Swiss Army Officer Lauds Nazi Gen. Erwin Rommel
Image by getty images
A Swiss army commander reportedly praised Nazi-era German general Erwin Rommel before a group of officers, holding up Rommel as an example for the Swiss army to follow.
According to a report in the Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag, the officer, a lieutenant colonel identified only as “PL,” defended his words as “no praise for Rommel the person, but merely highlighting his leadership.”
Rommel was the World War II field marshal who led German forces in North Africa. He conspired against Adolf Hitler late in World War II. Once the conspiracy was discovered in 1944, he committed suicide after being presented with a choice between killing himself or standing trial for treason.
The Swiss newspaper article, which appeared online on Dec. 8, said the lieutenant colonel delivered his talk on Rommel, who was known as the “Desert Fox,” to a group of soldiers, telling them Rommel “possessed leadership skills and was a model general in combat.”
“I was shocked that one of our officers praised a Nazi as a role model,” one of the soldiers told the newspaper.
The Swiss Ministry of Defense said in a statement that “because of his role in the Third Reich” mentioning Rommel was “inappropriate.”
“There are plenty of Swiss examples which can be used such as Henri Guisan, a symbol of self-assertion in dangerous times,” the ministry added.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
