Victory In Europe: The Field Marshals

“It is one of the most shameful and despicable affairs,” said Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, “for an officer to be taken without fighting back or offering resistance.” But, he explained, he was being treated for heart disease at Bad Tölz when he was captured.

The man who had engineered the breakthrough at Sedan in 1940, the sweep through the Ukraine in 1941, the Battle of the Bulge—and the loss of Normandy and the Rhine—told U.S. correspondents that Allied air power was the biggest factor in Germany’s defeat. He said that Hitler had ordered the Ardennes counteroffensive which almost reached the rear supply areas of the U.S. First Army; that Hitler had passed on every major military decision since the start of the war, and that he had ”good intuition.” Rundstedt did not doubt that Hitler had died, as represented, on the Berlin barricades—or from overwork. “Der Führer was a brave man,” he said. “He proved that in the last war.”

Rundstedt was only one of six field marshals rounded up. The others:

¶ Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, 63, who had commanded the First German Tank Army in the Caucasus. He was caught in Mitterfels by two doughboys of the U.S. 26th Division. The captors found 25 traveling bags packed for flight, a quantity of narcotics and hypodermic syringes, but apparently there was no food in the house. Shaking like a leaf, Kleist accepted some U.S. white bread.

¶ Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, 60, Bavarian brewer’s son, longtime Luftwaffe commander, who helped stage the aerial massacre of Rotterdam and blitz on Britain.

¶ Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, 68, lizard-eyed besieger of Leningrad.

¶ Field Marshal Siegmund Wilhelm Walther List, 65, country doctor’s son, veteran of campaigns in six countries.

¶ Field Marshal Baron Maximilian von Weichs, 63, bespectacled aristocrat, general staffer in World War I, Nazi commander in the Balkans in World War II. Last week the Yugoslav Government requested his extradition as a war criminal.

Not captured by the Allies was Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, 64, who piled up a great heap of German dead in his vain effort to take Moscow, and was known as Der Sterber (“The Dier”), because of his constant prating about the glory of death on the battlefield. On a roadside north of Hamburg last week British troops found Bock’s body riddled by bullets, apparently from an Allied strafing plane.