Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hans Speidel was a German general who served in three successive German armies: the Imperial German Army, the Wehrmacht, and the postwar Bundeswehr. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Bundeswehr and was, together with Adolf Heusinger, the first officer promoted to full general in West Germany. He also served as Commander of the Allied Land Forces Central Europe from 1957 to 1963.
Speidel was an active participant in the 20th of July Plot and had been specifically delegated by anti-Hitler forces to recruit Field Marshal Erwin Rommel into the conspiracy. He was arrested by the Gestapo on the 7th of September 1944 after the plot failed, but survived because senior officers including Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian, and Wilhelm Keitel refused to expel him from the German Army, shielding him from Roland Freisler's People's Court.
Speidel's appointment in April 1944 resulted from a social dispute. Lucie Rommel quarrelled with the wife of Alfred Gause, Rommel's existing Chief of Staff, over seating at a wedding, and subsequently had the Gause couple evicted from her home and pressured her husband to dismiss Gause. Rommel chose Speidel, a fellow Swabian, as Gause's replacement.
The Himmerod memorandum, produced in 1950, was a confidential document that set out the principles and conditions for rearming the Federal Republic of Germany, a debate known as Wiederbewaffnung. Speidel was one of its authors and used it as a platform to become a central military adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, eventually joining the predecessor of the Federal Ministry of Defence in 1951.
Speidel commanded the Allied Land Forces Central Europe from 1957 to 1963, with his headquarters at the Palace of Fontainebleau in Paris. He was appointed to the command in April 1957 and retired in September 1963.
After being held by the Gestapo for seven months following the failed the 20th of July Plot, Speidel slipped away from his captors as Allied forces closed in. He hid for no longer than three weeks, aided in part by religious Pallottines, in the Urnau area of what is now the Lake Constance district. French troops arrived on the 29th of April 1945 and took him in.