Background
Gerd von Rundstedt was born in Aschersleben on 12 December 1875.
General Field Marshal Commander- in-Chief
Gerd von Rundstedt was born in Aschersleben on 12 December 1875.
An officer in the Prussian infantry from 1893, von Rundstedt served on the General Staff during World War I in Turkey and France. After the war he was promoted rapidly in the Reichswehr, becoming a Major General in 1927 and Lieutenant-General in March 1929. Three years later he was appointed Berlin Military Area Commander and in October 1938 von Rundstedt became a General of Infantry. After heading an army group in the occupation of the Sudetenland, von Rundstedt was retired in October 1938 but was recalled in the summer of 1939, leading army groups in the Polish and French campaigns and receiving the Knight's Cross in September of the same year. As Commander-in-Chief of Army Group South he had outflanked the central Polish forces, preventing them from retreating across the Vistula. InMay-June 1940 commanding Army Group A in the invasion of France and the Low Countries, von Rundstedt led the armoured thrust through the Ardennes, outflanking the Allied armies. He was ordered by Hitler to halt in the Dunkirk area, thus enabling the British Expeditionary' Force, which was in danger of annihilation, to escape from the beaches and harbour at Dunkirk.
In reward for his services, von Rundstedt was promoted in July 1940 to the rank of General Field Marshal and appointed to command the major part of the forces to invade England, an expedition that never took place. Transferred to the eastern front following the invasion of the Soviet Union, von Rundstedt was appointed Commander of the Southern Army Group (Ukraine) in June 1941 and his armies rapidly overran the Crimea and Donetz basin, advancingas far as Rostov on the Don. Following his tactical retreat from Rostov (in defiance of Hitler's orders), von Rundstedt was relieved of his command in November 1941 and replaced by von Reichenau. He was recalled in 1942 as Commander-in-Chief West, responsible for anti-invasion preparations, serving in this capacity until March 1945, except for two brief intervals when he was recalled. Von Rundstedt’s plan of mobile defence was strategically sound, but ultimately failed to prevent the Allied landings in Normandy.
He was temporarily dismissed on 2 July 1944, but nonetheless presided over the court of honour which expelled from the army those generals implicated in the July 1944 plot against Hitler - having refused to commit himself to the conspiracy, though aware of the plans. Von Rundstedt was recalled once again to his command and succeeded in halting the Allied advance by mid-September 1944, stabilizing the defence line and holding it until December. Increasingly paralysed by Hitler’s irrational commands, von Rundstedt's Ardennes offensive of December 1944 failed to turn the tide and he ended the war as a British prisoner. The aloof, aristocratic von Rundstedt, an outstanding general and exponent of old-fashioned Prussian military values, was to have been tried by a British court for his illegal order of 21 June 1942 to hand over captured British commandos to the Gestapo, but the trial was dropped because of his ill-health. Nor was his possible complicity in the extermination of Jews in July-December 1941, when he commanded the Southern Army Group in Russia, investigated.
He died on 24 February 1953 in Hannover.