ROMMEL ILL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25213, 30 April 1943, Page 3

ROMMEL ILL

TREATMENT NEAR VIENNA REBUFFED BY HITLER LONDON, Apl. 28, Marshal Rommel is definitely at Sommering Pass, near Vienna, where he is undergoing specialist treatment for a serious chronic liver disorder aggravated by the hardships of the African campaign. The Times correspondent on the German frontier says this was established through several intimate Wehrmacht friends whom he summoned to visit his sanatorium. Rommel's illness is serious. He overtaxed his strength during the fortification of the Mareth Line, which brought on a more harmful condition because he was earlier wounded in the right buttock by a bomb splinter during the retreat from El Alamein. Rommel at the time refused appropriate treatment, and had to be accompanied continuously by two army staff doctors. In addition,’ he suffered acutely from the treatment he received after he returned to Berlin. Those in Hitler’s immediate’ vicinity made Rommel personally responsible for the loss of the Battle of Egypt, although they knew that Hitler’s headquarters twice failed to send him the reinforcements for which he had urgently asked. It was on the assumption that he would receive reinforcements that Rommel last summer told the foreign press: “ I now hold firmly the key to Egynt’s door, which I am determined to open." Rommel's enemies are even holding this prediction against him, stating that he failed to do what even he himself admitted was possible. Rommel several weeks ago enlisted Reichmarshal Goering’s help and tried to see Hitler, but Hitler refused him an audience.