Why do people fawn over Rommel instead of appreciating the man who deserves it, Guderian?

I wonder when we'll stop being sad about ww2

He fought the Russians+French
Rommel fought the Americans and British in NA
Gee I wonder which countries publish more texts about World War II

In English

>Guderian was dismissed twice, first on 26 December 1941 and again on 28 March 1945.
>The last dismissal followed a shouting-match over the loss of the German forces encircled at Küstrin. The encircled forces were not allowed to break out, and the 9th Army was unable to relieve them.
>Guderian was allegedly informed that his "physical health requires that [he] immediately take six weeks convalescent leave". He was replaced by General Hans Krebs.

What a fucking boss

Pleb tier peons only know Rommel

Thread needs more Contemptuous/Bantering German officers vs the Fuhrer.

Dietrich von Saucken (AKA Artillery face)

>A cavalry officer who regularly wore both a sword and a monocle, Saucken personified the archetypal aristocratic Prussian conservative who despised the"brown mob" of Nazis. When he was ordered to take command of the Second Army on 12 March 1945, he came to Hitler's headquarters with his left hand resting casually on his cavalry sabre, his monocle in his eye and then, saluted and gave a slight bow. This was three 'outrages' at once. He had not given the Nazi salute with raised arm and the words 'Heil Hitler', as had been regulation since 20 July 1944, he had not surrendered his weapon on entering....and had kept his monocle in his eye when saluting Hitler.

>When Hitler told him that he must take his orders from Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig, Saucken returned Hitler's gaze....and striking the marble slab of the map table with the flat of his hand, he said, 'I have no intention, Herr Hitler, of placing myself under the orders of a Gauleiter'. In doing this he had bluntly contradicted Hitler and not addressed him as Mein Führer.

>To the surprise of everyone who was present, Hitler capitulated and replied, "All right, Saucken, keep the command yourself." Hitler dismissed the General without shaking his hand and Saucken left the room with only the merest hint of a bow.

Fritz Darge -Waffen-SS Adjutant to Hitler

>On 18 July 1944, during a strategy conference in the Wolfsschanze,a fly began buzzing around the room, landing on Hitler's shoulder and on the surface of a map several times. Irritated, Hitler ordered Darges to dispatch the nuisance. Darges suggested that, as it was an airborne pest, the job should go to the Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below. Hitler took Darges aside, dismissed him on the spot and had him transferred to the Eastern Front.

>n August 1944 Darges returned to the SS Wiking to replace Johannes Mühlenkamp as the commander of the 5th SS Panzer Regiment. It was in command of this unit that Darges was awarded the Knight's Cross for his actions on the night of 4 January 1945. The division was advancing towards Bicske when it was stopped by the 41st Guards Rifle Division of the Soviet 4th Guards Army. Darges initially probed the Soviet line with a mixed Panzer and Panzer Grenadier Kampfgruppe and succeeded in breaking through the line at dawn. Subsequently he ambushed and destroyed a Soviet task force, knocking out four 122mm guns, four 76mm anti-tank guns, twelve trucks and a number of supply vehicles. He then attacked Regis Castle, forcing the garrison to retreat. Darges then found himself surrounded by Soviet reinforcements and was forced to repel several attacks. Three days later when they were relieved by another Kampfgruppe from SS Wiking, they left behind more than thirty destroyed Soviet tanks.

Walter Model -The Anti Rommel

>A telephone call from Army Group Center's chief of staff on 19 January 1942 informed Model that Hitler, having become nervous about the direct Soviet threat against Vyazma, had decided that XLVII Panzer Corps, 2nd SS Division Das Reich and 5th Panzer Division were not to be employed in the imminent counterattack but reserved for other use in the rearguard. Immediately, Model drove back from Rzhev to Vyazma in a raging blizzard and boarded a plane for East Prussia. Bypassing the figure of field marshal Günther von Kluge, his immediate superior, he sought a personal confrontation with Hitler. At first he attempted to lay out his reasons in the best, dispassionate General Staff manner, only to find the Führer unmoved by logic. Suddenly, glaring at Hitler through his monocle, Model brusquely demanded to know: "Mein Führer, who commands Ninth Army, you or I?". Hitler, shocked at the defiance of his newest army commander, tried to find another solution favorable for both, but Model still was not satisfied. "Good, Model", the exasperated Hitler finally responded. "You do it as you please, but it will be your head at risk".

Did it work?

Counting both WWs

>literal God-Tier genius
Guderian
Lettow-Vorbeck

>GOAT-tier
Mackensen
Rommel
Von Rundstedt
von Manstein
Moltke jr.

>decent tier
Model
von Bock
Tirpitz
Ludendorff
Falkenhayn
Hindenburg
Kleist

>shit-tier
von Leeb
Brauchitsch
Dietrich
Student
Jodl

>JUST tier
Paulus
Donitz
Richthofen

>sucked the fuhrer's cock tier
Goring
Keitel

>I wish I was born in a different country tier
Kesselring

>Adolf Hitler tier
Adolf Hitler
Kuchler

Yes, Das Reich served as meatshields while the regular Heer finished fortifying the position which held until the next offensives.

>Donitz
Why him?

Because I said so. Also, he was fucking shit

youtube.com/watch?v=FHnyQXyuTGY

Donitz did damn good work with what he had. He was constantly locked in battle with Goering over ship vs plane manufacturing priority.

I think you're thinking of Raeder, who was an opponent of submersible combat and genuinely believed his naval war could be successfully fought with his surface fleet. His only high point was that he didn't suck Hitler's cock like Donitz did.

As for Paulus, he was a pretty god commander who got caught up in a shitty turn of events, then as things went to absolute shit, his boss gave him a promotion in order to inspire him to commit suicide. Little wonder why he collaborated freely with the Soviets after his capture.

>using a British comedy bit to paint the man as a buffoon.

>paulus
Hence the JUST

>donitz
Shit, I was thinking about Raeder

Why do you hate laffter Karl?

>not Walter "the fireman" Model

He was like the sweeper in the football team, always there to clean up when others shit the bed, wouldn't know how to go on the offensive tho

>Moltke jr
>GOAT
Literally the moment Schlieffens notes ran out he went to shit and had a mental break down.

>Student
>Shit tier

>Paulus
>JUST tier

other than that pretty decent although i'd have Ludendorff higher

Maybe too harsh on Student, but Paulus is the living embodiment of JUST. Some1 shoop him with the hair n shiet

...

i just have a soft spot for student because i have a hard on for anything Fallschirmjager

i understand now why you put Paulus in JUST tier
his shit got fucked up good

...

;-;

lol this thread is fagland

Why Germany never built a monument of his balls is beyond me.
Probably didn't have enough steel to undertake the process.
Still probably don't.

desu Student really fucked up in Crete.

Why do people fawn over Guderian when they should be appreciating the man who deserves it, Percy Cleghorn Stanley "Hobo" Hobart.

Alfred Becker was better. The motherfucker took everything the BEF abandoned and what was captured from the French and converted it all for German use. Entire divisions fielded with his work at Hitler's personal request. Vehicle didn't have a gun? He'll slap a fucking cannon on it.

Pic related, him relaxing with his friend Fucking Erwin Rommel.

me on the right

Who was a better general Veeky Forums, Manstein or Guderian? France was taken so easily because of Manstein's genius, so i'm leaning towards him.

Becker sounds like an engineering badass.

But in this case, if we're talking about the development of armored warfare doctrine, then we'd have to talk about the likes of British military thinkers like Liddell Hart and the creator of the 7th Armored Division, Percy Cleghorn Stuart Hobart.

>Gun doesn't have a vehicle? He'll slap a fucking vehicle on it.
ftfy

horses man horses

Manstein got his ass kicked at Stalingrad, that alone pegs him down a notch as it was a total disaster. Not that he didn't have orders to engage and attack, but I think it could have been handled better.

Are you referring to operation winter storm? Because it may have succeeded if Paulus wasn't a pussy and actually attempted to break out, though at that point the sixth army was already starving and short on supplies. Also Manstein was given significantly less manpower and already weakened combat units compared to the superior Soviet forces who had more manpower and tanks. I don't think any German general could have succeeded with what was given to them, at least Manstein got close.

>Guderian and his staff surrendered to U.S. forces on 10 May 1945. He remained as a prisoner of war in U.S. custody until his release on 17 June 1948. His conduct was investigated and no charges were brought. After the war he was often invited to attend meetings of British veterans' groups, where he analyzed past battles with his old foes. During the early 1950s he advised on the reestablishment of military forces in West Germany. The reformed military was called the Bundeswehr.

based

My god he sounds so cool.

jesus christ that's ballsy, what a madman

Only today have I realized the meme potential of German officers and generals

>After surrendering on the Hel Peninsula, Saucken went into Soviet captivity. Initially he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka Building and the Oryol Prison before being transferred to the Siberian Tayshet camp in 1949. Kept in solitary confinement, ordered to hard labor and maltreated by Soviet interrogators after refusing to sign false confessions, Saucken was confined to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Released from Soviet captivity in 1955, he settled in Pullach near Munich. He died there in 1980.
This guy does not take bullshit

>Though an airplane stood by to evacuate him, he refused to leave his troops when they surrendered to the Red Army on the following day of 9 May 1945.

...

...

absolute madman

>During The Battle of Seelow Heights Hasso von Manteuffel was wounded when a group of Soviets burst into the command center. Four of his staff were killed and another four wounded before the six intruders were shot down. Manteuffel, who was a former World War I cavalry officer, shot one of his attackers and cut the other down with a trench knife. His own injury–a bullet wound in his upper arm–proved to be serious but not life threatening. A medic treated his injury, and the general, who had not slept in five days, slipped into a deep sleep and was carried to safety without his knowledge by his adjutant, who had himself been wounded twice during the last five days.

why no foch or petain?

nvm

Where's Hoffmann?
Also Moltke should definitely be in decent.

>Kesselring
>bad

He managed to hold the allies from entering north Italy until the end of war.

He's not saying Kesselring was bad, hes saying Kesselring didn't deserve his fate.

>As usual Hitler’s top military advisors were in attendance. In addition to Guderian and Busse there were Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Keitel; his Operations Chief, Jodl; the Führer’s adjutant, Burgdorf; several other senior officers and various aides. For several minutes Hitler listened to a general briefing on the current situation, then Busse was invited to give his report. He began by briefly outlining how the attack was launched and the forces that were employed. Hitler began to show annoyance. Suddenly he interrupted. “Why did the attack fail?” he yelled. Without pausing, he answered his own question. “Because of incompetence! Because of negligence!” He heaped abuse on Busse, Guderian and the entire High Command. They were all “incompetent.” The Küstrin attack was launched, he ranted, “without sufficient artillery preparation!” Then he turned on Guderian: “If Busse didn’t have enough ammunition as you claim—why didn’t you get him more?”

>There was a moment of silence. Then Guderian began to speak quietly. “I have already explained to you …” Hitler, waving his arm, cut him off. “Explanations! Excuses! That’s all you give me!” he shouted. “Well! Then you tell me who let us down at Küstrin— the troops or Busse?” Guderian suddenly boiled. “Nonsense!” he spluttered. “This is nonsense!” He almost spat the words out. Furious, his face reddening, he launched into a tirade. “Busse is not to blame!” he bellowed. “I’ve told you that! He followed orders! Busse used all the ammunition that was available to him! All that he had!” Guderian’s anger was monumental. He struggled for words. “To say that the troops are to blame—look at the casualties!” he raged. “Look at the losses! The troops did their duty! Their self-sacrifice proves it!”

>Hitler yelled back. “They failed!” he raged. “They failed.”

>Guderian, his face purpling, roared at the top of his voice: “I must ask you … I must ask you not to level any further accusations at Busse or his troops!”

>Both men were beyond reasonable discussion, but they did not stop. Facing each other, Guderian and Hitler engaged in such a furious and terrifying exchange that officers and aides stood frozen in shock. Hitler, lashing out at the General Staff, called them all “spineless,” “fools” and “fatheads.” He ranted that they had constantly “misled,” “misinformed” and “tricked” him. Guderian challenged the Führer on his use of the words “misinformed” and “misled.” Had General Gehlen in his intelligence estimate “misinformed” about the strength of the Russians? “No!” roared Guderian. “Gehlen is a fool!” Hitler retorted. What of the surrounded eighteen divisions still in the Baltic States, in Courland? “Who,” barked Guderian, “has misled you about them? Exactly when,” he demanded of the Führer, “do you intend to evacuate the Courland army?”

>So loud and violent was the encounter that afterward no one could remember exactly the sequence of the quarrel.* Even Busse, the innocent perpetrator of the argument, was unable to tell Heinrici later what had transpired in any detail. “We were almost paralyzed,” he said. “We couldn’t believe what was happening.”

>Jodl was the first to snap into action. He grabbed the yelling Guderian by the arm. “Please! Please,” he implored, “calm down.” He pulled Guderian to one side. Keitel and Burgdorf began ministering to Hitler who had slumped, exhausted, into a chair. Guderian’s horrified aide, Major Freytag von Loringhoven, certain that his chief would be arrested if he did not get him immediately out of the room, ran outside and called Krebs, the Chief of Staff, at Zossen and told him what was happening. Von Loringhoven implored Krebs to speak to Guderian on the phone, on the pretense that there was urgent news from the front and to hold him in conversation until the General calmed down. With difficulty, Guderian was persuaded to leave the room. Krebs, a past master at the art of manipulating information to suit the occasion, had no trouble in claiming Guderian’s undivided attention for more than fifteen minutes—and by that time the Chief of the Army High Command was in control of his emotions again.

>By 6 A.M. the following morning, Thursday, March 29, Heinrici had good reason to feel Guderian’s loss. He had just been handed a teletyped message informing him that Hitler had appointed Krebs as Chief of the OKH. Krebs was a smooth-talking man who was a fanatical supporter of Hitler; he was widely and cordially disliked. Among the Vistula staff, the news of his appointment, following so closely that of Guderian’s departure, produced an atmosphere of gloom. The Operations Chief, Colonel Eismann, summed up the prevailing attitude. As he was later to record: “This man, with his eternally friendly smile, reminded me somehow of a fawn … it was clear what we could expect. Krebs had only to spout out a few confident phrases—and the situation was rosy again. Hitler would get much better support from him than from Guderian.”

>Heinrici made no comment on the appointment. Guderian’s spirited defense of Busse had saved that commander and there would be no more suicidal attacks against Küstrin. For that Heinrici was grateful to a man with whom he had often disagreed. He would miss Guderian, for he knew Krebs of old and expected little support from him. There would be no outspoken Guderian to back up Heinrici when he saw Hitler to discuss the problems of the Oder front. He was to see the Führer for a full-dress conference on Friday, April 6.

>Manstein received the Swords of the Knight's Cross on 30 March 1944 and handed over control of Army Group South to Model on 2 April during a meeting at Hitler's mountain retreat, the Berghof. Model's adjutant, Günther Reichhelm, later described the scene and Manstein's response:

> "He (Hitler) must have paid him compliments about his strategic skills during the attack operations, but he also said, "I cannot use you in the South. Field Marshal Model will take over." And quietly Manstein protested this, replying with. "My Führer... please believe me when I say I will use all strategic means at my disposal to defend the soil in which my son lies buried."

;_;

On 2 May, General Weidling had his Chief-of-Staff, von Dufving, arrange a meeting with General Chuikov. Weidling and Chuikov had the following conversation:

Chuikov: "You are the commander of the Berlin garrison?"

Weidling: "Yes, I am the commander of the LVI Tank Corps."

Chuikov: "Where is Krebs?"

Weidling: "I saw him yesterday in the Reich Chancellery. I thought he would commit suicide. At first, he criticized me because unofficial capitulation started yesterday. The order regarding capitulation has been issued today."

Soviet General Vasily Sokolovsky entered with an immediate question. The conversation continued:

Sokolovsky: "Where have Hitler and Goebbels gone?"

The question surprised Weidling, but he kept his voice calm as he responded.

Weidling: "So far as I know, Goebbels and his family were to commit suicide. The Führer took poison on April 30. His wife also poisoned herself."

Chuikov: "Did you hear that or see that?"

Weidling: "I was in the Reich Chancellery on the evening of April 30. Krebs, Bormann, and Goebbels told me about it."

Chuikov: "So the war is over?"

Weidling: "I think that every unnecessary death is a crime . . . madness."

Sokolovsky cut in again.

Sokolovsky: "Issue an order regarding complete surrender, so that there will be no resistance in individual sectors. Better late than never."

Weidling: "We have neither ammunition nor heavy weapons, therefore, resistance cannot last long. All the Germans have become confused, and they will not believe me that the Führer is dead."

Chuikov: "Write an order regarding complete capitulation. Then your conscience will be clear."

Per Chuikov's and Sokolovsky's direction, Weidling put his surrender order in writing. The document written by Weidling read as follows:

"On 30 April 1945, the Führer committed suicide, and thus abandoned those who had sworn loyalty to him. According to the Führer's order, you German soldiers would have had to go on fighting for Berlin despite the fact that our ammunition has run out and despite the general situation which makes our further resistance meaningless. I order the immediate cessation of resistance. WEIDLING, General of Artillery, former District Commandant in the defence of Berlin"

Chuikov and Sokolovsky reviewed what Weidling had written and the conversation continued.

Chuikov: "There is no need to say 'former'. You are still commandant."

Weidling: "Jawohl! How shall it be headed, as an appeal or an order?"

Chuikov: "An order."

The meeting between Weidling and Chuikov ended at 8:23 am on 2 May 1945. Later that same day, loudspeakers announced Weidling's surrender order and copies of it were distributed to the remaining defenders. With the exception of scattered areas of resistance and desperate efforts to break out, the Battle of Berlin was over.

The Soviet forces took Weidling into custody as a prisoner of war and flew him to the Soviet Union. He never returned to Germany alive.

He also had the best nickname - Frontschwein (Frontpig).

here's the scene from the movie
youtu.be/u-hES2QeSno

>Forgetting the greatest

Because Rommel is the only general you're allowed to like without being called a neo-nazi

Wrong country, senpai, but a good choice.

>Just before dawn on April 16, 1945, Russian Marshal Georgi Zhukov gave the signal to attack. More than 20,000 field guns, mortars, and Katyushkas rocket launchers began firing on German positions west of Kustrin on the Oder River. People in Berlin, forty miles away, heard the barrage, and many of the gunners began to bleed from the ears so great was the noise. The greatest artillery onslaught of the war lasted for more than half an hour, and Zhukov believed no army on earth could withstand such fire; and he would have been correct, except it all fell on empty lines.

Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici had pulled his troops back hours before to let the Russians blast unoccupied ground. Now, when three Russian armies moved forward in a huge mass of 750,00 men and 1800 tanks, the Germans stopped them in their tracks.

>If the Russians had known who faced them, they wouldn’t have been surprised by this defensive tactic, for Heinrici had been doing similar things to them for more than three years.

>Heinrici had built his reputation as a brilliant defensive fighter during the disastrous winter of 1941-42. He was placed in command of the 4th Army at the gates of Moscow, when the Soviets threw a hundred divisions at his freezing and ill-clad troops. He held out for almost ten weeks using every method available to him. Goading, exhorting, promoting, and tactfully retreating, he kept his army intact in the face of 12-l odds. It was here, that Heinrici developed the technique that served him so well in the defense of Berlin. From intelligence reports, patrols, interrogation of prisoners, and an extraordinary sixth sense, he was able to pinpoint the time and place of impending Russian attacks. He’d order his troops to retreat the night before to new positions one or two miles back. ‘We let them hit an empty bag,” he would often say.

In fighting on the long retreat from Stalingrad, his soldiers held their ground well, knowing that Heinrici would never throw their lives away needlessly. He contested every mile, every step, and then would withdraw to safer ground when a situation became hopeless. A staff officer said of him, ‘Heinrici retreats only when the air is turned to lead…and then only with determination.”

The retreat was interrupted at Smolensk in 1943. He was accused by Reich Marshal Goering of failing to carry out the Fuhrer’s scorched-earth policy. He narrowly escaped court martial, but was instead declared in ill health, and dispatched to a nursing home in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia.

The incident with Goering was not unexpected, as Heinrici never got along with the toadies and lackeys that made up much of Hitler’s inner circle. After listening to on interminable discussion in the Fuhrerbunker that involved phantom divisions and panzer armies which no longer existed, Heinrici called it ‘Cloud Cuckoo-land.’

He was the sort of soldier that Hitler intensely disliked, having come from a family of military aristocrats—a class Hitler despised and blamed for leading Germany to defeat in World War I. Heinrici had spend forty of his fifty-eight years in the army, serving with solid professionalism, but in almost impenetrable obscurity. There had been no dashing blitzkrieg attacks, no full-page layouts in Das Signal, the Nazi magazine devoted to military triumphs.

And, worst of all, Heinrici had no time for, nor interest in, the spit and polish, the black boots, and baton-pounding posturing so common to the German general officers.

Brilliant

In fact, those meeting him for the first time would never suspect he was a general. Short, slightly built, with fair hair and a neat mustache, Heinrici seemed at first glance a schoolmaster, and a rather shabby one at that. He wore his uniforms until they were threadbare, and refused to part with a ratty sheepskin coat he wore for the duration of the war.

But if he didn’t look the part of a general, he acted like one. He was every inch the soldier, and his troops called him affectionately ‘unser Giftzwerg—our tough little bastard.’

When the Russians opened their winter offensive in 1943, it was Heinrici’s 4th Army which bore the brunt of it, holding a hundred mile front between Orsha and Rogachev, with only ten depleted divisions. The Russians delivered five offensives against him between October and December, each lasting five or six days, with several renewed efforts each day.

They deployed some twenty divisions in the first offensive, when the Germans had just occupied a hastily-prepared position consisting of a single trench line. They employed thirty divisions in the next offensive, and the subsequent attacks were made with some thirty-six divisions.

The main weight of the Russian assault was concentrated on a front of a dozen miles astride the Moscow-Minsk highway. Heinrici used three-and-a-half divisions on this very narrow front, leaving six-and-a-half to cover the remainder of his extensive line. He thus had a dense ratio of force versus space at the vital point.

Heinrici was well aware of the Russian tendency to mass troops and armor at a central point, and then try to simply overwhelm the defenders. His artillery was almost intact, and he concentrated 380 guns to cover the crucial sector. Controlled by a single artillery commander at 4th Army headquarters, he was able to concentrate his fire at any threatened point of the sector.

At the same time, Heinrici made a practice of ‘milking’ the divisions on the quiet part of his front in order to provide one fresh battalion daily during the battle, for each of the divisions that were heavily engaged. This usually balanced the previous day’s loss, while giving the division concerned an intact local reserve that it could use for counterattack.

The drawbacks of mixing formations were diminished by a system of rotation within each division— which now consisted of three regiments, each of two battalions.

For the second day of battle, the re-enforcing battalion would be the sister of the one that was brought in the day before. After two more days, a second completely new regiment would be in the lines; and on the sixth day, the original division would have been relieved altogether, and gone to hold a quiet sector recently vacated by the replacement units.

The repeated successes of this defensive maneuver against overwhelming odds were a remarkable achievement. They indicated how the war might have been drawn out, and the Russians’ strength exhausted if the defensive strategy had matched the tactics. But this prospect was wrecked by Hitler’s insistence that no withdrawal be made without his permission, and an accompanying reluctance to give such permission. With parrot-like repetition, the Supreme Command recited ‘every man must fight where he stands.’ Commanders who used their discretion were subject to court martial, even in cases where it was only a matter of withdrawing a small detachment from an isolated position.

Thus, Heinrici could count himself lucky that he was only confined to convalescence in the Karlsbad nursing home. He knew the war was being lost, and fully expected to never wear the Wehrmacht uniform again; a prospect he found unbearably frustrating.

There he languished for eight months as the Allies landed at Normandy, increased pressure in Italy; as the Russians moved every closer to the Reich, and Hitler survived the generals’ bomb plot. At last, late in the summer of 1944, he was ordered back to duty in Hungary as commander of First Panzer and Hungarian First armies. Although forced to retreat from northern Hungary, he contested the ground so tenaciously that on March 3, 1945, he was decorated with the Swords to the Oak Leaves of his Knight’s Cross—a remarkable achievement for a man so intensely disliked by Hitler.

At about this time, Heinz Guderian, Chief of the General Staff (OKW), the architect of Germany’s panzer armies and blitzkrieg tactics of the early years, began to entreat Hitler to place Heinrici in command of Army Group Vistula, replacing Heinrich Himmler.

That Himmler had ever been in command was in itself either shockingly naive or criminally ignorant. Himmler was one of Hitler’s closest associates, the head of the SS and the Gestapo, and considered the most powerful man in Germany next to the Fuhrer himself. A former chicken farmer, Himmler had not held military command at even a regimental level, let alone was he capable of commanding a major group of several armies.

After the failure of the Ardennes offensive in the West, Guderian had been able to convince Hitler that the only hope for survival in the East lay in having Heinrici direct the defense there. Hitler finally agreed after Himmler resigned the position because of ‘other pressing duties.’

It was, therefore, an evolving set of circumstances that brought Heinrici in April, 1945, to the line of defenses along the Oder and Neisse Rivers, and which would determine the fates of Berlin and the entire German nation.

What he found upon taking command was chaos. He had nearly half a million men, but their quality and loyalty were in question. Mixed with regular German troops were Romanians and Hungarians. Two Waffen-SS divisions were made up of Norwegian and Dutch volunteers. There was even a formation of former Russian POW’s that he expected to desert at the first opportunity. His shortages were acute in gasoline, ammunition, food, medicine, tanks, and even in rifles. One anti-tank regiment had one projectile for each man!

Within a week of taking command, Heinrici had bulldozed his way through these difficulties. He cajoled and goaded his troops, growled at and praised them, to build morale and to gain time to save lives. He moved all the AA guns out of Berlin where they were no longer effective. Though they were immobile, needing to be set in concrete, they did help to fill the gap; the Third Panzer Army alone received 600 flak guns.

His anticipation of Zhukov’s barrage and his astute movement of troops from one critical point to another served him well, as it had in the past. But he was under no illusions that the collapse of the Reich was inevitable. His only hope at the point was to prevent the wholesale loss of his armies, and to prevent a house-by-house battle in Berlin, which he knew would kill thousands of civilians.

When his forward position on the Oder became indefensible under mounting Russian attacks, he ordered the German Third army to retreat, setting up a second line of defense. As expected this was met with an immediate reaction from the Fuhrerbunker. Wilhelm Keitel, one of Hitler’s primary sycophants arrived on the scene. After berating Heinrici for cowardice, Keitel ordered the Third Army not be moved to secondary positions. When Heinrici refused, Keitel removed him from command of Army Group Vistula.

As Heinrici drove toward his headquarters at Plon, he told his driver to do so slowly. Perhaps the war would be over before they arrived.

>As Heinrici drove toward his headquarters at Plon, he told his driver to do so slowly. Perhaps the war would be over before they arrived.

Damn...