The trial itself was remarkable not only for its verdict, but for the public figures who surrounded it.

Winston Churchill, the former British Prime Minister who had led his country through the war, Mannstein had helped conduct, donated money to Mannstein’s legal defense fund.

A gesture that caused considerable outrage in several quarters and illustrated how quickly the framework of Cold War strategic thinking had displaced the moral clarity of the immediate post-war years.

The British and American military establishments were already looking toward West German rearmament.

Mannstein was to many in those circles less a war criminal awaiting justice than a strategic asset awaiting release.

After his release, Mannstein served as a military adviser to the West German government during the creation of the Bundes, the new armed forces of the Federal Republic in the mid 1950s.

He published his war memoir lost victories in 1955.

The book was widely read, widely praised in military circles, and deeply tendentious in its framing.

Hitler’s interference was the cause of defeat.

The professional generals had done their jobs brilliantly.

The crimes of the war were either minimized, deflected, or simply not mentioned.

In the years that followed, Mannstein lived quietly near Munich.

His wife, Uda Sabila, died in 1966.

His son Grow had been killed on the Eastern Front in October 1942 at the age of 19.

His surviving son Rutiger remained with him.

He spent his later years in correspondence with former colleagues, reading and writing.

He had outlived most of the men he had served alongside.

The great commanders of the Vermacht, Kaidel hanged, Powus dead in Dresden in 1957, Raml murdered by his own government, were gone.

The war they had fought had been over for nearly three decades.

On the night of June 9th, 1973, Eric von Mannstein [music] died of a stroke at his home in Ershinhausen, Bavaria.

He was 85 years old.

He was the penultimate surviving German field marshal.

Ferdinand Sherner would die 3 weeks later on July 2nd.

His funeral was attended by hundreds of West German Bundesfair soldiers in full uniform.

He was buried in Dwarf with full military honors.

The obituary published in the Times of London noted that his influence had come from the power of his mind rather than any electrifying presence.

D.

Spiegel was considerably harsher, writing that he had assisted in the march to catastrophe, misled by a blind sense of duty.

Both assessments were true, and neither was sufficient.

a man who dies at 85 in his bed after a career of genuine military achievement that was inseparable from a war of extermination.

The record does not resolve neatly.

It simply sits there in the archives and the grave markers refusing to be simplified.

While Raml died on a country road and Gderian died in his bed, the fate of Colonel General Alfred Yodel belonged more squarely in the category of judicial reckoning.

Though even his story carried a postcript that left it unresolved, Yodel had served throughout the war as chief of the operation staff of the Ober commando de Vermacht, working in direct daily contact with Hitler to plan and execute the German military’s operations.

He was not a field commander in the manner of Raml or Mstein.

He was more precisely the intellectual mechanism by which Hitler’s strategic intentions were translated into operational orders.

He had been present at virtually every major military decision of the war.

He had signed criminal orders.

He had planned campaigns that included provisions for the treatment of civilians and prisoners that violated every standard of international law.

He was in that sense as deeply implicated in the overall conduct of the war as any figure at Nuremberg.

He signed the documents of unconditional surrender alongside Kadel on May 7th, 1945, a day before the ceremony in Berlin at Sha headquarters in Rams, France.

He was arrested shortly afterward and transferred to Nuremberg.

At trial, Yodel’s defense was more sophisticated than Kaidle’s straightforward claim of obedience.

He argued that he had been a professional soldier doing his duty within a military structure, that many of the orders he had signed had been legal under the rules of war as he understood them, and that he had on several occasions resisted or modified Hitler’s instructions.

The tribunal found these arguments unpersuasive.

He was convicted on all four counts and sentenced to death.

On October 16th, 1946, he was hanged at 2:34 a.

m.

in the gymnasium of Nuremberg Prison in the same building where Kaidle had preceded him less than 90 minutes earlier.

He died on the gallows at the age of 56.

In 1953, a West German denatification court reviewed [music] his case and cleared him of all charges, ruling in effect that he had been a soldier who had done his duty and not a criminal.

The decision was controversial, condemned by Allied legal scholars and historians, and the clearing of Jodel’s name was itself later overturned and remains legally contested to this day.

He occupies in the post-war legal record an unresolved position, hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg, cleared postumously by a German court, cleared again, reversed.

A man whose guilt or innocence the law never definitively settled.

Even though the rope had long since rendered the question academic.

The four men examined in this script.

Raml killed by his own government.

Kitel and Yodel hanged at Nerburgg.

Gudderion released without charge.

Mannstein serving four years of an 18-year sentence represent the range of outcomes available to the senior commanders of the Third Reich.

But they were not the whole picture.

For every kadel who faced the gallows, there were dozens of senior officers who never faced any legal process at all.

Gird von Runstead, arguably the most senior German field commander of the war, was deemed too ill to stand trial in 1948 and was released.

He died in handover in 1953.

General Gayorg Hans Reinhardt, whose armored core had advanced on Moscow in 1941, was sentenced to 15 years by an American military tribunal in 1948 and released in 1952.

Hundreds of other officers passed through dnazification proceedings and emerged within a few years as advisers to the new West German military establishment.

Their records in the east either unknown to or set aside by the NATO officials who needed German officers to train against the Soviet Union.

The Cold War was for many of the surviving officers of the Vermacht a form of institutional amnesty that preceded any formal one.

The skills that had made them dangerous in the service of one cause made them useful in the service of another.

The machinery of accountability that Nuremberg had initiated was never completed.

It ran for a few years, produced a relatively small number of convictions at the highest level and then slowed, stopped, and was effectively set aside in the name of strategic necessity.

Entire categories of crime.

The operational orders permitting the killing of civilians.

The complicity in the Inzot’s Grippin operations, the deliberate starvation of prisoners were either prosecuted in limited fashion or left entirely unressed.

What remained was the record itself, the orders, the reports, the photographs, the testimony of the survivors who had lived on the receiving end of the decisions these men had made.

That record did not depend on the verdicts of any court.

It sat in the archives of four countries, accessible to anyone willing to read it, waiting for the historians who would spend the following decades doing exactly that.

The generals who shook Europe to its foundations ended their days in courtrooms and country roads and Bavarian hospitals in ways that ranged from the dramatically just to the quietly comfortable.

The difference between their endings in many cases came down not to what they had done, but to when they had been captured, which army had taken them, and what the political climate of their particular moment required.

That more than almost anything else about them tells you what kind of war it had been.

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