Discovering the Rommel Murder

by Charles F. Marshall

  From the German's early letters out of Africa, particularly those written in the flush of his first victories, there clearly emerges a portrait of a Hitler disciple. As the campaign went on and he came into closer and more frequent contact with the Nazi leader, his admiration waned. In ever sharper form and manner he became critical. When he landed his Fiesel-Storck on Oskar Farny's estate one day in August 1943, he brought with him some boxes of papers and war diaries for Famy to secrete. "I found him," Famy told me, "well cured of his Fuhrer worship." A year later, upon Kurt Hesse's visit to him when he lay wounded in the hospital, he expressed himself without reservation to the effect that he considered Hitler insane. To Hans Speidel, visiting him in Herrlingen to warn him of the High Command's attitude after the July 20 event, Rommel said, "That pathological liar has gone completely mad. He is venting his sadism on the conspirators, and this won't be the end of it!"

  Just days before his death he remarked to Rudolf Weckler, one of his sergeants in the previous war, "This erring crazy Hitler will sacrifice every last German before this war comes to an end."

  In his farewell address at Rommel's bier, written by the Propaganda Ministry, Rundstedt said, "Our enemies will not deny you their respect, you who with such knightly and soldierly greatness led with the sword." This the aging marshal knew to be true. But when he came to the words, "His heart belonged to the Fuhrer," Rundstedt must have had trouble articulating them. He knew better, and his absence from the cremation ceremonies affirmed it.

  While himself not a direct participant in the attempt to kill Hitler, and in disagreement with the method chosen to unseat "the one great general," Rommel in his deep feeling of accountability to the German people was ready to end the war in the West and to end the Nazi regime. The German people were closer to his heart than the Party, whose practice of National Socialism had long ago gone awry, and which he wanted to destroy to save the people. It was only his wounding that terminated his preparations to end the war in the West. In the murky situation that developed immediately after the assassination attempt, when the truth of Hitler's fate was unknown, would Rommel have taken Kluge's course and refused to act? Or would he have seized the moment to importune Eisenhower for an armistice? And had he, how would the river of history with its many confluent rivulets have been affected? The avenues of conjecture are limitless.

  Some of the clues to Rommel's disillusionment with the Fuhrer were Hitler's lack of sincerity and integrity, qualities Rommel had proven in his own character. "Whenever he approached the Fuhrer for men and materiel," Mrs. Rommel told me, "he was pumped full of promises. Time and again he would return buoyed up in the belief that he was about to get decisive help. 'It must be so!' he would say, only to find it wasn't."

  To the Nazi Party the Swabian owed little and did not hide his opinion of its amorality. With his trusted staff he was particularly outspoken. To an aide who took notes of his remarks, which Rommel happened to see, he ejaculated, "My God, man, are you trying to get me hanged?"

  He disavowed the Party early, although he valued his contacts with certain people in it, such as Propaganda Minister Goebbels. Propaganda, he acceded, was a legitimate and essential element of warfare.

  His first break with the Party occurred in 1938 while liaison officer to the Hitler Youth. He decided that the educational system of the organization was wrong. He was especially opposed to the power of its little leaders, the undermining of parental authority, and the discrediting of the church. He also objected to its program of military training, although less for idealistic reasons than for the more practical military ones. Its members came into the army spoiled, he said, imbued with the belief that they were trained soldiers. These views he brought sharply to the attention of Baldur von Schirach, the Reich youth leader. It was not enough for his charges in their short black trousers, brown shirt, and black neckerchief to sing the Horst Wessel Lied in admirable unison and accurate pitch, said Rommel sarcastically. (Horst Wessel was a fanatical Nazi who was murdered by Communists in February 1930 and provided National Socialism with its greatest martyr. A song he had written became known as the Horst Wessel Song and became the official song of the Nazi Party.)

  The breach that resulted made it necessary to replace Rommel as liaison officer. "I am glad to get out of that dirty atmosphere," he commented to friends at the time, and thereafter became an outspoken opponent of Schirach, who was eventually sentenced to twenty years by the Nuremberg WarCrimes court.

  Although sold on the merits of its early program, the Swabian watched the growth of the Party with uneasiness. He deplored the dual role of the officials, the poor quality of the Party leaders, and the interference of the Party with the state, government administration, and armed forces. Already before the outbreak of the war he lamented that the program was being watered and misused, that people in the Party were making money out of it. Often he amused friends by mimicking Party leaders in military positions. He particularly considered the higher ranks of the SS officer corps as inadequate and lamented that so many good young people volunteered for the SS.

  The story most responsible for the impression that the Fox was connected with the Party was one that originated with the Propaganda Ministry and was widely circulated at home and abroad. It described Rommel as the son of a bricklayer and a former storm trooper and was designed to show to what heights a storm trooper could climb. Since storm troopers were strong-arm groups who protected Nazi Party meetings, this story aroused the general's ire, and an acrid exchange of letters with the Propaganda Ministry followed. Like all regular army officers, he regarded the storm troopers as disciplined rabble. By 1943, when he took over the coastal defenses, he had so soured on the Party that he frustrated several attempts to assign a National Socialist orientation officer to his headquarters.

  To find a reasonably good comparison with Rommel among German generals, one must go back to Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht Bluecher, the rough and ready Prussian hero who helped Wellington defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. It is not a coincidence that both were called "Marshal Forward!" Both were thrusters. Bluecher, like Rommel, was the "Man of Initiative," the aggressor, the skilled tactician. But like Rommel he was also the darling of the soldier, who won hearts with a few simple words, who understood the soldier's exertions and his sufferings and worried about him.

  With most of the Wehrmacht's field marshals in World War II Rommel had little in common, certainly not with the three I interrogated during the course of the war. The frail, watery-eyed, unprepossessing Ritter von Leeb, brilliant demolisher of France in 1940 and besieger of Leningrad, suggests only contrast. The same is true of the correct, austere Wilhelm List, longtime director of the Wehrmacht's training program, whose armies smashed a path into the foothills of the Caucasus. Nor is any similarity suggested by the nearsighted, hoarse, rheumatic Baron Maximilian von Weichs, commander in the Balkans. All three were men whose decisions were motivated wholly by logic and logistics, less influenced than Rommel by intuition and less apt to give the same weight to the intangibles of war. All three were roughly fifteen to eighteen years older than Rommel and all had been less infatuated with National Socialism than Rommel had originally been.

  In some respects the best comparison is offered by Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, leader of an army in the Polish campaign, in the western campaign in 1940, and in the campaign against Russia in 1941. Like Rommel he was charismatic. Like Rommel he favored National Socialism and was intrigued by the Fiihrer, knew no doubts for years, but later saw the light. In other respects the two differed greatly. Reichenau was the officer out of the bandbox, elegant, liked beautiful women around him, could quote Goethe for hours, was fond of music and art, a grand seigneur, everything but simple.

  In Reichenau, however, and in the General Staff officer and cultured general, Hitler saw something-something he considered a vague, spiritual, intellectual overbreeding of the aristocracy-that he was incapable of sharing. To this incapability Rommel's swift rise in rank was partly due. Hi
tler could understand him and therefore especially valued him. To some extent he sponsored the unpretentious Swabian to spite the clannish General Staff.

  To some extent the Swabian shared the Fiihrer's aversion for General Staff officers. Too often, he thought, the General Staff accepted culture and debonairness as the measure of an officer's ability. Yet his chief of staff for Army Group B in France was one of the General Staff's most intellectual men. In Hans Speidel, former military attache in Paris and foremost expert on the French Army, he was paired with a man of astute mind, professorial in manner and precise in method, softspoken but quick of speech, multilingual, critic of the arts, and friend of the literati. Yet in all he was an officer who bore his intellectualism unobtrusively. "A stronger outer or inner contrast than that presented by these two figures is impossible to imagine," said Hesse, a friend of both men. "Nevertheless, not only did they understand each other, but they complemented one another and worked frictionlessly together. Each saw the weaknesses and strong points of both and acknowledged them."

  At the end of their collaboration the astute Speidel adjudged Rommel the greatest general produced by the German Army in World War II, and Rommel, shortly before his death, remarked to his wife, "Speidel was the perfect chief of staff."

  The admiration that Speidel developed for the Fox was not characteri stic of all members of the General Staff Corps. The reaction to Hitler's sponsorship was a tendency to deprecate the marshal's genius in the field and a certain understandable envy, of which Rommel was not unaware. Wrote he after one promotion, "My recent swift promotion has lifted me above the rank of many colleagues and created much jealousy." High military commanders such as Rundstedt, for example, did not at first consider him to be qualified to be a corps commander. A similar opinion was held in 1940-41 by the Commander in Chief of the Army, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, and by the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Haider. To these aging seniors he was "the young man," a phrase meant to imply, "He's a promising youngster but has a lot to learn." This attitude was reflected in Kluge's initial meeting with the Swabian in Normandy, when he began the conversation with the pedantic admonishment, "Rommel, it is time you learned to listen!"

  With one or two exceptions even Rommel's close friends, it must be admitted, did not think he would rise higher than colonel or brigadier general.

  "In my discussions with him," said Hesse, "he accounted for his success with four reasons. First, he had self-confidence and in connection with it a belief in his star. He had the luck that is necessary to the good soldier and did not permit himself to be discouraged by temporary setbacks. Second, he credited his military knowledge in conjunction with his energy, thoroughness, and industry, characteristics he had inherited from his pedagogic father. Third, he credited his confidence in Hitler until the climax of the African campaign. And finally, and what for him was the most important, he excelled because of the love-there is no other word-of his young officers and men.

  "He might have added a fifth reason," continued Hesse. "He could not for long participate in a seemingly purposeless conversation. For that he had an attenuated attention span. His mind would revolve around the work ahead. There can hardly be a man who drove straighter and more consciously toward a goal. His actions were invariably planned, although sometimes perhaps more adroitly than wisely."

  In discussing the theory of leadership as he lay wounded in the hospital, he said, "Between two courses of action, it is not so important which is chosen as it is that the chosen course be pursued with all possible determination."

  Varying judgments of Rommel have been made inside and outside Germany ranging from virulence to idolatry, from "a glorified street-corner bully" to "the greatest tactical genius since Hannibal." Any attempt to fairly assess these judgments must give due weight to the following points. Although not a General Staff officer, he was nevertheless promoted to field marshal at the age of fifty, by far the youngest of his rank. Then he was under the odium of having been sponsored by Hitler, which he was, and of having been a "Party general," which he was not. And last, he did not lead from the desk in the accepted tradition of the higher commander, but instead-like Bluecher, Seydlitz, and Robert E. Lee-out of the saddle. Like Seydlitz he achieved surprise through speed.

  Rommel can be rightly understood only if he is seen as a soldier with just one thought, to fulfill his mission in his soldier world. A man whose only passionate interest was the army, who rarely read a book that did not concern the military, who was less interested in logistics than in the human element of warfare, he was the fighting soldier's soldier and, as such, in a nation traditionally militaristic, unsurpassed. An idealist in one respect, in another he was a highly realistic individual who could see and value things, ambitious, energetic, who in his zeal could rise to passion and whose courage often led him to take risks. Fortune carried him high, but he also took advantage of all the opportunities that fortune offered. He was no spiritual personality in the sense that the great theoretician Clausewitz was, but rather he had a moral greatness, a strong will, and a belief in himself and his work.

  While Hannibal, Napoleon, and Lee were all eventually brought down, history has lifted them above their conquerors. The same is true of Rommel, a man whose high personal standards of conduct set him above and apart from the government for which he fought and assure him a place among the Great Captains in military history.

  AS THE READER HAS SURELY NOTICED, SECTIONS OF THIS BOOK, PARTICUlarly those dealing with the battle of Normandy and the aftermath of the putsch, owe much to General Hans Speidel, who died in 1984 at the age of eighty-seven. Although separated by a difference in nationality, nearly two decades in age, and many steps in rank, Speidel and I quickly developed a warm friendship. Astrologers might attribute this affinity to our having the same birthday. My friendship also extended to his wife and children and was, I felt, reciprocated by them.

  Speidel was an amiable man and generous to a fault with his time, information, and helpful suggestions. No man was better qualified to talk of the duel between Hitler and Rommel or what went on in the command post of those charged with fending off the Allied invasion forces. In response to my questions he frequently quoted from his manuscript-in-preparation or let me read and make notes from the appropriate section containing the answer. He accompanied me on visits to Mrs. Rommel and Oskar Famy and was host for a visit by Mrs. Rommel and me. At other times we visited points of interest together.

  He was unstinting in his praise of Eisenhower's diplomatic-military leadership of an alliance army, a feat he thought remarkable in light of history's teaching of the difficulties inherent in such unions. Of the Allied commanders he gave high marks to Patton's derring-do and battlefield intuition as, he said, did Rommel, who thought Patton an artist in mobile warfare.

  For a few years after I left Germany Speidel was a professor of modem history at Tuebingen University, where he had received his doctoral degrees in economics and philosophy. His book was published in Germany in 1949 and at that time he wrote me, generously saying, "I have recently published my book, a copy of which I dedicate to you."

  The following year it appeared in English under the title Invasion 1944, the first book published in America by a German general.

  When the Allies decided West Germany should be rearmed, Speidel was asked to help plan the new army and became its chief architect and first fourstar general.

  In 1957 he was named Commander of the Allied Forces, Central Europe, one of the most important posts in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and served in that position until 1963.

  He was a man with broad intellectual interests who had not looked kindly upon the rise of Hitler. "In those years," Colonel Truman Smith wrote in his foreword to Speidel's book, "he was hoping and praying for peace, but could scarcely dissimulate his fear that Hitler's policy would bring a second world was. As French and Western specialist of the German staff, Speidel stood very close in the critical prewar years to the then Chief of the General
Staff, General Ludwig Beck, later the chief conspirator in the generals' plot. It was an open secret in Berlin how bitterly Beck hated the Fiihrer. Thus all us attaches knew that Speidel was in Beck's camp."

  "Speidel's forte was character," added Smith. "It was his inherent sense of right and wrong, as well as love of Fatherland, which caused him in 1944 to disregard his military oath of loyalty to Hitler and ally himself with the conspirators."

  His action did not surprise Professor Arnold Bergstresser of the University of Chicago, who wrote to me in November 1946:

  Dear Captain: I received a letter from my old friend Dr. Hans Speidel.... It refers to you telling that you saw the Speidels over there and it speaks of you with particular warmth. I wonder whether you might be willing to tell me some more details about their present situation. Since I know (sic) Hans Speidel from my boyhood days onward, I should be very grateful for your kind reply. Before 1 left Germany in 19371 saw him regularly and, consequently, I was by no means surprised when I heard of his action in cooperation with Rommel and the price he had to pay for it.

  The many days and weekends I spent with General Speidel and his family, and with whom I remained in correspondence for a number of years after my return to the States, were memorable ones. They were filled with interest from the moment of arrival till the moment of departure.

  The general's youngest child and only son, Hans, Jr., after completing his formal education, entered the German Army. In 1984, as I learned from his letter acknowledging my condolences to the Speidel family upon the general's death, he was a colonel stationed in London as the military attache.

  Rommel's son Manfred did not make a career of the army as he had intended before his father's death, nor did he study medicine as his father had wished. Instead, he studied law, entered politics, and is in his third eightyear term as the popular mayor of Stuttgart, winning his elections with increasing margins. In January 1990 Queen Elizabeth approved his appointment as honorary commander of the order of the British Empire. The award was widely regarded as a simultaneous tribute to his father.