The Rommel Papers: A Discovery in Stuttgart

The Desert Fox’s Lost Papers

When Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was forced to take poison in October 1944 — the price of his alleged involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler — his personal papers disappeared. The official story was that they had been confiscated by the Gestapo. In reality, Rommel’s family had hidden the most important documents before the authorities arrived.

For over two decades, the Rommel papers remained hidden. Rommel’s son, Manfred Rommel (who would later become the long-serving mayor of Stuttgart), had preserved his father’s diaries, personal letters, and campaign notes — material that no historian had ever seen.

A Phone Call to Stuttgart

David Irving had already established his reputation with The Destruction of Dresden (1963) and was deep into research for what would become Hitler’s War. In the course of tracking down documents, he learned that Manfred Rommel might still possess his father’s papers.

Irving telephoned Rommel in Stuttgart. The two men met, and Manfred Rommel — impressed by Irving’s fluent German, his reputation for archival accuracy, and his willingness to let documents speak for themselves — agreed to give him unrestricted access to the papers.

What Irving found in the Rommel basement was extraordinary: the Field Marshal’s personal campaign diaries from North Africa and Normandy, private letters to his wife Lucie, situation maps drawn in Rommel’s own hand, and notes that revealed his increasingly critical view of the German High Command and of Hitler himself.

The Trail of the Fox

The resulting biography, The Trail of the Fox, was published in 1977 and became an international bestseller. It was the first Rommel biography built from the Field Marshal’s own documents rather than from the sanitised memoirs and post-war accounts that had shaped the Rommel legend.

The book revealed a more complex figure than either the Nazi propaganda image of the invincible “Desert Fox” or the post-war myth of the “good German” who opposed Hitler. Irving’s Rommel was a brilliant tactician and a flawed strategist, a man of personal honour who served a criminal regime, and a commander whose relationship with Hitler was far more complicated than later accounts suggested.

Normandy and the Death of Rommel

The papers were particularly revealing about two critical episodes: Rommel’s command in Normandy in June and July 1944, and the circumstances of his death.

The Normandy diaries show Rommel’s growing desperation as the Allied beachhead expanded — his repeated requests to Hitler for permission to withdraw, his conflicts with other German commanders, and his private conviction that the war was lost. The documents relating to his death confirm that he was given a choice between a public trial (with consequences for his family) and a quiet suicide with full military honours. He chose the poison.

The Power of Access

The Rommel papers story illustrates a principle that runs through all of Irving’s work: the people who were closest to the events often preserved the most revealing documents, and they were willing to share them with a historian who approached them with respect and linguistic competence rather than ideological preconceptions.

Manfred Rommel trusted Irving with his father’s legacy. The Milch family did the same with the papers of Field Marshal Erhard Milch. Hitler’s personal staff opened their private archives. In each case, the result was a work of history that could not have been written from published sources alone.

“Irving’s virtues as a historian are manifest. He is indefatigable in pursuit of new sources, which he uncovers with a skill and persistence that place most of his rivals to shame.”
— The Times Literary Supplement