Captain Hermann Aldinger portrayed in the Diary of Fieldmarshal Erwin Rommel, "The Desert Fox", during World War II
26 March 1941
"Spent our first day by the sea. It's a very lovely place and it's as good as being in a hotel in my confortable caravan. Bathe in the sea in the morning, it's already beautifully warm.
Aldinger and Guenther (Rommel's A.D.C and batman respectively) living in a tent close by. Yesterday's an Italian General, Calvi de Bergolo, made me a present of a bournous. It would do well for you as a theatre cloak".
Fieldmarshal Erwin Rommel
5 April 1941
"On the 4th April, I visited Benzhazi with the Chief of Staff and Aldinger and sent off the Reconnaissance Battalion, strenghtened by a Panzer company, through Regima and Charruba to Mechili. In
the afternoon I flew in a Junkers, there being no Storch serviceable, over Ben Gania and towards Tengeder. Columns were rolling eastwards along the track raising great pillars of dust. I thought I could identify our leading units 12 miles east of Gania".
28 June 1941
"You need not worry yourself any more about my health. I'm doing fine. Our place is much healthier, lying 600 feet above sea level. Besides, I've got the
advantage of my four walls. Aldinger was sick for a few days, but he's now getting better. There's alot of work".
11 April 1941
"When the commander of Brescia arrived at about midday, I informed him of my intentions, which were for the Brescia and later, the Trento to attack Tobruk
from the west, raising a great cloud of dust in the process and tying down the enemy strength, while at the same time the 5th Light Division made a sweep through the desert round the south of Tobruk in order to attack
it from the southeast. Early in the afternoon, Aldinger and I arrived in Tmimi, where our advance troops were located and General von Prittwitz of the plan for Tobruk"
Fieldmarshal Erwin Rommel
Footnote by Manfred Rommel, son of the "Desert Fox":
"Herman Aldinger, captain on the Reserve, a wiry Wuerttemberger of about 45 and a landscape architect in civilian life, had been on friendly terms with my
father ever since the First World War. My father, whom he had already accompanied in 1940 in France and in 1941 in North Africa, had summoned him to his staff when he returned to Germany in August 1944".
Stuttgart Mayor Manfred Rommel
Passage from the book, "ROMMEL" by Charles Douglas, Pages 77-78
"From Aldinger I heard a queer story about this period. When we went into Syria it will be remembered that the French hotly denied that they were helping the
Germans. They were resisting our advance, they said, merely because we were invading French territory. They would equally have resisted the Germans or any other invader. Having had my truck shot to pieces outside
Mezze, near Damascus, I spent three days as a prisoner and heard this explanation given with great vigour and apparent sincereity by various staff officers at French headquarters. What the truth was, I never discovered.
The French had, we were told, refuelled German aircrafts on their way to Iraq to support Rashid Ali's rebellion: it did not appear at the time that there had ever been more than a few Germans in plain clothes in Damascus
or Beirut. Aldinger's story was that, just before or just after "Battleaxe", a French aircraft from Syria landed at Bardia, that the French officer pilot was brought immediately to Rommel, that he spent more than
an hour with him and then took off again. If this is so, and Aldinger is positive, he presumably came from General Dentz, Commander of the Vichy French."
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