Gerd von Rundstedt

1. Lead

Gerd von Rundstedt (12 December 1875 – 24 February 1953) was the most senior field marshal of the German Army in the Second World War and one of the most experienced commanders of his generation. A Prussian staff officer who had served in the First World War, he commanded Army Group South in the invasion of Poland in 1939, Army Group A in the defeat of France in 1940, and Army Group South again in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

From 1942 he was Commander-in-Chief West, responsible for the defence of occupied France and the Low Countries, and he was in command when the Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Dismissed by Adolf Hitler in July 1944, he was recalled in September and directed the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944 before being dismissed for the last time in March 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

Rundstedt is a difficult figure to judge, and historians have judged him in sharply different ways. To his admirers he was the last representative of the old Prussian officer corps: professional, courteous, politically detached, and loyal to the army rather than to the Nazi Party, of which he was never a member.

To his critics he was a commander who served a criminal regime for six years without open protest, who signed orders connected with the war of annihilation in the Soviet Union, and whose reputation for aloof professionalism was itself a form of evasion. Both judgements rest on real evidence.

Rundstedt did criticise Hitler’s conduct of the war in private, and he was dismissed twice for telling him unwelcome truths; he also remained in high command long after the character of the regime was clear, and he accepted honours, money and estates from Hitler. This article presents the record as historians now understand it, distinguishing between what is documented and what remains a matter of interpretation.

2. Key Facts

Born	12 December 1875, Aschersleben, Province of Saxony, German Empire
Died	24 February 1953 (aged 77), Hanover, West Germany
Nationality	German
Role / Office	Field Marshal (Generalfeldmarschall, from 19 July 1940); Commander-in-Chief West (OB West), 1942–1944 and 1944–1945
Known for	Commanding Army Group South in Poland (1939); Army Group A in France (1940); Army Group South in the invasion of the Soviet Union (1941); defence of the West and the Ardennes offensive (1944–1945)
Spouse / Family	Married Luise von Goetz in 1902; one son, Hans Gerd von Rundstedt, also an army officer
Military rank	Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal)

3. Early Life and Education

A Prussian military family

Gerd von Rundstedt was born into an old Prussian military family. His father, Gerd Arnold Konrad von Rundstedt, was a major-general in the Prussian Army, and the family tradition pointed the boy towards the army from childhood. He was educated at cadet schools and entered the Prussian Army as a second lieutenant in 1893, joining the 83rd Infantry Regiment.

He attended the Prussian War Academy in Berlin between 1902 and 1905, the training ground of the General Staff, and he served as a staff officer before the First World War. By 1914 he was a captain on the staff of the 22nd Reserve Division, and during the war he served as a staff officer on the Western Front and later as chief of staff of a corps, rising to the rank of major.

He saw the war from the staff room rather than from the front line, and the experience shaped his whole approach to command: he believed in careful planning, in clear orders, and in leaving tactical detail to subordinates.

The Reichswehr years

After the defeat of 1918, Rundstedt was one of the officers retained in the small Reichswehr, the 100,000-man army permitted to Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. He rose steadily through the 1920s, commanding a division and then a corps, and in 1932 he became commander of the Berlin military district.

He was a conservative monarchist by outlook, suspicious of the republic and of the Nazi movement, and he was not a member of the Nazi Party. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Rundstedt, like most senior officers, accepted the new regime as the government of Germany and continued to serve.

He retired in October 1938 at the age of 62, after a disagreement over the direction of military policy, but the outbreak of war less than a year later brought him back to active service, as it did many retired officers of his generation.

The Reichswehr taught Rundstedt to do much with little: a small professional army, short of equipment and forbidden heavy weapons, had to rely on training, staff work and mobility rather than numbers. That habit of mind stayed with him throughout the Second World War, and it helps explain both his skill at improvisation and his frustration when Hitler demanded results that the available forces could not deliver.

4. Rise to Prominence

Poland and France: the partnership with Manstein

Rundstedt’s return to service in 1939 placed him at the centre of German war planning. As commander of Army Group South in the invasion of Poland, he directed the main German thrust from Silesia towards Warsaw and the Vistula, and his forces, including the armoured divisions that broke through Polish lines, played the decisive role in the campaign, which ended in less than five weeks.

His chief of staff was Erich von Manstein, one of the most gifted operational minds in the German Army, and the partnership between the cautious, courtly Rundstedt and the brilliant, abrasive Manstein worked well. In France in 1940, Rundstedt commanded Army Group A, the force that carried out the decisive thrust through the Ardennes.

The plan — the “sickle cut” proposed by Manstein — sent German armour through the supposedly impassable Ardennes forest to the Channel coast, cutting off the Allied armies in Belgium. Rundstedt’s role was to command the whole operation and to manage the tension between the armoured commanders, who wanted to press on, and Hitler, who ordered a halt outside Dunkirk.

The halt before Dunkirk

The halt order before Dunkirk, issued on 24 May 1940, remains one of the most debated decisions of the campaign, and Rundstedt’s part in it is still argued over. Rundstedt himself had ordered a pause for the armoured divisions on 23 May, concerned that the tanks were outrunning their infantry support and exposing their flanks, and Hitler confirmed the halt the following day.

The pause allowed the British Expeditionary Force and a large part of the French Army to be evacuated from Dunkirk, and historians have long debated whether it was a military decision, a political gesture by Hitler, or a combination of both.

What is clear is that the campaign in France was a triumph for Rundstedt’s command, and on 19 July 1940 he was promoted to field marshal, the highest rank in the German Army. He was now, in seniority and reputation, the leading soldier in Germany, and Hitler treated him with a deference he showed to few other generals.

5. Gerd von Rundstedt’s Role in World War II

The invasion of the Soviet Union

In June 1941 Rundstedt took command of Army Group South for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. His army group, the weakest of the three in tanks but the strongest in infantry, advanced through Ukraine towards Kiev, and in September 1941 his forces, with the help of armoured units transferred from the centre, encircled and destroyed several Soviet armies at Kiev, taking more than 600,000 prisoners according to German reports — one of the largest encirclements in military history.

He then pushed on to the Donets Basin and to Rostov-on-Don, which his troops captured in November 1941. It was at Rostov that his fortunes turned. A Soviet counter-offensive retook the city, and Rundstedt, judging that his forces were overextended and at risk of encirclement, ordered a withdrawal to the Mius River. Hitler, who had forbidden retreats, dismissed him on 1 December 1941.

The dismissal was the first sign of the conflict between Rundstedt’s professional judgement and Hitler’s insistence on holding every position, a conflict that would define the rest of his career.

Commander-in-Chief West

Rundstedt’s appointment as Commander-in-Chief West in March 1942 gave him responsibility for the defence of the whole of occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands against an Allied invasion that everyone knew was coming, but no one knew when or where.

It was a command of enormous scope and of inadequate means: his army group was stripped of its best divisions for the Eastern Front, and the forces left to him were a mixture of first-rate divisions, second-rate static divisions, and units rebuilding after service in Russia.

His task was to prepare a defence with forces that were never sufficient for the task, and to do so under a commander-in-chief, Hitler, who interfered in every detail and who kept the armoured reserves under his personal control. The years that followed, from the spring of 1942 to the summer of 1944, were the longest period of Rundstedt’s war, and they were, in many ways, the most frustrating: he could see the invasion coming, he could see that his defences were inadequate, and he could do little about either fact.

Defence in depth versus the beach defence

In March 1942 Rundstedt was appointed Commander-in-Chief West, responsible for the defence of France, Belgium and the Netherlands against an Allied invasion. It was a vast responsibility with inadequate resources: his army group was stripped of divisions for the Eastern Front, and the forces left to him were a mixture of first-rate divisions, second-rate static divisions, and units rebuilding after service in Russia.

Rundstedt favoured a defence in depth, holding his armoured reserves back from the coast so that they could be concentrated against the main landing once it was identified, while his subordinate, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who commanded Army Group B under him from late 1943, argued for defeating the invasion on the beaches.

The disagreement was never resolved, and the compromise that resulted — armour held back, but some of it close to the coast — satisfied neither man. Rundstedt also quarrelled with Hitler over the release of the armoured reserves, which Hitler kept under his personal control and released only slowly on 6 June 1944.

D-Day, dismissal and recall

When the Allies landed in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, Rundstedt’s forces were caught between two doctrines and two chains of command, and the armoured counter-attack that might have threatened the beachhead came too late and in too little strength.

Over the following weeks he warned Hitler that the position in Normandy was untenable and that a withdrawal to the Seine, or a negotiated peace, was the only realistic course. On 1 July 1944 he was dismissed and replaced by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge.

He was recalled on 5 September 1944, after Kluge’s death, and given command of the West again at a moment when the German Army was in full retreat towards the German frontier. His task was to stabilise the front, and he did so: the German line held in the autumn of 1944, at Arnhem and in the Hürtgen Forest, long enough for Hitler to prepare the Ardennes offensive.

The weeks after D-Day also exposed the weakness of a command system in which the armoured reserves could only be released by Hitler himself. By the time the reserves were committed, the Allies had already secured a lodgement too large to be thrown back into the sea, and the campaign in Normandy became a battle of attrition that Germany could not win.

6. Key Decisions

The early war decisions

The halt before Dunkirk (May 1940). Rundstedt ordered his armour to pause on 23 May 1940, worried about exposed flanks and worn-out tanks, and Hitler confirmed the halt the next day. The decision, whatever its military logic, allowed the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force and remains one of the most consequential pauses of the war.

The withdrawal from Rostov (November–December 1941). Against Hitler’s standing order forbidding retreat, Rundstedt ordered his forces back to the Mius River after the Soviet recapture of Rostov. The decision saved his army group from encirclement and cost him his command — the first open clash between his professional judgement and Hitler’s “no retreat” doctrine.

Together, the halt at Dunkirk and the withdrawal from Rostov show the two sides of Rundstedt as a decision-maker. At Dunkirk he was cautious when boldness might have destroyed the British Expeditionary Force; at Rostov he was bold when caution would have destroyed his own army group. In both cases he acted on a professional judgement about ground, supply and the condition of his troops, and in both cases the political consequences were decided by Hitler rather than by him. That pattern — sound military judgement, followed by a political outcome he could not control — recurs throughout his career, and it is the reason historians find him both impressive as a soldier and frustrating as a historical figure.

Defence in the West and the Ardennes

Defence in depth in the West (1942–1944). Rundstedt insisted on holding armoured reserves back from the coast to meet the main Allied landing wherever it came, against Rommel’s demand for a beach defence. The compromise that followed left German armour neither on the beaches nor concentrated in reserve, and the argument remains a central debate in the history of the Normandy campaign.

Accepting the Ardennes offensive (December 1944). Rundstedt regarded Hitler’s plan for a great counter-offensive through the Ardennes as unrealistic given German fuel and airpower, and he preferred a smaller operation to cut off the Allied forces around Aachen. He nevertheless carried out the larger plan, which he later described as an operation he had not designed and did not believe in.

The Ardennes offensive failed within weeks, as Rundstedt had expected: German armour ran out of fuel, Allied airpower returned once the weather cleared, and the offensive consumed the last German reserves in the West. His willingness to carry out a plan he regarded as unsound remains one of the most criticised episodes of his career, and it is often cited as evidence that his obedience to Hitler ultimately overrode his professional judgement.

The decision to remain in service

Remaining in service after 1941. After his first dismissal, Rundstedt accepted recall to high command twice more, in 1942 and 1944, rather than retiring permanently. His defenders say he stayed to save German soldiers’ lives; his critics say that by staying he lent the regime the authority of Germany’s most respected soldier.

Historians who defend Rundstedt point out that he was already in his late sixties when the war began, that he had no political base of his own, and that a resignation in 1942 or 1944 would not have changed the regime’s policies.

They argue that his presence at the head of the Western command at least ensured that orders were carried out by a professional soldier rather than by a party loyalist, and that his repeated warnings to Hitler about the military situation — warnings that cost him his command twice — show that he was not simply a silent instrument of the regime.

Critics answer that this argument proves too much: if a field marshal of Rundstedt’s standing could not influence Hitler, then his continued service achieved nothing except to lend the regime legitimacy, and the honourable course would have been to refuse, even at personal cost.

The debate cannot be settled by the documents alone, because it turns on what a senior officer owes to his country when the government of that country has become criminal.

7. Controversies

Private criticism and public obedience

The central controversy about Rundstedt is the gap between his private criticism of Hitler and his public obedience. In private, according to post-war testimony, he called Hitler a “bohemian corporal” and described the conduct of the war as amateurish; in public he never resigned, never joined a conspiracy, and never refused an order.

He was aware of the plot of 20 July 1944, but he took no part in it, and after the plot failed he sat on the Court of Honour that expelled the conspirators from the army and delivered them to the People’s Court.

His supporters argue that a field marshal who resigned would simply have been replaced by a more compliant officer, and that Rundstedt’s presence moderated Hitler’s worst impulses; his critics reply that this is the classic self-justification of the German officer corps, and that moderation from within did nothing to stop the crimes of the regime.

Responsibility in the East

A second controversy concerns his responsibility in the East. As commander of Army Group South, Rundstedt signed the order of 12 October 1941 instructing his troops to take “severe measures” against partisans and Jews, and his command was responsible for the area in which the murder of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war took place on a vast scale.

Rundstedt later claimed that he had not known the full extent of the killing, and that the orders he signed were routine security measures. Historians are divided: some accept that a front commander could be genuinely ignorant of the detail of the murder, while others argue that a commander who signed orders for “severe measures” and who commanded the area of the Babi Yar massacre cannot credibly claim ignorance.

The question was never tested in court, because the British, who held him as a prisoner, decided not to try him.

Whether Rundstedt read the order in detail or signed it as a matter of routine is not recorded, and that uncertainty is itself part of the historical problem. A commander of an army group signed many orders, and the distance between a signature in a headquarters and a massacre in a ravine was precisely the distance that allowed senior officers to claim, after the war, that they had not known what was happening.

A third controversy is the reputation he acquired after the war. In British custody, Rundstedt was treated with respect, and his testimony was used by the defence at Nuremberg to argue that the German Army had been a professional body separate from the Nazi Party.

The “clean Wehrmacht” idea, which Rundstedt’s image helped to sustain, has since been dismantled by historians who have documented the army’s complicity in war crimes in the East. Rundstedt’s own case illustrates why the idea was persuasive: he was courteous, dignified and plainly not a Nazi fanatic, and it was easy to mistake his personal decency for institutional innocence.

Modern scholarship treats him as a capable commander whose professionalism did not prevent him from serving a regime whose crimes he must at least partly have understood.

The idea survived for so long partly because it was comforting: it allowed West Germany to rebuild its army in the 1950s with officers from the old Wehrmacht, and it allowed the Allies to present the war as a struggle against the Nazi Party rather than against the German armed forces as a whole. Only the opening of the archives, and the work of historians in the 1980s and 1990s, made the fuller picture impossible to ignore.

8. Later Life and Death

Capture, charges and release

After his final dismissal on 11 March 1945, Rundstedt was replaced by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and played no further part in the war. He was captured by American troops at Bad Tölz in Bavaria on 1 May 1945 and transferred to British custody.

The British considered trying him for war crimes, and in 1948 he was charged, but the case was dropped in 1949 on grounds of ill health, and he was released. He was also a witness at the Nuremberg trials, where his testimony supported the defence of the German General Staff.

He spent his last years in Hanover, living quietly with his wife, writing nothing of substance about the war and giving few interviews. He died of a heart attack on 24 February 1953, at the age of 77, and was buried in Hanover. His son, Hans Gerd, who had served as his aide, survived him.

He gave evidence at Nuremberg as a witness rather than as a defendant, and his calm, precise testimony impressed the court. The contrast between his bearing in the witness box and the charges that had been prepared against him illustrates how uncertain the Allies themselves were about the responsibility of the senior generals.

The manner of his release has itself been a subject of debate. Some historians argue that the British dropped the case because the evidence of his personal responsibility for war crimes was genuinely thin; others argue that the decision was political, made at a moment when Britain and the United States were beginning to rearm West Germany and wanted the cooperation of the old officer corps.

Either way, Rundstedt was never convicted of any crime, and he died a free man. His reputation in Germany after the war was that of a soldier who had served his country rather than a party, and it was only in later decades, as historians examined the army’s role in the East, that the more critical judgement gained ground.

No new evidence has emerged to settle the question definitively, and the files of the British investigation remain the main source for both interpretations. What is certain is that the decision not to try him was taken at the highest political level in London, and that it reflected the changing priorities of the early Cold War as much as any judgement about Rundstedt’s personal guilt.

9. Legacy

A commander of the old school

Rundstedt’s legacy is that of the German Army’s old guard at its best and its worst. As a commander he was among the most respected of the war: his campaigns in Poland and France were models of operational planning, his handling of the retreat in the West in the autumn of 1944 showed that he could still stabilise a collapsing front, and even his enemies acknowledged his professional ability.

His style of command — giving his subordinates broad freedom within clear intentions, and refusing to interfere in tactical detail — was admired by German officers and studied by later generations. The Ardennes offensive, the last great German operation in the West, was carried out under his nominal command, though it was Hitler’s plan rather than his own, and its failure marked the end of Germany’s capacity for large-scale attack.

His campaigns are still taught in staff colleges, not because they were flawless but because they show how a commander should think about space, time and the concentration of force. The advance through the Ardennes in 1940, in particular, remains a classic example of an operational plan that succeeded because it attacked where the enemy believed attack was impossible.

His darker legacy is as a symbol of the German officer corps’ failure. Rundstedt knew the regime he served, criticised it in private, and continued to serve it in public until it was destroyed. The fact that a man of his reputation and seniority could not, or would not, break with Hitler is used by historians to explain why the army as an institution never resisted the regime until it was too late. His name is therefore remembered in two ways: as the finest operational commander of the German Army’s old school, and as the cautionary example of what professional loyalty becomes when it is divorced from moral judgement.

That dual memory is unlikely to change. Military colleges still study his campaigns in Poland and France as examples of operational art, while historians of the Third Reich still cite his career as evidence that professional competence, on its own, is no protection against complicity in a criminal regime. Rundstedt himself, who wrote almost nothing about the war, left no defence of his choices for posterity to judge.

10. Assessment by Historians

The military assessment

Historians today generally rate Rundstedt as a very good operational commander and a limited strategist. His strengths were planning, organisation and the management of large formations; his weakness was a reluctance to challenge Hitler directly and a tendency, in his later years, to accept impossible tasks rather than refuse them.

The British official historian of the war in the West described him as the ablest of the German commanders in France, while German historians have noted that his greatest victories — Poland and France — came when he had Manstein as his chief of staff and a clear plan to execute.

In Russia and in the West in 1944–1945, where he had to improvise under Hitler’s interference, his record was mixed: the withdrawal from Rostov was a model of professional judgement, while the Ardennes offensive was a defeat he had predicted.

His record also shows the limits of a command style that depended on gifted subordinates. Without Manstein beside him, Rundstedt’s campaigns were competent rather than brilliant, and his reluctance to argue with Hitler in person meant that his best advice was often given too late, or in writing that Hitler could ignore. That combination of talent and deference explains both his early triumphs and his later failures.

The moral assessment

The moral assessment is harsher now than it was in the 1950s. The generation of historians who wrote in the immediate post-war years, many of them working with German generals’ memoirs, presented Rundstedt as the honourable soldier who had served Germany and not the Nazis.

The scholarship of the last four decades, based on German military archives opened after the war, has shown that the distinction was less clear than Rundstedt’s admirers claimed. He signed orders for severe measures in the East, he sat on the Court of Honour after 20 July 1944, and he accepted the regime’s honours.

The current consensus is therefore a divided one: Rundstedt was a soldier of real ability and personal dignity, and he was also a senior commander who chose, again and again, to serve a criminal regime. Both parts of that judgement are necessary to understand him.

That divided verdict is the one most historians now accept, and it is unlikely to be overturned by new evidence. Rundstedt’s career shows that a soldier can be honourable in his personal conduct and still bear a heavy share of responsibility for the cause he served, and that the two judgements must be held together rather than traded against each other.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Gerd von Rundstedt?
Gerd von Rundstedt (1875–1953) was a German field marshal and the most senior commander of the German Army in the Second World War. He commanded Army Group South in Poland in 1939, Army Group A in France in 1940, Army Group South in Russia in 1941, and German forces in the West in 1942–1945.

What was Rundstedt’s role in the invasion of France?
He commanded Army Group A, which carried out the decisive thrust through the Ardennes to the Channel coast in May 1940. The operation cut off the Allied armies in Belgium and led to the evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France.

Was Rundstedt a member of the Nazi Party?
No. Rundstedt was never a member of the Nazi Party. He was a conservative Prussian officer who regarded himself as a soldier serving Germany, although he served the Nazi regime in high command for the whole of the war.

Why was Rundstedt dismissed in 1944?
He was dismissed on 1 July 1944 after warning Hitler that the German position in Normandy was untenable and that a withdrawal or a negotiated peace was necessary. He was recalled in September 1944 after his successor, Günther von Kluge, died.

Was Rundstedt tried for war crimes?
He was charged in 1948 while in British custody, but the case was dropped in 1949 on grounds of ill health and he was released. He was never convicted of any crime, although his responsibility for orders issued in the East remains a subject of historical debate.

What was Rundstedt’s view of Hitler?
In private he was critical of Hitler, whom he is reported to have called a “bohemian corporal”, and of Hitler’s interference in military operations. In public he remained obedient and never joined any conspiracy against him.

Related articles

• Adolf Galland
• Douglas Bader
• Erich Raeder

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Gerd von Rundstedt” — birth 12 December 1875, death 24 February 1953, commands in Poland, France, Russia and the West, dismissals in 1941, 1944 and 1945.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Gerd von Rundstedt” (britannica.com) — biography, field marshal, Commander-in-Chief West, Ardennes offensive.
3. Charles Messenger, The Last Prussian: A Biography of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, 1875–1953 (Pen and Sword, 2011) — the standard English-language biography.
4. Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., The German Defeat in the East, 1944–45 and Hitler’s Field Marshals (various) — Rundstedt’s commands and his relations with Hitler.
5. B. H. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk (William Morrow, 1948) — interviews with Rundstedt and other German generals in captivity.
6. Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge University Press, 1994) — Poland, France, Barbarossa and the Western Front.