One of the most unsettling ironies of the Second World War is that many of Adolf Hitler’s most senior commanders were not members of the Nazi Party. A substantial number of them privately despised the National Socialist movement, viewing its leaders as violent, uncultured thugs. Yet that aristocratic contempt did not stop them from carrying out Hitler’s expansionist wars, nor did it prevent them from overseeing some of the darkest atrocities in human history. Few figures illustrate this contradiction more clearly than Gerd von Rundstedt.
Born Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt on December 12, 1875, in Prussian Saxony, he came from a family whose nobility stretched back to the twelfth century. They were not exceptionally wealthy, but their true currency was military prestige. His ancestors had bled for Prussia in conflicts ranging from the Thirty Years’ War to the Franco-Prussian War. As the eldest of four sons, Gerd was raised on the classic Prussian principles: absolute discipline, strict obedience, modesty, and unyielding honor.
His military path was set early. At just twelve years old, in 1888, he entered a junior military academy near Koblenz. Showing a keen tactical mind, he earned a place at the Kriegsakademie in 1903, the primary training ground for the German General Staff. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he served as chief of operations for the 22nd Reserve Division of the First Army.
His wartime duties were largely administrative, but his impeccable service earned him the Iron Cross First Class. Germany’s crushing defeat in 1918 wounded Rundstedt’s pride, but his distinguished reputation allowed him to keep his position in the severely reduced postwar army, the Reichswehr. During the chaotic political turmoil of the Weimar Republic, Rundstedt adhered strictly to an old Prussian principle: a soldier must never interfere in politics. He was likely a conservative monarchist at heart, but he never joined the extremist factions attempting to overthrow the liberal government.
For Rundstedt, a soldier’s loyalty belonged absolutely to the state, regardless of who held power. By 1932, this steadfast devotion had earned him promotion to full general, commanding Germany’s eastern military districts. But the political landscape shifted violently in 1933. The Nazi rise to power forced senior officers into a difficult balancing act between sworn military duty and personal conscience.
Rundstedt harbored deep reservations about Hitler. While he fully supported the Nazis’ aggressive military rearmament, the aristocratic general regarded the party leadership as a collection of vulgar mobsters. Echoing President von Hindenburg, Rundstedt repeatedly and scornfully referred to Hitler as the “Bohemian corporal,” an insult aimed at his Austrian birth and lack of traditional military background. Despite this contempt, Rundstedt maintained a facade of political neutrality.
During the Blomberg-Fritsch affair of 1938, when the Nazi elite successfully blackmailed two senior generals to bring the army under political control, Rundstedt intervened to defend his colleagues. Yet he acted merely as a mediator, desperate to protect the army’s traditional honor rather than directly challenge the regime. Interestingly, Hitler held genuine respect for the old general, even though the feeling was not mutual. Rundstedt had another opportunity to intervene during the Sudeten crisis, when a group of senior officers led by Ludwig Beck conspired to overthrow Hitler.
They approached Rundstedt to join the plot. He flatly refused. However, true to his principles, he also did not report them to the Gestapo. After the occupation of the Sudetenland, Rundstedt quietly retired with the rank of colonel general.
His retirement did not last long. By May 1939, the drums of war were beating, and he was called back to command Army Group South for the invasion of Poland. Launching an attack from Silesia and Slovakia, his forces quickly captured Krakow. During that brutal campaign, the first major atrocities occurred under his oversight.
Prisoners of war were executed, and civilians, particularly Jews, were murdered with cruelty. While there is no concrete evidence that Rundstedt explicitly ordered these war crimes, he did officially complain about them to the army chief of staff. Legally and morally, however, these troops operated under his direct command. Moving to the Western Front in late 1939, he took command of Army Group A.
Rundstedt supported Erich von Manstein’s bold strategy of pushing armored divisions through the Ardennes forest, the very plan that would eventually break France. Although the campaign was spectacularly successful, Rundstedt was privately furious with rebellious, fast-moving tank commanders like Heinz Guderian, who repeatedly ignored his conservative orders to halt. Regardless of these disagreements, after the fall of France, Hitler rewarded Rundstedt with promotion to field marshal. His ultimate moral test came during Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
Tasked with invading Ukraine as head of Army Group South, Rundstedt attended a notorious meeting in Berlin. There, Hitler explicitly ordered his generals to abandon all conventional rules of warfare and execute captured Soviet political officers on the spot. This directive became the infamous Commissar Order. After the war, Rundstedt claimed that the generals collectively opposed and ignored this order.
History proves otherwise. Although Hitler dismissed him in December 1941 for refusing to launch a suicidal attack at Rostov, a horrific trail of blood had already been left in his wake. In September, just days after his forces seized Kyiv, SS extermination squads, with active assistance from army units commanded by Walter von Reichenau, one of Rundstedt’s direct subordinates, massacred more than 33,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine. Shortly afterward, Reichenau issued his horrifying Severity Order, demanding cruel and merciless vengeance against what he called the “subhuman” Jewish types.
Rundstedt did not merely know about this violently antisemitic directive; he officially endorsed it. He sent the order to his other commanders with a signed covering letter stating, “I fully agree with its contents. ”
Despite this documented and damning record, Gerd von Rundstedt miraculously escaped prosecution for war crimes at Nuremberg. He spent the remainder of the conflict serving as commander-in-chief in Western Europe, maintaining his illusion as an honorable, apolitical soldier.
But can a man truly claim political neutrality while knowingly leading the vanguard of an ideological war of extermination? At his core, Rundstedt was an old-fashioned aristocrat operating according to an outdated nineteenth-century moral compass. It was a compass that failed catastrophically when confronted with the horrific industrial slaughter of the modern age.
History remains the final judge of whether his blind obedience was a tragic flaw or a convenient excuse for unforgivable complicity.