On
this date, January 17, 1942, one of Hitler’s General, Walther Von Reichenau
died. I will post information about him from Wikipedia and other links.
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Generalfeldmarschall Walther von
Reichenau, 1941
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Born
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October 8, 1884
Karlsruhe, Baden, Germany |
Died
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January 17, 1942 (aged 57)
Poltava |
Buried at
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Invalidenfriedhof Berlin
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Allegiance
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German Empire (to 1918)
Weimar Republic (to 1933) Nazi Germany |
Years of service
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1903–1942
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Rank
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Generalfeldmarschall
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Commands held
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10th Army
6th Army |
Battles/wars
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World War I
World War II |
Awards
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Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross
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Walter von Reichenau (8 October 1884 – 17 January 1942)
was a German officer and Generalfeldmarschall during World War II. He
issued the notorious Severity Order concerning fighting on the eastern front,
which made him a war criminal. He was in charge of forces which helped to
commit the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar.
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Walther von Reichenau 2
Generalmajor von Reichenau, 1933 |
Early
life
Reichenau
was born in Karlsruhe, Baden into an aristocratic Prussian family, the son of
the later General lieutenant Ernst August von Reichenau (1841–1919). Throughout
the 19th and early 20th centuries the Reichenau family owned and operated one
of the largest furniture factories in Germany. Having passed the Abitur
examination, Reichenau joined the Prussian Army in 1903.
During
World War I he served as adjutant in the 1st Guards Field Artillery Regiment (1st
Guards Infantry Division) on the Western Front. He was awarded the Iron Cross
Second and First Class and already by 1914 had been promoted to the rank of captain.
From the next year he served as Second General Staff officer (Ib) of the
47th Reserve Division and First General Staff office (Ia) of the 7th
Cavalry Division. After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, he joined the Grenzschutz
Ost Freikorps units in Upper Silesia and Pomerania.
In
1919 Reichenau was selected to remain in the newly established Reichswehr, the
96,000 man army that Germany was allowed to maintain under the terms of the Treaty
of Versailles. The Reichswehr was limited to 4,000 officers, and the German
General Staff was not permitted to exist. Reichenau took a post in the Truppenamt, which was the equivalent
underground General Staff
that was formed by Hans von Seeckt.
From 1931 Reichenau was Chief of Staff to the Inspector of Signals at the Reichswehr
Ministry, and later served with General Werner von Blomberg
in East Prussia. Here he supported Blomberg in the development of new tactics
to put into practice the concept of mobile warfare that showed promise at the
end of the First World War. Reichenau had many of the books of British tank
proponents, including B.H. Liddell Hart
and J.F.C. Fuller, translated into German.
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Warsaw
during World War II: General Gerd von Rundstedt, General Walter von Reichenau
and General Johannes Blaskowitz in conversation at Warsaw Airport before the
arrival of Adolf Hitler in late September / early October 1939
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Nazi
support
Reichenau's
uncle was an ardent Nazi
and introduced him to Adolf Hitler in April 1932. Reichenau joined the Nazi Party,
although doing so was a violation of the army regulations laid down by Seeckt
to insulate the army from national politics.
In
1938, records indicate, the family "donated" its furniture factory
outside Karlsruhe to the Nazi Party and it was transformed into a munitions
plant. During Allied attacks in 1945, this factory was destroyed in an air
raid.
Reichenau
married Alix, a daughter of the Silesian Count Andreas von Maltzan. During the
war, Alix's sister Maria (Marushka) hid her Jewish lover Hans Hirschel
from the Gestapo
in her Berlin flat; Reichenau knew this and visited them there. Maria also
worked to hide underground Jews and political dissidents, sustain them, or help
them escape from Germany.
When
Hitler came to power in January 1933, Blomberg became Minister of War and
Reichenau was appointed as head of the Ministerial Office, acting as liaison
officer between the Army and the Nazi Party. He played a leading role in
persuading Nazi leaders such as Göring and Himmler that the power of Ernst Röhm
and the SA must be
broken if the army was to support the Nazi-led government. This led directly to
the "Night of the
Long Knives" of 30 June 1934.
In
1935 Reichenau was promoted to lieutenant general
(Generalleutnant) and was also appointed to command the military forces
in Munich. In 1938, after the Blomberg-Fritsch
Affair, in which General Werner von Fritsch was forced out of the
Army command, Reichenau was Hitler's first choice to succeed him, but older
leaders such as Gerd von Rundstedt
and Ludwig Beck refused to serve under
Reichenau, and Hitler backed down. Reichenau's enthusiastic Nazism repelled
many of the generals who would not oppose Hitler but who did not care for Nazi
ideology.
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Second
World War
Poland
and France
In
September 1939, Reichenau commanded the 10th Army during the German invasion of Poland. In 1940 he led
the 6th Army during the invasion of Belgium and France,
and in 1940, Hitler promoted him to field marshal during the 1940 Field Marshal Ceremony.
Barbarossa
Reichenau
strongly opposed the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless as
commander of the Sixth Army, he led his army into the heart of Russia during
the summer of 1941. The Sixth Army was a part of Army Group South, and captured
Kiev, Belgorod, Kharkov and Kursk. In September 1941, Reichenau reportedly
wrote to Adolf Hitler to suggest that Ukrainians and White Russians, who
initially viewed the German army as liberators, should be recruited to fight
against the Bolsheviks. Hitler rejected this idea, telling Reichenau to stop
interfering in political matters. Later that month Reichenau wrote again to
Hitler on this subject, warning him of the dangers of large-scale partisan
warfare in the Soviet Union. His advice was ignored, but his persistence in
challenging Hitler's opinion was noted.
During
its offensive into Russia, the German army was confronted with a number of
superior tank designs. Reichenau inspected the Soviet tanks he came across,
entering each tank and measuring its armour plate. According to general staff
officer Paul Jordan, after examining a T-34,
Reichenau told his officers "If the Russians ever produce it on an assembly
line we will have lost the war."
Reichenau
supported the work of the SS Einsatzgruppen in exterminating the Jews
in the occupied Soviet territories. On 19 December 1941, Hitler sacked Walther von
Brauchitsch as Commander-in-Chief and tried to appoint Reichenau to
the post. But again the senior Army leaders rejected Reichenau as being
"too political", and Hitler appointed himself instead.
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Hitler and Reichenau
in Russia, September 1941
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Death
On
15 January 1942 Reichenau suffered a hemorrhagic stroke after a trail run in
harsh cold weather, and it was decided to fly him from Poltava to a hospital in
Leipzig, Germany. He is often said to have been killed in a plane crash in Russia,
although Görlitz writes that the plane merely made an emergency landing in a
field and that Reichenau actually died of a heart attack. His death coincided
with a propaganda offensive conducted by the Polish underground, Operation Reichenau,
the goal of which was to discredit Reichenau, in the eyes of the German
leadership, as a man who had allegedly been plotting to overthrow the Nazi régime,
thus sowing distrust between the Nazi political leadership and its military
command and punishing one of the German generals responsible for war crimes in
Poland. The coincidence of such propaganda with Reichenau's death became a
fertile ground for conspiracy theories, which allege that Reichenau might
actually have been killed by the Nazi secret services.
War
crimes
Politically,
Reichenau was an anti-Semite who
equated Jewry with Bolshevism and the perceived Asian
threat to Europe. The infamous "Reichenau
Order" or Severity Order
of October 1941 paved the way for mass murder by instructing the officers thus:
"In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war... For this reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry...".
All
Jews were henceforth to be treated as de facto partisans, and commanders
were directed that they be either summarily shot or handed over to the Einsatzgruppen
execution squads of the SS-Totenkopfverbände
as the situation dictated. Upon hearing of the Severity Order, Reichenau's superior Field
Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt
expressed "complete agreement" with it, and sent out a circular to
all of the Army generals under his command urging them to send out their own
versions of the Severity Order, which would impress upon the troops the need to
exterminate Jews. During the Nuremberg trials, however, Rundstedt denied
any knowledge of that order before his capture by the Allies, although he
acknowledged that Reichenau's orders "may have reached my army group and
probably got into the office". Some historians such as Walter
Görlitz (de)
have sought to defend Reichenau, summarizing the above order as "demanding
that the troops keep their distance from the Russian civilian population."
Promotions
- Leutnant - 18 August 1904
- Oberleutnant - 18 August 1912
- Hauptmann - 28 November 1914
- Major - 1 July 1923
- Oberstleutnant - 1 April 1929
- Oberst - 1 February 1932
- Generalmajor - 1 February 1934
- Generalleutnant - 1 October 1935
- General der Artillerie - 1 October 1936
- Generaloberst - 1 October 1939
- Generalfeldmarschall - 19 July 1940
Awards
- Order of the Crown (Prussia) (4th Class)
- Iron Cross (1914) 1st and 2nd Class
- Knight's Cross of the House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords
- Knight's Cross of the Friedrich Order
- Hamburg Hanseatic Cross
- Military Merit Cross (Austria-Hungary) 3rd Class with War Decoration
- Spange to the Iron Cross
- Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 30 September 1939 as General der Artillerie and commander-in-chief of the 10. Armee
- Mentioned in the Wehrmachtbericht on 21 September 1941
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