Hitler's Commanders (8 page)

Fedor von Bock had suffered his first defeat. As disaster closed in on his divisions, Bock’s reaction was to contact Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler’s personal adjutant, and complain about his deteriorating health, especially his stomach ulcers. He asked Schmundt to relay the details of his illnesses to Hitler, which Schmundt no doubt did. Two days later, on December 18, 1941, Field Marshal Keitel telephoned and said that Hitler suggested he take an extended leave to restore his health. Bock jumped at the chance. He was replaced that same day by Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge.

One month later, on January 17, 1942, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau died, probably from a heart attack. The next day Hitler summoned Bock (now miraculously recovered) to Fuehrer Headquarters and offered him command of Army Group South, which Bock quickly accepted. By March, the Red Army offensives on this sector had been halted, largely because of Soviet troop exhaustion, supply failures, and deep snow. Now both sides began a race to build up supplies for a renewed offensive in the spring.

Bock’s command in 1942 was characterized by much greater caution than before. The field marshal obviously had been affected by his defeat at Moscow. When the Soviets launched their spring offensive on May 12, Hitler rejected several nervous requests from Bock and did not authorize the commitment of his reserves until May 17, when the Reds were within 12 miles of Kharkov. As a result, Army Group South won a major victory, capturing 240,000 men and capturing or destroying more than 1,200 tanks and 2,000 guns. The German forces suffered only 20,000 casualties. Hitler, however, was understandably unhappy about the lack of nerve Bock had displayed before Kharkov.
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Hitler now began the second phase of his summer offensive (Operation Blue) by ordering Bock to clear the Don in preparation for drives against Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Bock was openly critical of this plan because it relied too heavily on undependable foreign armies to guard the flanks of the German advance. He nevertheless attacked with more than a million men on June 28. In contrast to 1941, however, his advance was very slow, and he appeared to be preoccupied with the security of his left flank. Against Hitler’s orders, he allowed himself to be pinned down in a prolonged battle at Voronezh—a fruitless battle, which he continued even after Hitler ordered him to break it off. As a result, several large Soviet formations escaped across the Don, and the expected large haul of prisoners did not materialize. For this reason Hitler relieved Bock on grounds of illness on July 15 and never employed him again. Privately Hitler told Rudolf Schmundt that he still admired Bock but could work only with commanders who obeyed orders to the letter.

In early May 1945, with Hitler dead and the Russians already in Berlin, Fedor von Bock received a telegram from Manstein, informing him that the Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz was forming a new government in the vicinity of Hamburg. The ambitious Bock left for that city at once—even this late in the war angling for a new command. Accounts of his death vary. On or about May 4 his car was on the Kiel Road when it was attacked by a British fighter-bomber.
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According to some accounts, British soldiers found his bullet-riddled body several days later, along with those of his wife and daughter. Other reports have that Bock was still alive when the British arrived. He was rushed to the Oldenburg Naval Hospital, where he died without regaining consciousness. He was 64 years old.

ritter wilhelm joseph franz von leeb
is the least known of the three Germans who commanded army groups from 1939 to 1941 and the only one of the three who could properly be classified as an anti-Nazi. Ironically, he was the last to be dismissed, and the only one to be relieved at his own request. Unlike Rundstedt and Bock, however, he was never reemployed.

He was born in Landsberg-am-Lech, Bavaria, on September 5, 1876, into an old Bavarian military family. His father was Major Adolf von Leeb, and his future wife, Maria Schrott, was the daughter of a general of cavalry. Young Wilhelm entered the Bavarian 4th Field Artillery Regiment at Augsburg as an officer-cadet (Fahnenjunker) in 1895. Duly commissioned on March 3, 1897, he first saw action as a platoon leader in the East Asian Field Artillery Regiment at Peking, China, in 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion. After returning to Europe he attended the Bavarian War Academy at Munich, graduated in 1909, and served on the Bavarian General Staff in Munich, the Greater General Staff in Berlin, and as a battery commander in the 10th Artillery Regiment at Erlangen prior to the outbreak of World War I. He was a captain and Ib of the I Bavarian Army Corps in Munich in 1914, when World War I began.

Captain von Leeb served on the Western Front, primarily as Ia of the Bavarian 11th Infantry Division, during the first two years of the war. His division was transferred to the East in 1916, and during operations in Galicia and Serbia, Leeb won the Bavarian Military Order of Max Joseph for exceptional bravery. This decoration carried with it an honorary nonhereditary knighthood—hence he held the title
Ritter
(knight) but could not pass it on to his descendants.

Leeb was promoted to major in the summer of 1916 and fought against the Russians in the Battle of Kovel, and later took part in the conquest of Rumania. In May 1917, he was transferred back to the Western Front, as the second General Staff officer (Ib) on the staff of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, and remained there (like Fedor von Bock) until the end of the war. According to one source, he served briefly with the Freikorps in 1919.
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In any event he was a department chief in the Reich’s Defense Ministry in Berlin in October 1919. Selected for retention in the 100,000-man army, he rose rapidly in the Reichsheer. Promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1920, he became chief of staff of Wehrkreis II at Stettin in 1921 and in 1922 returned to Munich as chief of staff of Wehrkreis VII. He was a year at Landsberg as commander of the II Battalion of the 7th Mountain Artillery Regiment (1924), before being promoted to colonel in February 1925. In 1926 he was commander of the 7th Artillery Regiment, then stationed at Nuremberg. Two years later Wilhelm von Leeb was named
Artilleriefuehrer V
(Artillery Leader V) and one of the two deputy commanders of the 5th Infantry Division at Stuttgart. He was promoted to major general and named Artilleriefuehrer VII and deputy commander of the 7th Infantry Division in Munich in 1929. On December 1, 1929, while serving as commander of the 7th Infantry Division at Munich, Leeb was promoted to lieutenant general and in 1930 became commander of Wehrkreis VII.

By the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, Leeb was known as an austere and forbidding, no-nonsense Christian officer with a high moral code. He was openly suspicious of the Nazi Party and its leader at a time when almost all of the other generals were enthusiastically supporting Hitler’s rearmament program. A practicing Catholic, he made a point of going to mass in uniform (with his family), much to the displeasure of the party, whose ideals he rejected. Uncompromising in matters of principle, Ritter von Leeb refused to attend a dinner for Alfred Rosenberg, a top Nazi, because he was an anti-Christian.

For his part, Adolf Hitler privately denounced Leeb as “an incorrigible anti-Nazi” and had him placed under Gestapo surveillance—one of the first generals to earn this dubious distinction.
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Leeb, however, was a thinker and an intellectual, not a plotter or a conspirator. He was not a member of the German resistance and did not even know of the Stauffenberg assassination plot of July 20, 1944, until after it had failed.

An anti-Nazi attitude was not yet an impediment to advancement in the German Army, so von Leeb was named commander-in-chief of Army Group 2 at Kassel in late 1933, and on January 1, 1934, was promoted to general of artillery. In the mid-1930s his book,
Defense
, was published, and in 1938 it was republished by the German War Ministry in the prestigious
Militarwissenschaftliche Rundschau
(the Scientific Military Review), adding to Leeb’s international reputation as an authority on defensive warfare. His work on the subject was translated into English and Russian and was even incorporated into the Soviet Field Service Regulations.

Despite his preeminence, Leeb was one of the first commanders removed after General Walter von Brauchitsch assumed command of the army on February 4, 1938, and immediately began sacking commanders whom Hitler considered hostile to National Socialism. Leeb was involuntarily retired effective March 1, 1938, with the honorary (
charakterisierte
) rank of colonel general. Simultaneously, he received a singular honor when he was named honorary commander of the 7th Artillery Regiment. He was recalled to duty in August, as commander of the newly activated 12th Army, when it seemed certain that the Sudetenland crisis would lead to war. After the Anglo-French diplomatic capitulation at Munich, Leeb’s forces occupied southern Bohemia in October 1938, and shortly thereafter the general returned to his retirement home in Bavaria. He was recalled to active duty again the following year, however, and this time Hitler’s policies really did lead to war.

During the Polish campaign, Leeb’s Army Group C (which had evolved from his old headquarters, Army Group 2) was charged with defending the Western Front, while the main German armies conquered Poland. His three armies (the 1st, 5th, and 7th, plus Army Detachment A) controlled 51 divisions—mostly older-age or reserve formations. None of them was armored or motorized, so Leeb might have been in serious trouble had the French launched a major offensive. Leeb was not particularly worried about his situation, however, because he, like Hitler, considered an early Allied reaction unlikely. They were right—the French attempted only one limited offensive in the Saar area, beginning on September 9. It was halted on September 13 after a gain of only 16 miles, and Leeb regained all the lost ground by October 24, at a cost of less than 2,000 dead.

Wilhelm von Leeb was opposed to the Western campaign of 1940 from the beginning—on moral grounds. The death of his son, Lieutenant Alfred von Leeb of the 99th Mountain Infantry Regiment, no doubt contributed to his outspoken opposition to the operation. Young Leeb was killed in the Battle of Lvov—a city subsequently turned over to Stalin under the terms of the Soviet-German Non-aggression Pact—a fact hardly calculated to endear Hitler’s policies to the elder von Leeb. In the fall of 1939, Leeb wrote the “Memorandum on the Prospects and Effects of an Attack on France and England in Violation of the Neutrality of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg,” in which he predicted that the entire world would turn on Germany if she violated Belgian neutrality for the second time in 25 years.
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He urged the commander-in-chief of the army to confront Hitler on this issue, but the weak-willed General von Brauchitsch would have none of it. Therefore, on November 9, 1939, Leeb met with his fellow army group commanders, Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock, at Koblenz. Leeb wanted all three of them to resign if Hitler continued with his plans for an invasion of the West. Faced by the united front of his army group commanders, Leeb felt, Hitler might be compelled to change his plans. Rundstedt and Bock, however, were not troubled by Leeb’s sort of scruples, and the commander of Army Group C returned to his headquarters in disgust. He even considered resigning his command unilaterally but concluded that it would be an empty gesture, since it would do no good.

In the Western campaign, which began on May 10, 1940, Army Group C had only 17 divisions (all infantry) under the 1st and 7th armies. Its mission was purely secondary: feint against the Maginot Line to prevent the French from reinforcing the critical sector to the north. In this mission Leeb was entirely successful. After the French campaign he was rewarded with a field marshal’s baton on July 19, 1940.

After a brief period of occupation duty in southern France, the headquarters of Army Group C was transferred to Dresden in October, to begin preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Characteristically, Leeb protested against Hitler’s latest military adventure, but to no avail.

For the invasion of Russia, which began on June 22, 1941, Army Group C was redesignated Army Group North and controlled the 18th Army (Colonel General Georg von Kuechler), the 16th Army (Colonel General Ernst Busch), and the 4th Panzer Group (General of Panzer Troops Erich Hoepner). Leeb’s objectives were to advance rapidly, cut off and destroy the main Soviet forces in the Baltic States, and drive on to Leningrad.

Leeb’s problems in this campaign were mammoth: difficult terrain, poor roads, and insufficient forces for his mission. He had only 26 divisions, of which only three were panzer and three were motorized, and he faced 30 Soviet divisions, including four armored and two motorized divisions—and his opponents had 20 more divisions in reserve. In addition to all this, Leeb himself was neither trained nor suited to handle large mobile formations, which he commanded here for the first time in his long career. Nevertheless Leeb’s regiments struggled forward down dirt roads, through thick forests, across a landscape broken by many swamps, lakes, marshes, and streams. They breached the Dvina River line, took Ostrov, repelled repeated Soviet counterattacks, smashed entire opposing armies, and pushed on to Staraya Russa, which fell in bitter house-to-house fighting.

There can be little doubt that Leeb mishandled his armor during this campaign, forcing it to advance on a broad front, instead of thrusting forward in a concentrated drive, as Hoepner proposed. At one point Leeb even used a whole panzer division (the 8th) to clear his lines of communication. This process took an entire month and constituted a terrible waste of valuable armor. Leeb’s approach to the campaign was conservative and cautious—perhaps overly cautious. Nevertheless, on September 8, 1941, Leeb began his climactic push on Leningrad, which was already within range of his 240mm guns. Stalin hurled three fresh armies into the battle and committed three more against Leeb’s right flank at Staraya Russa and Kholm. Leeb’s men repulsed every attack and, on September 11, the 6th Panzer Division penetrated through the Duderhof Hills and the Leningrad fortifications to positions overlooking the city. Meanwhile, the 58th Infantry Division broke into the suburbs and captured a tram car only six miles from the heart of Leningrad, while the 126th Infantry Division took Schleusselburg off to the east on Lake Ladoga, sealing off the city. Leeb was poised for the final attack, and the second city of the Soviet Union seemed doomed when, on September 12, 1941, a message arrived from Adolf Hitler, ordering him not to take the city. Leningrad was to be starved to death instead, and Leeb was to immediately transfer the 4th Panzer Group (with five panzer and two motorized divisions) as well as the entire VIII Air Corps to Army Group Center.