This, of course, is one of the fundamental failings of von Stauffenberg’s entire plan: he needed Rommel—not merely a senior general of Rommel’s stature within Germany, but a general whom the Allies believed they knew and who they undoubtedly respected. That Rommel would have considered von Stauffenberg’s goals so much unsinn—nonsense—would have left the July 20 conspirators without credibility among the British and American leadership. Thus the most pervasive myth about Rommel and the conspirators who planned and attempted the July 20 attentat, that, had he not been severely wounded on July 17 Rommel would have, in cooperation with von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators in Berlin, announced a capitulation in the West, is rubbish.
As it was, any association, real or imagined, played by Erwin Rommel in the conspiracies against Adolf Hitler began not with Claus von Stauffenberg but with Hans Speidel, Rommel’s Chief of Staff beginning in April 1944, who was involved in the July 20 attentat, but neither so fervently nor as deeply as he would attempt to lead posterity to believe. The source of all “detailed” accounts of Rommel’s involvement with the conspirators is Speidel, and as postwar events would demonstrate, Speidel had ulterior motives for offering up Rommel as a key member of the July 20 bomb plot. And thereby hangs a tale, not one of Second World War intrigue, but of postwar politics and personal ambition.
At the end of the Second World War, the four Allied powers, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets, took collective responsibility for the security of Germany, as the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine were disarmed and dissolved after the German surrender on May 8, 1945. As the 1940s rolled into the 1950s, tensions grew between the Soviet Union and the West, especially after the Korean War and the formal partitioning of East and West Germany, which led to the idea of a revived German Army, the Bundeswehr, being formed to bolster the newly established NATO, itself a response to perceived Soviet threats to European security. As the idea began to coalesce, the question of who would provide the Bundes-wehr’s senior leadership became a major political issue in all of the NATO capitals. No one wanted the new German army led by officers who had any ties whatsoever to the Nazi regime, but such officers were in short supply, as most German generals had been tainted, at the very least, either by Hitler’s bribes or by association on some level with atrocities carried out by German armed forces, especially on the Eastern Front. Speidel, who had taken up as a professor of modern history at the University of Tübingen, began to quietly but forcefully put his name forward in consideration for a senior officer’s posting in the new Bundeswehr. To bolster his credentials as a “politically reliable” officer unblemished by a Nazi past, he let it be known that he had been a part of the July 20, 1944 conspiracy; this much was true. To further enhance his credibility, however, he emphasized his role as Rommel’s Chief of Staff, knowing that Erwin Rommel was the one German field marshal whom all of the Western Allies respected, and whom many British and American senior officers openly admired. He then began cultivating Frau Rommel and the field marshal’s son, Manfred, simultaneously implying that there had been a close personal as well as professional relationship with his superior while reinforcing the image of Rommel as the “good”—i.e. anti-Nazi—German general. It was a carefully planned and executed campaign, as befitted such a cerebral officer: on November 12, 1955, Hans Speidel was commissioned as generalleutnant in the newly constituted Bundeswehr; two years later, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the NATO ground forces in Central Europe, a post that he held until he retired in 1963.
The upshot of Speidel’s success, however, is that everything he affirmed regarding Rommel’s role or participation in the July 20 plot must be viewed through the prism of how Speidel’s words and deeds advanced his postwar career. For that matter, it was not only Rommel’s reputation that Speidel worked to burnish: he did his best to enhance his own standing among the von Stauffenberg conspirators, offering up himself as a more dynamic and central participant than in fact he ever was. There is no doubt that Speidel possessed a powerful personal and professional antipathy toward Hitler: his experience on the Russian Front in 1942 and 1943 persuaded him that the Führer’s military ineptitude would bring disaster down onto the German Army, while learning of the atrocities committed by the Einsatz-gruppen and the SS against civilians in Poland and the Ukraine occupied convinced him of the inherent immorality of National Socialist doctrines. His repulsion did not automatically translate into active participation in the “German resistance,” however; instead Speidel was what would have been best described as a “fellow traveler.”
He took pains, nonetheless, to offer up the scenario where Rommel specifically requested Speidel’s assignment to replace General Gause as Army Group B’s Chief of Staff because of Speidel’s connections with the conspirators, intending to use him as a conduit to von Stauffenberg, but it is here that Speidel’s story begins to unravel. Speidel’s utility for Rommel’s purposes was far more prosaic than facilitating a conspiracy: Rommel had always displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm for the more mundane details of generalship—generating reports and requisitions, assigning supply priorities, allocating replacement drafts, writing out detailed orders, and so on; it was not that he believed them unnecessary, rather they were the reason why general officers had staffs in the first place—and given Speidel’s well-earned reputation for efficient staff work, he was someone to whom Rommel could confidently assign such tasks. Rommel said as much in the very last letter he wrote to Hitler, on October 1, 1944, when he attempted to intervene with the Führer on Speidel’s behalf, saying, “[Speidel] took firm control of the staff, showed great understanding for the troops and helped me loyally to complete the defenses of the Atlantic Wall as quickly as possible with the available means. When I went up to the front, which was almost every day, I could rely on Speidel to transmit my orders as discussed beforehand to the Armies, and to carry on all talks with superior and equivalent formations along the lines I required.” Rommel, not knowing that his own doom was only days away, had written these words in good faith, and there is no reason to question their veracity or intent.299
The truth was that Rommel, had he desired a conduit to von Stauffen-berg’s conspiracy, did not need Speidel for that purpose: he already had one. While on medical leave in Wiener Neustadt in February 1943, Rommel was introduced by Lucie to Dr. Karl Strölin, the lord mayor of Stuttgart. Actually, it was a reintroduction, as Rommel and Strölin had served together in the 124th Infantry Regiment in the First World War; apart from that shared experience, however, the two men had little in common. After the war, while Rommel continued his military career, Strölin had become immersed in politics, joining the Nazi Party in 1923, while National Socialism was still in its infancy. By 1943, while still holding to the “ideal” of National Socialism, he was convinced that it had become hopelessly corrupted by Hitler and his cronies, and had made common cause with Karl Friedrich Goerdeler, a former senior economist for the Third Reich who had become von Stauffenberg’s civilian counterpart in leading the July 20 bomb plot. Goerdeler, “a conservative and a monarchist . . . a devout Protestant, able, energetic and intelligent, but also indiscreet and headstrong . . .” had been “heart and soul in opposition to Hitler” as early as 1937.300 Strölin often acted as an intermediary for Goerdeler, who was anxious to secure the cooperation and support of a senior Wehrmacht officer who could serve as the military leader for the putsch against the Nazi government once Hitler was dead. Strölin was convinced that Rommel was just that officer, and even before the field marshal began his convalescent leave in February 1943 had begun ingratiating himself with Lucie, the better to ease himself, so he believed, into Rommel’s good graces.
Rommel, sick and exhausted, had little interest in talking politics with anyone, let alone this Nazi busybody, but to placate Lucie, who had been flattered by Strölin’s gifts of flowers, theater tickets, and luxury hotel accommodations for her, her husband, and young Manfred, agreed to hear him out. Strölin immediately launched into what
seemed to be a prepared speech denouncing the Nazi regime, urging Rommel to step forward in order to save Germany from destruction. To reinforce his point, he produced a number of documents, some of which detailed crimes and massacres carried out by the SS and Gestapo in occupied territory, especially in the East, and particularly against Jews. (It is quite possible that the irony of Strölin’s claims was not lost on Rommel, as Strölin had been personally responsible for the deportation of some 2,000 Jews from Stuttgart, all of whom would perish in Nazi death camps.) When Strölin declared “If Hitler does not die, then we are all lost!” Rommel had enough. “Herr Strölin,” he announced, “I would be grateful if you would refrain from speaking such opinions in the presence of my young son!” Recognizing failure when he saw it, Strölin quickly made his manners and left the Rommel household.301 For Goerdeler’s part, the last pieces of the conspiracy fell into place a few months after Strölin’s abortive meeting with Rommel, and in doing so obviated the necessity for a senior officer of Rommel’s stature to be part of the putsch. Meeting Colonel Count Klaus von Stauffenberg shortly after the young officer was posted to the staff of the Replacement Army, Goerdeler found a kindred spirit for his hatred of Hitler and the Nazis, though the two men disliked each other personally. Goerdeler thought von Stauffenberg to be playing at politics, a vain and somewhat superficial romantic socialist who only came to oppose Hitler when Germany began losing the war, and who sought a measure of personal revenge for his maiming. There was an element of truth in all of Goerdeler’s misgivings about von Stauffenberg, but at the same time he could not deny the young colonel’s courage and determination. Von Stauffenberg in turn saw Goerdeler as a reactionary out of touch with modern political thinking; both men, however, were inclined to make common cause because they recognized that von Stauffen-berg’s new post presented the conspirators with a unique opportunity: as chief of staff for the Ersatzarmee, he was responsible for developing contingency plans for it, and so concocted Valküre—purportedly a plan for suppressing an uprising by the millions of slave laborers working in the Reich, but in reality the cover for toppling the Nazi government in the event of Hitler’s assassination. Colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors would separately lead their units to carry out specific operations which facilitated the putsch, without having—or needing to have—any knowledge of the larger plan which they were accomplishing.
Rommel would still have been a priceless asset for the conspirators, a respected and honorable figure who would be the face of the new regime—in the hope that they would not be perceived merely old wine in new bottles—presented to the Allies. With the adoption of the Valkyrie plans, however, it would not be necessary for him to take on the role of the provisional army commander-in-chief in the hope that his stature would be sufficient to persuade any hesitant regimental and division commanders to obedience. Instead those officers would simply carry out operational orders which were part of an official Wehrmacht contingency plan, one which had been already been unwittingly approved by Hitler himself. All that remained was for the right opportunity to carry out the attentat to present itself; after a handful of aborted attempts, the moment came on July 20, 1944.
And so the deed was done. Von Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded, and Adolf Hitler, in a bitter twist of fate, survived. Retribution was swift: goaded into action by Hitler’s rage and lust for vengeance, the Gestapo arrested anyone with even the most tangential connection to the core conspirators. The Gestapo’s chief, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, invoked the ancient German legal principle of sippenhaft (literally “imprisoning the family” but in practice blood-guilt) to punish the families of those accused in complicity with the attentat. Before the orgy of blood lust ran its course, over 7,000 Germans were arrested, and 4,980 were executed, some by firing squad, most by hanging. And not everyone arrested—or executed—was in fact connected to the July 20 assassination attempt: just as happened a decade earlier in the Night of the Long Knives, there were personal and political scores settled in the Gestapo manhunts.
BUT IF ERWIN Rommel was not part of the July 20 conspiracy did he have any plans of his own to bring about an end to the war—at least in the West? His devotion to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist regime had clearly been exhausted before von Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded, and whatever illusions regarding Rommel the July 20 conspirators might have entertained, he had a different objective than did they, and with it a different agenda which would have employed different methods.
In order to answer the question of Rommel’s intentions, the devolution of Rommel’s loyalty to Adolf Hitler—and especially his sense of being oathbound to the Führer—must be understood. Germans of Rommel’s generation as a rule took oaths very seriously: they were not mere formalities, to be observed or disregarded as was expedient to the moment, but were instead taken as the measure of a man or woman’s character. To be regarded as an oath breaker—eidesbrecher—was the worst sort of opprobrium which could be leveled at a German: the word itself, eidesbrecher, is in fact far more severe, even violent, than “oath breaker”—it literally means “oath crusher.” Indeed, one of the most compelling reasons why the July 20 conspirators were determined to end Hitler’s life rather than merely remove him from power was that the Führer’s death would remove any remaining moral obligation to the oath of loyalty—the Fahneneid—every German soldier, airman, or sailor had sworn to Hitler.
From his letters, diaries, and various conversations with colleagues, subordinates, and family members, it is clear that Rommel came to a far different conclusion: disobedience to the Führer’s orders and defiance of his authority did not, in fact, constitute a violation of his oath of loyalty. By the spring of 1944, the Fahneneid and any claims it had on the fidelity of German soldaten had been thoroughly shredded by Adolf Hitler himself. As Rommel saw it, that process began in November 1942, with Hitler’s “Victory or Death!” order at El Alamein; it was accelerated every time some new variation on that theme was offered up in the retreat to Tunisia, as Hitler demanded that the panzerarmee stand and die for some meaningless piece of desert waste that Hitler, peering at a map in Berchtesgaden or Rastenburg, had decided must be held at all costs.
In April 1943, when Hitler blithely abandoned Armeegruppe Afrika in Tunisia, consigning 150,000 veteran Axis soldiers, whose combat experience was irreplaceable, to Allied captivity rather than exerting himself to withdraw them to Europe, Rommel’s anger became fury. Now back in Italy and so no longer isolated and insulated in North Africa, Rommel quickly learned the truth about Stalingrad, where Hitler denied the soldiers of the Sixth Army any chance to escape the Soviet encirclement, condemning a quarter-million of them to death at the hands of the Red Army, either on the battlefield or as prisoners of war—fewer than 5,000 would ever return to Germany. Such actions on the part of the Führer were a breach of the faith between soldier and leader that was as old as warfare itself, that a soldier would never be sacrificed without meaning.
Rommel also began to hear the stories, often directly from men who had witnessed the events, about the actions of the Sonderkommandos, Einsatzgruppen, and even—particularly shameful to an officer like Rommel—units of the Wehrmacht in Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia; stories of burnings, looting, mass deportations and mass executions of men, women, and children, civilians who were excluded from the racial ideals of Nazi dogma and law, and so were declared untermenschen—subhumans. At first Rommel tried to convince himself that such actions were isolated incidents, then later that they were being done without the knowledge or consent of the Führer, but eventually he came to realize that these atrocities were too widespread and carried out on such a scale that it would have been impossible for Hitler not to have known of them—and that in knowing, and refusing to demand that such actions cease and repudiate those who committed them, he at least tacitly approved.
When the officers and men of the Wehrmacht first swore the Fahneneid to Adolf Hitler in 1935, no more was asked of them by the Führer than had ever been
asked of German soldiers for two centuries: that they obey the head of state and defend the Fatherland, with their lives if need be; implicit in the authority granted by that oath was the pledge made in return that such power would never be abused. Admittedly Hitler had gone a step farther than had even the Prussian kings by conflating the state and his own person, but at the time that seemed to be a mere technicality, and for over six years Hitler honored that unspoken pledge. But by the end of 1941, German soldiers were routinely being bidden to carry out acts of violence and retribution on the helpless and innocent, acts of such inhumanity and immorality that, if they could have done so, millions of ghosts in Prussian blue—feld blau—and field gray would have risen from beneath their black crosses in thunderous outrage. The history of German arms was not wholly free from blemish—no nation’s history truly is—but from the days of Friedrich the Great the wartime conduct of German officers and other ranks had, as a rule, been more restrained than that of many of their European counterparts. Since 1740 the German soldier had been respected—even feared—for his courage and skill on the battlefield; but now Adolf Hitler was transforming him into the avatar of schrecklichkeit—living terror—by making him the instrument of pointless death and needless destruction. It was a transformation in parallel with that of the Führer himself, as Hitler metastasized from a true national leader into a bloodthirsty tyrant little better than a barbarian warlord. The Adolf Hitler of 1944 was so fundamentally changed from the man he had been ten years earlier as to be unrecognizable: in essence the Adolf Hitler of 1934, to whom the officers and men of the new Wehrmacht had sworn their personal loyalty, no longer existed.
The realization that this was so was at the heart of Rommel’s final sundering of ways with Hitler: time and again from late 1942, in his diaries, letters and conversations Rommel used words like “crazy,” “abnormal,” “pathological,” and “demoniac” to describe the Führer, a hard contrast to his earlier admiration of the man. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Rommel, along with at least a plurality of countrymen, saw a figure wearing a most-convincing mask of a man wholly dedicated to returning Germany to greatness, and restoring stability, prosperity, and self-respect to the German people. His methods may have been harsh, but they were the ways of authoritarianism, something the Germans—including Rommel—understood and of which they approved. Before ten years had passed, however, the mask had not merely slipped, it had been all but discarded. The only cause Hitler now recognized was his own, the only purpose of Germany’s armed forces, her industry, her people, was to serve and preserve himself: Germany and the Germans no longer mattered—indeed, according to Hitler, they no longer were worthy of him: in July 1943 Hitler remarked to Rommel, almost conversationally, that “If the German people are incapable of winning the war, then they can rot.” The man to whom the Fahneneid was sworn in the summer of 1934 no longer existed, and when that man disappeared, the bonds of the oath of loyalty were broken: for an oath to be binding, there must be both a giver and receiver; absent one or the other, the oath is dissolved.302
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