This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Bachelors with Professor Lloyd Clark. His new book is The

Commander's The Leadership Journey of George Patton Bernard McGumran, Erwin Rommel. These are

professional soldiers. They devote themselves to understanding warfare and yet politics. The

course for Owen Rommel is deeply compromised by the rise of the National Socialist, the

Nazis. And it is surprising to learn that right away Rommel establishes what you

had to say is a manipulative relationship with the fear with Adolf Hitler. And he goes through

periods of admiring him and nodding him and being punished by him and nodding him, not being

punished by him. Professor, this is the strangest part because once you associate Rommel with

Hitler, he's not the same inspirational figure he was before. It's troubling only because it's

impossible to remove the fact that he would have known of the remarks that Hitler said repeated

again and again, treating human beings as worthy of being destroyed, particularly the Jews,

but many more people than that. Did Rommel reflect on that in his letters to Lucy, the anti-Semitism?

Did he talk about it?

No, he tended to gloss over what we might describe as the most extreme excesses of Hitler's politics

and personality. And as you say, he had this love-hate relationship with Hitler. There were very few

people, if any, that Rommel venerated more in his career. Most of the admiration that Rommel shows

for anyone in a superior position to his own is directed wholly towards Hitler, his leadership,

what he is perhaps providing Germany with to become a world-class power again. When he falls out

of love with Hitler, it is not really for his politics, which as I say, he glosses over it,

because he has let the army down or let Rommel down. It's about us. And whenever Hitler was

untrustworthy, Rommel deems this to be a negative point against the Führer. And the longer the

second world war goes on, the more those negative points seem to add up to quite a lot for Rommel.

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