Hitler Promoted 12 Field Marshals in One Day — What Happened to Them?

[00:00:00]On 19 July 1940, Adolf Hitler walked into  the Kroll Opera House in Berlin not to watch a performance, but to stage one. In a single  afternoon he promoted twelve generals to field marshal — the highest rank in the German military.  Within five years, one of them would be hanged by the Allies. Another would be hanged on Hitler’s  own orders. The rest faced trial, dismissal, or did not live to see the war’s end. Not one  of them ended where the ceremony had promised.

[00:00:32]In the summer of 1940, Germany stood at the height of its power. In one campaign  the German army had overrun the Netherlands, Belgium, and France — a country widely held to  have the strongest army on the continent — and had done it in six weeks. Poland had fallen the  autumn before, Denmark and Norway that spring.

[00:00:51]To mark the victory, Hitler wanted a ceremony  unlike any other. On 19 July he summoned his senior commanders to the Kroll Opera House in  Berlin — the building that had housed the German parliament since the fire of 1933 — for a session  of the Reichstag staged as a victory celebration.

[00:01:08]After a long speech, he called the commanders  forward and presented each with an ornately decorated baton. The newsreels carried the  scene across Germany: rows of senior officers, Hitler moving down the line. The rank they  received carried more than prestige. A German field marshal drew a salary of thirty-six  thousand Reichsmarks a year, free of tax, and was never formally retired — once promoted,  he stayed on active duty for the rest of his life.

[00:01:36]The rank itself carried deep prestige. Germany  had abolished it after the defeat of 1918, and only under Hitler’s rearmament had it  returned. Raising twelve commanders to field marshal in a single afternoon rewarded them —  but it also tightened Hitler’s grip on an officer class whose aristocratic traditions and distance  from the Nazi party he had never fully trusted.

[00:01:58]By the end of the ceremony, twelve officers who  had entered the hall as generals had left it as field marshals. Nine were army commanders:  Walther von Brauchitsch, Fedor von Bock, Wilhelm Keitel, Günther von Kluge, Wilhelm Ritter  von Leeb, Wilhelm List, Walther von Reichenau, Gerd von Rundstedt, and Erwin von Witzleben.  Three came from the air force: Albert Kesselring, Erhard Milch, and Hugo Sperrle. One  man stood even higher. Hermann Göring, already a field marshal, was raised that  same day to a rank invented specifically for him — Reichsmarschall, marshal of the  Reich — placing him above every officer in the armed forces and confirming his  position as Hitler’s chosen successor.

[00:02:45]The ceremony was meant to present them as the  finest military elite in Europe. It was not the start of a long age of glory. It was the high  point before the fall. But the men standing on the stage also revealed something about the kind of  officer Hitler was prepared to reward — and about those he was prepared to leave behind.

[00:03:05]The collapse came slowly, one  man at a time, across five years.

[00:03:09]Wilhelm Keitel had been the most senior of them on  paper. As chief of the Armed Forces High Command, he sat at the top of the military structure  and put his signature to a series of orders that stripped legal protection from prisoners and  civilians in the occupied territories. He stayed loyal to Hitler to the end, and on 8 May 1945  it was Keitel who signed Germany’s unconditional surrender. At Nuremberg, the International  Military Tribunal found him guilty on all four counts and rejected his defence that he had only  followed orders. He was hanged on 16 October 1946.

[00:03:44]Erwin von Witzleben arrived there by the  opposite road. He had turned against Hitler, and he was one of the central figures in  the plot of 20 July 1944 — had it succeeded, he was to have become commander-in-chief of the  armed forces. It failed. Witzleben was arrested, stripped of his rank, and expelled from the army  so that he could be brought before the People’s Court, the political tribunal where the judge  Roland Freisler presided over the trials of the conspirators. He was condemned and executed at  Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on 8 August 1944.

[00:04:15]Two of the twelve, hanged within two years of each  other — one by the victors for serving Hitler, the other by Hitler for trying to remove him.

[00:04:24]Two more never lived to face any reckoning. Walther von Reichenau had been one of the most political of Hitler’s commanders,  and one of the most committed. Leading the Sixth Army in the east, he issued an order  to his troops in late 1941 — later known as the Severity Order — that openly tied the army to  the crimes being carried out behind the front.

[00:04:42]He did not outlast the war by long. In January  1942, after running for miles in extreme cold, he collapsed from a stroke. The decision was  made to fly him back to Germany for treatment, and he died during the journey on 17 January 1942. Fedor von Bock lasted longer but ended more violently. He had commanded an army group in  the invasion of the Soviet Union before Hitler removed him in 1942, and he spent the rest of  the war in enforced retirement, sidelined and unwanted. On 3 May 1945, with the war days from  its end, a Royal New Zealand Air Force fighter strafed his car on a road in northern Germany.  His wife and daughter were killed. Bock died of his wounds the next day. He was the only  one of the twelve to be killed by enemy fire.

[00:05:25]One of them was destroyed by neither the enemy nor a court. Günther von Kluge had  known about the 20 July plot in advance and had given the conspirators quiet encouragement without  ever committing himself. When the attempt failed, his own hesitation left him exposed. By August  1944 his armies in France were collapsing in the pocket at Falaise, and Hitler, already suspicious,  relieved him of command on 17 August and ordered him back to Berlin. Kluge never reached the  city. On 19 August 1944, on the road near Metz, he took cyanide. In a final letter to Hitler,  he insisted he had done his duty to the last.

[00:06:04]By then, the fall was no longer coming from  the outside alone. The elite that had stood together on the opera-house stage four  years earlier had begun to consume itself.

[00:06:13]Five of the twelve lived to be tried by the Allies. This was where the promise  of Nuremberg met the reality of the postwar world.

[00:06:21]These were the men who had commanded  occupation armies and passed on criminal orders. Not all of them disappeared into  prison cells. Some did. Others walked out.

[00:06:30]Albert Kesselring had commanded German forces  in Italy. The gravest charge against him was the reprisal killing of more than three hundred  Italian civilians at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in 1944, carried out after a partisan bombing  killed German police — though none of those shot had any part in the attack. In 1947 a British  military court in Venice sentenced him to death.

[00:06:54]The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment,  and in October 1952 he was released on grounds of ill health. He died a free man in 1960. Wilhelm List was the principal defendant in what became known as the Hostages Trial at  Nuremberg, charged over reprisal policies in occupied southeastern Europe. He was sentenced  to life imprisonment in 1948 and released, like Kesselring, in December 1952 for  medical reasons. He lived until 1971.

[00:07:23]Erhard Milch had run aircraft production for the  air force and was convicted at his own Nuremberg trial in 1947 for the use of forced labour. He  too received a life sentence. It was reduced to fifteen years, and he was released in 1954. Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb and Hugo Sperrle were tried together in the High Command Trial, the last  of the Nuremberg proceedings. Leeb was convicted of passing on a criminal order and sentenced to  time already served — he walked out of the court a free man. Sperrle, whom Hitler had dismissed in  1944 after the failure to stop the Allied landings in Normandy, was acquitted of every charge. Five men who had served near the top of Hitler’s war machine. One death sentence,  commuted. Two life sentences, both cut short.

[00:08:06]One sentence of time already served. One  acquittal. Within a decade of those verdicts, all five surviving defendants were free.

[00:08:15]The last two never reached a courtroom at all. Walther von Brauchitsch had been commander-in-chief of the army at the ceremony in  1940 — the most senior soldier in Germany. A year later, after a heart attack and the failure of  the drive on Moscow, Hitler blamed him for the defeat and dismissed him on 19 December 1941.  He was arrested at the end of the war and held in British custody, where the Allies intended to  try him. He died in a Hamburg military hospital on 18 October 1948, before the trial could begin. Gerd von Rundstedt had been dismissed and recalled by Hitler so often that the pattern became a  feature of his career. He had also chaired the Court of Military Honour, the panel that expelled  the 20 July plotters from the army so the People’s Court could try them — among them, in effect,  his fellow marshal Witzleben. Captured in 1945, Rundstedt was charged with war crimes, but  the case against him was dropped on grounds of his age and failing health. He was released in  1949 and died in 1953, never having stood trial.

[00:09:15]The ceremony of July 1940 had been staged to prove that Hitler had built the greatest  military elite in. Within five years that elite was dead, imprisoned, disgraced, or simply gone. One senior general was notably absent from the promotions on 19 July. Johannes Blaskowitz  had been placed in charge of the German army in Poland after the invasion. In the months that  followed, he repeatedly reported the killing and mistreatment of Polish and Jewish civilians by SS  and police units. His memoranda warned that these actions were strengthening resistance, damaging  Germany’s reputation, and undermining discipline within the army itself. Hitler dismissed his  objections as childish, while Brauchitsch declined to support him. Blaskowitz was removed from his  command in May 1940. Two months later, he was the only colonel general not promoted to field marshal  that summer. He would hold major commands again, but he never received the baton. Blaskowitz had  not rejected Hitler’s war, but he had protested the conduct of the SS and police in Poland.  That was enough to leave him without a baton.

[00:10:19]And the reckoning that followed was thinner than  that July ceremony might suggest. Of the twelve men Hitler promoted that afternoon, only one was  hanged by the Allies for what the regime had done.

[00:10:30]The rest were released, acquitted, or beyond the  reach of any court by the time the trials came.

[00:10:35]If you found this video insightful, watch  Hugo Sperrle — The Nazi Field Marshal Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg next. And if  you want more forgotten aftermath stories from the Second World War, subscribe  to History Inside. Thanks for watching.