect on Germany? What would be his role during the end of the war and after?

Well, he did have some distant relatives in the Allied armies:


Unfortunately, they were already POWs...

It's interesting that why there were the competing "Seydlitztruppen" and "Vlasovites" on the eastern front, there's next to no example of Germans defecting to the west in the same period; even the abortive efforts to raise "Free Austrian" forces in the US petered out, for obvious reasons.

Best,
 
Well, he did have some distant relatives in the Allied armies:


Unfortunately, they were already POWs...

He had quite a few relatives in Poland some fought for Germany during WW1 and won some of the highest metals for valor. He ordered that they not be detained, but his son said when he was in Africa the German occupation authorities in Poland sent him two messages within the same week that two of his relatives died because 'it was a cold winter' for each message. He told his son that he believed they were lying to him.

Manfred said he found out after the war that they ended up being shot by SS Einsatzgruppen.
 
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