rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

968 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHField Marshal Model issued a ringing order of the day announcing thatRommel had died of ”wounds sustained on July 17” and mourning the loss ”ofone of the greatest commanders of our nation.”Hitler wired Frau Rommel: ”Accept my sincerest sympathy for the heavyloss you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name of FieldMarshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in North Africa.”Goering telegraphed ”in silent compassion”:The fact that your husband has died a hero’s death as the result ofhis wounds, after we all hoped that he would remain to the Germanpeople, has deeply touched me.Hitler ordered a state funeral, at which the senior officer of the GermanArmy, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, delivered the funeral oration. ”His heart,”said Rundstedt as he stood over Rommel’s swastika-bedecked body, ”belongedto the Fuehrer.” ∗”The old soldier [Rundstedt],” Speidel says, ”appeared to those present tobe broken and bewildered . . . Here destiny gave him the unique chance to playthe role of Mark Antony. He remained in his moral apathy.” †1295The humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army was great.It had seen three of its illustrious field marshals, Witzleben, Kluge and Rommel,implicated in a plot to overthrow the Supreme warlord, for which one of themwas strangled and two forced to suicide. It had to stand idly by while scoresof its highest-ranking generals were hauled off to the prisons of the Gestapoand judicially murdered after farcical trials before the People’s Court. In thisunprecedented situation, despite all its proud traditions, the corps did not closeranks. Instead it sought to preserve its ”honor” by what a foreign observer, atleast, can only term dishonoring and degrading itself. Before the wrath of theformer Austrian corporal, its frightened leaders fawned and groveled.No wonder that Field Marshal von Rundstedt looked broken and bewilderedas he intoned the funeral oration over the body of Rommel. He had fallen to alow state, as had his brother officers, whom Hitler now forced to drink the bittercup to its dregs. Rundstedt himself accepted the post of presiding officer over∗ It is only fair to add that Rundstedt probably did not know of the circumstances ofRommel’s death, apparently learning them only from Keitel’s testimony at Nuremberg. ”Idid not hear these rumors,” Rundstedt testified on the stand, ”otherwise I would have refusedto act as representative of the Fuehrer at the state funeral; that would have been an infamybeyond words.” 1294 Nevertheless the Rommel family noticed that this gentleman of the oldschool declined to attend the cremation after the funeral and to come to the Rommel home,as did most of the other generals, to extend condolences to the widow.† General Speidel himself, though incarcerated in the cellars of the Gestapo prison in thePrinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin and subjected to incessant questioning, became neither brokennor bewildered. Being a philosopher as well as a soldier perhaps helped. He outwitted hisS.D. tormentors, admitting nothing and betraying no one. He had one bad moment when hewas confronted with Colonel von Hofacker, who, he believes, had been not only tortured butdrugged into talking, but on this occasion Hofacker did not betray him and repudiated whathe had previously said.Though never brought to trial, Speidel was kept in Gestapo custody for seven months. AsAmerican troops neared his place of confinement near Lake Constance in southern Germany,he escaped with twenty others by a ruse and took refuge with a Catholic priest, who hid thegroup until the Americans arrived. Speidel omits this chapter of his life in his book, which isseverely objective and written in the third person, but he told the story to Desmond Youngwho gives it in his Rommel – The Desert Fox (pp. 251-52 of the paperback edition).Capping an unusual career, Speidel held an important command at NATO in the late 1950s.