ITT:historical figures you would follow

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this desu

I was going to say this desu

Aside from the outfits he wasn't even edgy

Fuck the corrupt Senate

All of these

handsomest midget after peter dinklage

those rebels are still salty

> believing the eternal anglo's propaganda

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>midget

He was above average height for that time.

>o. Confusion about his height also results from the difference between the French pouce and British inch—2.71 and 2.54 cm respectively; he was about 1.7 metres (5 ft 7 in) tall, which is above average for the period (for example, the average height of an English male was 170 cm (5 ft 7 in)

The only right answer

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10/10 would march upcountry with.

Why would you follow an utter failure and a charlatan?

>On 10 April 1945, Wenck was appointed commander of the German Twelfth Army located to the west of Berlin to guard against the advancing American and British forces. But, as the Western Front moved eastwards and the Eastern Front moved westwards, the German armies making up both fronts backed towards each other. As a result, the area of control of Wenck's army to his rear and east of the Elbe River had become a vast refugee camp for German civilians fleeing the path of the approaching Soviet forces. Wenck took great pains to provide food and lodging for these refugees. At one stage, the Twelfth Army was estimated to be feeding more than a quarter million people every day.

>Wenck's eastward attack toward Berlin was aimed specifically at providing the population and garrison of Berlin with an escape route to areas occupied by United States armed forces: "Comrades, you've got to go in once more," Wenck said. "It's not about Berlin any more, it's not about the Reich any more." Their task was to save people from the fighting and the Russians.Wenck's leadership struck a powerful chord, even if the reactions varied between those who believed in a humanitarian operation and those keener to surrender to the Western allies instead of the Russians. Wenck's actions, with the help of luck and American general William Simpson, successfully evacuated a large number of troops and civilians to range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, with Wenck himself being one of the last who crossed the river

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- multiple 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. General-Oberst 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 said.

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.

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 one week of taking command, Heinrici had bulldozed his way through these seemingly insurmountable 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 anti-aircraft 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 adroit 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 block-by-block, 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 and sharp reaction from the Fuhrerbunker. Field Marshal 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.

I would absolutely support him. Though I feel that he'd be quite hard to maintain a relationship with if you were on personal terms with him; apparently he was very quiet and preferred to be alone.

Definitely. He'd be humble and gracious, and fun to be around. He's also probably the most genuinely intelligent fascist.

Would follow until my dying breath. He'd be an absolute bro, too. Would probably die for you.

alexios i
epaminondas
cato the younger
hal moore

Ian Smith

Khosrau I

Some information of the philosopher-king.

He helped the country reach scientific heights for that time-period, and he removed the socialist scum Mazdakites.

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Mosley was an absolute joke, his greatest achievement is being idolized more than 70 years later by a handful of edgy, contrarian unachievers

Anyone going against Russia.
Russians have ruined so much it isn't even funny.

BASED
B
A
S
E
D

Would forcibly deport all the inhabitants of Antioch to Mesopotamia with him.

It's a pity such based men are so rarely born.

>would execute natives with

Have fun freezing to death in Russia

It would be worth it

>tfw no soft-hearted cultured czar

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Shivaji.

¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA!

Why so many edgy facists itt?

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he did nothing wrong

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Alexander II wasn't soft-hearted.

When the society is atomized, people tend to gather around notable persons.

definitely

only man here who can guarantee success

none of them, we're living in the best time in history.

was gonna post this

10/10 would defend Constantinople with

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Trying not to be too edgy here, but I'll be honest. If I was born in Germany in the 1920s, I absolutely would have fought in the Wehrmacht. Not even necessarily out of any belief in the National Socialist cause, but simply out of loyalty and pride for my country. Many people seem to think that all German soldiers were indoctrinated Nazis, but really most were just average people wanting to defend their family and way of life.

And if I was one of those men, there is no man I would rather follow more than Erwin Rommel. Although not necessarily the greatest general of all time, he was nevertheless a great leader, as he was a man of honor, courage, and charisma, thus inspiring fierce loyalty and pride in nearly all that followed him. I certainly would have been no exception.

>wanting to defend their family and way of life.
by waging wars of aggression, conquest and to a large degree also ethnic cleansing?

they call him general lee

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10/10 would shot Austrians and Frenchmen with

It's all about point of view. From the average German's point of view, yes they were in fact defending their country by attacking Poland, as Eastern Prussia was historically german and still had many ethnic Germans living it that were being actively oppressed by the Polish government of the time. Then France and England join in to supposedly defend Poland, (despite not giving a single shit when Russia invaded Poland shortly afterwards) so to the average German they were simply defending their country by preemptively invading France. Same situation with Russia, as the Soviet Union was presumably in the process of preparing its own invasion of Germany several years down the road, but due to Stalin's purges was still not ready and thus was happy to sign that non-aggression pact and sit on the sidelines while the rest of capitalist Europe wore itself out in a needless war.

As for the ethnic cleansing, I'm not going to try to defend it; it's simply abhorrent. However, to be fair the average German soldier was not even aware of it happening. Even most German generals were kept ignorant of the Holocaust. The worst thing the average Wehrmacht soldier would have done would have been to execute suspected partisans, many of whom were innocent civilians.

Anyway, all this justification is essentially moot when you consider the horrible shit that patriotism+propaganda can induce people to do "for their country". Just look at modern day America, and all those soldiers in the Middle East who truly believe they are fighting for freedom and protecting America by killing Muslims that conversely believe they're simply defending their country from foreign invaders. Sure, America might not be committing genocide or attempting to outright conquer entire countries, but the justification for war in the mind of the average soldier remains the same, and essentially just boils down to blind patriotism.

youtube.com/watch?v=0q0LuS_gpj4

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>After the battle Wan-yen Yi was offered his life if he would enter Mongol service but he refused, saying his honour would not allow it. He made one last request: that he should be able to set eyes on the great Subedei. The veteran warrior, now in his fifties, was sought out, and Wan-yen was presented to him. Busy supervising executions, Subedei listened, bored, while Wan-yen paid him a handsome compliment: it was not chance, but destiny, that produced great conquerors like him, said Wan-yen. Subedei, never a man known for his charm, seemed uninterested, and ordered him away to his own decapitation.
>ywn kill subhuman chinks with based subotai

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>Even most German generals were kept ignorant of the Holocaust
>Believing the bullshit wehrmact generals and Allies made up to make Werhmact look clean

Eastern Prussia was still german at that time, you retard. They only lost it after WW2

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