Hans Speidel

• 1. Introduction

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  Hans Speidel was the man who answered the phone when Hitler ordered Paris destroyed. On the 26th of August 1944, Alfred Jodl, chief of staff of the German high command, rang Field Marshal Walter Model with instructions to begin targeting Paris with V1 and V2 rockets. Model was not there. Speidel took the call. He put the receiver down and passed the order to no one.

  That single act of inaction captures something essential about Speidel: a man who spent his career navigating the gap between the uniform he wore and the convictions he held. He served three German armies in succession, from the Kaiser's imperial forces in 1914 to the democratic Bundeswehr of the Cold War. He was trained as a historian, earned a doctorate magna cum laude, and wrote books about the campaigns he had survived. He was also, by the end, the first officer to hold the rank of full general in postwar West Germany.

  How does a man who served the Nazi war machine become a founding pillar of a democratic army? How did a soldier implicated in wartime reprisals also risk his life to unseat Hitler? And why did a German general end up commanding NATO's ground forces from a French palace? These are the questions that follow.

• 2. The Making of a Soldier-Scholar

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  Metzingen, in the Swabian region of what is now Baden-Wurttemberg, was where Speidel was born on the 28th of October 1897. He joined the German Army at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and rose quickly to the rank of second lieutenant. He served as a company commander at the Battle of the Somme and also as an adjutant, gaining experience across different levels of military command before the armistice.

  Rather than leave military life when the war ended, Speidel remained in the Reichswehr, the small professional army Germany was permitted to maintain under the Versailles Treaty. Alongside his military service, he pursued an unusual parallel track: he enrolled at multiple universities and studied history and economics. In 1926 he received his doctorate in history magna cum laude, a credential that set him apart from most professional soldiers and would shape his career in ways that outlasted the uniform.

  That combination of scholarly discipline and military experience gave Speidel a reputation as an officer who could think beyond the immediate tactical problem. When he later taught modern history at the University of Tubingen after the war, it was a return to an identity he had never fully abandoned. His 1950 book, Invasion 1944: Rommel and the Normandy Campaign, drew directly on what he had witnessed as a senior staff officer.

• 3. France, War, and Moral Entanglement

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  In 1940 Speidel took part in the German invasion of France, and by August of that year he had been appointed Chief of Staff of the military commander in France. The position placed him at the administrative centre of a brutal occupation, and his time there later drew serious scrutiny.

  The German military command in France ordered mass executions and deportations of Jewish and Communist hostages in reprisal for partisan activities by the French Resistance. Speidel did not issue those orders himself; they came from the military governors, first Otto von Stulpnagel and then, after Otto von Stulpnagel resigned because of his own reluctance to carry them out, his cousin Carl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel. But Speidel's role was not simply passive. He sent reports on the reprisals to the German high command in Berlin, and at one point attempted to justify the measures, arguing that they were directed at Jewish communists responsible for attacks on the Wehrmacht.

  In 1942 he was transferred to the Eastern Front as Chief of Staff of the 5th Army Corps, and in 1943 he became Chief of Staff of the 8th Army, where he was promoted to general. These postings kept him embedded in the machinery of the Nazi war effort even as his private objections to the regime's racial ideology were hardening. That tension would come to a head in April 1944, when he was assigned as Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

• 4. Rommel, Chance, and the Conspiracy

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  Speidel's appointment as Rommel's Chief of Staff in April 1944 was not the product of careful conspiratorial planning. It happened because of a quarrel at a wedding. Lucie Rommel argued with the wife of Alfred Gause, who was then Rommel's Chief of Staff, over who had the more honourable seat at the ceremony. Lucie Rommel's response was to evict the Gause couple from her home and instruct her husband to dismiss Gause from his post. Rommel chose Speidel, a fellow Swabian, as his replacement.

  By this point, Speidel had already been recruited into the circle of officers planning to assassinate Hitler. Anti-Hitler forces had specifically delegated him to bring Rommel into the conspiracy. Rommel's name carried enormous weight; drawing him in would lend the plot credibility. Speidel had cautiously begun making overtures before Rommel was wounded in a British strafing attack on the 17th of July 1944. His new position as Rommel's confidant, obtained entirely by accident, gave those conversations a context they might never otherwise have had.

  On the 20th of July 1944 the assassination attempt failed. The Gestapo moved swiftly, rounding up, torturing, and executing approximately five thousand people, including many senior officers. Speidel was arrested on the 7th of September 1944. Rommel, in what would become his final letter to Hitler, dated the 1st of October 1944, appealed for Speidel's release. He received no answer.

• 5. Interrogation, Survival, and a Complicated Legacy

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  Speidel's survival of the Gestapo's investigation was not guaranteed, and it rested on a narrow series of contingencies. During interrogation, according to an affidavit later left by Heinz Guderian and Heinrich Kirchheim, he let Rommel's name slip. The historian Maurice Remy concluded that this did not constitute a true betrayal, and that Speidel probably blamed himself for Rommel's fate until his own death. What Speidel did not know at the time was that his statement told his interrogators nothing they had not already learned from other conspirators; they already knew Rommel had not merely been aware of the plot but had agreed with it.

  The intervention of three senior German officers proved decisive in keeping Speidel alive. Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian, and Wilhelm Keitel refused to expel him from the German Army. That refusal blocked his transfer to Roland Freisler's People's Court, where conviction and execution were nearly certain. He was held by the Gestapo for seven months.

  As Allied forces closed in on the place where he was being held, Speidel slipped away. He was in hiding for no longer than three weeks, sheltered in part by religious Pallottines, before French troops arrived in the Urnau area, in what is now the Lake Constance district, on the 29th of April 1945. He was one of the very few participants in the 20th of July Plot to come out of the war alive. In 1960 he successfully sued an East German film studio for libel after it portrayed him as having betrayed Rommel and as having been involved in the 1934 assassinations of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou.

• 6. Building West Germany's Army

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  In 1950, Speidel was one of the authors of the Himmerod memorandum, a confidential document that set out conditions and principles for rearming the Federal Republic of Germany. The memorandum became a foundational text in the debate over West German rearmament, known in German as Wiederbewaffnung, and it announced Speidel's return to the centre of German military affairs.

  Chancellor Konrad Adenauer appointed him as a military adviser in 1950. A year later Speidel joined the predecessor agency of the Federal Ministry of Defence. From 1951 to 1954 he served as the West German chief delegate to the conference on the Treaty establishing the European Defence Community, the ambitious but ultimately failed attempt to create a unified European army. When that treaty collapsed and West Germany sought a different path into Western defence structures, Speidel was a lead negotiator in the talks that brought West Germany into NATO.

  In 1955 he became a director-general in the Federal Ministry of Defence at the military rank of lieutenant-general. Two years later, in 1957, he and Adolf Heusinger jointly became the first officers to be promoted to the rank of full general in the Bundeswehr. That year he also took command of the Allied Land Forces Central Europe, a NATO command whose headquarters were at the Palace of Fontainebleau in Paris. According to a 2014 article in Der Spiegel, citing documents released by the German foreign intelligence service, Speidel may also have been connected to the Schnez-Truppe, a secret and illegal organisation that veterans of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS had established from 1949 onward as a clandestine force against potential Soviet or East German attack.

• 7. After the Uniform

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  Speidel held his NATO command at Fontainebleau until September 1963, when he retired after six years overseeing Allied ground forces in Central Europe. That same year he received the Grand Cross with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country's highest civilian honour.

  In 1964 he became President of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, the main think tank advising the German government on foreign and security policy. The appointment reflected a trajectory that had run, over five decades, from company commander on the Somme to the highest levels of postwar European statecraft.

  His personal connections extended into a generation of postwar European politics. He was the father of Brigadier General Hans Helmut Speidel and the father-in-law of Guido Brunner, a European Commissioner and liberal politician. Hans Speidel died on the 28th of November 1984 in Bad Honnef, North Rhine-Westphalia, aged 87. In 1972 his birth town of Metzingen had made him an honorary citizen. Twenty-five years after his death, in 1997, a German Army base in Bruchsal was named the General Dr Speidel Barracks in his honour.