Even though Rommel is one of the more famous German military commanders of the Second World War, he really is a somewhat negligible figure within wider German historiography. There is not much interest in the academy over Rommel and as such there is no discrete historiographical "Rommel Myth" that historians debate. The downward trajectory of Rommel's reputation was perhaps inevitable given the near-hagiographic material produced in the 1950s and 60s celebrating the Field Marshal as a true German warrior. This trailer for the 1951 The Desert Fox manages to distill down many of the elements of this approach to Rommel contained in the biographies of Rommel in this period. Yet the current reassessments of Rommel run deeper than pricking the bubble of the Desert Fox, but rather is the confluence of two wider developments in German historiography.

The first trend in historiography is the larger reassessment of German military strengths and capabilities which often focus on the weaknesses of the German military system and the strategic myopia of its leadership. This is in part a pushback against the post-Vietnam renaissance for the German "way of war" among military intellectuals such as Martin van Creveld. These figures argued that German decentralized command and mission-tactics provided a vital lesson for a reforming US military to meet a potential Warsaw Pact juggernaut in the Fulda Gap. One of the problem for the proponents of German methods was that they relied excessively on German sources and German memoirs which tended to embellish successes and glossed over defeats of their system, especially against the Soviets. The access to Soviet archives as well as salient details like Germany's total military defeat damaged this myth of German military effectiveness in the 1990s with historians like David Glantz and Robert Citino pushing a more nuanced version of German efficacy. While these historians did emphasize that German generals could be at times frighteningly effective, the early victories of 1939-41 overshadowed real problems in the German military machine such as poor attention to logistics, an obsession with movement, and a poor grasp of strategic thinking beyond immediate victories.

Rommel's military reputation was collateral damage from this historiographical swing against German methods. Part of the problem was that Rommel's previous virtues in DAK- improvisation, speed, attacking against the odds- began to look like vices when seen through this more critical lens. Bernd Stegemann's assessment of Rommel in the Bundeswehr's official history of the war encapsulates many of these critiques:

It is therefore difficult to find any positive result which would justify the high-handedness with which Rommel disregarded his orders. Hitler's favor enabled Rommel to satisfy his personal ambitions and give the North African theatre an importance which neither Hitler nor the Wehrmacht and army high commands had originally intended it to have. This was evident in the transfer of additional army units and II Air Corps, and especially in the sending of U-boats to the Mediterranean, which almost amounted to stopping the U-boat war in the Atlantic.

It is hardly possible to say with certainty whether the defeat of the German and Italian forces in North Africa in the winter of 1941-2 could have been avoided. It is, however, clear that Rommel himself contributed significantly to the defeat by stubbornly basing his own assessment of the situation more on wishful thinking than on facts, e.g. in his insistence on attacking Tobruk or in his thrust to the Egyptian frontier. His behavior revealed one of his weaknesses-his tendency to underestimate others, especially the enemy.

This reassesment of Rommel does not simply present an inverse of older treatments of Rommel by turning his victories into defeats. Karl Heinz-Frieser notes in The Blitzkrieg Legend that Rommel's improvisation was crucial in the 1940 breakthroughs:

It is certainly correct to say that Rommel was a master of self-aggrandizement and that a veritable cult grew up around him later. Nevertheless, it must be noted quite objectively that during this particular phase of the campaign there was probably no other commander who gave his division such decisive impetus as did Rommel.

In the case of DAK, while the current crop of military historians acknowledge he did manage to win victories in Libya, they ask the more pointed question "what exactly did he win?" As Stegemann observes, success in North Africa siphoned off material from theaters more strategically important for Germany to gain a foothold in Egypt that was logistically unsustainable without any real feasible plans to push into the Levant.

Freiser's observation about Rommel's capacity for self-aggrandizement taps into a second wider historiographical trend in German studies that further diminishes Rommel: the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. Broadly speaking, this idea held that German soldiers were honorable and apolitical lot that fought the war the best they could. German war crimes were the responsibility of Hitler the SS, and a motley few German soldiers corrupted by ideology. This exculpatory narrative no only drew from the immediate postwar period when a good many German generals were were afraid of facing trial for their actions, but was abetted by the wider Cold War need for German rearmament and the normalization of FRG society (the GDR went on a slightly different path of a clean Wehrmacht).

Rommel fitted the image of an apolitical professional quite well. He not only had the luxury of only fighting in against the Western Allies, but his tangential relationship with the 20 July plotters and his
suicide placed him as noble enemy. Although he was a much more popular subject in Anglo-American accounts than German media. The German war film boom of the 1950s did not really feature Rommel save in one film while James Mason managed to play the Field Marshal twice in this period. The newly-formed Bundeswehr did build on the Rommel legend naming destroyers and military bases after him, as well as new units like the 7th Panzer Division and its PzBrig 21 drawing unit traditions from Rommel's formations.

This deceptive image of the German Wehrmacht was not going to survive sustained scrutiny. The collapse of the Berlin Wall led to the opening of various archives in Eastern Europe that outlined the scale and involvement of regular German troops in war crimes and other atrocities. Yet even had the Iron Curtain managed to magically stay up, the "clean Wehrmacht" was already on its way out of the academy by the 1980s. A whole host of social historians in the 1970s and 80s had examined the issues of complicity and participation within the Third Reich and discovered a much broader acceptance of National Socialist tenets and patterns of collaboration. Moreover, the so-called new military history of the 1980s also tried to refocus military history away from martial matters and instead examined armed forces as wider components of society and political players in their own right. Finally, even though many Germans and others in the West in the 1950s and 60s decried the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings (not to be confused with the more famous International Nuremberg Tribunals) as a form of victor's justice, these trials did amass a substantial amount of evidence against the accused, including many military officers.

Rommel's complicity in the darker parts of the Third Reich is much harder to establish than a general officer serving on the Eastern Front, but it was there. /u/commiespaceinvader outlines some of the major charges against Rommel in this answer of theirs, and while Rommel's responsibility for German war crimes do not rise up to the level of someone like von Manstein, his actions in Libya do cut down a major element of the Rommel myth. Had Rommel achieved the impossible and managed to conquer Egypt and the Levant, then he would have presided over war crimes. His toleration of the use of impressed Jewish labor and the construction fo camps for Libyan and Tunisian Jews strongly suggests that Rommel would not have opposed Rauff and his Einsatzgruppe murdering Jews in Egypt or Palestine. While we will never know for sure what Rommel and the Germans would have done if triumphant in Egypt, the odds for a clean outcome were not good.

There are some defenses of Rommel in the vein of Heinz-Frieser; that in certain conditions where Rommel's panache and drive were assets to Germany. Citino's Death of the Wehrmacht makes the rather trenchant observation that the Germans' offensive-minded operations in 1942 did come dangerously close to meeting their objectives. Pace Stegemann, there is also an argument to be made that Rommel's North African offensives were the better of several unpalatable options for Axis forces. Playing for time and stabilizing the front would only allow Anglo-Commonwealth forces to smother the Axis position with a preponderance of material. Striking out may have made little strategic sense given German capabilities, but it did offer the dim prospect of a victory which ceding the initiative to the British did not. But these are very qualified defenses of Rommel and cannot really erase the man's problematic relationship with the NSDAP and its ideology. While historians can push back against the Rommel Myth in 2017, they would be swimming against two well-established and quite strong historiographic currents.