Desert Fox: Erwin Rommel’s Photograph Collection

The Vietnam War started in 1955 and ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975 when the Americans left in a hurry. It has been described as the first televised war but a claim to be the first war photographed in its entirety and detail could easily be made for that in the Western Desert in WW2.

Most of the soldiers in the “Deutsches Afrikakorps” were professionals who had joined the Wehrmacht in the 1930s and had spent many years training and exercising. They were also well paid compared to their contemporaries and had access to modern, high quality and robust cameras that were being produced in Germany by the likes of Leica.

When the DAK were sent out to North Africa, many took their cameras with them and, similar to modern tourists, they photographed everything they saw.

This meant, for example, that the DAK parade in the Port of Tripoli on 15th February 1941 was extremely well documented but not just by official German sources, such as the “PK” or “Propaganda Kompanie”, but also by photographs taken by the soldiers themselves.

What makes these “soldier photographers” more interesting than those posed for the PK is that alongside their tourist shots of ancient buildings, palm trees, bazaars and natives, they also photographed their own daily lives as it happened.

The tents they slept in, the food they ate, the foxholes they dug, water plants they built, fuel dumps they created, the tanks and soft-skinned vehicles they drove, and the guns they fired were all subjects to be photographed along with taking photographs of each other.

A lot of these are honest photographs of their daily life, warts and all, complete with worn-out and stained uniforms and include the graves of fallen comrades and of their opponents.

They make a stark contrast with those nearly every soldier had taken before they left Germany, a portrait in their best uniform with any decorations they had accrued worn. These portraits served two purposes, a reminder of them to their families whilst they were away and to be used on their “Sterbebild” or in-memoriam “death cards” if they fell in action. “Sterbebild” are an old German tradition and are given to relatives and friends at funerals as a keepsake.

These “soldier photographers” used black and white film. The Agfa colour film available at the time did not store well, suffered colour changes if exposed to elevated temperatures, were difficult to process and relatively rare and expensive so was generally limited to PK use. However, one person had a source of both black and white, and colour film for photography, this was Erwin Rommel.

Rommel was a keen photographer and took his Leica with him wherever he went. During the Blitzkrieg across France, he photographed his troops advancing and in action, including whilst he was under fire.

He had intentions to write an update to his military manual, “Infanterie greift an”, to reflect the advances made in tactics using Panzers, and also a history of the war in the desert. He also took candid photographs of his officers and men, rarely setting up posed shots, and liked to include strong geometric shapes within his compositions.

When he got to Africa, Rommel initially also took tourist-style photographs but as his initial advance got underway, he began to concentrate more on documenting how the DAK were achieving the gains they made, particularly through candid photographs of his men in action.

His biographer, Basil Liddel Hart, considered that Rommel through training had a “highly developed eye for spotting what was significant in a scene, and a knack of registering it. His passion for taking photographs at every step of an advance was a symptom of this characteristic – as it was with Lawrence, in the Arabian Theatre of World War 1”.

He was regularly flown over battlefields to look over the terrain for his advances, particularly in a Fiesler Storch where its noticeably short take-off and landing, along with resilient landing gear, enabled him to literally drop in on his forward units to direct them personally. Being also relatively slow, flying in a Storch allowed Rommel to photograph the terrain, his troops and armour and that of his opposition. On one occasion, flying over Italian lines, his Storch was hit by ground fire as the Italians did not recognise which side the aircraft belonged to.

When he returned to his home in Germany for the last time, he left his camera and photographs with his wife Lucie-Maria.

After his death, as the American advance was closing in on his home, his wife and son Manfred attempted to hide his remaining personal effects such as his diaries, notes for his new military manual and a book on the Desert War, his uniforms, camera and photographic collections.

This was to no avail as when the Americans reached his home, they threw them out and ransacked the place, stealing much of his property but not the hidden photographs. Next came officers of the US Counterintelligence Corps who, after interrogating his widow and, despite making promises that the photographs would be looked after and eventually returned, giving her a receipt signed by a “Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Quirk”, took away his remaining papers and photographs as well as his camera.

Taken to the US, the photographs eventually ended up in the National Archives in boxes with no attempt at conservation for most of the rest of the 20th century.

That is until a teenager called Zita Ballinger Fletcher went to the National Archive to undertake research on a novel she wanted to write about North Africa. Having made research inquiries, she discovered the neglected collection and was so impressed with the techniques used that she decided to write a thesis based on “Rommel as a photojournalist” as an undergraduate project.

To do this she had to digitally copy and then repair the images of the damaged photographs, many had faded or darkened with age as well as some being stuck together through poor storage, to make them suitable for publication whilst she made an analysis of Rommel’s photographic style and techniques.

Zita Ballinger Fletcher is a descendant of Spanish settlers in New Mexico and of German settlers of a Swabian background, which is where Rommel originated from. One of her late relatives had fought against the DAK and she grew up with family stories retold about his time in North Africa.

When she began this project she said she was “confronted by opposition from many people” and that “this hostility came from fellow students, professors, university staff and even members of my own family”.

Zita Ballinger Fletcher pursued completing her project on the grounds of “it’s unquestionable that Erwin Rommel was an important historical figure. This photo collection is significant because it sheds new light on his personality (and) allows us to view him from a creative standpoint”. Also that her project was “not about passing moral verdicts”.

As “Zita Steele”, she has now successfully published four volumes of Rommel’s photographs, the first book in 2015, and which are all available on Amazon, from her publishers (www.fletcherpublishers.com) or used on eBay. She has recently had published a book based on Rommel’s book “Infantry Attacks” as a new translation with added analysis and photographs restored from the Rommel collection.

For Military Collectors, original DAK soldier photographs are now becoming more readily available for the reason that many families in modern “woke” Germany appear to either not care for or no longer relate to the history of their soldier ancestors. Inherited albums, broken-up albums from house clearances and collections of unique, original photographs can be bought from specialist dealers or online from sites such as eBay, as also can “Sterbebild”.

However, be aware that fakes, such as printed screenshots from DVD stills, scans from books, reprints off original photographs and digitally colourised black and white images do afflict the market.
 

© John Tull 2024