Discovering the Rommel Murder

by Charles F. Marshall

  Rommel dispatched Speidel to see Stuelpnagel in Paris, advise him of the talks with Kluge, and promise him that he would take action no matter what Kluge's decision was. During the next three days Rommel visited the front and held frank discussions with the commanders, returning with assurances that the troops and officers of all ranks trusted his leadership and would follow him.

  In discussions Rommel and Speidel had had before the invasion had begun, they were in accord that it might be possible to save Germany by ending the war in the West through an armistice, contacting Eisenhower directly or through Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador in Madrid, or through Vatican or Swiss emissaries. "We envisioned withdrawing the German forces behind the West Wall and holding the German front in the East," Speidel told me. "Rommel and Kluge were also in accord on this on July 12."

  Returning from the front on July 15, the marshal discussed his findings with Speidel. He directed him to draft a special report for Hitler. This report, in effect an ultimatum, was sent as a radio message. It said that the situation on the invasion front had so developed, as Rommel had repeatedly warned orally and in writing, that the front could be held fourteen days or at most three weeks. Then it was to be expected that the enemy would break through south of the Seine with the primary aim of winning the Paris area and cutting off Brittany. There were no more reserves of any of the three arms available, it continued, and the bloody losses now amounted to 28 generals, 354 fieldgrade officers and 250,000 men, who could be replaced only by 30,000 convalescents. It could be determined with almost mathematical exactness where and when the front would fall apart. The result of the enemy's steadily increasing potential and the simultaneous decrease in the German potential had to be given the weightiest consideration.

  "After reading the draft," said Speidel, "Rommel scribbled the concluding sentence himself. 'I must inform you, my Fuhrer,' he wrote, 'that you must immediately accept the political consequences. Rommel, Field Marshal.' But before we sent it off, we thought it best to delete the word 'political.' This would have been a red flag to Hitler and we would have been showered with a flurry of ridiculous orders. We decided 'consequences' could be read to include both military and political matters.

  "At this point Rommel said to me, 'I am giving Hitler this last chance before we negotiate ourselves."'

  The message was transmitted to Hitler via Kluge. Before sending it on Kluge added a sentence: "I agree with all Rommel's conclusions."

  To my observation that the original message would be an interesting historical document, Speidel replied, "Yes. Unfortunately my wife had to bum it when I was arrested."

  That evening, after the dispatch of the message, Rommel discussed with his naval aide, Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, and Speidel his expectations of the conditions of peace. They would be tough, he was sure, and he expected little sympathy from the Allies, but he hoped for understanding. In preparation for discussions he had selected a commission to be made up of Speidel, Ruge, Stuelpnagel, Hofacker, and Generals Geyr von Schweppenburg and Gerd von Schwerin.

  There was no answer to this message the next day and at dawn on the following, July 17, Rommel left his headquarters in his Horch to once more discuss the alarming developments with his corps and division commanders. During the night and the prior two days, the Allies had staged a big attack that had been halted only by throwing in the last reserves. Now the Germans were trying desperately to hold the line from the mouth of the Ome River to Colombes, then to the southeast edge of Caen, then to Caumont and Saint Lo-Lessay.

  By 4:00 P.M. the marshal had concluded his last conference and departed from the headquarters of General Sepp Dietrich's 1st Panzer Corps, heading for his own command post. Speidel had telephoned that the situation at Caen looked threatening, and since noon Allied air activity had greatly increased. The roads were full of burning vehicles. Fighter-bombers patrolled the main highways, forcing traffic to take secondary dirt roads. On dirt roads the dust a car raised soon betrayed its presence.

  Around 6:00 Rommel's car reached the vicinity of Livarot, where more freshly burning vehicles were piled up. For four hours British and American flyers had been strafing all traffic leading into the city. Just outside Livarot the car branched off onto a side road in order to skirt the city and connect with the main road again two miles before Vimoutiers. Suddenly the air observer shouted the alarm. Banking toward the car were three planes that Rommel later told his son and Speidel were American but which the British have always maintained were RAF aircraft.

  The driver was ordered to head full speed for a tree-bordered road 300 yards away and to seek concealment there. Before the sanctuary could be reached, bursts from the lead plane riddled the Horch. One shot shattered the driver's left shoulder and arm and punctured his lung. He lost control of the vehicle. It hit a tree stump on the right side of the road, ricocheted off the tree, careened into a ditch on the other side of the road, and flipped over.

  Rommel, thrown out of the carat the first impact, suffered a crushing blow to the left temple and cheekbone that caused a quadruple fracture of the skull and immediate unconsciousness. Twenty yards down the road from where he lay was the entrance to an estate named, ironically, like his old opponent, "Montgomery." Rommel was bleeding profusely from the eyes and mouth and from many glass splinter wounds in the face. His aide, Captain Helmuth Lang, and his air spotter, Corporal Holke, both of whom escaped serious injury, managed to carry Rommel off to shelter despite bursts from another plane. Not for forty-five minutes were they able to get a car to take the wounded to a hospital.

  In a French aid station in Livarot, a French doctor administered emergency treatment but considered the German's wounds almost certainly fatal. The man whom all elements of the conspiracy felt would have to lend his voice and strength to the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazi Party in the effort to rescue Germany now lay at death's door.

  Still unconscious, the Fox and his driver were rushed twenty-five miles to the Luftwaffe hospital in Bemay. The driver, despite blood transfusions, died during the night.

  The day after the incident Rommel dictated, but could not sign, a letter to "Dearest Lu": "Yesterday I had an accident when strafing planes attacked my car. Fracture of the skull and smaller injuries in the face. I'll be all right in a few weeks."

  July 22: Kluge has taken over my post and will have a hard time bringing matters to a proper end. A short time ago I sent a report on the situation to the higher headquarters, and Kluge added his opinion in support.

  Two days later Rommel wrote that he was being well taken care of in the hospital but that he had to remain immobile until he could be moved, which, he expected would not be for another fortnight. His head was giving him a lot of trouble at night but felt better during the daytime. He grieved over his driver, Daniel, whom he characterized as an excellent driver and a loyal soldier.

  After a few days he was transferred again, this time to a hospital in Le Vesinet near Paris, and after three weeks of complete rest was removed at his insistence to Germany.

  Never again was Rommel to see the battlefield. For all practical purposes his career had come to its end.

  UPON LEARNING THAT ALLIED PLANES HAD STRAFED ROMMEL'S CAR and severely wounded the marshal, the High Command proposed an SS general as successor. This appointment Field Marshal von Kluge vigorously objected to and successfully forestalled. The putsch was due to come off momentarily and Kluge, knowing of the conspiracy, wanted no SS general at one of the two key posts in the West. He therefore assumed combined command of Theater West and Rommel's Army Group B, personally transferring to Rommel's command post.

  Three days later, on July 20, the plotters' bomb exploded. It failed to kill Hitler. The injuries he suffered were described to me by his physician, Professor Theodor Mot-ell, whom I interrogated in the War Crimes Camp in Stuttgart, and are recounted in chapter 13.

  At 5:00 P.M. Speidel received a phone call from Blumentritt, relaying information from the conspirators at Army Headquarters in
Berlin, saying Hitler was dead. But by the time Kluge returned from the field to his headquarters an hour or two later, the government-controlled radio was already reporting that the putsch attempt had failed. During this critical time while matters were in flux and Army Headquarters in Berlin under General Beck's control, Blumentritt, Stuelpnagel, and Field Marshal von Sperrle descended upon La Roche Guyon and implored Kluge to seize control of the army and the government and end the war, even by capitulation if necessary.

  Stuelpnagel, upon first hearing from the Berlin conspirators that Hitler was dead, had ordered General Boineburg, the Commandant of Paris, to arrest all the important SS and SD officials and the entire secret police, some 1,200 in all. He was openly committed, far out on a limb.

  In Germany were two men capable of taking over the government and the armed forces, but neither Dr. Goerdeler nor General Beck were sufficiently known to the German public to count on its support in a coup d'etat while Hitler was still alive.

  While Kluge pondered the situation and vacillated, Rommel, the man of unquestionable international stature who would have seized the reins, whose voice the people and the Army would have followed, lay wounded in a military hospital fighting for his life, only a stone's throw outside Paris.

  Finally, Kluge took soundings. He called Army Headquarters in Berlin and then Berchtesgaden. Hanging up the phone, he ordered Stuelpnagel to free the arrested secret police. He had come down on the side of Berchtesgaden. For Stuelpnagel it was the death knell.

  "That evening we dined in a funereal atmosphere," said Speidel. "Stuelpnagel was advised to don civilian clothing and disappear."

  Instead, he returned to Paris and tried to unscramble the mess. The resulting situation in the French capital, simultaneously delicate and frenetic, was described to me by General Boineburg and is recounted in the next chapter.

  The vast Gestapo apparatus sprang into action and was soon tracing the roots of the plot to important military and political circles. One of the first to be netted was Stuelpnagel, who was ordered the next day to report to Berlin. Knowing the fate awaiting him, he ordered his car stopped en route. Wading into a stream, he shot himself in the head, destroying his sight. His driver and an accompanying guard, hearing the shot, rescued him from drowning and rushed him to a hospital, where the surgeons removed one of his eyes. As he was coming out of the anesthesia, he reportedly called out the name of Rommel. Taken then by the Gestapo to Berlin, he was tortured and hanged.

  As the Gestapo continued with its bloodhound work, General George S. Patton on July 30 cracked the line at Avranches and rapidly advanced. Although Rommel had two weeks earlier predicted such a breakthrough in his radioed ultimatum to the Fiihrer, and although Kluge had endorsed the message with his concurrence, Hitler tried in a series of hysterical telegrams to ram the blame for it down Kluge's throat.

  With the situation continuing its unfavorable unfolding and with the Allies pushing on toward Paris, Kluge on August 12 drove to the area south of Falaise to consult with his army and corps commanders. En route his mobile signal unit suffered a direct hit. He was cut off from all communication and pinned down by enemy fire for several hours. During this period of incommunication Jodi, chief of operations at Hitler's headquarters, was trying to contact him. Suspicious, Jodi called Speidel several times and asked whether it was possible that Kluge had gone over to the enemy. Despite Kluge's explanations for his inability to communicate, the Fiihrer's suspicions were not allayed. And when, despite Hitler's orders to the contrary, he ordered a breakout of the Fifth Panzer Division and Seventh Army from the Falaise pocketanother of Hitler's many "fortresses"-in an effort to save the troops, Hitler made evident his wrath. Twenty-four hours later Field Marshal Walther Model arrived at La Roche Guyon and personally handed Kluge the Fuhrer's curt dismissal order.

  To escape the trial and ignominious death by public hanging, which had become the Fiihrer's way of disposing of out-of-favor generals and field marshals, and which Kluge knew would shortly follow, he took poison in his car on the road between Verdun and Metz.

  The main factor in influencing der kluge Hans to take his own life was not, however, the failure to surmount the fast eroding military situation, but the miscarried putsch. This bore two tragic results for Kluge. One was the immediate replacement of General Kurt Zeitzler by Guderian as Chief of the General Staff. Kluge and Guderian were bitter enemies and on the Russian front had once been kept from fighting a duel over differences in strategy only by Hitler's personal intervention. In a suicide note to Hitler urging him to make peace, Kluge wrote, "I could not approach him [Guderian] and so there was no possibility of my receiving panzer support for the West, which was necessary."

  The second tragic result was the arrest of the pre-Hitler mayor of Leipzig, Dr. Karl Goerdeler. Goerdeler had been the chief organizer of the putsch and had been planning it for years. As early as 1942 Kluge had been in contact with Goerdeler and had agreed to participate in the putsch on condition that Hitler be killed and he, Kluge, get complete control of one front. Knowing the Gestapo methods, he feared that a confession to this effect would be tortured out of Goerdeler. The news of his arrest had greatly agitated him, and he discussed his fears with Speidel far into the night.

  Rommel's jinxed command now passed to Field Marshal Model, a man mentally sharp, physically untiring, but a swaggerer submissive to Hitler and prone to curry favor with the troops at the expense of the officers. Politically naive, he had an aversion to discussing the political situation. Attempts by Speidel to draw him out were brushed off with reminders of the aftermath of July 20. Urgings by his commanders that he consider independent strategic decisions were handled similarly. To the horror of his staff he requested an SS officer be assigned as his aide. Quick to swap principle for expediency, this was not a man whose conscience was going to override his orders.

  Long used on the eastern front as a specialist in crises, and now recalled while directing the masterful retreat in the central sector, Model soon found that this crisis was one too big even for his talents to handle. Although a man of great ambitions and a highly competent General Staff technician, he was forced to continue the withdrawal of the outclassed German forces. In time, as his troops fell back across the Rhine, he, too, took his own life. In a forest near Duesseldorf on April 21 he shot himself.

  Like Rommel and Kluge, Speidel was not one to blindly follow Hitler's directives. In Russia he had not passed down the Fuhrer's demand that all captured commissars be executed. Now, on August 23, a directive that Army Group B destroy the bridges and other important installations in Paris, even if it meant the destruction of artistic works, he also circumvented.

  While the wounded Fox lay in a hospital in Le Vesinet, conditions on the Normandy front went from bad to worse, as he had predicted. In spite of the initial doubts of the attending doctors, his condition improved, so rapidly in fact that after three weeks he was able to receive visitors for short periods. One of these was Professor Doctor Kurt Hesse, an old, dear friend and internationally known military historian. As Hesse sat on the edge of his bed, the marshal held his hand for a long time. He was in the mood to reminisce. Twice he sent away the doctor who had come to ask the visitor to leave. He spoke about the quick fall of Cherbourg and told how all his suggestions had been ignored, how Jodi and Warlimont had sabotaged his ideas, and that his radio messages had gone unanswered. He was sure he was being stigmatized as "a defeatist" in the Fiihrer's circle.

  "His predominant thought now," said Hesse to me in May 1946, "was how the war could be ended most quickly. Since it had not been possible to throw the Allied forces back into the sea, he would have liked them to march in and occupy all of central Europe and join the Wehrmacht in keeping the Russians outside the German borders. The one hindrance he saw was Hitler. Much bitterness lay in his words, especially when he talked about the putsch and the officers who were being executed for their participation in it. He expressed a presentiment of his own death."

  The marshal
did not want to fall badly wounded into enemy hands in the event the front collapsed, as he knew it would, and as indeed it soon did. The next day the Swabian, over the remonstrations of the medical team, gave a direct order to be transported home. Seeing that they could not dissuade him, the doctors proposed that the wearisome trip of 450 miles be made in two stages, lest he begin hemorrhaging again.

  "Nonsense!" rasped Rommel, and he decreed an uninterrupted journey.

  "He is an unusually healthy human being," commented the chief surgeon to Speidel during a visit. "He has a passionate will to live and enormous powers of recovery. He will be well again in one-fourth the time it would take an ordinary man."

  In a specially rebuilt truck, accompanied by two doctors from the hospital, Rommel was driven to his home, and his care was taken over by two medical professors at the Tuebingen University hospital, one a brain specialist and the other an eye, ear, and nose specialist.

  The surgeon's prediction proved correct. Under the care of the specialists, Albrecht and Stock, Rommel's condition improved so rapidly that after a short time the doctors were able to discontinue their regular visits to the patient's home in favor of his visits to the hospital. A near complete recovery was the prognosis.

  His recuperation, said Mrs. Rommel on one of my visits, moved Albrecht to remark, "I have always taught my students that a man with skull fractures such as yours could not live."

  Among the injuries Rommel suffered when his car was strafed in France in July 1944 were skull fractures and a damaged eyelid. During his recuperation, he diligently pursued exercises prescribed by his eye specialist in an effort to regain control of the drooped lid. Photo August 5 or 6, 1944, from Mrs. Rommel.