The man who was indirectly to shape and influence Gerd von Rundstedt more than anyone or anything else was Frederick II, otherwise known as Frederick the Great, who came to the Prussian throne in 1740 and was to rule his country with an iron hand until 1786. For the first 23 years of his reign, he was almost entirely at war, usually against superior odds. That Prussia survived and was on the winning side was largely due to him and to the army which he shaped. Yet, to build such an army required sacrifices. In order to obtain support for it, Frederick, as his father had done before him, looked to the aristocracy for complete commitment and to provide the backbone of the officer corps. In return, he gave his officers status above all other estates in the hierarchy. Gerd’s great, great grandfather, August, was born in 1731 and probably served at the tail end of the War of the Austrian Succession and in the Seven Years War. That both he and his eldest son had Friedrich among their forenames, and their wives, likewise, Friederice, was in itself a demonstration of the total loyalty which the King of Prussia received in return for the privileges that he was prepared to grant.
During the Napoleonic era, Prussia was beaten to her knees at Jena-Auerstadt in October 1806 and Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph. A few Prussian officers refused to acknowledge the humiliating terms which Napoleon forced on their country, even though Prussia did not join the Confederation of German States, which he created. One of these was Gerd’s great grandfather, Joachim, a Lieutenant Colonel in the 10th Gendarmes Regiment (Cuirassiers). He and other like-minded officers created a resistance movement which was to bear much fruit when a resurgent Prussia took to the field again against Napoleon in 1813.
Von Rundstedt’s grandfather Eberhard also served in the Royal Prussian Army, probably as a cavalryman, and retired as a Major. He, though, was the youngest of four children and had two brothers. The eldest died whilst still a boy and the next brother, Werner Rudolf Otto, inherited the family estates. Eberhard’s branch of the family now became the cadet line. He, in turn, also produced four children, of which again the youngest, Gerd Arnold Konrad, was the future Field Marshal’s father. He, too, had two elder brothers and all three became Hussars, while their two first cousins were Dragoons. They all served in the Franco-Prussian War, in which the second brother was killed. In 1874 the young Hussar married Adelheid Eleanore Fischer. In this he went outside the normal custom of the von Rundstedts, which was to marry their own kind, the Prussian aristocracy. The Fischers were of Huguenot descent and it may well have been this blood that gave Gerd his natural affinity for France and the French.
Gerd von Rundstedt himself was born on 12 December 1875 at Aschersleben, a small but ancient town 35 miles north of Halle and on the eastern edge of the Harz Mountains. He was christened Karl Rudolf Gerd, but was always called by his third forename. Gerd was not to remain an only child for long. During the next three and a half years Adelheid bore three more sons, Udo, Eberhard and Joachim. By the time Joachim was born, Adelheid was still only 22 years old, but exhausted and a semi-invalid. To asist her in looking after the boys, she employed an English nanny, a fact which helped to give Gerd and his brothers a grounding in the language. His brother Udo later wrote that Gerd showed an early talent for music and drawing; the latter skill was something which would be of considerable help in bearing the strain of captivity in Britain after the Second World War. He also blossomed into a very good mimic, with a marked ability for imitating German dialects and foreign languages.2
Gerd’s father was now transferred to the 13th Hussars, who were stationed at Mainz, and it was here that Gerd first went to school. Udo recalled that he, Gerd and Eberhard first met a member of the House of Hohenzollern in the military swimming pool at Mainz. The Crown Prince Frederick, who was visiting the city in order to inspect troops, romped with them, but none of the boys realised who their older playmate was. One of their schoolmates was an English boy, Douglas Harrington, which would have increased the boys’grasp of English and English ways. In 1886, the boys’ father was posted again, this time to the staff of the 22nd Infantry Division, whose headquarters was then at Frankfurt-am-Main, and Gerd attended the local Gymnasium (high school).
Given the long military tradition of the von Rundstedt family, it was virtually pre-ordained that Gerd and his brothers should enter the Royal Prussian Army. There were two ways of doing this if a commission was the goal. The more popular method was for a youth, once he had completed his studies at the Gymnasium, to apply to a regiment to become Fahnenjunker or aspirant officer. This entailed serving in the ranks for six months while he did his basic training. He was, however, accommodated separately from the ordinary rank and file. If considered by the commanding officer to have the right potential he would attend Kriegsschule (War School) for six months in order to train as an officer and, provided that he passed the final exams, he returned to his regiment as a Fähnrich (officer cadet) for a further period of probation before eventually being granted his commission. The other method, favoured by the not so well off upper classes, which, of course, included the von Rundstedts, was through cadet college. The attraction of this method, for the parents at least, was that the fees were very low. Admission could be as young as ten years old and a boy began by attending one of the twelve or so junior colleges scattered around the country. For their final two years, which equated to the last two years at Gymnasium, the cadets moved to Grosse Lichterfelde in Berlin. Like the Fähnenjunker, they then had to apply to a regiment and, if accepted, also served six months in the ranks of their chosen regiment. They were termed Portepee Fähnrich (cadet officer, Portepee being the term used for the officer’s sword knot) which gave them a slightly higher status, in view of their previous military training, and they were very quickly equated to non-commissioned officers. Like the Fähnenjunker, they also had to attend Kriegsschule and then returned to their regiments as Seconde Leutnant, which was not a fully commissioned rank in the old German Army. When they were finally commissioned they received seniority over the Fähnenjunker. The drawback of this long training, the backbone of which was the traditional strict Prussian discipline, was that it tended to produce officers with a narrow and rigid outlook. As the eminent German siege specialist, and later von Rundstedt’s superior as Governor of Warsaw, General von Beseler remarked to the British World War 1 official military historian Brigadier General Sir James Edmonds, the system was ‘numbing’ and produced officers who were ‘faithful to duty, but stupid (Pflichttreu aber Dumm)’3 This was perhaps somewhat sweeping and certainly did not apply to the cream of the Royal Prussian Army, but it did have a ring of truth when measured against the average regimental officer.
On 1 April 1888, with his brother Udo, the youthful von Rundstedt entered the junior cadet college at Oranienstein, situated at Diez, east of Koblenz and today a Bundeswehr divisional headquarters. Here, in spite of the discipline and initial homesickness, he continued to display his natural liveliness and his talent on the stage. While acting the part of Varus in the von Kleist play Hermannsschlacht (Hermann’s Battle), which commemorated the defeat of the Romans by the German of that name in AD 9, Gerd suffered a serious wound to the head from his fellow cadet playing Hermann, who had been provided with a Japanese Samurai sword by his doting father. Two years later, both brothers went on to Lichterfelde, where again Gerd’s high spirits were much admired by his fellows. His brother recalled that:
‘Supervision at the college was inadequate. It was difficult for the instructors to hold a thousand cadets together. Disciplinary relations were completely reversed in the case of some of these instructors. Gerd was not the last to play such pranks. One day, when an instructor dawdled at the door, addressing him with the familiar Du, he [Gerd] called out to him: “Now, are you coming in or going out?” As a punishment, the instructor, a Dr Reich, entered the offender’s name in the class-book thus: “Rundstedt, lebhaft” (cheeky, keen). When the book was laid before the military superintendent, a captain, he took this entry for praise, and Gerd got special leave to Berlin! On Sunda
y, leave began after Church service. Gerd once contrived to get off earlier on the grounds that he wanted to go riding in the woods with his grandmother, although, actually, the old lady was ill in hospital.’
The cadets of Lichterfelde were in a privileged position, taking part in the parades of the Guards, and going on manoeuvres with them. This close connection with the Kaiser’s household troops often enabled the cadets to see the Kaiser himself, which would have done much to inspire them. Equally memorable during Gerd’s time at Lichterfelde were two parades for the great von Moltke the Elder, mastermind of Prussia’s victory over France in 1870. On his 90th birthday, the cadets presented arms to him in front of the buildings of the Grosse Generalstab. A year later, they lined the route of his funeral procession.4
Gerd wanted to follow the von Rundstedt cavalry tradition, but the family’s limited finances would not allow this. Instead he tried for the field artillery, probably because it was also mounted, but there were too many candidates for the number of places available and he was unsuccessful. Perhaps it was because he was not sufficiently competent in mathematics and science when compared with some of the other applicants. Thus, he was left with the infantry and joined the Regiment von Wittich (3rd Hessian), but more commonly known in the Royal Prussian Army as the 83rd Infantry Regiment, at Kassel for his six months as a Portepee Fähnrich on 22 March 1892. Since the regiment was part of 22nd Infantry Division, Gerd’s father would have known it well and was probably instrumental in getting Gerd appointed to it. Kassel, which was to become Gerd’s home town for over fifty years, was the capital of the state of Hessen-Nassau at that time and had a population of 100,000 inhabitants. During his initial period with the 83rd Infantry Gerd was allowed to take his meals in the officers’ mess and also roomed apart from the rank and file. He was to find himself put very much under the microscope, not just by his commanding officer, but by all the officers in the regiment, who had to decide if he was of suitable character and had the qualitities to become one of them. If he was disappointed at not becoming an artilleryman, Gerd clearly did not show it and entered the Kriegsschule at Hannover in autumn 1892 for the penultimate state of his long officer training. After six months, and having passed the necessary exams, he returned to the Regiment as a Seconde Leutnant. He was now subjected to even closer examination by the officers of the regiment. They particularly watched a cadet officer’s behaviour in the mess, even to the extent of getting him drunk to see if he did so like a gentleman. Finally, the officers voted on whether to elect him to be one of them. In Gerd’s case, the election was in his favour. On 17 June 1893, he reached the end of the long road and was commissioned Leutnant in the 83rd Infantry Regiment. Udo and Joachim followed Gerd into the infantry, joining the 163rd and 80th Infantry Regiments respectively. Eberhard, however, succeeded in becoming an artilleryman in the 27th Field Artillery Regiment, but resigned his commission after a few years.
The army that Gerd and his brothers joined was still riding very much on the crest of the wave of its victory over France over 20 years earlier. It must be remembered that although Bismarck had unified it under Prussia, Germany was still a collection of states, enjoying varying degrees of autonomy. All save three had placed their armies under Prussian control, the last, Brunswick, in 1886. Of the three exceptions, Saxony and Württemberg had their own war ministries, but were even so under overall Prussian control, although Saxony maintained her own officer corps and promotion was within the Royal Saxon Army. The same applied to the third, Bavaria, which enjoyed even greater independence. However, like all the other states, her army was equipped and organised on Prussian lines and was subordinated to Berlin in time of war.
The German armies were conscript, with every male being liable to serve three years with the colours and four years with the active reserve, before passing on to further service with the Landsturm, which equated to a home defence force. In 1893, the year that von Rundstedt was commissioned, there was a radical reorganisation. For a start, service with the colours was reduced to two years, except for mounted arms. A man was registered with the Landsturm on his 17th birthday, but was not called upon to join the standing army until he was 20. Even so, the constitution laid down that only one per cent of the population could be active soldiers at any one time. Hence not all German males, by any means, actually donned uniform. The Army was thus able to select its recruits and preferred to take them from rural areas rather than the growing industrial cities, since there was a danger that the latter would have been imbued with socialist ideas. The fact that the population of Germany was growing rapidly (from 41 million in 1871 to 65 million by 1910) and increasing tension in Europe meant that Gerd was joining an expanding army.
The Prussian Army still occupied a very privileged position, one that it had maintained since the era of Frederick the Great 150 years earlier. This was primarily reflected in the officer corps. From Frederick’s time it had been cocooned and nurtured as a body which was answerable only to the Kaiser, and totally isolated from the civil community. As General Hahnke, Chief of the Military Cabinet in the 1890s, said: ‘The army must remain an insulated body into which no one dare peer with critical eyes.’5 When the young Kaiser Wilhelm II succeeded his short-reigned father (the von Rundstedt boys’ erstwhile playmate in the baths at Mainz) in 1888, he did so determined that Germany should have ‘her place in the sun’. To bring this about, he was prepared to pander to Britain, making maximum use of the fact that he was Queen Victoria’s grandson, but was unconcerned that this heightened Russian suspicions. France would, of course, never warm to Germany until she had regained the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Her enmity and growing Russian coldness meant that the possibility of war on two fronts became increasingly real. This danger was not lessened by the fall of Bismarck, who had striven so hard to maintain the balance of power in Europe. Wilhelm, recognising that a strong army was essential if he was to achieve his ends and deter his neighbours, encouraged every move to expand it.
The officer corps itself was kept bound to the Kaiser through privilege, as it had been for the past 200 years. While pay was low, even compared to British officers, whose financial rewards from their country were hardly generous, the social standing of the German officer was higher. Even a reserve commission was much valued and sought after by politicians among others, besides being a means of making a rich marriage match. Just as significant was the fact that the German officer was so insulated from civilian life that he could not be brought before a civil court. The reason for this was the Prussian Code of Honour.
It is important to understand this code because it was to exert a significant influence on von Rundstedt’s life. One cannot do better for a description of the Prussian concept of honour than to quote from an 1874 order by Wilhelm II’s grandfather:
‘I therefore look to the whole corps of officers of My Army to make honour their finest jewel in future as they have always done hitherto. To keep its honour pure and spotless must be the sacred duty of the whole Estate and of every member of it. If that duty is fulfilled, then every other duty incumbent on an officer will be fully and conscientously performed. True honour cannot exist without faithfulness unto death, without invincible courage, firm determination, self-denying obedience, simple truthfulness and strict discretion, nor without self-sacrifice in the fulfilment of what may seem but trivial tasks. Honour requires, too, that an officer’s outward bearing shall reflect his conscious pride in being a member of the Estate to which the defence of Throne and Fatherland has been entrusted. An officer should endeavour to keep no company but that in which high standards are cherished; and least of all in public places should he forget that he will be looked upon not merely as a man of education but as one who represents the honour and highest obligations of his Estate. He should keep aloof from all dealings that may reflect upon the good name of the individual or of the fellowship to which he belongs; especially from all excess, from drunkenness and gambling, from contracting any obligation that may lead to ev
en the slightest appearance of dishonest conduct, from speculative dealings on the Stock Exchange, from taking part in any commercial enterprises whose aims are not unimpeachable or whose reputation is not of the highest. Never should he lightly pledge his word of honour.
As luxury and good living become widespread in other walks of life, the more it is an officer’s serious duty never to forget that it is not in his possession that he gained, or will preserve, the highly honoured place that he occupies in the State and society. It is not simply that his military value may be reduced if he lives in comfort; the pursuit of riches and good living involves the danger that the very foundations on which the officers’ Estate is built may be brought to total ruination.
The more attention the corps of officers pays to cultivating the genuine comradeship and a true esprit de corps, the easier will it be to prevent excess of any kind, bring comrades back if they stray from the right path, and avoid senseless quarrels and unworthy wrangling.’
The Kaiser then went on to exhort his officers never to display ‘lack of respect’ or ‘arrogance’ to the ‘other Estates’, because all must have confidence in the officer corps.6 Honour, however, served to keep the Army isolated from the ‘other Estates’. The traditional Prussian argument was that only someone who bore arms could be considered a man of honour. Since the Army was the only sector of society entitled to bear arms only army officers had honour. Encapsulated within the Prussian definition of honour was the edict that a man of honour could not be tried in a court of law by someone who lacked it. This was the justification for army officers being immune from civil justice. If an officer did commit some crime, he had to come before a military Court of Honour. If found guilty, and the crime was sufficiently serious, he could be ordered to resign his commission. By so doing, he lost his honour and hence could be tried by the civil authorities. This concept of honour was to be carried on throughout the First World War, the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht, and was to have particular consequences for Gerd in 1944. Furthermore, coming as he did from a family with many generations of soldiers, the Code of Honour would have been imbued in him virtually from birth and was to exert a deep influence on him throughout his life.
The Last Prussian Page 2