Background
Walter von Reichenau was born in Karlsruhe on 8 October 1884.
Walter von Reichenau was born in Karlsruhe on 8 October 1884.
A professional soldier, he entered the Imperial army in 1903, becoming an officer in the Prussian field artillery and serving on the General Staff during World War I. Subsequently attached to the Reichswehr, he was promoted to Major General and head of the Army Supply Office. Already head of the Wehrmacht Chancellery under the Weimar Republic, von Reichenau became Chief of Staff and personal adviser to General von Blomberg, the War Minister, in 1933.
A crucial figure in the army's policy-making circle after 1933, von Reichenau had demonstrated his unconditional support for Hitler when, in August of that year together with von Blomberg, he compelled his fellow officers to take the oath of unconditional obedience to the ‘Führer of the German Reich' and ‘Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht’. Determined to eliminate the revolutionary pretensions of the SA as a rival to the Wehrmacht, he negotiated an agreement with Himmler and the SS in February’ 1933 and again in May 1934 which made the Rohm massacres of June 1934 possible. Von Reichenau and von Blomberg were behind the deliberate political decision to keep the army in barracks and not to intervene in the wave of terror and intimidation which finally destroyed the few remaining remnants of democracy in the Third Reich. The army, von Reichenau declared, would not give succour to those persecuted by the régime or to its political opponents. Promoted to General on 10 January 1935 and chosen to replace General Wilhelm Adam as Commander of the Seventh Army Corps, Munich, it is not surprising that he approved the training of the SS as a military formation. Previously regarded as a desk general without field experience, von Reichenau's political loyalty was rewarded by his appointment in 1938 as Commander of Army Group IV, Leipzig, and at the outbreak of war he was made Commander-in-Chief of the Tenth Army.
Although privately pessimistic about the prospects of victory over the western powers with whom he desired peace, von Reichenau publicly supported Hitler’s war plans and was made a Field Marshal after the end of the French campaign in July 1940. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, von Reichenau commanded the Sixth Army and on 30 November 1941 succeeded von Rundstedt as Commander of Army Group South. After the stupendous SS massacre of Jews in Kiev in September 1941, von Reichenau had been responsible for issuing a notorious order of the day to his troops on 10 October 1941 emphasizing ‘the necessity of a severe but just revenge on sub-human Jewry’. The German soldier in the East, according to Field Marshal von Reichenau, was the carrier of an inexorable racial idea’ which transcended all hitherto accepted codes of military honour. Not surprisingly, he was warmly praised by the murderous Einsatzgruppen responsible for the massacres of Jews in occu¬pied Soviet territory, for having secured the co-operation of the Wehrmacht in easing their task. Von Reichenau did not live to see the full fruits of his orders, dying of a stroke on 17 January 1942.
Cold, purposeful and Machiavellian in outlook, von Reichenau regarded the National Socialists as an indispensable battering-ram against Marxism and planned to harness their revolutionary drive for his own career ends and the interests of the army. A calculating cynic and opportunist, uninterested in moral considerations, von Reichenau was the prototype of the modern, technically trained officer who had thrown off the feudal blinkers of his caste and saw in National Socialism a mass movement which, if tamed at the right moment, would strengthen the hand of the Reichswehr.