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Born October 8, 1884 in Karlsruhe, Germany died January 17,
1942, in flight near
Poltava, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.)
Reichenau was born in Karlsruhe to a Prussian general and
joined the German Army in 1903. During World War I he served on
the Western Front. He was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and
by 1918 had been promoted to the rank of captain.
Reichenau stayed in the army under the Weimar Republic as a
General Staff officer. From 1931 he was Chief of Staff to the
Inspector of Signals at the Reichswehr Ministry, and later
served with General Werner von Blomberg in East Prussia. His
uncle, an ardent Nazi, introduced him to Adolf Hitler in 1932
and von Reichenau became a convert, joining the Nazi Party soon
after[citation needed]. Doing so was a violation of army
regulations, which forbade army members from joining political
parties.
Reichenau's family was quite wealthy, descended from a long line
of German nobility. Throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries the von Reichenau family owned and operated
one of the largest furniture factories in Germany. In 1938,
records indicate, the family donated the factory to the Nazi
cause, transforming it into a munitions plant. During Allied
attacks in 1945, the factory (located just outside Karlsruhe,
Germany) was destroyed in an air raid, the last remaining
vestiges of the von Reichenau family's wealth and prominence
obliterated in the process.
He was married to Alix, daughter of Silesian Count Andreas von
Maltzan. During the war, Alix's sister Maria (Marushka) hid her
Jewish lover Hans Hirschel (from the Gestapo) in her Berlin
apartment; von Reichenau knew this, and visited them there.
Maria also worked to hide underground Jews and political
dissidents, sustain them, or help them escape from Germany.
When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Blomberg became
Minister of War and von Reichenau was appointed head of the
Ministerial Office, acting as liaison officer between the Army
and the Nazi Party. He played a leading role in persuading Nazi
leaders such as Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler that the
power of Ernst Röhm and the SA must be broken if the Army was to
support the Nazi regime. This led directly to the "Night of the
Long Knives" of 30 June 1934.
In 1935 von Reichenau was promoted to major-general (generalleutnant)
and was appointed Commander in Munich. By 1938, after the
Blomberg-Fritsch Affair in which General Werner von Fritsch was
forced out of the Army command, von Reichenau was Hitler's first
choice to succeed him, but older leaders such as Gerd von
Rundstedt and Ludwig Beck refused to serve under him, and Hitler
backed down. Von Reichenau's enthusiastic Nazism repelled many
of the generals who would not oppose Hitler but who did not care
for the Nazi ideology.
Poland and France
In September 1939, von Reichenau commanded the 10th Army during
the invasion of Poland. In 1940 he led the 6th Army during the
invasion of Belgium and France, and in July Hitler promoted him
to field marshal.
Barbarossa
During the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, von Reichenau
again commanded the 6th Army, which captured Kiev and Kharkov.
During the offensive, Reichenau inspected every single Russian
tank he came across. He would enter each tank and, using a ruler,
he would examine the thickness of the armor. Upon examining a
T-34 tank, he told his officers, "If the Russians ever produce
this tank on an assembly line, we will have lost the war."[citation
needed]
Politically, von Reichenau was an anti-Semite who equated Jewry
with Bolshevism and the perceived Asian threat to Europe. The
infamous October 1941 "Reichenau Order" paved the way for mass
murder by instructing the officers thus:
"In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a man fighting
in accordance with the rules of the art of war...For this reason
the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the
severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the
subhuman species of Jewry...".
All Jews were henceforth to be treated as de facto partisans,
and commanders were directed that they be either summarily shot
or handed over to the Einsatzgruppen execution squads of the
SS-Totenkopfverbände as the situation dictated.[2] Upon hearing
of the Severity Order, Reichenau's superior Field Marshal Gerd
von Rundstedt expressed "complete agreement" with it, and sent
out a circular to all of the Army generals under his command
urging them to send out their own versions of the Severity
Order, which would impress upon the troops the need to
exterminate Jews. Some historians such as Walter Görlitz have
sought to defend von Reichenau, summarizing the above order as "demanding
that the troops keep their distance from the Russian civilian
population."[citation needed]
Reichenau supported the work of the SS Einsatzgruppen in
exterminating the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories.[citation
needed] On 19 December 1941 Hitler sacked Walther von
Brauchitsch as Commander-in-Chief and tried to appoint von
Reichenau to the post. But again the senior Army leaders
rejected von Reichenau as being "too political" and Hitler
appointed himself instead.
Death
In January 1942 von Reichenau suffered a cerebral hemorrhage,
and it was decided to fly him from Poltava to a hospital in
Leipzig, Germany. He is often said to have been killed in a
plane crash in Russia, though Görlitz writes that the plane
merely made an emergency landing in a field, and that von
Reichenau actually died of a heart attack. His death coincided
in time with a propaganda action conducted by the Polish
underground (Operation Reichenau), whose goal was to discredit
Reichenau, in the eyes of the German leadership, as a person who
allegedly had been plotting to overthrow the Nazi régime, to sow
distrust between the Nazi political leadership and its military
command, and punish one of the German generals responsible for
war crimes in Poland. This coincidence became a fertile ground
for conspiracy theories, which allege that Reichenau might
actually have been killed by the Nazi secret services.
Promotions
Leutnant - 18 August 1904
Oberleutnant - 18 August 1912
Hauptmann - 28 November 1914
Major - 1 July 1923
Oberstleutnant - 1 April 1929
Oberst - 1 February 1932
Generalmajor - 1 February 1934
Generalleutnant - 1 October 1935
General der Artillerie - 1 October 1936
Generaloberst - 1 October 1939
Generalfeldmarschall - 19 July 1940
Awards
Prussian Crown Order (4th Class)
Iron Cross (1914) 1st and 2nd Class
Knight's Cross of the House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords
Knight's Cross of the Friedrich Order
Hamburg Hanseatic Cross
Military Merit Cross (Austria-Hungary) 3rd Class with War
Decoration
Spange to the Iron Cross
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 30. September 1939
Mentioned in the Wehrmachtbericht on 21. September 1941
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_von_Reichenau
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