This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchel with Professor Lloyd Clark.

His new book is The Commanders,

the leadership journey of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and 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 Socialists, the Nazis.

And it is surprising to learn that right away Rommel establishes what you have to say

is a manipulative relationship with the

furor, with Adolf Hitler.

And he goes through periods of admiring him and not admiring him, being punished by him

and 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 Rahmell reflect on that

in his letters to Lucy, the anti-Semitism? Did he talk about it? No, I think 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 Romel venerated more in his career.

Most of the admiration that Romel shows for anyone in a superior position to his own is directed wholly towards Hitler.

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