Last of the Great Prussians

In World War II, General Eisenhower and Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery did not see eye to eye on all things military, but they agreed that the best of the German generals they faced was Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. The stiff, cold, duty-obsessed old Prussian never joined any plots against Hitler, but he often opposed the Fuehrer's plans and acts, was three times removed from command, and in the end came to despise a man he sometimes called "Corporal Hitler." B. H. Liddell Hart says that von Rundstedt was an abler soldier than Field Marshal von Hindenburg--of World War I--abler even than the Hindenburg-Ludendorff combination--and adds: "Gerd von Rundstedt was a gentleman to the core. His natural dignity and good manners inspired the respect even of those who differed widely from his views."

The Obedient Soldier. Karl Rudolph Gerd von Rundstedt was born in Ascherleben, the son of a Prussian major general. At 12, he was a military cadet; at 17, a lieutenant in Wilhelm II's army. He fought creditably on three fronts in World War I, and by 1929 was a lieutenant general. His first unsavory taste of politics came in 1932, when he was ordered by Chancellor von Papen to oust the Socialist ministers of Prussia; he obeyed. The ranking general when Hitler shortly came to power, von Rundstedt did nothing to hobble the Fuehrer, acquiesced--however unwillingly--in Hitler's assaults on the officer corps. Six years later, he saw his friend and colleague, Werner von Fritsch, sacked and tried on a trumped-up morality charge. Von Rundstedt protested. By that time he saw that the Nazis' course was leading to war with Britain, which he feared, and he asked for retirement. In 1939, Hitler called him back to command an army group in Poland; von Rundstedt obeyed.

Von Rundstedt's command was a main spearhead in the conquests of Poland and France, and formed the stout southern arm of the Nazi thrust into Russia. But when the German attack in Russia slowed down, with winter coming, von Rundstedt counseled not only a halt but retreat. Hitler removed him. In 1942, with the U.S. in the war, Hitler made von Rundstedt Commander in Chief West, to prepare for the eventual Allied invasion of Europe. By 1944, says World War II Historian Chester Wilmot (The Struggle for Europe), von Rundstedt had lost the master's touch, and was having to drink himself to sleep at night. After the Allied landing in Normandy and the subsequent breakout, Field Marshal Keitel, Oberkommando chief in Berlin, got von Rundstedt on the telephone and wailed, "What shall we do?" Von Rundstedt snapped, "Make peace, you fools!" Keitel ran to Hitler with the remark, and the Fuehrer wrote von Rundstedt a "nice letter," saying that Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge would take his place. Discharged, von Rundstedt nonetheless presided at the "Court of Honor," which ruthlessly drummed out of the German army those officers implicated or suspected in the unsuccessful July 20 attempt on Adolf Hitler's life.

Changing the Guard. Three months later, with Eisenhower's armies rushing toward the Siegfried Line, von Rundstedt was reinstated. When Hitler launched his last, convulsive counterstroke in the Ardennes--the Battle of the Bulge--the Allied generals assumed that von Rundstedt was masterminding the job. Actually, it was conceived and timed by Adolf Hitler, and mainly executed by Model, von Manteuffel and the SS's tough-guy General Sepp Dietrich. Von Rundstedt knew in advance that it would fail; by then a figurehead, he said, "My only prerogative was to change the guard at the gate." Six days before V-E day, the British captured him at Bad Toelz near Munich. They held him in custody for several years, intending to try him for war crimes, freed him in 1949 on the ground of ill health.

Embittered by the way the war had gone and saddened by the recent deaths of both his wife and son, General von Rundstedt had lately been living at Han-over-Klefeld in a modest third-floor flat over a shoeshop. He never wrote his memoirs. Last week, in a quiet and gentlemanly way, he died at 77.

Since West Germany has no army, there was no semblance of a military funeral. The handful of old Wehrmacht officers who appeared wore top hats instead of their high-peaked military caps. Instead of a gun-carriage, a common horse-drawn hearse carried the coffin. Said Dr. Ernst Strasser, the officiating clergyman: "We are burying the last of the great Prussians."

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