The distinguished German soldier, General Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, who has died aged 99, embodied his country's turbulent military history through his service in three successive national armies - the Reichswehr of the Weimar republic, Hitler's Wehrmacht and the Bundeswehr of today, in which he rose to the Nato command of Allied Forces, Central Europe. His father, a Prussian aristocrat, was a major in yet another German army, that of Kaiser Wilhelm II's second Reich.
Although not quite 12 years old when the kaiser abdicated following Germany's defeat in the first world war, Kielmansegg was determined to follow his father into uniform. Opportunities were limited because the Versailles treaty of 1919 limited the Reichswehr to 100,000 soldiers and 10,000 sailors, and banned capital ships, submarines, aircraft and tanks. But the young Johann Adolf got into a cavalry regiment in General Hans von Seeckt's new army.
Since almost every German adult regarded Versailles as grossly unjust, it became virtually a national sport, years before Hitler came to power in 1933, to undermine the treaty. Stalin helped by allowing Germany to train tank and aircraft crews secretly in the open spaces of Russia; when this was revealed by the Manchester Guardian in 1926, the still war-weary western powers turned a blind eye. Thus Kielmansegg exchanged his horse for a tank.
After 1933 Hitler soon suborned the general staff with vistas of massive expansion and unlimited rearmament as he tore up Versailles to popular acclaim. Kielmansegg took a two-year junior staff course, and by the time the second world war broke out he was staff officer responsible for transport and supply in one of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's armoured divisions.
The blitzkrieg against France and the low countries in May 1940 saw the Wehrmacht advance from Germany to the North Sea, the English Channel and the French Atlantic coasts in 10 days. Faced with the dilemma of giving priority to fuel or ammunition at the height of the campaign, Kielmansegg chose petrol, gambling that the sheer speed of the advance would make massive supplies of ammunition less necessary.
His experience of the Polish and western front campaigns enabled him to produce a standard textbook on armoured warfare as early as 1941, a work whose inclusion of the ritual salute to Hitler led to postwar allegations of Nazi sympathies. These were rightly dismissed, especially after Kielmansegg publicly condemned revisionist dismissals of the Holocaust. He also fought in Operation Barbarossa, when Hitler invaded his erstwhile Soviet ally in 1941 and almost got to Moscow.
Kielmansegg was then posted to various administrative posts in Berlin, where he renewed his friendship with his fellow staff-colonel (and fellow count) Claus von Stauffenberg, who went on to lead the army officers' plot to kill Hitler and sue for peace in the west. Although aware of the conspiracy, Kielmansegg was kept out of the loop by his friend. But on July 20 1944, when the plot failed, he faced another dilemma: to destroy papers proving he knew of the plan so as to foil the Gestapo, or to keep them in order to prove to the approaching allies that he was no Nazi. In the end he and his wife, the former Baroness von Dincklage, who died in 2000, shredded the papers, annoying the neighbours with the ensuing hyperactivity of the lavatory cistern.
This proved a wise course since the Gestapo included Kielmansegg in their massive round-up, holding him for two months before releasing him for lack of evidence, an unusual display of delicacy. His luck continued after his release: discharged from the staff, he was ordered to face the advancing Americans in command of a Panzer regiment, rather than go to the eastern front, where those out of favour were more commonly sent. Knowing that the end was near, he arranged to meet his wife on a family estate in north-west Germany. She managed to get out of Berlin with their two sons and two daughters; he was taken prisoner by the Americans but escaped in the chaos and got to the rendezvous.
After the war Kielmansegg worked in publishing until 1950, when he became secretary of a committee set up to supervise the remilitarisation of the federal republic. When this occurred in 1955, he went back into uniform as a major-general commanding a division of the new Bundeswehr, and served as Bonn's military representative to Nato for two years until 1958. Eight years later, as a full general, he became its commander in central Europe. He had 500,000 German, US and British troops on West German territory under his command until he retired, liked and respected, in 1968.
All four of his children survive him, including the son who went on to become a Bundeswehr major-general.
· Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, soldier, born December 30 1906; died May 26 2006