NATO: A German in Command

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It was the French who first proposed the German general. With the first five West German divisions due to join NATO forces this year, they saw that the Germans would be entitled to fill some of the higher spots in NATO's chain of command. Having pulled out most of their own NATO troops to fight in Algeria, leaving only about a division behind, they were also aware that they could claim few top NATO posts for themselves. Accordingly, when two of their generals vacated NATO commands last year, the French suggested that a German be named com mander of NATO's Central European land forces—with the understanding that their own General Jean-Etienne Valluy take over the higher office of chief of all NATO forces in Central Europe.

Duly invited by Supreme Commander Lauris Norstad to fill its first big NATO post, Bonn last week nominated Lieut. General Hans Speidel, 59, to the Central European land-forces command. Thus U.S., British and French divisions in Germany will now pass under the command of a man who fought against them in two wars. The French, who might have been expected to make a fuss, were already taken care of; only in Britain, which will have four divisions under Speidel's command, could there be heard the suppressed sound of tight-throat swallowing.

A soft-spoken Swabian who thinks like a general but looks like a professor (he once taught history at Tübingen University), Speidel is a cultivated specimen of the oldtime German general staffer. On his desk he keeps two photographs—one of the late General Ludwig Beck, the stiff-backed martinet who headed the German general staff 20 years ago, the other of turn-of-the-century German Dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann.

The testing question asked about any German general these days is where was he on July 20, 1944. That was the date of the German generals' attempt on Hitler's life. In Paris, as chief of staff in France. Speidel was intimately involved in the plot to overthrow Hitler, but like his superior. Rommel, disapproved of assassinating him. When the assassination attempt failed, Speidel was one of those cross-questioned by SS interrogators but handled himself so skill fully that Hitler never got enough on him to hang him with the rest.

When Western leaders began negotiating for EDC in 1951, Chancellor Adenauer, who had called Speidel from his classroom in 1950 to act as military adviser, sent him as West Germany's "observer" to Paris. As a German who had learned to speak fluent French as assistant military attache in the Paris of the early '30s, he made a hit with the French generals. They also remembered that as a high staff officer in the occupation he had prevented the SS from shooting hostages. Later Speidel won the sympathies of the Danes, Belgians and Dutch by criticizing French plans to defend Europe only as far east as the Rhine. He made himself so agreeable throughout NATO's top echelons, in fact, that the Germans had practically no choice but to name him to the new job—his first field command since he bossed a Grenadier battalion in his native Württemberg 21 years ago.