Schnapps glass, part of a molded and filigree-engraved crystal service produced by the French manufacture Saint-Louis/Baccarat around 1900.

Each glass measures approximately 9.8 cm high x 6.5 cm in diameter and features a decoration, with arabesque and floral motifs.

Based on family tradition and documentary evidence, the glass was part of the service that belonged to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, “the Desert Fox,” (1891-1944), who died by suicide on suspicion of taking part in the failed conspiracy to kill Hitler.

The presence of the glasses in Field Marshal Rommel’s house in Herrlingen, Germany.

According to the testimony of American soldier Joseph H. Rose, at the end of World War II the glasses were in the kitchen of Villa Lindenhof, Erwin Rommel’s private home in Herrlingen, in the Swabian hills near Ulm. Rose was assigned as an interpreter to the Headquarters of the 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th U.S. Army Division, which occupied Ulm in April 1945.

After Rommel’s death (October 14, 1944), the house had been abandoned by the family and was requisitioned by the occupying troops. In this house, Private Rose was housed for over a month.

Rose relates that she met Lucie Rommel, the Field Marshal’s widow, in the garden of the house and asked her if she could keep the glasses as a memento of her stay in Ulm. Lucie nodded, as if “letting a ghost go.” One of the glasses was Rommel’s favorite, because it “stayed cold even in summer.”

Rose brought the glasses with her to the United States as wartime souvenirs, displayed them in her home, and throughout her life showed them in lectures and public presentations devoted to her wartime memories. He carefully documented each piece in his retirement years, later bequeathing them to his family.

The Tale of Private Rose

“I found them in the kitchen of Field Marshal Rommel’s house.” That is how my story always begins, because that is where everything takes shape in my memory.

When the war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945, I did not feel the euphoria I had imagined for years. It was like exhaling after holding my breath too long: I felt a sudden, almost guilty silence. I was twenty-one years old, a translator in the 141st Infantry Regiment of the 36th Division, and I was assigned quarters in the empty house of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox. The most feared enemy, the most respected.

The house was located in Herrlingen, in the Swabian hills. It was a sober, almost melancholy building, surrounded by trees and a garden that seemed to have stopped waiting for someone. There was nothing monumental, no ostentation, no sign of the arrogance of the regime.

Rommel had been dead for six months. Forced to poison to save his family. A noble choice, a gesture that defeat had not erased.

I slept in his bed. I shaved in front of his mirror. I walked in the garden where he had walked in the last days of his life. In every room, in every object I felt a silent presence that commanded respect.

It was in that suspended everydayness that I saw them.

Glasses.

They were in the kitchen, among the tableware left where the family had abandoned them. French Baccarat crystal schnapps glasses, finely molded, etched with a delicacy rarely seen today. The cup decorated with a floral weave looked like silver filigree. The stem, carved in crystal ribs, gave the impression of a transparent spine.

They looked fragile. They weren’t. Above all, they were intimate.

They were the personal service of a man accustomed to discipline, sobriety, and measure.

One day, as I was sitting in the garden with one of those glasses in my hands, I saw her coming.

Lucie Rommel. Widow.

She did not protest the requisition. Her eyes carried the weight of her husband’s decision and what that decision had saved and, together, destroyed. We spoke in her language, not as enemies but as those who share a tragedy.

He looked at the glass and said only:

“It was his favorite. He stayed cold even in the summer.”

She asked me softly to enter the house, for the first time since her husband’s suicide.

“It is your house, Madam,” I said to her, almost in an apologetic tone. She seemed surprised: she feared perhaps a rejection. She prowled those rooms for a long time, as if for a final farewell. When she came out her beautiful face was streaked with tears.

Before the farewell I hinted a greeting, lifting the elegant glass, still filled with liquor, toward her. I asked her if I could keep it: not a trophy but a memory to cherish. She nodded, as if letting go the shadow of a ghost.

When I returned to America in late 1945, those glasses were with me, a silent relic, protected in the burden of a veteran. Over the years I carried them to conferences, veterans’ meetings, commemorations. Not to boast or to show off an achievement. But to tell the story of a man who, at the most difficult time, had chosen honor over life.

Long afterwards, when one of the glasses was transferred to the Gettysburg Museum of History, the curators confirmed what I had known all along: they dated from about 1900, made before Baccarat introduced the engraved signature, in 1936. Domestic, personal objects. Used every day by the Rommel family.

They were the private memory of a war hero, far removed from propaganda. They recalled the moral tragedy of a man who stood up to Hitler; the silence with which he faced the fate imposed by tyranny; the compassion of a woman who knew how to let go of a memory.

And the choice of an American soldier who had preferred to bring home a story, not a trophy.

The weight of human choices in inhuman times.