"If he were alive today," said Aldinger, after some reflection, "he would tell you that the commander in chief must be the driving engine in the battle and that his troops must see him in personal control. He must have an affinity with his men. He must not be above eating with them and sharing their discomforts, including dying with them if necessary. The affinity must be genuine, for if it is not, the soldier has a keen sense of fakery and will quickly sniff it out. Yet, despite this affinity, he must not give up a snippet of his authority. Subordinate commanders and their troops, even when weary unto death, even when outmatched in numbers and weaponry, must be convinced by the commander that the battle plan will succeed if they will give it their maximum effort. A second-rate battle plan, he felt, if executed with determination, will prevail over a first-rate plan halfheartedly carried out. `In evenly matched forces,' he would say, `the battle will always be decided in favor of the side with the stronger will."'
As we arranged for further meetings, he offered to prepare a biographical sketch of the field marshal for me.
From Mrs. Rommel I had learned where Aldinger was being held. She had also given me the address of General Speidel, who, I believed, would be a key to my research if he would cooperate.
February 2: Saturday. Picked up Fraulein Dr. Kimmich and we drove 1 00 kilometers deep into the French Zone to Freudenstadt for the purpose of visiting Generalleutnant Dr. Hans Speidel, Rommel'schiefofstaff: WearrivedatSpeidel shomeinFreudenstadt only to find he was visiting friends in Talheim, near Heilbronn, and in Stuttgart, from which we had just come.
Mrs. Speidel invited us to dinner, consisting of soup, potatoes, carrots, and apples. I had brought along rolls freshly baked of white flour and contributed that to the meal. Mrs. Speidel and her three children, Ina, Christa, and Hansie, aged thirteen, ten, and six respectively, were delighted with them.
It had been so many years since the Germans had bread or rolls made of white flour that they looked upon it now almost as a dessert, as cake.
When I brought out a bar of candy for each of the three kids they ecstatically fondled them, turning them over and over, before eating them.
Took a picture of the kids. Everything very friendly.
Then drove back to Stuttgart where we met the general at the home of a baker friend where Mrs. Speidel said we might find him. I told him I was researching Rommel and he said he would be highly pleased to talk to me about him. I discovered in our two-hour meeting over wine and cake that the general was a brilliant and energetic man. He told me many new things, and many revealing ones, and agreed to let me read the manuscript on Rommel on which he was working and to let me quote liberally from it if I wished.
We arranged to spend Monday together, and that 1 would pick him up in Stuttgart.
Speidel was also writing a tract in defense of the honor of Colonel General Beck, the leader of the military wing involved in the putsch, who in 1938 had resigned as the German Army's chief of staff in opposition to the proposal to invade Czechoslovakia and who committed suicide upon failure of the putsch. We walked to my car as we arranged a date for a second meeting. As I pulled out my note pad to jot down the time and date, the thought flashed through my mind that I, a young junior officer, might be conveying an image of self-importance if I needed a note to remind me of an appointment with a high-level officer who had played such an important role in the defense of Normandy. "Forgive me, Herr General," I apologized, "I use a note pad to reinforce a leaky memory."
With a smile Speidel pulled out his own pad. "As soon as you pulled away," he said, "I was going to make note of our appointment. A note pad relieves the mind."
In the weeks and months ahead whenever Speidel and I approached a door together I. as the junior officer, would indicate for him to enter first. He, probably considering himself my host in his country, or possibly the vanquished in the war, would insist on holding the door and waving me in. I, in turn, would refuse and insist the honor was his, raising a smile on both our faces. These Alphonse and Gaston incidents continued throughout the course of our association.
February 3: Spent day at home. Prepared questions for visit to General Speidel tomorrow.
February 4: Drove to Stuttgart and picked up Fraulein Dr. Kimmich and then General Speidel. Drove to his home in Freudenstadt in the Black Forest.
Enjoyable and enlightening chat during the two hour drive.
Upon arriving at his house and being greeted by his family, we began work, he freely and at length answering all my questions, at times quoting from his manuscript, which I suggested and hope he will publish in America.
Then came dinner. I brought candy and an orange for each of the three kids, and they were delighted beyond description. I also brought along a can of turkey, plus coffee, which we drank during the afternoon's work, and a loaf of white bread, which they ate as cake, cutting it into thin slices. It is dramatically illustrative of Germany's plight, this physical hunger that grips everyone, even such once-powerful people. The general went to Heilbronn, 120 miles, and lugged hack a heavy suitcase and a knapsack of apples and other food donated by friends in better circumstances.
After dinner we had another schnapps or two and worked on until 7 P.M., and / got a wealth of information.
We made an appointment for me to visit him again at l I A.M. on Saturday, February 23, at which time he will give me some neverbefore-published photos of Rommel.
Before we left, he gave me the story, twelve closely typed pages, of his arrest and imprisonment by the Gestapo after Romniel's wounding, asking me to read it and give hire my advice on what to do with it.
A fine time was had by all, and when we finally left, I felt we parted as friends.
Speidel gave me his calling card and his copy of Rommel 's book Infanterie Greift An and inscribed it: "In comradely remembrance of'that day in Freudenstadt.
February 2, /946
Dr. Hans Speidel
Major General, Retired
Last chief of staff of
Field Marshal Rommel"
The general had two copies of the hook. The other was a copy Rommel had given him.
I am also mailing two letters for him to Colonel Truman Smith, former American military attache in Berlin.
On return trip we had motor trouble, water in gas, but immediately found a mechanic.
It had been a long day but a highly profitable one. I had learned much, and in the course of another dozen visits I was to learn much more.
At H hour on D-Day it was Speidel who was the general in charge of repulsing the Allied invasion. Rommel happened to be away from the command post, visiting his wife on her birthday.
Speidel had been chief of staff of the Eighth Army fighting in the Caucasus when he had been assigned to the same post for Army Group B, the troops defending the Atlantic coast. For his masterful planning of the Eighth Army's successful fighting retreat in Russia he had been awarded the Knight's Cross. He was a well-built, freckled, sandy-haired, bespectacled man in his early forties, of a forceful analytical mind and, like Rommel, a Swabian. Professorial in speech and manner, he was multilingual and a perfect example of the Renaissance man. He was an enthusiastic horseman and music lover. For ten years he had been the critic of military literature for the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfort Newspaper) and correspondent for the Allgemeine Schweitzer Militaerzeitung (Universal Swiss Military Newspaper). He was a personal friend of numerous German poets and literary figures and by marriage a distant relative of the eighteenth-century poet and novelist Friedrich von Schiller. His father, like Rommel's, had been a teacher, Rommel's at a high school and Speidel's at Tuebingen University.
He had joined the army as a volunteer in November 1914 after the outbreak of the First World War. Following the war, as a young officer, he studied at the Universities of Stuttgart and Tuebingen and in 1925 was awarded doctoral degrees in economics and philosophy. As assistant military attache to the German Embassy in Paris, Speidel had travelled widely in France, was considered the leading s
pecialist on the French Army, and had become enamored of many things French. (In August 1944 he had sabotaged Hitler's direct order to carry out demolition in Paris that would have destroyed much of the city.)
During the German invasion of France he had been the operations officer of the 9th Corps at Dunkerque and later the chief of staff of the Military Governor of France, General Stuelpnagel. Displeased with the high numbers of Gestapo entering France, he requested transfer and over time held several high-ranking staff posts in Russia.
Suspected as a participant in the July 20 coup d'etat, he was removed as chief of staff in the first days of September, on the 5th he returned home, on the 6th he visited Rommel to warn him of the likelihood of consequences as the result of their involvement. The following day, the 7th, he was arrested by the Gestapo while still in bed and hustled off to prison in Berlin. There he was tortured and interrogated at length, refusing to admit having made disparaging remarks about Hitler's Stalingrad debacle or having been involved in the putsch. He was threatened that if he did not confess, a confession would be extracted from his wife and children.
Hitler, Field Marshal Keitel was later to say, was convinced of Speidel's guilt. The army's Court of Honor, however, for lack of evidence, refused to expel him from the army, sparing him public prosecution. This did not prevent the Gestapo from holding him in a succession of prisons, but through guile and intelligence he outfoxed his inquisitors. Not until the last days of the war was his final place of incarceration, a school in Bavaria, captured. Notified by the First French Army of their eminent prisoner, Eisenhower personally ordered that he be set free.
The general and I were to spend numerous days together, usually over a bottle of wine, sometimes ruminating on his balcony in the same wicker chairs in which plotters of the failed putsch had sat, particularly Mayor Stroelin of Stuttgart. They were days in which, I like to think, we developed a mutual regard and became good friends. Pondering formulas for peace, Speidel was an advocate of the balance of power as the best guarantee. I agreed. On another point I did not. I felt the American development of the atom bomb had made us such a dominant power that we could force nonmilitary solutions in our areas of interest. Speidel disagreed. He predicted that in time the bomb would be developed by other countries and a prolif eration would follow. "You will see." he said with great prescience, "that you will regret ever having invented that weapon. It will become a dangerous world."
Another time I said, "Throughout the campaigns I fought in, I thanked God every night before I closed my eyes that I was not called upon to point my gun at another man. I don't know how many men I may have killed by telephone as a result of interrogation and the translation of captured documents. If I could find out by just pushing a button, I would not push that button."
The general nodded his understanding. "I often thanked God that I was never called to serve at Hitler's headquarters."
Discussing the vagaries of army life, I mentioned that at a critical point in the Anzio battle, when it appeared that we might be driven into the sea, that we might be facing another Dunkerque, I had used a phosphorous grenade to burn a pile of secret and top-secret papers, and still it took me an hour to reduce them to ashes. "An hour!" I repeated. "And with a phosphorous grenade!" I exclaimed.
"In the German Army," said the general drily, "we used to say, That side will win the war which first runs out of paper."'
February 5: Usual office day.
Still trying to get the dump mess straightened out.
February 6: To Seventh Armv Headquarters in Heidelberg and learned that despite rumors to the contrary, the camp is to stav and hold 10,000 in the immediate future. Only the guarding battalion is being changed.
Then on to Stuttgart where Dr. Kinunieh and I translated and discussed the notes she took for me at General Speidel's.
February 8: Met the new camp battalion commander. Discussed plans with him and sre found ourselves in complete agreement. With his acquiescence I selected a German administration for the camp.
February 9: Drove to biterninent Camp 78 at Zuffenhausen to see Hauptmann Hermann Aldinger. He had prepared the biographical sketch he had promised me.
In further discussion he mentioned that the marshal thought the Americans were the best armed and outfitted soldiers of any army and that their commanders were able to fight the war "mit dens Rechenstift (with a calculator)," a comment Rommel made to different people at different times, implying we had such overwhelming power that tactics were of only secondary importance.
February 11. Further work on Rommel article.
Again heard a rumor that our camp will be ordered to fold up by February 25.
February 12-15: Routine working days.
Now supposed to be definite that we will be folding up.
Slight progress on Rommel article.
February 19: Got in 1,800 PWs, known as "active cooperators "-supposedly de-Nazifled. Found one of them to be a murderer. Fourth murderer we've picked up in two days.
That weekend I drove to Freudenstadt in the Black Forest with a brother of Dr. Kimmich, a pleasant, well-educated chap and an ex-captain in the German Army, who was studying at Tuebingen University and who acted as my note taker. Dr. Kimmich had told herbrother of my research on Rommel and he was eager to meet Speidel. It was a rough trip. There was a lot of snow in the mountains and the BMW had difficulty making it up some of the hills.
We arrived at 2:30 P.M. in the middle of a snowstorm. In Freudenstadt the snow was from three to six feet deep.
As usual the general was very helpful and I gathered more material for the article.
In the evening it was still snowing and we couldn't leave Freudenstadt without taking the risk of getting hopelessly stuck overnight in the mountains and possibly freezing to death. We spent the night in a small pension in town.
On the return trip I took Mrs. Speidel along. I dropped Mr. Kimmich at the University of Tuebingen and then drove Mrs. Speidel to Talheim to her sister-in-law, the Baroness von Schubert, who lived in a small castle. She received me graciously and I stayed for two schnappses.
The lack of postal service between Germany and the United States often forced me into the role of mailman. My father owned a knitting mill in Ridgewood, at the time a section of New York City heavily populated by people from the German-speaking regions of Europe.
A number of his employees were Germans, and they were always interested in my whereabouts. If I was stationed anywhere near their hometowns, letters and food packages would be sent to me with pleas that I deliver them to their relatives, many of whom had been impoverished by the war.
One Sunday I delivered a package to a family whose son was a discharged soldier who had fought on both the Russian front and the western front. As we drank the usual hospitable schnapps, and making small talk, I asked him if there was a difference in the fighting on these fronts. "Oh, yes," he said. "Emphatically yes. The Russians had to be cut down by rifle and machine gun fire and still they kept coming. On the other hand I fought the Americans for months without ever seeing one."
"Never seeing one?" I asked.
"Well, not closely," he replied. "Your tactics consisted mainly of plane, tank, and artillery attacks."
The comment brought to mind Rommel's oft-repeated remark that the Allied generals had fought the war with calculators.
March 5: Found a little time during the day to work on the Rommel article. Noticed in going through my diary a letter that Generalleutnant Boineburg, Commandant of Paris at the time of the attempt on Hitler's life, wrote me explaining his part in the putsch. It gave me several more points on which to question Speidel at our next meeting on March 16.
In one of our talks Speidel had told me there was a man named Oskar Farny to whom Rommel had been particularly close and with whom he thought I ought to talk. The weekend of March 16 had been set aside for that purpose.
After lunch with the Speidels, the general, his wife, and I embarked on the long drive to see Famy, a gentleman
farmer whose estate and business properties lay deep in the French zone of occupation near the Swiss border, not far from the eastern tip of Lake Constance. Speidel had arranged for our visit and we were expected to be overnight guests.
The 300-mile trip offered much time for more discussion of the war, Rommel's part in it, his disillusionment with Hitler, and his ultimate falling out of favor with the Fiihrer.
"Soon after assuming command of Army Group B and the responsibility for the French coastal defenses," said the general, "Rommel was dismayed by their inadequacy and ordered them strengthened manyfold. He concluded that in light of the overpowering Allied air and naval forces, the outcome of the war largely hinged on the outcome of day one. The invasion,' he said, will be decisive. For the Allies, as well as for Germany, it will be the longest day."'
When the Western Powers successfully landed at Normandy, continued Speidel, it was obvious to Rommel that the war was lost and he wanted Hitler to come to terms with the enemy. "In contrast to the sycophant generals with whom the Fiihrer surrounded himself," said Speidel, "Rommel was a brusque, honest, outspoken commander who told the Nazi leader the facts, which was not always what Hitler wanted to hear. And when those facts pointed to the incontrovertible conclusion that it was in Germany's interest to end the war, Hitler considered him a defeatist, a non-stayer, a quitter. The Margival meeting with Hitler's scathing accusations and Rommel's heated rejoinders caused the final break in their relationship.
"But there was another factor, perhaps even more important. Widely respected in Germany and abroad, Rommel was the potential head of state of a new Germany should peace be effected. The finding of Goerdeler's list confirmed for Hitler that Rommel was involved in the July 20 affair."
The long trip to Famy's estate had been tiring, but with much picturesque scenery, especially along Lake Constance, the body of water that partly separates Germany from Switzerland, and on which Propaganda Minister Goebbels, I was told, had a country home. On the way we made stops at Urna, a town near Lake Constance, to see the school in which Speidel had been last in Gestapo custody and to visit with the Buergermeister and the Catholic priest who had been instrumental in rescuing him from the SS.
Discovering the Rommel Murder Page 25