by David Irving
Eventually, Speidel and Hofacker did set their signatures to at least one joint statement of some sort for the Gestapo, because the Gestapo then showed it to Max Horst—so Horst recalled.
I had walked in heavy rain up the steep hill to Max Horst’s villa in an exclusive suburb of Bonn one morning in 1976. His wife, who was Frau Speidel’s sister, tactfully withdrew while Horst described his Gestapo imprisonment and interrogations to me.
It was Horst, a jovial Central European of medium build and light blue eyes, who had driven Hofacker to the château for the first, innocuous meeting with Rommel in 1944. “The Gestapo didn’t use violence or torture us,” Horst told me. “They preferred more refined psychological techniques. For instance, I was suddenly awakened at three or four a.m. in Moabit prison, driven across Berlin to the Gestapo and interrogated by intimidating plain clothes officials. They screamed at me, ‘You’re lying!’ but I didn’t react to that. Once the official opened a folder, took out a document and covered it so I could see only one line. ‘Do you recognize these two signatures?’ he shouted. And of course I did—there was Hans Speidel’s on the left and Hofacker’s on the right. The man shouted at me, ‘Either these two are lying, or you are.’ After that I was taken, back to Moabit prison.”
The weeks of sleeplessness made Rommel moody and incautious. He wrote to Hans Lattmann on September 27, “I’m very dissatisfied with the slow progress my recovery is making. I’m suffering badly from insomnia and constant headaches, and I’m not up to very much at all. You can imagine how hard it is for me to have to remain idle at times like these.”
He made no secret of his criticism of the direction the war was taking. He heard rumors of Hitler’s plan for a mighty winter counteroffensive against the British and Americans in Belgium, and growled at Manfred, “Every shell we fire at them in the west is a shot fired against ourselves.”
He had no sympathy for the Nazi regime, if it could hound innocent generals like Speidel. When the local Nazi bigwig, Eugen Maier of Ulm, treated him to a sanctimonious lecture—“If we couldn’t have faith in our Führer, then whom could we trust?” Rommel angrily retorted: “You can’t have any faith in him at all. Since I saw the Führer in November 1942 I have come to realize that his mental faculties have steadily declined.”
There was still no word of poor Speidel’s fate—it made the field marshal’s blood boil. Ruth Speidel wrote on September 26, and Rommel replied sympathetically on October 1, again mentioning his insomnia and headaches.
On the same date he penciled a long letter to Hitler. He began it by regretting that his health was still not good enough for him to accept any fresh burden. “The quadruple skull fracture,” he wrote, “the unfavorable turn of events in the west since my injury and not least the dismissal and arrest of my own former chief of staff, Lieutenant General Speidel, of which I learned only by chance, have all placed an intolerable burden on my nerves.”
He did not stint his praise of the general, and reminded Hitler that he himself had awarded Speidel the Knight’s Cross. “In the west Speidel proved in his very first weeks to be an outstandingly efficient and capable chief of staff,” Rommel said. “He ran a tight ship, showed a great understanding for the troops and loyally helped me complete the defensive capability of the Atlantic wall as rapidly as possible with the means available. When I drove to the front—which was almost every day—I could rely on Speidel to transmit my orders to the armies as arranged between us beforehand, and to deal with superior and equivalent echelons as I would have myself.”
Then followed perhaps the most significant sentence in the letter. “I cannot imagine,” wrote the honest and forthright field marshal, “what can possibly have resulted in Lieutenant General Speidel’s dismissal and arrest. . . . Unfortunately,” he continued, “it proved impossible to fight the defense of Normandy so that the enemy could be destroyed while still afloat or at the latest while setting foot on land. I set out the reasons for this in the attached letter of July 3, which General Schmundt no doubt showed you at the time.”
He described his acrimonious relations with Field Marshal von Kluge and concluded the long letter with these words: “You, mein Führer, know how I have done everything in my power and capabilities, be it in the western campaign of 1940 or in Africa 1941/43 or in Italy in 1943 or again in the west in 1944. Just one thought possessed me, constantly—to fight and win for your New Germany. Heil mein Führer!—E. Rommel.”
Hellmuth Lang has the pencil draft of this letter. There is a carbon copy in Rommel’s personal papers, so it appears to have been forwarded to Hitler. But by this time the field marshal’s name was hopelessly compromised. On September 28 Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, had submitted to the Führer a report from a Nazi functionary—evidently Eugen Maier of Ulm, to whom Rommel had spoken so bluntly about Hitler’s decline—laying bare Rommel’s undiminished hostility to the regime. Five years earlier, during the Polish campaign, Bormann had been publicly snubbed by Rommel; now he could get even. Bormann scribbled this comment on the report: “This confirms other, even worse facts that have already reached me.”
The Gestapo interrogations of General Speidel were also complete, and on October 4, 1944, the army’s Court of Honor was specially reconvened to hear the evidence. Speidel was not present. As chief of the High Command, Field Marshal Keitel himself presided, with five generals—including, ironically, the cautious Guderian—nominated as the panel of judges. One of the five, however, was killed in a road accident, and Lieutenant General Heinrich Kirchheim, an Afrika Korps veteran whom Rommel had insulted after the failure of the last unsuccessful attack on Tobruk in 1941, found himself ordered to attend. Kirchheim and Guderian both swore affidavits later describing the hearing.
In a sense, not only Speidel but Rommel too was on trial now—and by the most unfavorable of juries, his fellow generals. The judges had to decide, as it turned out, whom to hang—Speidel or Rommel. According to Kirchheim’s testimony, Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner (for whom Speidel had developed quite a liking) himself stated the prosecution case. “Speidel,” said Kaltenbrunner, “has admitted under interrogation that he was informed of the assassination plot by an emissary from Stülpnagel,” no doubt indicating Hofacker. “But Speidel claims to have duly reported this to his immediate superior, Field Marshal Rommel, and he says it is not his fault if the field marshal did not pass his warning on. In fact—this is Speidel’s case—he did not realize that Rommel kept the warning to himself.”
Kaltenbrunner argued in response to this that Speidel’s excuse was not good enough. “If we assume,” he continued, “that what Speidel claims did in fact happen, would Rommel really have kept it secret from his own chief of staff that he intended to sit on the warning? The fact remains that if Speidel had himself reported the plot to the High Command, then the assassination attempt could have been nipped in the bud.”
Thus, Kaltenbrunner argued, Speidel was at the very least an accessory to murder. (Four men had died as a result of the bomb blast, including Rudolf Schmundt—Rommel’s friend—who had just succumbed to his injuries after ten weeks of agony.)
“At this,” wrote Kirchheim in his deposition, “there was an uneasy silence. Probably the same thought occurred to the other judges that occurred to me—that the case as set out incriminated not only Speidel but also Rommel, and to a far graver degree.” Kirchheim, of course, had had a rough deal from Rommel in 1941; Guderian lost no love for the field marshal either. Both knew that a “thumbs down” for Speidel would clear Rommel. Both opted the other way. When Keitel nonetheless announced, ominously, “The Führer has expressed the view that there can be no doubt that Speidel is guilty,” Kirchheim boldly pointed out that the burden of proof was on the prosecution, and that if General Speidel said he had reported the plot to Rommel, it was for the prosecution to prove the contrary. Guderian supported this argument.
Kirchheim described the hearing in a private letter to Speidel on August 18, 1945. “I spoke out for your acquittal
,” he wrote, “but your close relationship with Rommel was adduced as being particularly damning, since it appeared to be out of the question for Rommel to have kept from you something as important as this—as not having forwarded your report. Guderian defended you at length, with great force and skill.” Thus the ball was put back in the Gestapo’s court. Speidel was not thrown out of the army—the People’s Court could not get hold of him. And the witch-hunt against Rommel accelerated.
Distinctly uncomfortable, I had to raise directly with General Hans Speidel the curious question of how he had passed through the jaws of the Gestapo and survived, while Rommel had had to die.
Speidel, after all, became one of NATO’s top commanders and one of West Germany’s most venerated figures. News photographs bear testimony to his solicitude for the Rommel family—Lucie leans heavily on his arm as they attend Bundeswehr military parades to mark the field marshal’s anniversaries.
Speidel looked me squarely in the eye, and emphatically denied making any statements to the Gestapo. “If Kaltenbrunner produced any,” he asserted, “then they were forgeries.” I argued that the Gestapo would not have dared to produce forgeries to the six shrewd army officers of the Court of Honor, risking subsequent exposure. Besides, why had Speidel not denied them in his reply to Kirchheim’s 1945 letter? I quoted to him one of my favorite ironic lines from Friedrich Nietzsche: “My memory says this did happen. But my conscience says ’t were better it had not. Gradually memory yields to the dictates of conscience.”
Speidel’s family sat in a tense half circle around us, eager for his reply. My pencil waited. He heaved his bulk into an easier sitting position.
“Herr Irving,” he said finally, “my conscience is clear.”
Three days after the court met, on October 7, 1944, Keitel phoned Rommel’s villa to ask him to come to Berlin. “We’ll be sending a special train to Ulm to fetch him,” he told Rommel’s aide. He also stipulated a firm date, October the tenth.
Rommel discussed it with his family. “I’m not going to make it easy for these gentlemen,” he said. Then he phoned Keitel back, but he was put through instead to General Wilhelm Burgdorf, who had stepped into the dead Rudolf Schmundt’s shoes as chief of army personnel and Hitler’s chief adjutant.
“What’s this meeting going to be about?” inquired Rommel.
Burgdorf’s gruff voice replied, “The Führer has instructed Field Marshal Keitel to discuss your future with you.” Burgdorf and Rommel were old comrades from the Dresden infantry school days, but the field marshal was still uneasy. “I’m afraid I can’t come,” he explained. “I’ve an appointment with my specialists on the tenth, and they say I mustn’t make long journeys in my condition.”
It seems that he had lost interest now in a new job. He appeared more concerned with small matters. For example, though as a field marshal he was entitled to a car for life, Keitel’s office had recently given notice that Rommel’s big Horch was going to be taken away in mid-October, leaving him with a little BMW that had been converted to wood-gas operation. Rommel was also distracted by premonitions. When Carl Schwenk, an industrialist in nearby Ulm, visited the villa, Rommel remarked: “You won’t see me again, they’re coming for me.” And he quietly told his elderly adjutant, Hermann Aldinger—veteran of the heroic battle for Monte Mataiur—that in the event of his death he wanted to be buried in one of three places, Heidelberg, Heidenheim (his birthplace) or here in Herrlingen—but somewhere small and solitary, not majestic at all. He had always been something of a small and solitary figure.
On the eleventh Admiral Ruge, now also forcibly retired, paid him a visit, and for a couple of days they reminisced. Ruge recorded in his diary: “We dined pleasantly on roast venison and a country soup, then went down the road for some champagne. Chatted until well after midnight. The field marshal isn’t as fresh as I had expected. He complains about constant headaches and a lack of vitality. For the time being he has turned down Keitel’s offer of another job. He’s very angry that his car is being taken away from him and that they won’t let him keep his sentry at the house. But otherwise he’s in good spirits. His eyelid is working again, but the eye doesn’t see as well as it did before.”
Together Rommel and Ruge drove fifty miles the next morning to Augsburg, with Rommel himself at the wheel. Perhaps this display of vigor was an error, because it contradicted his professed reluctance to go to Berlin because of poor health. This and the other information flowing from Gestapo agents still shadowing him was bound to revive suspicions at Hitler’s headquarters. One agent said that the conspirator Karl Strölin, mayor of Ulm, had visited him, and the agent listed the exact times. Another described Rommel’s walks “leaning on his son’s arm.” Yet another agent had rifled the hotel room of one of Rommel’s former officers, at Bad Gastein, and kept watch on the officer from behind a newspaper; the officer’s wife had inserted a note in her diary for the agent: “To the snooper. Mind your own business!” But, most damaging, there was the flow of reports from the Gestapo interrogators and from the People’s Court. Hofacker had now signed a lengthy statement alleging that Rommel had actually guaranteed the plotters his active support if the assassination succeeded.
After a war conference on October 12, Hitler briefed Keitel—a tall, moustached and distinguished-looking figure who had shared so many other crises with him—to make Hofacker’s testimony available to Rommel. Hitler also dictated to Keitel a letter to be handed to Rommel, setting out two alternatives. If Rommel still claimed to be innocent of Hofacker’s allegations, then he must report to the Führer. If not, his arrest and trial would be inevitable—and as an officer and gentleman Rommel ought to avoid that by taking the appropriate action. How many times in Prussia’s long history had one officer carried a pistol to a fellow officer who had besmirched his profession, and placed it on the table before him!
Keitel, the very personification of a Prussian officer and gentleman, handed the letter and the interrogation reports to General Burgdorf to carry down to Herrlingen in person. He indicated to Burgdorf that it would be better, if Rommel did choose the second alternative, to offer him poison rather than a pistol. His death could then be hushed up as “by natural causes.” Burgdorf in turn ordered Major General Ernst Maisel, head of the legal section of the army personnel branch, to accompany him as an official witness.
Hitler had thereby accorded his pet field marshal one last favor, something he had granted to none of the conspirators he had ordered to be hanged. The nation should never learn that Erwin Rommel had gone over to the traitors. Not even Lucie was to be told. Hitler also kept the truth from top Nazis such as Göring and Dönitz. Rommel’s personnel files were to contain no hint of this “blemish” on his career.
Early on October 13 Gestapo agents saw Rommel, Lucie and Aldinger drive off in the Horch for one last time—to see Rommel’s longtime friend Oskar Farny. About eleven A.M., Hitler’s headquarters phoned the empty villa. The manservant Rudolf Loistl took the call and answered that the field marshal was out. When General Burgdorf himself phoned, he got the same reply. Burgdorf told Rudolf, “Please be so good as to inform the field marshal that he will be receiving another general and myself tomorrow between noon and one P.M.” Before Burgdorf and Maisel set out from Berlin, in a small Opel provided by the Reich Chancellery’s motor pool, Maisel phoned his principal aide, Major Anton Ehrnsperger, to meet them on the autobahn near Leipzig at three.
Later that day a message reached the Wehrmacht garrison at Ulm to send an officer to the railroad station to meet the express from Berlin next morning—to pick up a large wreath. The Germans always had known how to plan in fine detail. For several days, in fact, a “Study Group F”—under Burgdorf’s Lieutenant Colonel Fressen—had been drafting a program entitled “Sequence for a State Funeral (R.).” Only the date and place still had to be filled in.
WHEN ROMMEL RETURNS to the villa that evening, he is weary from the long drive, but content: still fearing air attack—or worse—he has deposited w
ith Farny the last of his treasures—his valuables, Leica camera and Lucie’s jewelry.
When the manservant repeats General Burgdorf’s telephone message, Rommel never suspects the real purpose of the generals’ coming visit. The optimist in him hopes that he is to be given a new command, perhaps the defense of East Prussia, for the Soviet army is already storming the very frontiers of Germany. He jots down on a blotter the points he is going to raise with Burgdorf first: “Need car for driving to treatment in Tübingen. Motorcycle for staff officer. Secretary. Staff officer.” (These are all perquisites to which a German field marshal is traditionally entitled for life.)
Then the pessimist in him speaks. Suppose he is, after all, going to be tackled about the reasons for the military collapse in France? The next morning, October 14, wearing his favorite brown jacket, the field marshal walks with young Manfred, who is in the gray-blue uniform of a Luftwaffe auxiliary. Rommel muses out loud: “There are two probabilities today. Either nothing happens at all—or this evening I won’t be here.”
At the Ulm railroad station, the wreath has already arrived.
On the autobahn not many miles away, Burgdorf’s Opel stops briefly near a powerful eight-seater police limousine, packed with plain clothes men. From the snatches of conversation he overhears, Major Ehrnsperger realizes that their unit commander is in charge of the surveillance of Rommel’s movements.