Hans Speidel (General)

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Hans Speidel (early 1944), photo from the Federal Archives

Hans Speidel (born October 28, 1897 in Metzingen , † November 28, 1984 in Bad Honnef ) was a German general . He fought in the First World War as a lieutenant and was in World War II, Chief of Staff of Army Group B under Erwin Rommel , Günther von Kluge and Walter Model . From 1957 to 1963 Speidel was General of the Bundeswehr and Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Land Forces in Central Europe at NATO .

Life

Hans Speidel was the son of the Chief Forestry Officer Emil Speidel (1859–1938) and his wife Amalie "Mali" von Klipstein (1869–1952). He was married to Ruth Stahl (1903–1990) since 1925, with whom he has two daughters and a son; this, Hans Helmut Speidel (* 1938), is Brigadier General a. D. the Bundeswehr. Speidel's brother was the General der Flieger Wilhelm Speidel .

First World War

During the First World War Speidel went for a on 30 November 1914 Notabitur as a cadet in the Grenadier Regiment "King Karl" (5 Württembergisches) No. 123 a. In November 1915 he was made a lieutenant . He fought in Flanders , the Somme and Cambrai and became a regimental adjutant .

Speidel was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Württemberg Military Merit Medal in gold.

Between the world wars

Speidel was taken over as a professional soldier by the Reichswehr after the end of the war and deployed as a company and orderly officer in the 13th (Württemberg) Infantry Regiment in Ludwigsburg .

He studied history and economics in 1923/24 with the support of his superiors in Berlin , Tübingen and Stuttgart and received his doctorate on February 14, 1925 with the thesis 1813/1924: A military-political investigation for Dr. phil. magna cum laude . In this work he deals with the different political currents of thought after the defeats in 1813 and 1923, in particular with the so-called stab in the back legend. On April 1, 1925, he was promoted to first lieutenant . Speidel, who also dealt with military science work, including the monograph Au fil de l'épee by Charles de Gaulle , then completed an assistant driver training course and was transferred to the Foreign Armies Department (T 3) of the Troops Office after its completion in 1930 . On February 1, 1932, he was promoted to captain .

On October 1, 1933, Speidel was transferred to Paris as an assistant to the German military attaché . This was followed by assignments as a company commander and battalion commander in Ulm , before he was appointed head of the Foreign Army West department at the end of 1936 . In 1937 he became first general staff officer (Ia) of the 33rd Infantry Division in Mannheim .

Second World War

Major General Hans Speidel (left) in conversation with an officer during the "Citadel" operation (Soviet Union, June 21, 1943)
Lieutenant General Speidel (left) with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (right) inspecting the Atlantic Wall (Pas de Calais, April 18, 1944)

In 1939 Speidel's division was deployed on the Siegfried Line. In 1940 he took as Ia of IX. Army Corps participated in the French campaign and after the capture of Paris in June became chief of staff of the local military commander Alfred von Vollard-Bockelberg and a little later chief of the command staff at the military commander in France. The so-called “Georgsrunde”, named after their meeting point in the Paris hotel “George V”, to which the then captain Ernst Jünger belonged , was formed around this time . Speidel was promoted to colonel on February 1, 1941 .

In March 1942 Speidel was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the V Army Corps on the Eastern Front. In the winter crisis of 1942/43 he temporarily served as chief of the staff of the German General at the Italian AOK 8 , Kurt von Tippelskirch , and then the Lanz army department (later Kempf), which was formed from this staff. In this position he was, meanwhile promoted to major general, involved in the battle of Kharkov and the citadel enterprise . In August 1943, a new 8th Army under Otto Wöhler was formed from the army department, whose Chief of Staff Speidel remained. On January 1, 1944, he was promoted to lieutenant general in this position .

In April of the same year he became Chief of Staff of Army Group B under Erwin Rommel and tried to win him over to the military resistance against Adolf Hitler . After Rommel's wounding, he tried the same with Rommel's successor, Hans Günther von Kluge . On August 17, 1944, when von Kluge's successor Walter Model arrived at the headquarters of the Army Group in La Roche-Guyon Castle, Speidel said to the Field Marshal (known to him from earlier times): “The best thing is to join the West to arrange the allies to get a free hand in the east. [...] Model agreed, was silent for a moment, then said: 'Oh, let's leave the political things behind.' ”His job was to get as many of his soldiers as possible out of Normandy. Speidel's acquaintance with Model dates back to 1929, when he heard the then major's war history at a "Führer Helper Course" (including with Adolf Heusinger).

Model passed on Hitler's ' rubble field order ' of August 23, 1944 against Paris - and then no longer paid much attention to the city. "His chief Speidel and Choltitz regulated the non-compliance with the notorious 'Führer order' by mutual agreement." On August 30, the chief of the Army Personnel Office, General Burgdorf, called the temporary headquarters of the Army Group in Havrincourt and requested that General Speidel be replaced as chief of the staff. He was "strongly suspected to have been involved on July 20. [...] Model raged [...]. ”Here, however, there was nothing more he could do than give him a final assessment, which, according to his intention, he wrote“ very carefully so as not to harm Speidel ”. Speidel was arrested by the Gestapo on September 7, 1944 after Kluge's suicide , and charged with helping and complicit in the assassination attempt on Hitler. The court of honor of the Wehrmacht pleaded “not guilty but not free from suspicion”, which spared Speidel a hearing before the People's Court . But he remained in custody. In the fortress detention center in Küstrin he was imprisoned together with Ernst Wirmer , the brother of Josef Wirmer , who was designated as Reich Justice Minister by the resistance fighters , as well as the commander of the Dutch army, General van Roell, and General Theodor Groppe . When the Soviet troops approached, the group was transported via several stations to Immenstaad on Lake Constance in April 1945 and held captive in the house chapel of Hersberg Castle. Together with the commandant of the prison, Speidel organized the escape from the SS. With the help of religious of the Pallottines , the prisoners were able to go into hiding in Urnau in what is now Lake Constance and were arrested by French troops in the last days of the war.

post war period

Lieutenant General Adolf Heusinger and Lieutenant General Hans Speidel with Federal Minister of Defense Theodor Blank presenting the certificates of appointment for the first 101 volunteers in the German Armed Forces

After his release from Allied custody, Speidel returned to scientific work. Speidel's older brother Wilhelm Speidel was military commander in southern Greece and Greece from 1942 to 1944 and was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in February 1948 in the hostage murder trial because of his responsibility for the hostages there (pardoned in 1951). In 1949 Hans Speidel published his book "Invasion 1944" and was a lecturer at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen .

In October 1950 he worked on the secret " Himmeroder Memorandum " on the question of German rearmament . After working as military advisor to Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1950, Speidel was appointed as an expert in the Blank office (later the Federal Ministry of Defense) in January 1951 . In the course of the intensified discussion of the West German rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War from the summer of 1950, there was a “ junction ” between the “restoration of the honor of the German soldier” and the consent to rearmament. From 1951 to 1954 Hans Speidel was chief delegate at the conference on the formation of a European Defense Community (EVG).

After the failure of this project, Speidel represented the Federal Republic of Germany in the negotiations on joining NATO in 1954/55 . On November 22, 1955, he was appointed head of Department IV "General Armed Forces " in the Federal Ministry of Defense and was again appointed Lieutenant General, only this time as OF-8 with one more "star" (3 "stars") according to NATO standards. On June 14, 1957, he was promoted to (four-star) general (OF-9). From April 1957 to September 1963 Speidel was Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Land Forces in Central Europe ( COMLANDCENT - Commander Allied Land Forces Central Europe ) with headquarters in Fontainebleau Castle , France, and ensured the smooth integration of the Bundeswehr into NATO. In General Charles de Gaulle he found an irreconcilable political opponent (in particular because of Speidel's activities against the Resistance and French Jews in Paris in 1942) and was replaced by NATO at the beginning of September 1963 at his pressure.

In March 1964, at the age of 66, he retired and was elected President of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP) in October of the same year . Speidel was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit with a star and shoulder ribbon and in 1972 became an honorary citizen of his hometown Metzingen. He died on November 28, 1984 in Bad Honnef. The General-Dr.-Speidel-Kaserne of the Bundeswehr in Bruchsal is named after him.

Awards

Grave in the Pragfriedhof Stuttgart

Fonts

  • 1813/1924 - a military-political investigation. Dissertation. University of Tübingen 1925.
  • Invasion 1944. A contribution to Rommel and the Reich's fate. Wunderlich, Tübingen 1949.
  • Considerations of time: selected speeches. v. Hase & Koehler, Mainz 1969.
  • From our time. Memories. Propylaea, Berlin 1977.

literature

  • Dieter Krüger : Hans Speidel and Ernst Jünger. Friendship and history politics under the sign of the world wars . Edited by the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr, Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-3-506-78567-1 .
  • Elmar Krautkrämer : Lieutenant General Dr. phil. Hans Speidel. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. 68 CVs. 2nd reviewed and bibliographically updated edition , WBG, Darmstadt 2011, pp. 516–526, ISBN 978-3-534-23980-1 .
  • Michael Bertram: The image of Nazi rule in the memoirs of leading generals of the Third Reich. A critical investigation . Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-8382-0034-7 .
  • Walter Görlitz : Strategy of the Defensive - Model . Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden and Munich 1982, ISBN 3-8090-2071-0 .
  • Dieter Krüger:  Speidel, Hans. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 648 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Max Horst (Ed.): Soldiership and Culture. Festschrift for the seventieth birthday of Hans Speidel. Propylaea Verlag, Berlin 1967.
  • Christopher Dowe, Hans Speidel, in: Fred Ludwig Sepaintner (Ed.): Baden-Württembergische Biographien Vol. VII. W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2019, ISBN 978-3-17-037113-2 , pp. 520-524.

Web links

Commons : Hans Speidel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Speidel in: German Resistance Memorial Center , accessed on May 24, 2018
  2. ^ The study in the holdings of the Tübingen University Library , accessed on March 1, 2012
  3. ↑ Walter Görlitz: Strategy of the defensive model. Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden and Munich 1982, p. 199.
  4. ^ Görlitz: Model , p. 39.
  5. ^ Görlitz: Model , p. 201.
  6. ^ Görlitz: Model , p. 203
  7. ^ Records of the United States Nuremberg War Crimes Trials , Vol. XI, United States Government Printing Office , District of Columbia 1950, pp. 1313-1319. (Volume 11 of the " Green Series ")
  8. ↑ Elmar Krautkrämer : Lieutenant General Dr. phil. Hans Speidel. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. 68 CVs. 2nd reviewed and bibliographically updated edition , WBG, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-534-23980-1 , p. 522.
  9. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 591.
  10. ↑ Otto von Moser: Die Württemberger in the world war. 2nd edition, Belser, Stuttgart 1928, p. 140.
  11. ↑ a b Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearer 1939–1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 712.
personal data
SURNAME Speidel, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German general
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Metzingen
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1984
Place of death Bad Honnef