Speidel had been in Gestapo custody for seven months undergoing periodic questioning, while the inquisitors waited for a damning admission or some irrefutable evidence that would seal his fate. As the war neared its end and French forces approached, the SS officer in the prison was temporarily lured away by a Speidel-concocted phony telegram from Himmler. In his absence the sympathetic prison commandant freed Speidel and the other score of prisoners, and the priest hid them. Before the SS could find them, French soldiers had besieged the region. Had the plan not worked, it is probable that the French would have found the prisoners murdered in accordance with SS precedents.
When we arrived at the Famy home, the large, solid, and comfortable abode of people of means, Speidel, as was the courtly custom in those circles, clicked his heels, bowed, and brushed his lips over the proffered hand of Mrs. Famy. Upon my being introduced, I gave a fleeting thought to emulating the custom but feared I couldn't creditably pull it off. I shook hands.
Also present for dinner that evening was the former head of Germany's dairy association and his wife. The conversation was stimulating since much of it dealt with international relations, and it was particularly fascinating to me when Germany was discussed since most of the leading figures including Hitler were personally known to these people.
Oskar Famy was a man of short stature but extraordinary presence. He was a muscular, large-chested man who exuded physical and moral strength, was brusque in manner, and was not easily swayed from his convictions. He had been a member of the Reichstag, which had 876 representatives, only four of whom had defied all Nazi pressure to join the Party. Famy, a Center Party deputy, was one of the four. His wife was to tell me that every time he left for Reichstag sessions, she was afraid he would be arrested for his opposition and she would never see him again.
After the other guests had departed, he took Speidel and me to his study. There we discussed Rommel at length and he revealed that the marshal had a foreboding of his fate. The day before his death he had visited and asked Famy to secrete some papers. "I am in grave danger," Rommel told him. "Hitler wants to do away with me. His reasons are my ultimatum on July 15 when I told him `the war is lost, make peace,' and the events of July 20. If anything should happen to me, I beg you to take care of my son." The boy was thinking of a career in the Army, but his father wished him to study medicine.
When Famy protested that it would be impossible for psychological reasons for Hitler to put his most popular army leader on trial, Rommel replied, "You will see. He will have me put to death. You are a politician who has fought these people and should understand this criminal better than I."
At the end of the evening the Speidels were put up for the night in the main house, and I was accommodated in a small guest house near a stream that ran through the property.
In the morning after breakfast, as we were preparing to leave, Farny insisted we first visit his dairy, a short drive from the house. There he loaded us up with several pounds of cheeses and other edibles, an act much appreciated by the Speidels, who, like most Germans, had to contend daily with the country's food shortage.
I was not to see Famy again, but eighteen months after I left Germany I received a letter from him informing me that General Maisel, "one of the two Mordkavaliere (knights of murder)," to use Farny's phrase, was trying to minimize his involvement in Rommel's death. He was trying to convey to the prosecutors and public that he had been an innocent escort for Burgdorf.
Having used up all the gas on the long trip to Farny's estate, I needed some to drive back. To get gas I had to see the colonel of the French regiment in Wangen. The colonel spoke neither English nor German, forcing me to resort to my lamentable French. A vaudevillesque dialogue ensued, as was so often the case when I dealt with the French, and I finally extracted two and a half gallons. I could more easily have extracted that amount in blood from an American. I needed ten gallons, not to get home but just to get back into the American occupation zone. What angered me, and most Americans who travelled in the French zone, was that almost all the gas, oil, cars, and equipment that the French had, even many of their uniforms, were American, yet getting back a few gallons of gas in an emergency could be an exercise in futility. I wondered if the French had even an inkling of how much ill feeling their supercilious attitude created. To me it was understandable why army polls showed the GIs preferred the Germans over the French.
The trip back to Freudenstadt was not as pleasant as the trip there. When the two and a half gallons of gas I had been allowed were used up, I pulled into a French tank park. After driving around in it and ascertaining there was no officer about, and particularly no colonel in sight, I slipped a French soldier a pack of cigarettes for two five-gallon cans of gas, enough to get me back into the American zone.
March 18: Letter from Colonel Truman Smith. the friend of Charles A. Lindbergh, asking me to transmit an enclosed letter to General Speidel. Also, enclosed for me, was a carbon copy of the letter to Speidel.
Smith was an officer influential far beyond his rank. Not a West Pointer, he was educated at Yale and Columbia before joining the Army. While stationed at Fort Benning he came to the attention of Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, then assistant commandant at Fort Benning.
Smith lectured on military history and Marshall frequently stopped by to listen. During leisure hours they were often tennis partners. When a German general who had been invited to observe American training methods invited Marshall to send an observer to study German training, it was Smith that Marshall sent. As military attache in Berlin from 1935 to 1939, he quickly became the leading American expert on the German Army.
Soon after Smith took up this post, he began sending perceptive reports on the rapidly growing Wehrmacht. Seeing also that Goering's air force was expanding with astounding rapidity and was developing new planes at a fast clip and that new bombing techniques were being devised and new aircraft plants being built, Smith came to the conclusion that his assistant attache for air, while a good pilot and a hard-working officer, had insufficient technical knowledge to evaluate the Luftwaffe's progress.
He decided to ask Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh to come to Germany and assess the air developments. He felt that for the world-famous flyer Goering and the air generals would open all doors, and so it proved. Lindbergh was heartily welcomed by the Luftwaffe and was shown virtually everything he asked to see.
Living with the Smiths in their Berlin apartment, Lindbergh flew around Germany studying the airfields, the aircraft manufacturing facilities, and the specifications and characteristics of the newest planes. He was even shown what was on the drawing boards; German airmen talked freely to him.
At the end of each day's inspections, Lindbergh wrote a report of his findings for Smith, which Smith sent to Washington along with his own report of the rapidly escalating ground forces' developments.
While intended to alert American defense forces, the reports greatly displeased President Roosevelt as he was shifting the United States from a stance of neutrality to one of overt belligerence on the side of the Western democracies.
Smith and Lindbergh were accused of exaggerating the strength of Hitler's forces. It was said their reports were motivated by pro-German sentiment, and they were accused of being defeatist. There was even an attempt by top Roosevelt advisers to start court-martial proceedings against Smith. General Marshall, however, warned the president that Smith would be acquitted and that such an outcome would estrange the administration and the army.
In the summer of 1939 Smith was found to be suffering from a serious diabetic condition and was ordered back to the United States and expected to be retired. Marshall intervened and prevented the retirement. Two years later, though, a retirement board at Walter Reed Hospital ordered Smith's mandatory retirement. But when a few weeks later the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, Marshall personally called Smith at his Connecticut home and asked him to come back to Washington.
In the summer of 1943 when Gener
al Marshall was about to leave for England to command the forces that were being assembled to invade Europe, he wanted to take Smith with him as a special intelligence consultant.
The medical board at Walter Reed found Smith unfit for overseas service, but this did not stop Marshall, who held to his previous decision that Smith would go along to Europe and would live at an army hospital while working in army headquarters.
When Roosevelt decided he needed Marshall in the United States and that Eisenhower would direct the invasion forces in Europe, Marshall kept Smith at his side. For the duration of the European war, despite his debilitating illness, Smith worked in the Pentagon's intelligence division and presented an oral resume of enemy operations in Europe at Marshall's daily staff conference. At the war's end, on Marshall's recommendation, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and retired, finally, in June 1946.
After his retirement Smith wrote a book, Berlin Alert, and in the foreword, four-star General A. C. Wedemeyer has written:
Marshall personally admired Truman Smith and highly respected his professional abilities, particularly his judgments concerning military affairs in Europe. He considered Smith's retirement a serious loss to the Intelligence Division of the General Staff and arranged for him to participate in intelligence evaluations on a schedule that would not endanger his health. Had his illness not intervened, 1 have little doubt that Smith would have risen to high rankand might have played a role equal in influence to Eisenhower's during World War 1/.
When Wedemeyer was given the task in 1940 of preparing a national plan for the full mobilization of men and materiel in the event of war, he relied heavily "upon the shrewd and informed assessments of Truman Smith."
Not only did Wedemeyer think that Smith would have risen to high rank had illness not intervened, but General Speidel concurred. When he first told me he would like to contact Smith, he said, "Smith must be at least a twoor three-star general. Do you know of any General Truman Smith'?"
"No," I said, racking my brain, "the only generals I know of by the name of Smith are a Marine Corps Lieutenant General Holland Smith and Eisenhower's deputy, Lieutenant General Bedell Smith." I suggested he send his letter to Smith's home, if he had the address, which he had.
So it was that shortly before his retirement, Truman Smith and I became acquainted by mail. My first letter from him, dated March 8, thanked me for transmitting the letter from Speidel. "He is an old friend and I was delighted to hear from him.... I hope you will transmit further letters from Hans Speidel.... In the prewar years he was the outstanding French specialist of the German Army ..."
In the weeks that followed more letters were exchanged, through me, by the two men. Smith asked Speidel at one point to explain a puzzling strategic move by the German Army in Russia.
While drafting his reply, the general pulled out a military map from his desk and we discussed the German tactics and strategy on the Russian front. He stressed that as the German Army increasingly departed from fighting by the principles of Clausewitz, the Red Army increasingly and successfully adopted those principles. In referring to the Fiihrer's military acumen, he referred to him as a "dilettante" and quipped that Germany's defeat on the eastern front was due to too many Russians and one German too many.
Another time Smith asked Speidel's opinion about various German military personages. In regard to this letter, Smith wrote:
Dear Marshall, I hope you kept a copy of Speidel's valuable letter.... Can you transmit the attached two letters to Speidel and Professor Dr. Kurt Hesse? Let us get together as soon as you reach New York. I am in the Fairfield, Connecticut telephone book and I hope you will be my guest in New York at luncheon after reaching these shores.
Smith's request that I forward his letter to Professor Hesse was inadvertently to lead to another excellent source of data on Rommel.
March 22: A slow day at the camp, so I got some retyping done on my article. Tomorrow I'm going to Speidel's and we'll read the manuscript together, see if every word of it is accurate and if there is anything that ought to be added.
The following day was Saturday and once again I was in Freudenstadt. The general took me to visit one of Hitler's headquarters, a group of underground bunkers that were his command post for the invasion of France in 1940. For lunch we stopped at a nearby Gasthaus that had a guest book boasting the Fiihrer's signature and those of other VIPs.
Returning to the Speidel home after our little junket, the general read my manuscript, finding several minor inaccuracies and points that needed further clarification. He also found a few points he was able to use for the manuscript he had under way. While we always conducted our conversations in German, he read English as fast as I.
I slept overnight at Frau Honecke's pension. She and Speidel were friends and, as previously when I spent the night there, I was treated royally. In the hallway there was mounted the largest butterfly I had ever seen, with a wingspan of almost a foot.
In the morning Speidel and I finished our work, and after dinner we left. En route to Heilbronn I dropped him at his brother-in-law's castle in Talheim, where we drank a bottle of wine, a product of its vineyards. The baron was away and the Baroness von Schubert showed me through the castle, which included an immense atticlike room in which hung a dozen or so larger-thanlife paintings of the baron's military forbears, some posed with hand on sword, all in full uniform, including some with spiked helmets, all enhanced with elaborate epaulettes and sashes, and dripping medals and decorations by the pound. After a stroll in the park, which she showed me with justifiable pride, she cordially invited me back.
March 25-26: Wrote a letter to Colonel Truman Smith among a series of letters, mainly forwarding photographs and letters from Germans to their relatives in America and vice versa. Although it is purely a matter of mercy, some day I'm liable to get hit in the head, because this is prohibited.
Even the correspondence between Speidel and Smith was, strictly speaking, prohibited. Both men always furnished me with carbon copies of their letters, I suppose for my protection, although I never asked for copies. I presume they felt that if my transgression as a middleman ever came to light, the carbon copies would prove that the correspondence was not treasonous.
My next visit with the Speidels was on the weekend of April 6-7. In the afternoon we went to look at a monastery dating back to the middle of the eleventh century. Upon returning we worked on the Rommel article. Speidel gave me a carbon copy of his answer to Colonel Truman Smith on the reasons for Hitler's eccentric strategy in Russia in 1942 and the Stalingrad disaster. He also went over the campaign with me on a map, emphasizing Hitler's psychological inability to sacrifice ground in exchange for flexibility in defense. This resulted in much conflict with his generals in the field, who were hobbled by the Fuhrer's fixation and dismayed by the disregard for Clausewitz's teachings. Rommel had been similarly thwarted in North Africa. In hopeless situations the Fiihrer would demand that the battle be fought "to the last man, victory or death." Much of what Speidel said to me corroborated what Marshal List had told me a year earlier.
April 23: Met Captains Kleikamp and Manthe of the 9th Division G-2 Section in Stuttgart by appointment. They wanted me to take over the Headquarters Intelligence Detachment and all the internee camps, eight or nine, in the Ludwigsburg area. Since I don 't expect to be in the service much longer, I turned it down.
April 24: The G-2 of the 9th Infantry Division, to which the Intelligence Detachment is now attached, insists that I take over operational control of the interrogation in the internment camps and hospitals, not only in the Ludwigsburg area, but also of those in the Bad Mergentheim and Karlsruhe areas.
Spent the day visiting several of the camps and getting oriented.
In my mail I now found a letter from Colonel Smith asking me to forward an enclosed letter to Professor Dr. Kurt Hesse. Also enclosed was a letter for General Speidel, with whom I had an appointment for May 9.
In the meantime I worked on the Rommel art
icle, which was getting rather lengthy, and continued making the rounds of all the camps whose interrogation functions were now under my jurisdiction. With the approval of the Security Review Board I began instituting procedures to speed up the interrogation and resulting disposition of the inmates.
May 9: Visited General Speidel and spent a most interesting day. He is checking the manuscript, now considerably expanded.
We agreed that it is odd that Mrs. Rommel so vociferously denies in interviews that her husband was involved in the Hitler putsch.
Mrs. Rommel's denial was based on the German officer's oath of loyalty to Hitler. Although she was aware of her husband's acute disdain for the Fiihrer, she refused to believe that he would have agreed to the attempt on the Fuhrer's life. The fact of the matter is that in the course of the convoluted plotting, involving numerous groups, Rommel wanted Hitler taken alive, not killed, and tried for his crimes in a court.
May 17: Drove to Speidel's. They had a guest, the wife of the general's chief of operations on the Normandy front.
Together with the guest, Mrs. Speidel, and the general, I drove to Herrlingen, near Ulm, to see Mrs. Rommel. She greeted me warmly. To the laughter and amusement of the others, she and soon engaged in a lighthearted verbal duel, riposte countered by riposte, about the propriety of the French occupation versus the American, Mrs. Rommel upholding the French. I can understand why. She has been shabbily treated by us and chivalrously by the French.
Several high-ranking French officers and officials had paid her courtesy calls, the chivalry much appreciated by her, and had invited the Rommels to take up residence in the French zone of occupation. In contrast to her experience with the French, the Americans had looted her house. Locked closets and trunks were forcibly opened. Her husband's uniforms had been taken, as were his riding boots and saddles. His Leica camera with all its attachments had been "liberated."
Discovering the Rommel Murder Page 26