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Hans Speidel (28 October 1897 – 28 November 1984) was a German general who successively served in the armies of the German Empire, Nazi Germany and West Germany. The first general officer of the Bundeswehr, he was a key player in West German rearmament during the Cold War as well as West Germany's integration into NATO and international negotiations on European and Western defence cooperation in the 1950s. He served as Commander of the Allied Land Forces Central Europe (COMLANDCENT) from 1957 to 1963 and then as President of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs from 1964.
Speidel joined the Imperial German Army in 1914, seeing action during World War I, and served in the Reichswehr during the interwar period. He served as chief of staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel during World War II and was promoted to Generalleutnant in 1944. Speidel participated in the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler due to objecting to the racial policy of Nazi Germany, and he was tasked with recruiting Rommel for the resistance. After the plot failed he was arrested by the Gestapo. With the help of religious Pallottines, he was able to escape together with other prisoners and they were able to go into hiding in Urnau in today's Lake Constance district and were taken there by French troops in the last days of the war. Speidel was one of the few participants in the 20 July Plot to survive the war.
During the early Cold War, Speidel emerged as one of the major military leaders of West Germany, and played a key role in West Germany's rearmament, Western international negotiations on defence cooperation and West German integration into NATO. He is thus regarded as one of the founders of the Bundeswehr. He was appointed as the military advisor of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1950 and joined the predecessor of the Federal Ministry of Defence in 1951, was the West German chief delegate to the conference on the Treaty establishing the European Defence Community from 1951 to 1954 and was a lead negotiator when West Germany joined NATO. In 1955 he became a director-general in the Federal Ministry of Defence with the military rank of lieutenant-general in the Bundeswehr, and in 1957 he became the first officer to be promoted to full General in West Germany. He served as COMLANDCENT from 1957 to 1963, with headquarters at the Palace of Fontainebleau in Paris.
Speidel was also a historian by training, taught at the University of Tübingen and wrote several books. He received the Grand Cross with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1963. In 1964 he became President of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, the German government's main think tank in international relations. He was the father of Brigadier General Hans Helmut Speidel and the father-in-law of European Commissioner and liberal politician Guido Brunner. A German Army military base, the General Dr Speidel Barracks in Bruchsal, was named in his honour in 1997.
In 1942 Speidel was sent to the Eastern Front where he served as Chief of Staff of the 5th Army Corps, and as Chief of Staff of 8th Army in 1943, where he was promoted to general.
In April 1944, Speidel was appointed Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, stationed on the French Atlantic Ocean coast. When Rommel was wounded, Speidel continued as Chief of Staff for the new commander of Army Group B, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge.
On 26 August 1944, Speidel answered the phone when Alfred Jodl, the OKW chief of staff, called Field Marshal Walter Model, commander in chief of the western front, with Hitler's order to start targeting Paris immediately with V1 and V2 rockets. Model was not in. Speidel did not pass on the order to his superior.Lapierre, Dominique, A Thousand Suns, Warner Books, 1997, p.129
Following the assassination attempt, the Gestapo rounded up, tortured and executed some five thousand Germans, including many high-ranking officers. Speidel's involvement was suspected by the Gestapo, and he was arrested on 7 September 1944. Rommel, in his final letter to Hitler of 1 October 1944, appealed for Speidel's release, but received no answer. Speidel appeared before an Army court of honour. According to an affidavit left by Heinz Guderian and Heinrich Kirchheim, during interrogation he blurted out Rommel's name. Maurice Remy comments that Speidel's testimony did not truly betray Rommel, although Speidel probably blamed himself until his death for his revered Field Marshal's fate afterwards. Unknown to Speidel though, his statement offered nothing new or startling to the interrogators, who had already obtained from other co-conspirators the information that Rommel not only knew about but agreed with the assassination. Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian and Wilhelm Keitel refused to expel him from the German Army. Thus he was not compelled to appear before Roland Freisler's Volksgerichtshof, which would have been a death sentence. He was jailed for seven months by the Gestapo. As Allied forces approached the location where he was held, he slipped from his captors and went into hiding for not longer than three weeks until 29 April 1945, when French troops entered the area.
According to an article in Der Spiegel, which cited documents released by the Bundesnachrichtendienst in 2014, Speidel may have been part of the Schnez-Truppe, a secret illegal army that veterans of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS established up from 1949 in Germany in order to repel an attack either by the Soviet Union or by Soviet-controlled East German police units.Wiegrefe, Klaus, "Files Uncovered: Nazi veterans Created Illegal Army", Spiegel Online, 14 May 2014
After the war Speidel served for some time as professor of modern history at Tübingen and in 1950 published his book Invasion 1944: Rommel and the Normandy Campaign before being involved in both the development and creation of the new German Army ( Bundeswehr) which he joined, reaching the NATO rank of full general. He was subsequently appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied NATO ground forces in Central Europe in April 1957, a command that he held until retirement in September 1963. His headquarters were at the Palace of Fontainebleau in Paris.
Visit by General Hans Speidel to Karlsruhe on the occasion of a US Army reception to mark the 10th anniversary of the Karlsruhe Department of Historical Research at US Headquarters in Europe.
In 1960, Speidel took legal action against an East German film studio which portrayed him as having been privy to the assassinations of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and France Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in 1934, as well as having betrayed Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to the Nazis after the 20 July Plot in 1944. He successfully claimed damages for libel. See Plato Films Ltd v Speidel [1961] AC 1090.
Hans Speidel died in 1984 at Bad Honnef, North Rhine-Westphalia, aged 87.
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