Field Marshal

A biography of the WWII military genius known as the Desert Fox—and his complex, ultimately fatal relationship with Hitler from a New York Times–bestselling author.

Born leader, brilliant soldier, devoted husband and father—Erwin Rommel was intelligent, brave, and compassionate, while at the same time vain, egotistical, and arrogant. In France in 1940, then for two years in North Africa, then at Normandy in 1944, he proved himself a master of armored warfare, running rings around a succession of Allied generals who never got his measure and could only resort to overwhelming numbers to defeat him.

Yet for all his genius, Rommel was also naive, a man who could admire Adolf Hitler at the same time that he despised the Nazis, dazzled by a Führer whose successes blinded him to the true nature of the Third Reich. Above all, he was the quintessential German patriot, who ultimately would refuse to abandon his moral compass—so that on one pivotal day in June 1944, he came to understand that he had mistakenly served an evil man and evil cause. He would still fight for Germany, even as he abandoned his oath of allegiance to the Führer, when he came to realize that Hitler had morphed into nothing more than an agent of death and destruction. In the end, Erwin Rommel was forced to die by his own hand, not because, as some would claim, he had dabbled in a tyrannicidal conspiracy, but because he had committed a far greater crime—he dared to tell Adolf Hitler the truth.

In Field Marshal, New York Times–bestselling historian Daniel Allen Butler describes the swirling, innovative campaigns in which Rommel won his military reputation, and assesses the temper of the man who finally fought only for his country and no dark depths beyond.