German History Vol. 26, No. 4, pp.

520–535

‘Our Friend Rommel’: The Wehrmacht as ‘Worthy

Enemy’ in Postwar British Popular Culture*
Patrick Major

Existing scholarship on British war films has focused almost exclusively on films made
contemporaneously, as part of wartime propaganda before 1945.1 These tell us a great

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deal about British self-perceptions, often presenting microcosms of British society, but on
the whole have avoided discussing enemy depictions or Feindbilder. Unsurprisingly, with
the notable exception of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell and Pressburger,
1943),2 wartime images of the enemy were dominated by caricatures of Prussian
militarists or bombastic party functionaries. Despite the scholarly interest, however, the
general public appears to prefer the filmic memories offered after the event by postwar
war films.3 These have largely evaded serious discussion until John Ramsden addressed
the problem a decade ago.4 Yet, war films were big box office hits in Britain in the 1950s,
regularly accounting for the first or second spot in the film top ten in the latter half of the
decade. Postwar productions also provide a more nuanced, and potentially interesting,
image of the former enemy as part of the process of reconciliation. At the same time,
one is dealing with a very selective version of the past. As Norman Davies has recently
pointed out, filmically speaking, the memory of the Second World War is bifurcated
through the dual prism of the Cold War.5 There are, to my knowledge, no British postwar
feature films depicting the struggle on the eastern front between the Wehrmacht and the
Red Army. This may, of course, have been a question of limited resources for such an
epic subject. Nevertheless, some conscious erasure of this aspect of the Second World
War was surely involved too. When the Soviet drama The Fall of Berlin (Chiaureli, 1949)
was screened in London, the Foreign Office had misgivings that ‘this 1949 film should
appear at this time to revive memories of hostility towards Germany’.6 The moment
was, of course, when the Federal Republic was poised to sign a series of treaties
integrating her into the Western alliance, including a European Defence Community. As

* I would like to thank the British Academy for funding the research for this article.

1 Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986);
James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (London, 1998); S.P. Mackenzie,
British War Films, 1939–1945 (London, 2000).
2 Ian Christie, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: Powell and Pressburger (London, 1994); A.L. Kennedy, The Life

and Death of Colonel Blimp (London, 1997).

3 Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, 2004), pp. 267–99.

4 John Ramsden, ‘Refocusing “The People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History,

33 (1998), pp. 35–64, here p. 35.

5 Norman Davies, Europe at War, 1939–1945: No Simple Victory (London, 2006), p. 439.

6 Roberts to Strang, 29 Apr. 1952, The National Archives (Kew), FO 1110/528.

© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghn049
 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 521

this article hopes to show, however, British popular history and culture were not apolitical
either, and reconstructed another theatre of war, the Western Desert, almost to the
exclusion of all others. The desert wilderness indeed proved remarkably useful in the
rehabilitation of the image of an honourable Wehrmacht acceptable to the British public.
One film in particular had a catalytic effect. In 1951 an Englishman, James Mason,
played a German, Erwin Rommel, in the Twentieth Century-Fox biopic, The Desert Fox.
Mason did not ham up the role as Erich von Stroheim had done eight years earlier in Five
Graves to Cairo (Wilder, 1943). He played it straight, not affecting a guttural German
accent, the standard alienating device of previous films. The movie took great pains to
show a chivalrous mutual respect between Afrika Korps and Eighth Army. Both sides’
troops are treated in each other’s dressing stations; the screen Rommel tears up Führer
orders to execute Allied commandos; and he treats prisoners-of-war according to the

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Geneva convention. At one point a captured British officer, who spots the legendary
figure from a distance, salutes him as one officer to another.
This incident was allegedly based on fact, and the officer playing himself was Brigadier
Desmond Young, author of the best-selling 1950 British biography, Rommel, upon which
the film was largely based.7 The book was a true best-seller, going through eight reprints
in its first year, and had previously been serialized in the Sunday Express, including
swastika-rimmed adverts for added authenticity.8 It also proved successful in German
translation, for instance at the Afrika Korps’ first postwar reunion at Iserlohn in 1951,
where it reportedly sold like hot cakes.9

Figure 26.24: Desmond Young spots a living legend.

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (Hathaway, 1951), courtesy of Twentieth-Century-Fox Pictures.

7 Desmond Young, Rommel (London, 1950).

8 Sunday Express (8 Jan. 1950).

9 Life (8 Oct. 1951).

522 Patrick Major

In it, Young had famously claimed that Commonwealth desert commander Claude
Auchinleck had become so concerned about Rommel’s reputation in Allied ranks that:
There exists a real danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogy-man to our
troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a superman, although he is undoubtedly
very energetic and able.10

This message duly found its way into the film script, as did the final tribute from Winston
Churchill to the former enemy, also published in 1950:
His ardour and daring inflicted grievous disasters upon us, but he deserves the salute which I made him—
and not without some reproaches from the public—in the House of Commons in January, 1942, when I said
of him, ‘We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a
great general’. He also deserves our respect because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler
and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy of 1944 to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and

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tyrant. For this he paid the forfeit of his life. In the sombre wars of modern democracy chivalry finds no
place. Dull butcheries on a gigantic scale and mass effects overwhelm all detached sentiment. Still I do not
regret the tribute I paid to Rommel, unfashionable though it was judged.11

Young had relied extensively on interviews with the late Field Marshal’s surviving
widow, son and former comrades, so that the positive picture which emerged is perhaps
hardly surprising. Yet the overall effect bordered on hagiography. At one point the
biographer
looked again at Rommel’s photograph, covering up the cap … Perhaps because my own father was a sailor
and I spent much of my early life at sea, I felt that I could now understand this very unusual German gen-
eral. He had hardly seen salt water until his last assignment. But think of him in the line of Nelson’s captains,
an unromantic Hornblower, and he runs true to type.12

Perhaps the unspoken comparator was in fact Lawrence of Arabia, a distinctly romantic
figure in the British imagination. The clinching factor in the Rommel legend was, of
course, his enforced suicide following his alleged involvement in the 20 July conspiracy
against Hitler in 1944. The depiction of a Wehrmacht leader as a resister was, however, to
cause serious reservations among some reviewers. Nor was Young so naïve as to ignore the
political implications of such a sympathetic portrait in the current, delicate world climate.
Konrad Adenauer and the Allied High Commissions were considering West German
rearmament under the pressures of the Cold War. During 1950 a popular protest
movement unfolded against the notion of Germans back in uniform, only five years after
the Potsdam Agreement had banned them. Yet in press interviews Young was pragmatic:
Since you cannot remove this military spirit from the German race, you had better see if you can build on
their soldierly virtue. Many of our leaders who take the soldierly view think the next best thing to a good
friend is a good enemy.13

The reception of the Young biography in Britain became something of a cause célèbre in
early 1950. Former military opponents were the most generous, not only praising
Rommel as a resistance martyr against National Socialism, and thus as a ‘good German’,
but also for his technical expertise as a field commander who had led from the front.

10 Ibid., p. 23.

11 Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston, MA, 1950), p. 200.

12 Young, Rommel, p. 190.

13 Manchester Guardian (25 Jan. 1950).

 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 523

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Figure 26.25: Desmond Young signing copies of his Rommel biography at Ashford in Kent on 23
January 1950.
Courtesy of www.reflections-images.co.uk.

There was an element of suppressed envy that British commanders from Wavell and
Auchinleck, even to Montgomery, had not won hearts and minds in the same way as the
Afrika Korps leader. As Wavell recalled:
Of all our enemies in the late war Rommel was the only one who appealed to the public imagination, both as
a dashing commander in the field and, by all accounts, an honourable and generous enemy. There was an
aura of romance and chivalry about him which was quite foreign to the rigid, grim efficiency normally at-
tributed to German generals.14

Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tuker, writing in the Guardian, drew classical parallels,
calling Rommel ‘the Belisarius of our age’, harking back to the Byzantine general who
had prevailed despite half-hearted support from his emperor.15 Enoch Powell, a former
intelligence officer in the Eighth Army, now campaigning for the general election which
was to return him as the Tory member for Wolverhampton, believed ‘Rommel to have
been the ablest general of any army during World War II’.16 Unwittingly, of course,
many of these homages paralleled Goebbels’ earlier propaganda imagery of Rommel as
the man of action,17 and a number of reviewers said so at the time.18 It was also suggested
that the Rommel legend was a diversion from the failings of British commanders,
who had then to conjure up their own ‘Monty’ counter-legend.19 Such imputed
Machiavellianism so incensed Montgomery’s deputy, Brian Horrocks, that he stepped in
to ‘debunk’ the Rommel myth, arguing that the Eighth Army had beaten the Afrika Korps
fair and square.20 Nevertheless, in a curious cultural role-reversal, Rommel the daredevil

14 Sunday Times (22 Jan. 1950).

15 ‘Rommel: A Great Soldier’, Manchester Guardian (23 Jan. 1950).

16 Evening Standard (24 Jan. 1950).

17 Reuth, Rommel, pp. 121–61.

18 Cyril Kersh, The People (22 Jan. 1950); Jon Kimche, ‘The White Knight’, Tribune (27 Jan. 1950).

19 E.T. Williams, ‘The Rommel Legend’, Observer (22 Jan. 1950).

20 ‘The Rommel Myth Debunked’, Picture Post (1 Apr. 1950), pp. 39–41.
524 Patrick Major

and improviser—’a slashing but serious, tough but intelligent, professional officer with
manners to correspond … a swashbuckler and superb leader of men’, according to one
review21—signalled stereotypically ‘Anglo-Saxon’ values, while Montgomery remained
the methodical, almost ‘Prussian’ organization man.
There were, however, a number of more searching interventions which probed beneath
the surface of the Desert Fox myth. Malcolm Muggeridge, onetime leftist, but by this time
a maverick conservative critic, accused Rommel sympathizers of reverting to the forgive-
and-forget attitudes occurring after the First World War. Muggeridge had more respect
for diehard Nazis such as Goebbels who had gone down with the Führer, unlike the generals
who had jumped ship. Only by turning away from ‘its obsequious-arrogant stooges like
Rommel’ would Germany be able to resist ‘the threat of Slav Imperialism’, and if:
she is to come back into the family of the Christian West, must get rid of her Rommels, get them right out of

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her system, abolish for ever and ever that terrible tendency towards collective schizophrenia whereby ‘hon-
our’ in the Western Desert is unrelated to unutterable dishonour at Dachau, and ‘chivalry’ towards a cap-
tured brigadier is in no wise incompatible with a foreign policy of consistent perfidy and a brutal disregard
for all the elementary decencies of civilized behaviour in disposing of displaced persons and other
unfortunates.22

A number of Telegraph letter-writers, traditionally the voice of Conservative Britain, wrote

in to agree. But on the left, too, there was disquiet. As Richard Crossman, former
psychological warfare officer and Labour MP for Coventry, pointed out—quite
presciently given current assessments of National Socialism: ‘to argue that because he
was attractive, courageous and chivalrous, Rommel could not have been a real Nazi is to
miss the whole German problem, which is that any German who is uninterested in politics
can be a good Nazi and a good fellow at the same time’.23 Writing a little later, he added:
During the war we adopted Rommel, along with Lili Marlene, and made him an honorary Englishman by
picturing him as the one German who played war according to the rules of cricket. Of course, this is a myth;
many other German generals felt a keen distaste for S.S. methods, and Rommel was by no stretch of the
imagination a gentleman.

Yet Crossman was shrewd enough to recognize that ‘it is not a Pro-German myth, since
what the Rommel fan believes is that his pet German was the exception which proves the
rule that German generals are brutal militarists’. His real objection was that Young was
claiming Rommel as an anti-Nazi:
As a nation, we deceive ourselves into believing that there are two sorts of Germans—Good Germans and
Bad Germans. The ‘Bad Germans’ are militarists, Nazis, anti-democratic, and perpetrators of atrocities.
The ‘Good Germans’ are peace-loving democrats and real gentlemen. Ergo, since Rommel was a clean
fighter, he must have been anti-Nazi, and men like him would make good allies of democracy against the
Russians.24

Finally, even historian Hugh Trevor-Roper joined the fray: ‘The danger now is that
“our friend Rommel” is becoming not a magician or a bogy-man, but too much of a
hero’. He reminded readers of Rommel’s earlier support for Hitler, commander of his
body-guard in 1938, and thus emblematic of Wehrmacht support generally for National

21 George Malcolm Thomson, ‘The fascinating story of a swashbuckling general’, Evening Standard (25 Jan. 1950).

22 ‘Rommel: A Flattering and Unconvincing Portrait’, Daily Telegraph (23 Jan. 1950).

23 The New Statesman and Nation (28 Jan. 1950).

24 Picture Post, 1 Apr. 1950, p. 41.

 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 525

Socialism, until it was too late. ‘Above all, let us not regard him as a hero or a martyr,
though it may flatter our vanity to idolise the enemies we have defeated. Hitler’s politics
and Hitler’s war were serious and criminal affairs’.25
Nevertheless, the negative voices on the Rommel biography were at least
counterbalanced by the supporters, revealing an evenly divided public opinion. Yet when
the book became a film nearly two years later, it received almost universally positive
reviews in Britain, even more so than in the United States.26 The Times advised viewers to
watch the film from the Germans’ point of view.27 If it did cause annoyance, it was the
suggestion that Afrika Korps defeat had been caused by Führer meddling, rather than Allied
superiority. As Leonard Mosley wrote in the Daily Express: ‘It is brilliantly made, fiendishly
well acted, tremendously exciting—but there were moments in it when I wanted to stand
up and throw hand-grenades at the screen. It made me that angry’.28 Yet such views were

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rare. There were only minor protests at the premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square,
when a Mrs Seares (aged 41) was bound over to keep the peace after shouting ‘Don’t
glorify the murderer’.29 Elsewhere, in Vienna for example, or Milan, the film had led to
Communist-inspired riots and had been closed down.30 The British response appeared
muted by comparison. And just as the book had been launched during one general
election campaign, so too was the film during the Tories’ re-election campaign of 1951.
Indeed, since the official commemoration day for the Battle of El Alamein, at which
Churchill and Montgomery were to speak, was deemed by the BBC too party-political
for transmission, rather surreally the soundtrack to Desert Fox was broadcast instead.31
One informed critic, who ‘went to see it in a very critical frame of mind, from past
experience of “Hollywood” handling of history’, but was ‘pleasantly surprised’, was
Basil Liddell Hart, the celebrated British military historian.32 He had attended with a
group of high-ranking British officers, who had been equally appreciative. Liddell Hart
had followed the book and film controversy assiduously, and had indeed acted behind
the scenes to secure the assistance, as technical adviser to the film, of former Field
Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, whom he had already interviewed in captivity for The
Other Side of the Hill (1948). Then, Liddell Hart had famously described Wehrmacht generals
as mere ‘technicians’, but its second, expanded edition, significantly published in
Germany in 1950 before it appeared in English in 1951, included a whole new chapter
on Hitler’s ‘soldier in the sun’.33 In it, he conceded that British ‘admiration became

25 ‘Why should we idolise Rommel?’, Picture Post (18 Mar. 1950), pp. 25–9.

26 Johnson to Young, 26 Oct. 1951, Boston University—Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Nunnally Johnson
collection, box 7/61; see also Brian C. Etheridge, ‘The Desert Fox, Memory Diplomacy, and the German Question in
Early Cold War America’, Diplomatic History, 32 (2008), pp. 207–238.
27 The Times (10 Oct. 1951).

28 Daily Express (4 Oct. 1951).

29 ‘War widows say “Free wife who shouted at Rommel”’, Herald (5 Nov. 1951).

30 Manchester Guardian (29 Feb. 1952); Rundschau am Montag (6 Oct. 1952).

31 Neue Zeitung (21 Oct. 1951).

32 Liddell Hart to editor of Daily Herald, 21 Nov. 1951, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London,

Basil Liddell Hart papers, 9/24/34.

33 Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill: Germany’s Generals—Their Rise and Fall, with Their Own Account of

Military Events, 1939–1945 (2nd edn, London, 1951), pp. 76–85. In German this appeared as Jetzt dürfen sie reden:
Hitlers Generale berichten (Stuttgart, 1950).
34 Ibid., p. 76.
526 Patrick Major

almost affectionate’ towards Rommel.34 It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Liddell
Hart was seized on as a sympathetic outside expert in West Germany’s emerging
rearmament debate,35 or that he agreed to write forewords for other Wehrmacht
autobiographies.36 It has even been suggested that, in order to restore his own waning
reputation and assert his claim to be the intellectual father of blitzkrieg warfare, he had
entered into an unspoken pact to help rehabilitate Wehrmacht leaders in return for their
own endorsement of his guru status.37 Liddell Hart then went on to edit the English
edition of The Rommel Papers (1953), after these had appeared in German in 1950 as War
without Hate,38 making flattering comparisons of Rommel with Lawrence of Arabia—
‘two masters of desert warfare’.39 Moreover, the Englishman had in the interim helped
to secure the return from American confiscation of Rommel’s letters to his wife, which
were incorporated into the English-language edition, further humanizing his image.

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Liddell Hart was also co-opted into West German filmic rehabilitations of the Desert
Fox, revealing important transnational aspects of postwar Wehrmacht mythmaking.
Constantin-Verleih’s documentary Das war unser Rommel (That Was Our Rommel, Wigankow,
1953) is a curious mixture of grieving commemoration and soldierly reminiscence. Made
officially at the behest of the German war graves’ commission, publicity material showed
a German and a British soldier laying a wreath at the grave of Geoffrey Keyes, the British
commando leader killed during the raid on Rommel (the opening scene of Desert Fox).40
The documentary then ended with a reverential shot of Rommel’s tomb, just as Desert Fox
had begun. It also used copious Wochenschau newsreel footage, as well as stock from
Britain’s Desert Victory (1943), even bringing its co-director David MacDonald over to the
German cutting room. Alongside Rommel’s former aide Fritz Bayerlein, the film
company placed great value on securing Liddell Hart as technical adviser, according to
whom this was ‘superb propaganda for Britain in every way … Constantin [were] ready
to do anything I wish’.41 But whereas Desert Fox had used Anglo-German rapprochement
to rehabilitate the top military leadership, the German production does this at the rank-
and-file level. The plain-speaking Afrika Korps Landser narrator is joined by a fictitious
British tommy, ‘Jack Elliott’, who puts the British case in disarmingly broken German.
Yet, Liddell Hart was deluding himself if he thought this was one-way British propaganda.
In the film the Eighth Army learns its tactics from the master, Rommel, who is attributed
even in 1942 with the superhuman foresight to predict Cold War developments a decade
hence: ‘We must come to an understanding with the West. The self-destruction of
Europe must come to an end. Only a political, economic and military union can
guarantee the existence of Europe in the future’. Moreover, reconciliation was closely
tied to self-assertion. As one adviser on Das war unser Rommel boasted: ‘James Mason does

35 Alaric Searle, ‘A Very Special Relationship: Basil Liddell Hart, Wehrmacht Generals and the Debate on West German
Rearmament, 1945–1953’, War in History, 5 (1998), pp. 327–57.
36 For instance, for Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (London, 1952), pp. 11–15; Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories: The

War Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Brilliant General (London, 1958), pp. 13–16.
37 John J. Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (London, 1988).

38 Basil Liddell Hart (ed.), The Rommel Papers (London, 1953); Erwin Rommel with Lucie Rommel and Fritz Bayerlein

(eds), Krieg ohne Haß (Heidenheim, 1950).

39 Liddell Hart (ed.), Rommel Papers, p. xiv.

40 Illustrierte Film-Bühne, Nr. 1985.

41 BLH handwritten notes, LHCMA, Basil Liddell Hart papers, 9/24/35.

 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 527

his best as Rommel, but it is sissy stuff to us who fought with him. We are going to make
the real thing’.42 Between the pious interludes, therefore, the film takes a fond and often
macho trip down memory lane. Other, more revisionist documentary-based films
followed, such as So war der deutsche Landser (Baumeister, 1955), which pleaded for a
normalization of all fronts in popular memory. Here, as with the feature films, Rommel
appears to have been the stalking horse sent out to explore the acceptable boundaries of
wartime nostalgia and legitimation.
Other British military historians went on to add to Rommel’s respectability, but often
choosing to focus on his military exploits rather than the political backstory.43 These were
precisely the areas which the Young biography, and above all the film, had neglected. But
it soon became clear that the armchair generals had an appetite for more action, although
this needed excusing in some way. Ronald Lewin, a former Desert Rat and then a leading

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BBC radio executive and founder of the Today Programme, after one straight military
history,44 claimed in a second that, ‘[w]ithout indulging in the romanticism of T.E.
Lawrence, it is still possible and necessary to assert that in some indefinable way the purity
of the desert purified the desert war’.45 Retired general Sir David Fraser did not shrink
from labelling Rommel a modern-day hero, not so much for his purported eleventh-hour
conversion but largely for his battlefield prowess.46 One of the more recent North African
histories even borrows Rommel’s own posthumous memoirs for its subtitle.47 Thus,
British biographers were far less likely to indulge in the ‘democratization’ myths which
had characterized some of the earlier West German biographies, most notably that of
Hans Speidel, Rommel’s second-in-command in Normandy.48 Instead, the story of
Rommel is essentially depoliticized and remilitarized. The biographer who went furthest
in this direction was David Irving, later attacked as a Holocaust denier, who discounted
the Desert Fox as a resister, accusing his former opponents instead of creating an ‘anti-
villain, a benign Nazi in contrast with whom the regular run of Nazis would seem all the
more despicable’.49 For Irving it was Speidel, a key figure in the build-up of the Bundeswehr
and NATO, who had used the Rommel myth to further his own ‘reflected glory’.50
Parallel to these military histories is a cloak-and-dagger literature bordering on fantasy.
One popular theme is ‘Rommel’s gold’, allegedly plundered by the Afrika Korps and
hidden somewhere in the Mediterranean, a modern holy grail51 which has also prompted
romantic spy thrillers52 and films.53 Or else Rommel becomes an elusive target for Allied
hit squads in search of the ultimate ‘rogue male’,54 a stocking-filler for special forces

42 Daily Express (18 Sept. 1952).

43 Kenneth Macksey, Rommel: Battles and Campaigns (London, 1979).

44 Ronald Lewin, Rommel as a Military Commander (London, 1968).

45 Ronald Lewin, The Life and Death of the Afrika Korps (1977; Barnsley, 2003), p. 21.

46 David Fraser, Knight’s Cross: The Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (London, 1994).

47 John Bierman and Colin Smith, Alamein: War without Hate (London, 2002).

48 Hans Speidel, Invasion 1944: Ein Beitrag zu Rommels und des Reiches Schicksal (Tübingen and Stuttgart, 1949),
translated as Invasion 1944: Rommel and the Normandy Campaign (Chicago, 1950).
49 David Irving, The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (London, 1977), p. 5.

50 Ibid., p. 408.

51 Peter Haining, The Mystery of Rommel’s Gold: The Search for the Legendary Nazi Treasure (London, 2004).

52 Maggie Davis, Rommel’s Gold (London, 1971).

53 Il Tesero di Rommel (Marcellini, 1955).

54 Michael Asher, Get Rommel: The Secret British Mission to Kill Hitler’s Greatest General (London, 2004).
528 Patrick Major

buffs.55 This hunt for the Desert Fox has spawned its own pulp fiction,56 including that of
‘John Kerrigan’,57 otherwise known as the late Charles Whiting, who has used Rommel
under his other alias, ‘Leo Kessler’, for his ‘SS Wotan’ series.58 Indeed, twenty years after
Desert Fox, director Henry Hathaway found himself shooting Raid on Rommel (1971), one
in a long series of behind-the-lines special operations films starring Richard Burton. It
was even possible for British schoolboys in the 1970s to make an Airfix model of Rommel
in his command halftrack, pointing into the imaginary distance, and still today several
12-inch action figures of the Field Marshal are available from militaria companies,
complete with authentic uniform and marshal’s baton. In the United States in the 1960s
youngsters could even buy a ‘Rommel’s Rod’, a ‘Krazy Kommand Kar’.59 At this remove,
the figure of Rommel had become largely mythic, divorced from his historical time and
place. Or simply kitsch.

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The ‘Worthy Enemy’ in Context

The publicity battles cited above would suggest that, alongside an overt and
understandable hostility, there developed an ambivalent love-hate relationship with the
Germans, more subtle even than some of the knee-jerk reactions associated with the
more recent present. This was therefore a mixed discourse about a curiously ‘worthy
enemy’. There were a number of obvious reasons. Germany no longer represented an
immediate threat to Britain. The Cold War and mobilization against the new (or rather
old) Soviet enemy meant that, realpolitisch, Britain had to make friends with its new
alliance partner, the Federal Republic of Germany. This entailed a revised attitude to the
German military in particular. In the shadow of the new superpowers, Britain was a
déclassé great power, having lost many of the colonies which the Empire had supposedly
been fighting to secure. The technologization of modern warfare and the post-1949
atomic stalemate recast the Second World War as the apparently last gasp of conventional
conflict, when a post-Victorian power such as Britain could still make a difference. The
Second World War was, furthermore, an encounter where, at least in its first half, Britain
could ‘claim’ Germany as her personal enemy: France was defeated; the Soviet Union
co-existed in an uneasy non-aggression pact; America could only enter the war in earnest
in 1942. It is quite possible, therefore, that retrospective pro-Germanism masked a
contemporary anti-Americanism. There was a certain Commonwealth schadenfreude at
the poor showing of America’s green troops against Rommel at the Battle of Kasserine
Pass in February 1943. As Enoch Powell wrote at the time, after his first encounter with
US troops in Algiers, ‘I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or
Japan ever were … our terrible enemy, America’.60 Desert war epics therefore represented
a cultural division of labour which excluded Americans from the heroic past. Apart from
the ahistorical Sahara (Zoltan Korda, 1943), which saw Humphrey Bogart fighting the

55 Jon E. Lewis (ed.), The Mammoth Book of Special Forces: Over 30 Missions of Ultimate Danger Behind Enemy Lines,
from the Attempted Assassination of Rommel to the Iraq War (Philadelphia, 2008).
56 Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel (New York, 2008).

57 John Kerrigan, Kill Rommel (Sutton, 1995).

58 Leo Kessler (Charles Whiting), Rommel’s Last Battle (Sutton, 2006).

59 Dennis Showalter, Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2005), p. 1.

60 Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London, 1998), p. 75.
 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 529

Axis months before the Torch landings, or Tobruk (Hiller, 1967) with Rock Hudson and
George Peppard, desert war films featured a small band of very British character actors.
Faced with the rather anticlimactic present, Britain liked to relive her ‘finest hour’, but
it was important that this was against a foe worth beating. One needs only to compare the
attitude to the Italians, who were usually treated with derision and contempt, despite
becoming the Allies’ co-belligerent in 1943.61 It has been suggested in one influential
psychohistory that the postwar Germans suffered unconscious withdrawal symptoms
from their departed, forbidden love object, Adolf Hitler.62 By the same token, one might
add that Britain suffered the loss of a familiar hate object, but simultaneously discovered
the new pleasures of reconciliation. In a hate-hate relationship the othering process often
creates a mirror opposite image of the enemy, diametrically opposed to the self. In a love-
hate relationship, however, the other bears family resemblances to the self. ‘A Psychologist’,

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drafted into the Desert Fox debate, compared the British rehabilitation of Rommel to
hunters mounting their trophies, or a class act with homoerotic overtones:
the whole business of the gentleman’s code is an affair of men with a special outlook, of manly men, of men
who regard war as a game and who can avert their eyes from the political and human significance of it.63

Boys beaten in childhood would claim it had never done them any harm.
The fact that they enjoy discipline by stronger men, and admire manly, rather than womanly, virtues makes
them excellent warriors… . [Rommel] was the one German general who gave us a good hiding and was de-
feated after a close thing.64

Part of the intensity of the Anglo-German relationship was predicated on these elective
affinities. Britain’s popular culture already enjoyed a bellicose strain, suggesting that
Britons, too, liked to see themselves as a ‘warrior nation’.65 Discipline, duty and self-
abnegation were values which united conservatives everywhere, as well as ideas that
warfare was still played by the ‘rules of the game’. British notions of fairness, themselves
often a chimera in the age of total war, thus dictated a certain respect for the enemy, even
in defeat. War in the desert was constantly infused with sporting metaphors—Monty was
going to ‘hit the enemy for six out of Africa’. There emerged a latent envy of the
Wehrmacht: man for man, the German forces had apparently outperformed Allied troops,
who had nevertheless prevailed by virtue of superior matériel.66 The embracement of
officerly values and a war of movement was thus in part a rejection of modern, attritional
warfare (and thus an escape from the First World War). Yet this ‘remilitarization’ of the
war against National Socialism signalled at the same time its compartmentalization and
depoliticization. This was the precursor to more alarming impulses to rehabilitate the
German Army, not only in its encounters with the former western Allies, but also
retrospectively in its deadly combat on the eastern front against the Soviet Union. One

61 Even an Anglo-Italian reconciliation film such as The Best of Enemies (Hamilton, 1962) cannot do so without stere-
otyping the Italians as comic buffoons. But this was a tradition which went back to Five Graves to Cairo (Wilder,
1943).
62 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich,

1967).
63 ’Why Rommel goes down with Sportsmen’, Picture Post (1 April 1950), p. 43

64 Ibid.

65 Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture (London, 2000).

66 John Laffin, Jackboot: The Story of the German Soldier (1965; Thrupp, 2003), p. vii.
530 Patrick Major

recent volume has documented American popular culture’s romanticization of the

Wehrmacht on the eastern front, offering a retrospective wish-fulfilment for Americans’
own anticommunism, in films, wargames and historical reenactment societies.67 While
Rommel’s sins may have been more of omission than commission, his relatively good
name was used, by extension, to sanctify less deserving members of the German military.
For instance, Erich von Manstein’s defence counsel at his trial, Reginald Paget, Labour
MP for Northampton, wrote of his anti-guerrilla operations: ‘It was really unreasonable
to expect the Germans to fight these all-in wrestlers [the partisans] with the Queensberry
rules’.68 The British publisher Odhams commissioned a biography of von Rundstedt69—
who had only escaped prosecution for war crimes due to failing health—which completely
glossed over his role in the subsequent dishonouring of the 20 July conspirators.70 There
was thus not so much a battle of the memoirs in the early 1950s, as a combined operation

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conducted on both sides of the Channel to present the Wehrmacht in a positive light. These
Anglo-Saxon openings also made it possible for revisionist accounts by former members
of the National Socialist propaganda apparatus, such as Paul Carell, who started with
the Desert Fox before moving on to more hardcore revisionist histories of the eastern
front.71 These in turn were recycled in translation back into the English-speaking world.
Probably most of Carell’s appreciative Anglo-American readership did not know that
‘Carell’ was in fact Obersturmbannführer Paul Carl Schmitt, former press chief in
Ribbentrop’s foreign ministry.
Yet when dealing with cultural products such as film screenplays, one needs to be aware
of the rules governing the genre, as well as the background politics of the Cold War. The
‘worthy enemy’ serves literary as well as political needs. Most scriptwriters, for instance,
would have feared audiences being turned off by the unremitting depiction of black-on-
black evil. Since most propaganda films were conversion narratives, characters had to
exist who were in some way redeemable. It was simply good theatre to have a flawed, but
essentially good character to offset the truly wicked. One will thus encounter numerous
pairings of complementary characters who embody on screen different aspects of a psyche
which may in reality have co-existed in one individual. A classic tactic was to gender the
divide between good German (woman) and bad Nazi (man), as in Basil Dearden’s 1947
Frieda, an Ealing reconciliation film about a German war bride moving to England, where
the heroine is contrasted with her incorrigibly fanatical brother Ricki. It is Frieda’s
conventional gendering as submissive housewife which breaks through local hostility in
fictional Denfield, allowing audiences to answer the film’s rhetorical tagline ‘Would you
invite Frieda into your homes?’ with a ‘yes’. Meanwhile, Ricki, the Wehrmacht POW, only
understands the language of violence and fanaticism and is ultimately defeated.72

67 Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular
Culture (Cambridge, 2008), esp. pp. 187–222.
68 R.T. Paget, Manstein: His Campaigns and His Trial (London, 1951), p. 139.

69 Guenther Blumentritt, Von Rundstedt: The Soldier and the Man (London, 1951).

70 Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford,

2001), p. 46.
71 Paul Carell, Die Wüstenfüchse: Tatsachenbericht (Hamburg, 1958), translated into English two years later; see also

Wigbert Benz, Paul Carell: Ribbentrops Pressechef Paul vor und nach 1945 (Berlin, 2005).
72 Charlotte Brunsdon and Rachel Moseley, ‘She’s a foreigner who’s become a British subject: Frieda’, in Alan Burton

et al. (eds), Liberal Directions: Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge, 1997), pp. 129–36.
 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 531

Such dichotomizing formulae came at a price, nonetheless. It is not that negative

images of Germans did not exist in postwar cinema—there were many. But the ‘bad
Nazi’ stereotypes remained precisely that: stereotypes which could be filed away in
viewers’ minds by virtue of their familiarity. One regular bad Nazi/good German
juxtaposition occurs, for instance, in the prisoner-of-war drama, contrasting an
honourable commandant fighting a war on two fronts, against both the prisoners and the
totalitarian SS/Gestapo. In the earliest British example of the genre, The Captive Heart
(Dearden, 1946), Herr Forster of the Gestapo (Karel Stepanek), in his rimless,
Himmleresque spectacles and mackintosh, is always an outsider even for the regular
camp guards. In Albert, R.N. (Gilbert, 1949), the avuncular German naval commandant
is in conflict with the SS man, the aquiline Anton Diffring, forever typecast in subsequent
roles as the evil Nazi. This format was repeated ad infinitum, until it parodied itself. In

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The Colditz Story (Hamilton, 1955), incarceration is reduced to British public schoolboy
pranks against the ‘goons’. There were, however, minor variants on this theme. Whereas
the understanding in earlier films was between officers, later films allowed a form of
proletarian internationalism between other ranks and the guards themselves. The
Password is Courage (Stone, 1962) has a cockney Dirk Bogarde both humiliating and
protecting a buffoonish NCO, amid scenes of slapstick comedy. It was only a matter of
time, therefore, before the predictability of the genre demanded something new. The
Germans themselves became the camp inmates in The One That Got Away (Ward Baker,
1957), which launched a new star on the British screen, Hardy Krüger, popular with
female audiences for his rugged good looks and hyper-masculinity, in contrast with the
rather fuddy-duddy British male leads of the time.73 Now audiences were rooting for a
Luftwaffe pilot to escape, after its director had made a conscious decision to break with
stereotypes of ‘homosexual, Prussian officers, Gestapo torturers or beer-swilling
Bavarians’.74 John Ramsden’s recent research has shown that an important component
of such Anglo-German rapprochement was financial. British filmmakers realized that
rather than seeking their return from a purely domestic box office, Europe and above all
Germany offered an internationalized market. The film was highly successful in West
Germany, returning £3 million.75 As the German public relations material from
J. Arthur Rank made clear, film stars were the new cultural diplomats: ‘In fact, these men
and women should receive a public relations bonus from the foreign ministry… . Einer
kam durch is ideally suited to remove many resentments and prejudices about “the
Germans”’.76 Indeed, not long afterwards Krüger did receive the Bundesverdienstkreuz for
services to Germany abroad. Nevertheless, at the first press conference, when British
journalists asked Krüger if he had ever been a Nazi, he disarmingly answered yes, having
also debuted in Alfred Weidenmann’s Junge Adler in 1944.77
The One That Got Away was perhaps the best known Anglo-German reconciliation film,
but there were others. In the little-known So Little Time (Bennett, 1952), the British actor

73 Melanie Williams, ‘“The Most Explosive Object to Hit Britain since the V2!”: The British Films of Hardy Krüger and
Anglo-German Relations during the 1950s’, Cinema Journal, 46, 1 (2006), pp. 85–107.
74 Roy Ward Baker, The Director’s Cut: A Memoir of 60 Years in Film and Television (London, 2000), p. 99.

75 Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), p. 48.

76 J. Arthur Rank, ‘Presse-Information’ for Einer kam durch, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, 3364.

77 Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, pp. 295–324.

532 Patrick Major

Marius Goring plays an officer billeted in Belgium against the budding Maria Schell as
the local young countess. It is Colonel Hohensee’s love of music which finally breaks
down the silence between the two, allowing love to intervene. Goring was to play another
bridging role in Powell and Pressburger’s Ill Met by Moonlight (1957). The Archers team
had of course already made one of the most famous Germanophile films of the war, The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which Anton Walbrook had played the Prussian
officer and aristocrat, ending the film as a convinced antifascist. Ill Met took a real-life
incident, the abduction of General Kreipe from Crete in 1944, to deliver a faintly comic
juxtaposition of British amateurishness and Prussian correctness, on their hike through
the mountains.78 Only at the end does the German realize that all the carefully discarded
artefacts, with which he is hoping to provide a trail for the pursuers, are being equally
carefully collected by his captors. He then salutes not only them, but their true

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professionalism.
Powell and Pressburger’s previous film, The Battle of the River Plate (1956) had also
provided a vehicle for Peter Finch’s highly sympathetic portrayal of Captain Langsdorff
of the Graf Spee, who becomes the tragic hero at the end of the film. Contrast this with
the wartime propaganda film For Freedom (Elvey and Knight, 1940), which covers the
same story, but in which the Germans play a far more marginal role. The implicit
juxtaposition now, however, is between past Germanic chivalry and the rather crass
American media reporting of the ship’s final moments amid the vapid pleasures of
Montevideo Harbour. It seems clear where the British audience’s sympathies are
supposed to lie.
It is also instructive that as real Anglo-German relations improved, so it became more
difficult to cast real Germans as bad Nazis. Robert Shaw thus played the fanatical panzer
leader in The Battle of the Bulge (Annakin, 1965). The late Paul Scofield played the warped

Figure 26.26: General Kreipe (Marius Goring) confronts Major Leigh Fermor (Dirk Bogarde) and
British amateur professionalism.
Ill Met by Moonlight (Powell and Pressburger, 1957), courtesy of the Rank Organization.

78 Michael Powell, Million Dollar Movie (New York, 1995), p. 352.

 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 533

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Figure 26.27: Captain Dove (Bernard Miles) bids farewell to a sombre Kapitän Langsdorff (Peter Finch)
The Battle of the River Plate (Powell and Pressburger, 1956), courtesy of Arcturus Productions.

art-lover and hostage-killer of The Train (Frankenheimer, 1964). Indeed, in what might
be called ‘friend/foe transvestism’, there were a suspiciously large number of British or
British-acted films that played out the fantasy of donning the uniform of the enemy. The
perceived glamour of the Wehrmacht had clearly posthumously reached beyond National
Socialist propaganda. In The Guns of Navarone (1961), based on the Scottish thriller writer
Alastair MacLean’s novel, the plot requires Gregory Peck and David Niven to disguise
themselves as German troops, as they do in MacLean’s other film adaptation, Where
Eagles Dare (1968). So, too, do the escaping POWs in Von Ryan’s Express (1965), in which
the British padre puts on the uniform of the hostage officer, rather overdoing the part for
the film’s comic effect. The padre is so convincing to German troops he encounters that
one speaks shyly to camera, shrugging ‘Nazis … mein Gott’. Joking apart, these acts of
transvestism suggest that a wish fulfilment fantasy was occurring with these transgressions.
As the US-based Polish artist Piotr Uklanski has also recently suggested, in a photographic
exhibition of stills of Hollywood actors in Wehrmacht uniforms, the viewer was
collaborating in the act of glamourization.79 One can also observe how the audience’s
sympathies in some cases migrate wholesale to the Germans. The Eagle Has Landed
(Sturges, 1976) is a largely faithful reworking of Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942), in
which German fifth columnists give themselves away by their callous behaviour towards
civilians. A generation later, however, the audience is rooting for Michael Caine’s
German paratroops.80
To return to North Africa, where a surprising number of 1950s war films were located,
the desert also became the perfect arena for reconciliation narratives, existential trials
where nature is the new common enemy. The classic British Ice Cold in Alex (Thompson,
1958) presents a conversion narrative where the ‘bad Nazi’, a German spy masquerading
as a South African straggler, becomes the ‘good German’ by spiritually defecting to the

79 Piotr Uklanski, The Nazis (Zurich, 1999).

80 S.P.
Mackenzie, ‘Nazis into Germans: Went the Day Well? (1942) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976)’, Journal of
Popular Film and Television, 31 (2003), pp. 83–92.
534 Patrick Major

new in-group. It is reminiscent of its intertextual predecessor, Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944):

there too, a German helps the enemy to survive with his brute strength; in Ice Cold,
however, the Allies do not throw the German overboard, instead risking their own lives to
save him from the quicksand of the Qattara Depression. ‘All against the desert—the
greater enemy’, acknowledges Captain Lutz in the final reconciliation scene. In similar
vein, but in a more lyrical tragic-comedic vein, the Franco-Spanish-West-German
co-production Un Taxi pour Tobrouk (de la Patellière, 1960) teams Hardy Krüger up with
Lino Ventura to negotiate a minefield which has become the common challenge, only to
succumb to ‘friendly’ Allied fire. Krüger was to appear yet again as the engineer in Flight
of the Phoenix (Aldrich, 1965), a self-referential revisitation of the desert by a group of
stranded oil-workers, who bury their previous national differences and pool their
technical know-how to refly a crashed plane. Only rarely do we witness ‘bad Nazis’ in the

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desert of the 1950s, as in The Young Lions (Dmytryk, 1958), where massacres of sleepy
British soldiers can take place against type. Yet, even here film sanitizes. Whereas the
anti-hero Wehrmacht NCO of the original novel reluctantly obeys orders to give British
wounded the coup de grâce, as did various drafts of the screenplay, on screen Marlon
Brando’s Christian Diestl cannot pull the trigger. Why? As Buddy Adler, Twentieth
Century-Fox’s chief executive wrote:
This would be the perfect spot in the script to show that there were good Germans too, and that they were not
all Nazis even though they are in the German army. If you do not do this, I am sure that even in Western
Germany today they will not want to run this picture… . A good picture today can take a million dollars out of
Germany.81

And here British history meets German history. Films in the 1950s, but also popular
publishing, were an increasingly transnational business. Yet the recent Wehrmacht
controversy of the 1990s has been largely couched in national terms, as a problem of
postwar Germans, and West Germans in particular.82 It could be suggested, however,
that for various reasons the British (and Americans) colluded in the creation of a sanitized
image of the Wehrmacht. We need to see the ‘clean hands’ mythologization of the
Wehrmacht as part of an international process. Erwin Rommel himself may not have been
the worst offender, a fellow traveller rather than a war criminal. As one review of Desert
Fox tellingly realized, however, this was a film which could not have been made in
Germany, at least not yet:
Foreigners are opening a page of German history which gives even the hardened doubters proof of the exist-
ence of the ‘Other Germany’ which turned against the Hitler terror—a venture which from our own pen
would hardly have had the necessary distance and objective persuasiveness.83

As Bärbel Westermann has also suggested, the film removed a taboo against indigenous
war films in the early Federal Republic.84 Certainly, this did not mean an unreflected
return to martial values. As a recent article in this journal has suggested on the German

81 Buddy Adler, ‘Memorandum on First Draft Continuity of 4/25/57’, 15 May 1957, University of Southern California-
Doheny Library, 20th Century-Fox collection.
82 Michael Schornstheimer, ‘“Harmlose Idealisten und draufgängerische Soldaten”: Militär und Krieg in den

Illustriertenromanen der fünfziger Jahre’, in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds), Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen
der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg, 1995), pp. 634–50.
83 Kurier (11 Oct. 1952). Emphasis in original.

84 Bärbel Westermann, Nationale Identität im Spielfilm der fünfziger Jahre (Frankfurt/Main, 1990), pp. 51–67.
 ‘Our Friend Rommel’ 535

reception of a supposedly anti-war British box-office hit of 1957, The Bridge on the River
Kwai, there were plenty of liberal German reviewers who regarded it as glorifying the
British empire and latently racist.85 Yet some German viewers were bound to see the film
as a validation of the unbroken spirit of POWs everywhere, including, presumably,
among Germans held until recently in the Soviet Union. Thus, as cultural artefacts
crossed geographical boundaries, they could acquire unintended new meanings. Yet the
British seal of approval could be dangerous too, however well-meaning. The imprimatur
of British historians such as Liddell Hart implicitly sanctified the actions of the Wehrmacht
even in those theatres where it had breached codes of military conduct. These authors,
many of them translated back into German, conferred a retrospective legitimacy from a
former enemy on the rather murky history of the Second World War. The neat
compartmentalization of political responsibility for National Socialism meant that if

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war guilt was not black and white, it was at least black and field grey. Finally, if anything,
the reinvention of the Wehrmacht as the ‘worthy enemy’ served the needs of a reconstructed
postwar British identity, remasculinized and de-Americanized.86 Yet, in resurrecting these
warrior values from the recent past, the British were coming perilously close to making
war films rather than anti-war films, in which the ‘good Germans’ became little more
than politically correct sops to the rather unsavoury—dare one say obsessive?—interest
in ‘bad Nazis’.

Abstract

This piece examines the British reception of the biography of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel by
the British author Brigadier Desmond Young, upon which was based the Twentieth Century-Fox movie The
Desert Fox (Hathaway, 1951). British newspaper reviewers showed a love-hate relationship towards the
memory of the late Wehrmacht Field Marshal. For some, such as former opponent Claude Auchinleck and
military historian Basil Liddell Hart, Rommel was a talented field commander and resistance martyr, tangled
up in the 20 July 1944 conspiracy against Hitler, for which he had been forced to commit suicide; for others,
such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and Richard Crossman, he was an unthinking collaborator who had betrayed the
Führer only when the war had turned against the army. The author argues that the book and film set the
precedent for the cultural rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht on screen, not only in English-speaking countries,
but in West Germany too. Moreover, Anglo-American military histories and films tended to depoliticize and
remilitarize the Wehrmacht even more than West German productions. Other films considered include The
Battle of the River Plate (Powell and Pressburger, 1956), Ill Met by Moonlight (Powell and Pressburger, 1957)
and Ice Cold in Alex (Thompson, 1958). The author argues that the postwar ‘clean hands’ myth-making sur-
rounding the Wehrmacht was performed not only by the West German film industry but by a transnational
cultural division of labour which suited the needs of the Western alliance during Cold War rearmament and
West German reintegration into the international community.

Keywords: Rommel, Desert Fox, Wehrmacht, war film, Basil Liddell Hart
University of Reading
p.major@reading.ac.uk

85 Anne-Marie Scholz, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Revisited: Combat Cinema, American Cinema and the
German Past’, German History, 26 (2008), pp. 219–50.
86 Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the 1950s: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (London and New York, 2000),

pp. 175–95. How I Won the War (Lester, 1967), that quirky counter-cultural take on the war film featuring John
Lennon, can be viewed as a self-critical take on this genre. Here, muscular Christianity and German fascism converge.