Erich von Manstein

1. Lead

Erich von Manstein (24 November 1887 – 9 June 1973) is one of the most controversial figures of the Second World War, and one of the most argued-over generals in military history. As a staff officer he devised the plan — the Sichelschnitt, the “sickle cut” — that destroyed the French army in six weeks in 1940; as an army commander he conquered the Crimea in 1941–1942, taking the fortress of Sevastopol in one of the great sieges of the war; and as commander of Army Group South in 1943 he won the Third Battle of Kharkov, the last great German victory on the Eastern Front, and he held the German line in the Ukraine through the winter of 1943–1944. His admirers, and Manstein himself in his bestselling memoir Lost Victories (1955), present him as the greatest operational commander of the war — a strategist of genius who was betrayed by Hitler’s interference and by the weakness of his fellow generals. His critics present a different man: a general who served a criminal regime, who signed orders that led to the murder of civilians and prisoners, who was convicted of war crimes by a British military court in 1949, and whose memoir did more than any other book to create the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” — the false idea that the German army fought an honourable war and had nothing to do with Nazi crimes.

This article examines both sides of that record, and it does so on the evidence. It does not take Manstein’s own account at face value, and it does not dismiss his military achievements because of his crimes. It looks at what he did as a soldier — the plans, the battles, the decisions — and at what he did, and did not do, as a commander responsible for the treatment of civilians and prisoners in the areas his armies occupied. The reader is invited to judge for themselves, on the basis of the documents: the operational records, the orders he signed, the testimony at his trial, and the work of modern historians who have studied his career from both the military and the moral side.

2. Key Facts

Born	24 November 1887, Berlin, German Empire (born Fritz Erich Georg Eduard von Lewinski)
Died	9 June 1973 (aged 85), Irschenhausen, West Germany
Nationality	German (Prussian)
Role / Office	Chief of Staff, Army Group A (1939–1940); Commander, Eleventh Army, Crimea (1941–1942); Commander, Army Group Don and Army Group South (1942–1944); Field Marshal (from July 1942)
Known for	The Sichelschnitt plan for France (1940); the conquest of Sevastopol (1942); the Third Battle of Kharkov (1943); Lost Victories (1955); war crimes conviction (1949)
Spouse / Family	Jutta Sibylle von Loesch (married 1920); son Gero von Manstein, killed in action in 1942
Military rank	Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal)

3. Early Life and Education

A Prussian Officer Family

Erich von Manstein was born Fritz Erich Georg Eduard von Lewinski on 24 November 1887 in Berlin, into a Prussian officer family of the old school. His father, Eduard von Lewinski, was a Prussian general of artillery; his mother, Helene von Sperling, was the daughter of a Prussian general; and his uncles included Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg — the subject of another article in this series — who was married to his mother’s sister. Manstein was adopted, as a child, by a childless uncle, General Georg von Manstein, and he took the Manstein name. He was educated at the cadet schools at Plön and Groß-Lichterfelde, the training grounds of the Prussian officer class, and in 1906 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Foot Guards, the same regiment in which Hindenburg had served. He was, from the beginning, a staff officer rather than a regimental soldier: he was intelligent, he was ambitious, and he was, in the words of one of his superiors, “the ablest brain in the German army”.

The First World War

In the First World War Manstein served on the Western Front, where he was wounded in 1914, and then on the Eastern Front, where he served as a staff officer in the operations against Russia, and later as a staff officer on the Western Front again. He ended the war as a captain, with the Iron Cross First and Second Class, and with a reputation as a brilliant staff officer. In the interwar years he remained in the Reichswehr, the small army permitted by the Treaty of Versailles, and he rose steadily: he served in the operations section of the General Staff, he commanded a battalion, and in 1938 he was appointed Chief of Staff of Army Group South for the invasion of Czechoslovakia — an invasion that was cancelled by the Munich Agreement. He was not a Nazi: he was a conservative Prussian officer who distrusted the Party, and who, in 1938, was one of the officers who protested against the dismissal of the Commander-in-Chief, Werner von Fritsch, on false charges of homosexuality. But he was, like most of his fellow officers, willing to serve the regime, and he was, above all, a soldier who believed that his duty was to obey the government of the day, whatever its character. That belief would shape his whole career, and it would be, at his trial, both his defence and his condemnation.

4. The Plan for France, 1940

The Sichelschnitt

Manstein’s first great achievement came in 1939–1940, when he was Chief of Staff of Army Group A, under General Gerd von Rundstedt, in the planning for the invasion of France. The original German plan, drawn up by the General Staff, was a repetition of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914: a strong right wing advancing through Belgium, with a weaker left wing holding the line on the Rhine. Manstein argued that the plan would fail, because the Allies expected it and had concentrated their best armies in Belgium, and he proposed a different plan: a strong armoured thrust through the Ardennes — the wooded hills that the French believed to be impassable to tanks — cutting across northern France to the Channel coast, and trapping the Allied armies in Belgium. The plan, which became known as the Sichelschnitt — the “sickle cut” — was, at first, rejected by the General Staff, which regarded Manstein as a troublemaker and transferred him to command a corps in the east, in order to get rid of him. But Manstein’s plan reached Hitler, through a dinner with the Führer in February 1940, and Hitler, who had a weakness for bold ideas, adopted it.

The Victory in France

The plan worked exactly as Manstein had predicted. On 10 May 1940 the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries, and while the Allies advanced into Belgium to meet the expected attack, seven panzer divisions drove through the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse at Sedan on 13 May, and raced to the Channel coast, reaching Abbeville on 20 May. The Allied armies in Belgium were cut off, and they were evacuated at Dunkirk in late May and early June, leaving their equipment behind. France surrendered on 22 June 1940, six weeks after the invasion began. Manstein’s contribution to the victory was real, but it should not be exaggerated: the plan was his, but its execution was the work of the panzer commanders — Erwin Rommel, Heinz Guderian and others — and of the German army as a whole, and Hitler’s adoption of the plan was as much a matter of luck as of judgement. Manstein himself, who had been given command of an infantry corps, fought in the campaign, and he was, in the words of one historian, “the man who had the idea, but not the man who won the battle”. His reward was promotion to general and command of a corps for the invasion of Russia.

5. The Crimea and Sevastopol, 1941–1942

The Conquest of the Crimea

In September 1941 Manstein was given command of the Eleventh Army in the Crimea, in the south of the Soviet Union, and he was ordered to take the peninsula and the great naval fortress of Sevastopol, the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. The campaign that followed was one of the hardest of the war: the Eleventh Army, with some 200,000 men, fought its way across the Crimea in the autumn of 1941, and it besieged Sevastopol through the winter and the spring of 1942, against a Soviet garrison that fought with great determination. Manstein’s army was supported by the heaviest artillery ever assembled — including the giant 800 mm railway gun “Dora”, the largest gun ever used in war — and by the Luftwaffe, which bombed the fortress day and night. The siege ended on 4 July 1942, when the last Soviet defenders surrendered, and Manstein was promoted to field marshal for the victory. The cost was high: the Germans lost about 25,000 men killed and wounded, and the Soviets lost, by Soviet estimates, about 90,000 men killed and wounded and more than 90,000 taken prisoner — figures that, like all wartime figures, should be treated with caution, but that show the scale of the battle.

The Crimes in the Crimea

The conquest of the Crimea was also the campaign in which Manstein’s responsibility for war crimes is clearest. While the Eleventh Army was besieging Sevastopol, the Einsatzgruppe D — the SS mobile killing unit operating in the south of the Soviet Union — was murdering the Jews of the Crimea and of the Ukraine, and it did so with the knowledge, and with the logistical support, of the army. Manstein signed an order, on 20 November 1941, that called on his troops to show “understanding for the harsh measures” against the Jews, and that described the Jews as the “middlemen” between the enemy and the population — language that, in the context of the time, was an invitation to murder. He also signed orders for the execution of Soviet prisoners and for the use of forced labour, and his army handed over Soviet prisoners to the SS, knowing that they would be killed. At his trial in 1949, Manstein denied that he had known about the murders, and he claimed that his order had been a routine document, but the court found that he must have known: the Einsatzgruppe was operating in his area, it was reporting to his headquarters, and its victims numbered in the tens of thousands. The court convicted him of war crimes, and the judgement remains, for historians, the central fact of his career.

The Order of 20 November 1941

The order of 20 November 1941 is the single most important document in the case against Manstein, and it deserves to be quoted accurately. In it, Manstein told his troops that the war in the east was not a normal war but a struggle against “Jewish Bolshevism”, and that the soldier must show “understanding for the harsh measures” that were being taken against the Jews. The order was, in form, a call for discipline and for cooperation with the SS, but in substance it was, as the historian Jürgen Förster has shown, a deliberate endorsement of the murder of the Jews. Manstein’s defenders have argued that the order was drafted by his staff and that he signed it without reading it, and that he was, in any case, a soldier, not a politician, and that he was not responsible for the SS. The court, and most historians, have rejected that defence: Manstein was the commander of the army, he was responsible for what happened in his area, and he signed the order. The order does not prove that Manstein ordered the murder of the Jews, but it proves that he knew about it, that he approved of it, and that he told his troops to cooperate with it. That, for the court, was enough.

6. Stalingrad, Kharkov and Kursk, 1942–1943

The Relief of Stalingrad and the Third Battle of Kharkov

In November 1942 Manstein was given command of Army Group Don, and he was ordered to relieve the German Sixth Army, which had been encircled at Stalingrad by the Soviet counter-offensive, Operation Uranus. His relief attempt, Operation Winter Storm, launched in December 1942, advanced to within about 50 kilometres of Stalingrad, but it was stopped by the Soviet armies, and Hitler refused to allow the Sixth Army to break out. The Sixth Army surrendered in February 1943, with the loss of some 300,000 men killed and captured — one of the great disasters of the war, and one for which Manstein, in his memoir, blamed Hitler. Manstein’s own role is more complex: he had argued for a breakout, but he had also obeyed Hitler’s order to hold Stalingrad, and he had not, as some historians have noted, made the relief attempt with the full force available to him. The failure at Stalingrad was followed, in February and March 1943, by Manstein’s greatest victory: the Third Battle of Kharkov, in which his Army Group South, with a brilliantly executed counter-offensive, recaptured Kharkov and Belgorod from the Soviets and inflicted heavy losses on them. It was the last great German victory on the Eastern Front, and it showed Manstein at his best: a commander who could read a battle, who could concentrate his forces at the decisive point, and who could turn a retreat into a victory.

Kursk and the Retreat from the Ukraine

In July 1943 Manstein commanded the southern wing of the German offensive at Kursk — Operation Citadel — the great tank battle that was intended to destroy the Soviet armies in the Kursk salient and to restore the German initiative in the east. The offensive failed: the Soviets had prepared deep defences, and the German attack, after a week of fighting, was called off by Hitler, who needed the troops in Italy. Manstein argued that the offensive should have been continued, and that it was on the verge of success — a claim that modern historians have, for the most part, rejected: the Soviet defences were too deep, and the German losses were too heavy, for the offensive to have succeeded. After Kursk, Manstein commanded the German retreat from the Ukraine, fighting a series of defensive battles in the autumn and winter of 1943–1944, in which he repeatedly asked Hitler for permission to withdraw to better defensive positions, and was repeatedly refused. In March 1944 Hitler dismissed him, telling him that the time for operations was over and that the time for holding fast had come. Manstein, who was fifty-six, never held a command again. He was, in the words of one historian, “the best general Germany had, dismissed by a leader who no longer wanted generals”.

7. Trial and Conviction, 1949

The Hamburg Trial / Phiên tòa Hamburg

After the war Manstein was arrested by the British, and in 1949 he was tried by a British military court at Hamburg on seventeen charges of war crimes, including the murder of Soviet prisoners, the murder of Jews in the Crimea, the deportation of civilians for forced labour, and the execution of captured Soviet commissars under the Commissar Order. The trial lasted from August to December 1949, and it was, at the time, one of the most closely watched trials of the post-war period: Manstein was defended by the British lawyer Reginald Paget, who argued that Manstein was a soldier, not a politician, and that he was not responsible for the crimes of the SS. The court found Manstein guilty on nine of the seventeen charges, including the murder of Soviet prisoners and the deportation of civilians, and it sentenced him to eighteen years’ imprisonment. The sentence was, by the standards of the time, severe, but it was also, as the court noted, a recognition that Manstein was not a mass murderer on the scale of the SS, but a general who had known about crimes and had failed to prevent them, and who had, in some cases, ordered them.

Release and the Campaign for Rehabilitation

Manstein served only four years of his sentence: he was released in May 1953, on medical grounds, after a campaign by British and German supporters who argued that his conviction was unjust and that he was a victim of “victor’s justice”. The campaign was led, in Britain, by senior officers — including Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, who had fought against Manstein in North Africa — and by the military historian Basil Liddell Hart, who regarded Manstein as the greatest general of the war. The release was controversial at the time, and it remains controversial today: his supporters argue that the trial was unfair, that the evidence was weak, and that Manstein was punished for crimes he did not commit; his critics argue that the sentence was lenient, that the evidence was strong, and that Manstein was lucky to serve only four years. The debate over the trial is, in the end, a debate over the responsibility of a general for the crimes committed by the army he commanded — a question that has no simple answer, but that the court, in 1949, answered with a conviction.

8. Lost Victories and the “Clean Wehrmacht” Myth

The Memoir

In 1955 Manstein published his memoir, Verlorene Siege — Lost Victories — in which he presented himself as a brilliant strategist who had been betrayed by Hitler, and in which he argued that Germany could have won the war in the east if Hitler had listened to his generals. The book was a bestseller in Germany and in the West, and it shaped the image of the German army for a generation: the image of a professional, honourable army, led by brilliant generals, that had been defeated by Hitler’s interference and by the overwhelming numbers of the Allies. The book was, as a work of military history, influential and, in many places, accurate: Manstein’s account of the operations — the plan for France, the siege of Sevastopol, the battle of Kharkov — is, for the most part, correct, and it remains a valuable source for the history of the Eastern Front. But the book was also, as modern historians have shown, a work of self-justification: it omitted the crimes, it blamed Hitler for every failure, and it presented Manstein as a man who had nothing to do with the murder of civilians and prisoners.

The Myth and Its Consequences

The “clean Wehrmacht” myth, which Manstein’s memoir did so much to create, had profound consequences. It allowed the German army, and the German public, to avoid confronting the army’s part in the crimes of the Nazi regime, and it allowed former generals — including Manstein himself — to be rehabilitated as military experts, advising the new West German army, the Bundeswehr, and the NATO alliance. It was not until the 1990s, with the exhibition “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” and with the work of historians such as Omer Bartov, Jürgen Förster and Wolfram Wette, that the myth was challenged, and that the evidence — the orders, the reports, the photographs — showed that the German army had been deeply involved in the murder of Jews, in the starvation of Soviet prisoners, and in the destruction of Soviet villages. Manstein’s memoir, and the myth it created, delayed that reckoning by a generation, and it is, for many historians, Manstein’s most damaging legacy: not the battles he fought, but the history he wrote.

9. Later Life and Death

Adviser to the Bundeswehr

After his release in 1953 Manstein lived in West Germany, at Irschenhausen in Bavaria, where he wrote his memoir and where he acted, informally, as an adviser to the new West German army, the Bundeswehr, and to the West German government on military questions. He was, in the 1950s, a respected figure in the West: he was consulted by the British and American military, he was interviewed by historians, and he was, in the words of one of them, “the oracle of the Eastern Front”. His son Gero had been killed in action in 1942, on the Eastern Front, and Manstein, who had lost his son in the war he had helped to plan, rarely spoke of him. He lived quietly, he wrote, and he defended his record — in his memoir, in interviews, and in his correspondence with historians — until his death. He never, in public, expressed remorse for the crimes of which he had been convicted, and he never acknowledged that the army he had served had been involved in murder. He maintained, to the end, that he had been a soldier, that he had done his duty, and that his conscience was clear.

Death in 1973

Manstein died on 9 June 1973, at the age of eighty-five, at Irschenhausen, and he was buried with military honours in the cemetery at Dorfmark, in Lower Saxony. His death was noted in the German and the British press, and it was, for the most part, respectful: he was remembered as a great general, and as the author of Lost Victories, and the question of his war crimes was, in many of the obituaries, mentioned only in passing. In the decades since, the judgement has become more critical: the opening of the archives, the work of historians, and the exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht have shown that Manstein’s record was more complex, and more compromised, than his memoir suggested. He remains, in the words of the historian Robert Citino, “the most gifted operational commander of the war, and the most compromised” — a judgement that captures both sides of his career, and that is, perhaps, the fairest that can be given.

10. Legacy and Assessment by Historians

The Military Assessment

On the military side, Manstein’s reputation remains high. Historians of the Eastern Front — including Robert Citino, David Glantz and Karl-Heinz Frieser — regard him as the most gifted German operational commander of the war: a general who could see the battlefield as a whole, who could concentrate his forces at the decisive point, and who could turn a retreat into a counter-offensive. The Sichelschnitt, the conquest of Sevastopol, and the Third Battle of Kharkov are studied in military academies to this day, and they are, by common consent, among the great operations of the war. His critics, on the military side, point to his failures: the relief of Stalingrad, which he did not press with full force; Kursk, where he argued for an offensive that could not succeed; and his willingness, throughout the war, to obey Hitler’s orders to hold ground that could not be held, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of German lives. The most balanced military assessments conclude that Manstein was a brilliant operational commander and a poor strategist — a man who could win battles but who could not see that the war itself was lost, and who served a regime that made his victories meaningless.

The Moral Assessment

On the moral side, the judgement is clear, and it is severe. Manstein was convicted of war crimes, and the evidence — the order of 20 November 1941, the reports of the Einsatzgruppe, the testimony at his trial — shows that he knew about the murder of Jews and of Soviet prisoners, that he approved of it, and that he failed to prevent it. His defenders argue that he was a soldier, that he was not responsible for the SS, and that his conviction was a matter of “victor’s justice”; his critics reply that a general is responsible for what happens in the area he commands, and that Manstein’s failure to act was itself a crime. The consensus of modern historians is that Manstein was not a Nazi ideologue, and that he did not order the murder of the Jews, but that he was complicit in it — that he knew, that he cooperated, and that he did nothing to stop it. His memoir, which omitted the crimes and which created the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht”, compounded the offence: it misled a generation about the nature of the war, and it delayed the reckoning that Germany, and the German army, owed to its victims. Manstein’s legacy, in the end, is twofold: the general who won some of the great battles of the war, and the man who helped to hide what the war really was.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Erich von Manstein?
Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) was a German field marshal, the planner of the Sichelschnitt for France in 1940, the conqueror of Sevastopol in 1942, and the commander of Army Group South in 1943. He was convicted of war crimes by a British court in 1949.

What was the Sichelschnitt?
The Sichelschnitt (“sickle cut”) was Manstein’s plan for the invasion of France in 1940: a strong armoured thrust through the Ardennes to the Channel coast, trapping the Allied armies in Belgium. It led to the fall of France in six weeks.

What was Manstein convicted of?
In 1949 a British military court at Hamburg found him guilty on nine of seventeen charges of war crimes, including the murder of Soviet prisoners and the deportation of civilians for forced labour. He was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment and released in 1953 after serving four years.

What is Lost Victories?
Lost Victories (Verlorene Siege, 1955) is Manstein’s memoir, in which he presented himself as a brilliant strategist betrayed by Hitler. The book was a bestseller and did much to create the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht”.

Did Manstein know about the murder of Jews in the Crimea?
The evidence — above all his order of 20 November 1941, which called on his troops to show “understanding for the harsh measures” against the Jews — shows that he knew about the killings by Einsatzgruppe D and that he approved of cooperation with them. He denied this at his trial, but the court rejected his defence.

When was Manstein dismissed?
Hitler dismissed Manstein in March 1944, after the German retreat from the Ukraine. Manstein never held a command again.

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Erich von Manstein” — life, the Sichelschnitt, Crimea, Kharkov, trial and Lost Victories.
2. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (Verlorene Siege, 1955; English edition, 1958) — Manstein’s own account; to be used with care, as it omits his war crimes.
3. Robert Citino, The German Way of War (University Press of Kansas, 2005) — Manstein’s operational art and its limits.
4. Jürgen Förster, “The German Army and the Holocaust” and “Operation Barbarossa as a War of Conquest” — Manstein’s order of 20 November 1941 and the army’s complicity.
5. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army (Oxford University Press, 1991) — the Wehrmacht’s involvement in crimes on the Eastern Front.
6. Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2008) — Manstein’s memoir and the “clean Wehrmacht” myth.
7. Reginald Paget, Manstein: His Campaigns and His Trial (Collins, 1951) — the defence case at the Hamburg trial of 1949.