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Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch

Colonel General Heinrich Alfred Hermann Walther von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the German Land Forces, was a member of the nobility who, by virtue of extraordinary flexibility of mind (for a soldier), good luck and perpetual wariness had escaped the fate of General Werner von Fritsch and former Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher, both of whom were eliminated by the Nazis as men of dangerous ability and excessive intelligence. Von Brauchitsch also escaped the political and military demise of General Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the Fiihrer's first War Minister, who was booted from the Nazi cabinet ostensibly because of a fatal attraction for a blonde secretary whom he married, but in reality because Hitler feared that Blomberg was cooking up a Reichswehr coup d'etat. Despite the Blomberg fiasco, in 1939 von Brauchitsch purged himself of his wife, one Welly von Karstedt who was well-to-do but of a certain age, and married another employee of the War Ministry, Charlotte Schmidt, a judge's daughter, described as the most decorative biped in the Reichswehrministerium, for all her forty years.

As a youth, von Brauchitsch had no choice of career, as he was the son (the fifth) of a cavalry general. At Berlin he sought manfully to keep awake at the Franzosische Gymnasium, one of the best junior colleges in pre-War Germany. At the age of nineteen he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Royal Elizabeth Guard Grenadiers, whence his father transferred him to the artillery because of the grenadiers' predilection for corsets. By the time of the outbreak of the World War he had risen to a captaincy, and because of influence was assigned to solve logarithmic puzzles for General Staff dullards on the Western Front. For four years he rarely heard the faintest belch of artillery. But he made friends; in his unobtrusive way, the tall and lean young officer, almost seven feet in height, cemented acquaintance into friendships. The grimness of his face, punctuated by gray, intelligent eyes, is softened by a humorous mouth, and he is ready enough to laugh-in a manner, however, that suggests he fears he may awaken somebody.

At the disastrous war's end, Captain von Brauchitsch still had an unstained uniform, but no place to go. He was ushered out of the Reichswehr and thus discharged. But at Headquarters, the selfcontained captain of artillery had found favor with General Hans von Seeckt, then re-organizing the Reichswehr to conform with the terms of Versailles. Through him von Brauchitsch was again summoned to service, and in three years had risen to command of the artillery section at the War Ministry. His work continued to be sedentary and he had a succession of paper assignments. In 1930 he was appointed chief of military training in the Reich; in 1932 he was appointed Reichswehr chief of artillery, and the next year (when Hitler came to power) he was awarded command of the East Pressian Military area. He was largely responsible for construction of the new fortifications there.

All that had happened was his exchange of one swivel-chair for another, and the improvement of his wife's 300,000 acres in Pomerania. He gave the impression, in 1933, that no one was more surprised than himself at his eminence, but the truth was that von Brauchitsch had been advancing and ingratiating himself with great finesse. In 1937 he became chief of the Leipzig Group Command, a key post that secured his future.

By this time, von Brauchitsch had seen enough of Hitler to persuade himself of the sincerity of the Fuhrer for his avowed mission - to regain for Germany her pre-war position; so far as von Brauchitsch was concerned, that included the reinstatement also of the Reichswehr officer-class to its rightful place in the sun. He had the advantage over colleagues, in dealing with Hitler, that the Fuhrer recognized that the Colonel-General regarded him not as a parvenu, but as a very gifted politician in whom rested the fate of the Reichswehr officer-caste. The primary reason that Hitler and the Silesian aristocrat (who traces his forebears to 1259) could see eye-to-eye was that von Brauchitsch treated the Fuhrer as an equal: it was as simple as that. Von Brauchitsch became a confidant of the Fuhrer. There was, however, one lesser reason for Hitler's early approval of the soldier. Much against his judgment, he supported Hitler's first gamble in reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936 - like Hitler, but unlike other high Reichswehr officers, von Brauchitsch was disposed to believe the French and British would do nothing. He supported the Austrian seizure, less of a gamble, but before the Anschluss, when he had been given command of the Reichswehr.

Colonel-General von Brauchitsch played safe, and he had the not altogether likeable trait of covering all his bets. Militarily speaking, von Brauchitsch is an officer in no way comparable to von Hindenburg, but he was molded in the same tradition, he had an impressive physical facade, and he commanded popular support as well as the respect of the upper classes. Like all the Junker class, he was a die-hard monarchist, but he saw in the lunatic ex-corporal with the magical voice a God-sent means to an end-the destruction of Versailles, and the resurrection of the German army.

That the Colonel-General, who destroyed the respectable Polish army in some three weeks, can persuade himself of Hitler's omniscience in the present scheme of things was the secret of his eminence. Unlike most men of his training and background, he readily dismissed the Chancellor's personal history of childhood frustration, the picture of the flophouse orator by night and the postcard peddler by day. He seemed rather to believe that in the moves of the onetime Vienna panhandler and ex-corporal are the incalculable operations of Divine providence. This no other consequential officer of the Reichswehr could bring himself to believe; lip-service, yes, but not much more.

Together with his sincere respect for Hitler, Brauchitsch had the enormous advantage, in the set-up of Nazi opportunists and megalomaniacs, of being a rather dull fellow, inclined to self effacement. Not given to strutting, and with no interest in Nazi blood-and-soil gibberish or 'Aryan' abracadabra, he had the energy to consolidate every advance and to become more expert in his field, the vital one of major tactics. It was commonly said of von Brauchitsch that he had no political deftness, but he demonstrated an exceedingly subtle brand of political dexterity in selling himself to Hitler and his coterie, while remaining persona grata to the Reichswehr high command. He has not fallen from the tightwire and lost his life - or ruined his career - as did Schleicher, von Fritsch and von Blomberg.

On 30th March, 1941, Hitler held a conference at Berlin with leaders of the Wehrinacht. After Hitler had made his speech and had departed to his inner sanctum, protests were uttered by the commanders to the effect that the extermination planned by Hitler would violate their soldierly principles, and, further, would destroy disyipline. Brauchitsch agreed with them and promised to express their opinion to the OKW and Hitler respectively. He tried through Keitel to obtain a change in ,the plans, but was unable to do so. Subsequently, he lent his approval to the objections made by the field commanders, who, in some instances at least, expressed a negative opinion of the order to their subordinates and tried to avoid its execution as far as they could do so without peril to themselves. One of the means to ameliorate the brutality of the Commissar Order was the issuance by von Brauchitsch of what is known as the" Maintenance of Discipline" order.

On 19 December 1941, Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German army, resigned his position, partly because of a heart attack and partly because he could no longer face Hitler. Hitler then announced that he would personally assume the position of Commander in Chief of the Army, in addition to his powers as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

In the 1945-46 Nuremburg Trial, Brauchitsch was charged with complicity in Hitler's war of aggression and crimes against humanity. It was claimed by the Defence at Nuermberg that the Maintenance of Discipline order was conceived by von Brauchitsch as a means of sabotaging the Hitler order, but it will be noted that in the quoted part of Halder's diary he had Hitler saying, " This need not mean that the troops get out of hand." Brauchitsch was sent to a prisoner of war camp in South Wales and brought back to Germany in 1948 to stand trial before a British court. His general health was poor, he was almost blind, spent time imprisoned at Nuremberg and then Hamburg, due to go on trial as a war criminal in front of a British Military Court in 1949, heart failure took his life on 18 October 1948.