'Chivalrous' Rommel wanted to bring Holocaust to Middle East
Erwin Rommel's reputation as one of Nazi Germany's few chivalrous generals has been blackened by a new documentary film which depicts the legendary "Desert Fox" as an unscrupulous commander who spearheaded Hitler's attempts to take the Holocaust to the Middle East.
Rommel, the head of the German Afrika Korps who won fame for his initial successes against the British in North Africa in 1942, was widely respected during and after the Second World War. Churchill once referred to him in parliament as a "great general".
Defeated by General Bernard Montgomery's "Desert Rats" at the battle of El Alamein in Egypt the same year, Field Marshal Rommel once claimed that his military campaign against the British was a chivalrous affair and the nearest thing to "war without hate".
However, a new two-part documentary series being broadcast on Germany's ZDF television channel provides evidence that Rommel played a key role in the Nazis' drive to invade Palestine and exterminate the Jews of the Middle East.
The historian Jörg Müllner, who made the film Rommel's War with co-author Jean-Christoph Caron, yesterday dismissed as a "myth" the notion that Rommel fought a clean war in the desert. "With his victories, he was simply preparing the way for the Nazi extermination machine," he added.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...to-bring-holocaust-to-middle-east-450304.html