by David Irving
At first, Speidel’s battlefield reports were distinctly encouraging. “So far as they concern the American offensive at Saint-Lô,” wrote Lang on July 28, “General Speidel seems very confident. And a line of fortifications appears to be under construction on the eastern front as well.” But terrible air raids were now falling on Germany, and Stuttgart—the beautiful capital city of Rommel’s native Swabia—suffered cruelly, with nearly 1,000 people killed in the last week of July. Speidel brought stark descriptions of the damage to Rommel, and they deeply affected the field marshal.
The British announced that Rommel had been injured and might even now be dead. Rommel seized the opportunity for a press conference in Paris on August 1, 1944; he struggled to pull a uniform jacket over his hospital pajamas, and he turned his relatively intact profile toward the press photographers. “The British have written me off,” he announced to his own staff correspondent, Baron von Esebeck. “But it’s not the first time they’ve pronounced me dead. And I’m not gone yet—not by a long shot.”
AT APPROXIMATELY THE same moment, 900 miles away in his bunker in East Prussia, Adolf Hitler sighed, took off his metal-rimmed eyeglasses, and sent for General Jodl. He still had the document he had been reading in his hand when Jodl stepped into the bunker. It was disturbing proof against Kluge and Rommel, from Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner. In his unpublished diary, Jodl noted: “Five P.M.: the Führer asks me to read a report from Kaltenbrunner on the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel von Hofacker about his talks with K. and R. The Führer is now looking for a new Commander in Chief West. He plans to question R. after his recovery, and then to retire him without any further fuss.”
What had happened was this. After the macabre supper party at the château on July 20, Kluge had sacked General von Stülpnagel from his staff and privately recommended that he try to escape. Stülpnagel and Hofacker had driven back to Paris in low spirits. Stülpnagel—for whom Rommel had always had a close affection—summoned to Germany by Keitel the next day, attempted suicide. It failed, and in the resulting delirium he was heard murmuring Rommel’s name. Hofacker, meanwhile, had been given 4,000 francs by his friend Baron von Falkenhausen and also advised to flee. Far better for Rommel had he done so, but instead Hofacker decided to stay and brazen things out.
Kluge felt compelled to set up a formal commission of inquiry, and all Stülpnagel’s staff were questioned, including Hofacker. Just what his motives were for revealing so much, first to Kluge’s commission and then to the Gestapo, we shall never know; but there is a powerful clue in Hofacker’s remark to his co-conspirator Falkenhausen on July 22: “Why don’t I go to Kluge and demand his protection? I can threaten to expose his own ambivalent actions before the assassination attempt.”
The temptation for the expendable small fry to shelter behind the names of two popular and powerful field marshals was very strong. Hofacker did not resist it. In a British prison camp—bugged by hidden microphones—General Blumentritt later described to General Eberbach the curious behavior of Hofacker, which he himself had witnessed. Blumentritt had been telephoned by the Gestapo chief in Paris, SS General Carl-Albrecht Oberg, and invited to sit in on Hofacker’s next session at the Hôtel Raphael, Stülpnagel’s former headquarters. “Names are being mentioned,” Oberg warned Blumentritt in obvious embarrassment as they went in. “And among them that of your boss Kluge! I can’t believe it—I’m sure there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. Rommel’s name has been mentioned too.” “Picture the scene,” said Blumentritt in 1945. “Here is Hofacker, sitting on a sofa, smoking a cigarette. Everybody’s very pleasant. The conversation with Hofacker is nice and friendly. It lasts from about four to eleven P.M. He tells them everything, explaining, ‘I know my own life is forfeit now.’ ”
But “everything” is not what Hofacker told the Gestapo. He never once betrayed the real conspirators, his close friends like Speidel, Falkenhausen, Teuchert, Horst and Michel; he put the finger only on the two field marshals—evidently a desperate attempt to escape the firing squad himself.
By July 30, the Gestapo had also interrogated Colonel Georg Hansen, Hitler’s new chief of intelligence. Hansen admitted that in Berlin on the sixteenth Stauffenberg, the assassin, and Hofacker had quoted Kluge and Rommel to their fellow plotters as believing that the western front would cave in under the sheer weight of Allied troops and materiel within two weeks.
All these reports went to Hitler.
On August 12, the fugitive Mayor Carl Goerdeler, one of the principal conspirators, was also picked up. Like Hofacker, Goerdeler baffled the Gestapo by inundating them—in Goerdeler’s case with documents, statements and lists of alleged fellow plotters. By the fourteenth, this report was also ready. Himmler’s liaison officer, the odious Hermann Fegelein, put it to Hitler. On that day a Luftwaffe general attending the noon war conference noted in his diary, “Strained atmosphere. Fegelein hints that even more generals and field marshals are implicated in the Twentieth of July.” A few hours later SS chief Heinrich Himmler arrived to see his Führer—and in his briefcase was a note pad with these words as Item 5: “West. Kluge–Rommel.” What he told Hitler was the last straw.
Kluge evidently got word of this indictment.
All the next day, August 15, he was mysteriously absent from his headquarters. Hitler suspected that the field marshal had been out trying to contact the enemy, so he sacked him immediately and without notice and ordered him recalled to Germany.
Kluge swallowed that cyanide pill rather than face the music.
Hofacker was removed to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, still singing like a canary. Somebody—probably Finckh—now testified that General Hans Speidel had also known of the assassination plot. By August 25 Hitler was clamoring for that general’s arrest.
“The interrogations prove that he was in it up to his neck,” Hitler insisted. Field Marshal Walter Model, whom Hitler himself had rushed to France as Kluge’s successor, flatly refused to part with Speidel—the allegations sounded to him like a monstrous Gestapo fabrication. But Hitler himself was adamant. He selected General Hans Krebs, a hard-nosed officer from the eastern front, to replace Speidel, and he ordered Krebs to clean out Speidel’s “thoroughly infected” army group staff first.
Now Hitler learned that Tempelhoff, Rommel’s operations officer, was married to an English woman; also that Hans Lattmann, Rommel’s artillery officer, was a brother of Martin Lattmann, a general who had deserted to the Russians at Stalingrad and was now regularly broadcasting from Moscow.
To Hitler’s suspicious mind, these alien influences probably lay at the root of Rommel’s incurable pessimism. Perhaps, thought Hitler, they explained the extraordinary report that Rommel had signed on July 15.
Before sending General Krebs out to France, Hitler lectured him. “What he [Rommel] did was the worst possible thing a soldier can do in the circumstances,” said Hitler. “He tried to find some other way out than the purely military. At one time, you know, he was also predicting imminent collapse in Italy; yet it still hasn’t happened. Events proved him wrong there and justified my decision to leave Field Marshal Kesselring in charge. . . . I regard Rommel, within certain limitations, as being an exceptionally bold and also a clever commander. But I don’t regard him as a stayer, and everybody shares that view.”
By this time, therefore, as the shorthand conference record reveals, Hitler’s feeling toward Rommel was one of benign disappointment, rather than malevolence or a sense of betrayal. But this would change when further interrogation reports reached him.
ROMMEL KNEW NOTHING of all these suspicions against him. He was concerned for a time with nothing more momentous than establishing that his recent injuries entitled him to a sixth wound stripe and thus the coveted Golden Wound badge; his personnel file shows that he got it on August 7, 1944. He was mending well at the Paris hospital, but he was pale, his left eye was still closed and there was a thumb-sized dent in his forehead. Hans Lattmann spent thirty minutes alone with him on th
e sixth and wrote the next day: “It does a soldier good to see how this man’s heart beats only for his people and the fatherland, and how conscious he is of his responsibility toward the Führer and his troops. . . . He has only one thought, to get well as soon as possible and return to us.”
To this colonel, too, Rommel whispered, “As soon as I’m well again I must see the Führer and tell him bluntly it’s time to call a halt—the Germans have suffered too much.” And he said much the same to his old friend Colonel Hesse the day after. He told him of the accident, and of his ultimatum of July 15, and of the battle for Normandy. Twice Professor Esch came in to end the visit, and twice Rommel sent him away. “There’s only one solution in France,” he told Hesse. “We’ve got to retreat. But the Führer just refuses to see it that way—he’s learned nothing from the loss of Stalingrad, he always wants to fight for every square inch of ground. That’s going to lose us the war.” When Hesse finally rose to leave, wishing Rommel a rapid return to his headquarters, Rommel looked meaningfully at him and commented: “I think that this knock on the head was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
That same day Rommel was pronounced well enough to be transported back to Germany, and General Speidel came to take leave of him. At Speidel’s request Rommel gave him a photograph, and he scrawled a generous dedication on the back.
On August 8 Erwin Rommel was driven home from Paris to his native Swabia. As he walked unsteadily into the villa at Herrlingen, Lucie and the manservant Rudolf Loistl met him. Rommel saw their horror at his head injuries, and forced a grin: “So long as I don’t have to carry my head under one arm, things can’t be all that bad.”
The best brain and eye surgeons were only a few miles away at the University of Tübingen. They were pleased with his progress but warned it would be at least eight weeks before he could return to duty. To his brother Karl he wrote on the twenty-third, “I’ve got to have absolute rest until all the bits and pieces are properly set again. The first walks outside the house have caused some pretty awful headaches.” The neighbors saw him strolling in the garden, unsteadily leaning on Manfred’s arm, with the new Golden Wound badge sewn on his uniform.
Occasionally he talked about the assassination attempt—painfully shaking his head in disbelief that anybody would have obeyed the orders that emanated from the plotters in Berlin, let alone from a discredited colonel-general like Beck. “Hitler would be much more dangerous dead than alive,” he told Manfred. “What I wanted all along was to act independently in the west, and get an armistice.”
He was still kept informed daily on his army group’s operations, but few officers could come and see him. General Meise wrote on the twenty-sixth, “Your staff still pines for you, Feldmarschall, and we hope you will soon recover enough for the Führer to call on you to save the German Reich. And then we shall all want to serve under you again, Feldmarschall.”
As for the trials of the plotters, Rommel knew little more than what the press reported. Every army officer involved was first being tried by an army Court of Honor; if a prima facie case was made out against him, Hitler discharged him from the army and he was at the mercy of the People’s Court. On August 29, this court condemned to death Stülpnagel, Hofacker and their fellow plotters from Paris. All except Colonel von Hofacker were hanged the same day. Hofacker, still talking volubly, was to survive for four more months.
It was in these summer months of 1944 that Rommel first really came to know his son Manfred, now fifteen, and talked to him man to man. Sometimes he spoke of the first years of his marriage: “There’s not much to show for all my triumphs,” he said, chuckling, “but I can claim one success: I did prevent your mother from bringing a piano into our household.” (How Rommel hated piano music!) Manfred had been given leave from his flak unit so that he could read official papers aloud to his father. In France, General Patton had at last appeared in the flesh—but in Normandy, and in command only of an army, not an army group. It had achieved a breakthrough at Avranches, on the coast, and Rommel knew that nothing could now save the German Seventh Army. “How I wish I had just been a shepherd on some Swabian hillside,” Rommel said with a sigh.
Once Lucie’s brother-in-law Hans Seitz called, wearing his uniform as a Nazi propaganda official. Seitz, a boyhood friend of Rommel’s, found himself asking him outright about his attitude to their Führer. Rommel answered that his conscience was clear. “But,” he added, “there may be microphones behind the wallpaper,” and he led Seitz out into the garden. “For me,” he thereupon amplified, “Adolf Hitler is the Supreme Commander and my duty as an officer is to obey. But I’ve spoken my mind quite plainly to him.”
Then his face clouded with anxiety: “I hear they’ve found a briefcase belonging to Goerdeler, and do you know, there was a note in it saying that since I am the only soldier whom the enemy respects, I must take power after the revolution. That may cost me my neck,” he observed. Just before Seitz left, Rommel pulled himself upright on the garden seat, covered his good eye and strained his facial muscles to raise the closed eyelid slightly. “You know, I must be getting better, Hans. I think I can see you.”
There were odd happenings at the house in Herrlingen. Once Rommel’s manservant Rudolf heard something scratching at the front door—and when he jumped up to the window he saw someone flitting into the darkness. The local mayor reported that Frau Wolfel, a neighbor, had seen suspicious characters shadowing Rommel, evidently the Gestapo. After that Rommel obtained an army sentry from the Ulm garrison, and he never went out without a pistol in his pocket. He told Manfred to do the same, since he could not guarantee that he himself could shoot straight. Soon they saw the shadowers themselves, when they strolled in the local woods or went collecting mushrooms around the Upper Herrlingen chapel. One night his sentry opened fire on an intruder. Was the Gestapo really watching him, Rommel must have wondered, and if so, why?
He decided to watch his step more carefully. He had heard of Kluge’s sudden death and probably put two and two together. When Colonel Hans Lattmann’s crippled seventy-five-year-old mother was arrested by the Gestapo in August as a reprisal for her other son’s defection to the Russians, the colonel wrote Rommel asking him to intervene. Rommel wrote back on September 1, politely declining. But, he assured the colonel, “In a few weeks I hope to get back to you all again.” That was not to be. Just two days later Erwin Rommel was formally retired from the position of army group commander.
His aide Hellmuth Lang confidently predicted, “There’s probably some new job lined up already for him to take over as soon as he is well again.”
A severe shock awaited Rommel. General Speidel arrived at Herrlingen. He complained to Rommel that his successor, Hans Krebs, had arrived out of the blue with a letter dismissing him and ordering him back to Germany; no reason whatever had been given. Worse was to follow. The next evening Ruth Speidel telephoned him from the Speidel home in Freudenstadt—the Gestapo had arrested her husband and taken him to Berlin. Rommel, ignorant even now of Hans Speidel’s involvement in the Stauffenberg assassination plot, could only assume that a witch-hunt was beginning against the western front commanders “responsible” for the collapse in France. From this moment on, he always carried around with him neatly folded copies of the “defense exhibits” he felt he was going to need to justify his decisions at the château, such as the prophetic letters of July 3 and 15 to the High Command.
Speidel’s brother-in-law Max Horst, Baron von Falkenhausen and other plotters had been arrested at the same time, and taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, a building still bearing the enamel plate of the YMCA—the previous Gestapo headquarters had been blitzed. Their guilt was beyond doubt, but since all eventually survived the war, one gathers that they outwitted their ponderous Gestapo interrogators in one way or another. Falkenhausen, for instance, was confronted on September 6 by a tall, angular plain clothes detective with blond hair and cold fish-eyes: “Did you ever discuss with Hofacker the possibility of making a sep
arate peace deal with the West or the East?” After a time, the detective said: “Why not admit that you knew perfectly well about Hofacker’s part in the affair? Everybody else has already confessed.” And then, as a written statement was drawn up for the baron to sign: “Admit that on July 24, if not earlier, Hofacker told you everything. He has said as much himself”—and he flourished a document with a red top secret stamp. Falkenhausen lied convincingly, and the People’s Court eventually acquitted him.
Speidel’s turn came some days later. Hitler was convinced that Speidel was guilty—but the general’s superior intellect rescued him time and time again. All he would at first admit to the Gestapo, who interrogated him on September 11 and 12, was the stroll in the château grounds with Rommel after Hofacker’s visit on July 9, and Rommel’s plan to obtain Hitler’s permission to meet Montgomery. He admitted visiting Rommel in the hospital on July 22. “Rommel told him,” wrote the Gestapo inquisitor Georg Kiessel, “that since the assassination attempt he now felt bound to view that conversation with Hofacker in a very different light.”
However, Hofacker’s story was significantly different. He claimed to have discussed the actual assassination plot with Speidel, before going in to see the field marshal. The Gestapo hammered away at Speidel to know whether or not he had reported this to Rommel (so evidently Hofacker himself did not claim to have discussed it with Rommel). Either way, Speidel was in a jam. Unless he were to put all the blame on Rommel, he could only accuse Hofacker of lying. Unfortunately, the actual Gestapo interrogation records on Speidel are missing. He himself wrote in an unpublished 1945 manuscript: “The series of interrogations ended with a face-to-face confrontation with Hofacker, lasting several hours. Hofacker had complete control of himself, although showing signs of physical ill treatment. He shielded me magnificently. When his earlier testimony was put to him, he withdrew what he had said about my having been an accessory to the assassination plot, saying, ‘My memory must be at fault.’ ” It must be said that there are reasons to doubt Speidel’s memory of events, however.