Background
Walter von Brauchitsch was born on 4 October 1881 in Berlin.
Walter von Brauchitsch was born on 4 October 1881 in Berlin.
An officer in the Imperial army from 1900, he served on the western front as Captain of Artillery during World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross (First Class). After various staff appointments in the Reichswehr between 1919 and 1928, von Brauchitsch was promoted to Lieutenant-General and Artillery Inspector in 1931 and two years later he was made Commander of the First Division at Königsberg. In 1935 he became Commanding General of the First Army Corps, a year later General of Infantry and in 1937 Commander of the Fourth Army Group, Leipzig. Promoted to General on 4 February 1938, von Brauchitsch was at the same time appointed by Hitler to succeed Werner von Fritsch as Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, a position he held until December 1941.
It was partly due his second wife's influence that the pliable von Brauchitsch proved so weak and compliant towards Hitler and left top army opponents of the régime like General Ludwig Beck in the lurch.
On 17 July 1940 he was made General Field Marshal. On the other hand these successes, which continued during the campaigns in Yugoslavia, Greece and the early stages of the Russian invasion, made von Brauchitsch even more compliant and incapable of standing up to Hitler. After the first setbacks of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, von Brauchitsch began to lose what little influence he still had and plagued by heart disease he was retired on 19 December 1941. Hitler himself now took over as the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht. At the end of the war, von Brauchitsch was arrested on his estate in Schleswig-Holstein and taken to England where he was imprisoned for a time. Subsequently interned by the British in a camp in Munster, together with von Rundstedt and von Manstein , he was to have been tried by a British military court in 1949. The practically blind, ailing General died, however, of heart failure in the British military hospital in Hamburg- Barmbeck.
Though aware of the conspiracy and himself sceptical of Hitler's aggressive plans, von Brauchitsch felt constrained by his loyalty oath and he backed the Führer even when his own military instincts dictated the reverse. Thus he supported the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the occupation of Czech frontier areas in October 1938 and the military take-over of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The successes in the early stages of World War II, with the rapid defeats of Poland, France and the Low Countries, all of which took place under his command.
Von Brauchitsch was under a personal obligation to the Führer, who not only persuaded his first wife to agree to a divorce but even paid the divorce settlement costs. A few months later von Brauchitsch was able to marry his second wife, née Charlotte Schmidt, who was a rabid Nazi.