Before I have my fun , a bit of advice Anything else is merely opinion better left to the aforementioned historical scholars . Certainly not illiterate ShitWehraboosSay circlejerkers . This sub is a hive of scum and villainy , but you ' d better get your facts right or they ' re going to eat you alive . There are a disproportionate number of pretty well informed and even expert voices here . You need to tease apart your argument and decide what it is you want to argue for because you ' re just laying out a pretty thoroughly disproven narrative about who Rommel was . This is fine if you ' re willing to learn because the truth is that there ' s a lot of shitty history written about Rommel , some of it written by known Holocaust deniers . I too was once quite enamoured of the Desert Fox , for me it never rose to the level of thinking he wasn ' t a Nazi sympathizer , but I did think he was an exceptional general . In my case the veil was lifted when I found out that very few actual experts see him as a crucial figure or even a particularly important general within the German army let alone on a historical scale . See this as an opportunity to discover all of the German generals who were better than Rommel and thus didn ' t get sent to a backwater like North Africa to assist Italy in trying to seize a desert and instead were employed fighting Germany ' s most strategically significant opponent . So I ' ll start with your biggest mistake in my opinion Undebated Facts Rommel was an exemplary tank commander , admired by many , including . Rommel was never a tank commander in the first place . Until the Nazis rose to power he was essentially an unremarkable infantry officer who was good enough to stay in the Reichswehr but not remarkable enough to rise to any high positions until he found a political patron who would influence his career progression in the immediate lead up to the war . His most remarkable combat action was almost certainly his role in 1917 as a company commander against the Italians in the Battle of Caporetto . His company accepted the surrender of an entire Italian division in this engagement and Rommel won his Pour la Merite in this action . Though I would be remiss in failing to note that this was mostly a Pyrrhic victory as the German forces were essentially on a starvation diet by this stage . This is a theme that will recur in his career . Rommel made his name in the Nazi party by serving as the commander of Hitler ' s field headquarters defence unit during the invasion of Poland . This was at Hitler ' s personal request . He game to Hitler ' s attention as a military instructor and was initially assigned to train Hitlerjugend . This is about as much as you need to know to understand how he ended up leading an armoured division in France . Rommel ' s contemporaries were well aware that he was a favourite of Hitler and Goebbels . He may not have been a card carrying Nazi , surprisingly few Germans were . But he was one of the most politically connected officers in the Heer in the prewar period and no serious historian thinks that this didn ' t contribute to his rise . But unlike much more substantial officers like Guderian he had next to no role in the development of equipment or doctrine of the Panzerwaffe . Back to the main point , Rommel was admired by Montgomery in part because he needed an opponent to match his own sense of self . I ' m a big apologist for Monty , but I always take things I see he ' s written or quotations he makes about other generals with a huge grain of salt . Monty is not a reliable source in this regard , he held grudges and had favourites on a scale you may not be fully aware of . Every german general in 1941 was ten feet tall and breathed fire as far as many British officers were concerned . There ' s no reason to think that if Kesselring or Model had been sent to Africa instead of Rommel that we wouldn ' t be reading hagiography about them these days , in fact in both cases I think we might be reading even greater tales of their victories . These were men , that at least for German officers , took supply and logistics seriously and they also understood that a general ' s job wasn ' t to scream at captains and lieutenants on the front lines , but was to support them by keeping a clear view of the big picture and providing them with appropriate resources and support as the battle developed . Rommel might well have been one of the greatest Infantry company commanders in modern history no joke the problem was that in WWII he was employed as a general . He looms large because both the British and the Nazi Party propaganda machine lionized Rommel as a heroic figure and foil to the 8 th Army . But he did lose and it was in no small part because he violated orders from Berlin . Another recurring theme . Rommel was never charged nor tried as being a war criminal . You probably know this by now , but you do understand that he shot himself in October 1944 , the war crimes charges were first laid in the summer of 1945 . It ' s also important to note that Rommel simply wasn ' t influential enough to ever have been charged in as one of the Major War Criminals and I ' m not even certain that he would have been tried in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials as he never held a high command role and had very little political influence . TLDR for the NKVD The exact same type of cunts that made up the SS , the sole difference being one of magnitude . Hardly . The NKVD was a brutal secret police force , they are certainly analogous to the Gestapo , but they are not the same sort of organization as the General SS . The SS had a far broader remit and had units which existed specifically to murder civilians on an industrial scale . The NKVD would have happily achieved its political objectives without violence if it had been feasible for SS Einsatzgruppen the murder was the goal . It ' s a fundamental difference in understanding the banality and bureaucratic nature of Nazi murder . The SS was murdering people as a routine task that was so horrifying that Himmler eventually forced the Party to find a better system because he was worried about the toll the murders were taking on his troops morale ! , the NKVD never faced this sort of a problem because fundamentally murder wasn ' t their goal . Industrial scale murder of entire classes of humanity is different from assassinating and executing political opponents . And lastly I ' m English as a matter of fact , and no idea what you ' re smoking thinking 1 spitfire is greater than 5 109 ' s . Biased nonfactual prejudice ring any fucking bells ? I ' m Canadian and all I can tell you is that 1 Avro Arrow is worth at least 5 F 22 Raptors .