Erich von Manstein

Fritz Erich von Lewinski was born in Berlin on 24 November 1887, the tenth child of the artillery general Eduard von Lewinski. Because his mother's sister and her husband, General Georg von Manstein, were childless, it had been agreed before the birth that they would adopt him. He grew up in a milieu in which almost all the men were officers; the later Reich President Paul von Hindenburg was an uncle by marriage.

After the cadet corps at Plön and Berlin-Lichterfelde he became an ensign in the 3rd Foot Guards in 1906. In November 1914 he was badly wounded on the eastern front; for the rest of the First World War he served on staffs. In the small Reichswehr he made his name as a trainer and planner. In 1935 he became head of the Operations Branch of the General Staff and in 1936 deputy chief under General Ludwig Beck.

Manstein thought in large movements. The original German plan for the west resembled the advance of 1914 through Belgium; he proposed shifting the main effort to the Ardennes and breaking through with the armoured divisions at Sedan to the Channel coast, so that the Allied armies in Belgium would be cut off. The army command thereupon moved him to a corps far behind the front, but Hitler adopted the idea. In May 1940 it led to the collapse of France.

On the Eastern Front he showed the same preference for speed and surprise. After the fall of Sevastopol and the failed relief of Stalingrad he managed in February and March 1943 to restore the collapsed southern front: he let the Soviet spearheads advance far and then cut them off with armoured corps. After that he argued repeatedly for a mobile defence and a single commander-in-chief in the east, which led to clashes with Hitler and finally to his dismissal.

The German officer corps in which Manstein was formed was conservative, nationalist and hostile to the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. Most officers welcomed rearmament under Hitler and in 1934 swore the oath to him personally. Anti-communism and antisemitism were widespread, including among those who were not party members.

The war against the Soviet Union was waged from the outset as a war of annihilation. Orders such as the Commissar Order prescribed the murder of political commissars, prisoners of war were left to starve in their hundreds of thousands, and behind the front Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews, Roma and alleged partisans. The armies provided transport, cordons and supplies. Manstein's order of 20 November 1941 adopted the language of that war.

The Ardennes plan gave Germany victory over France in six weeks and gave Hitler an authority over his generals that determined the further conduct of the war. The counterstroke at Kharkov prolonged the war in the east but could not reverse the balance: after Kursk the initiative lay with the Red Army for good.

In the area of the 11th Army, Einsatzgruppe D murdered tens of thousands of Jews, Krymchaks and Roma between late 1941 and mid-1942, among them more than ten thousand people near Simferopol in December 1941. The army staff pressed for speed and made lorries and men available. During the retreat in 1943 Army Group South had villages, stores and livestock destroyed and hundreds of thousands of civilians moved west.

After his dismissal Manstein remained without a command. Officers of the resistance sounded him out several times; he refused to take part in a coup, saying that Prussian field marshals do not mutiny, but did not betray them either. In 1946 he testified at Nuremberg in defence of the General Staff. His own trial, in Hamburg in 1949, was controversial: British sympathisers, among them Winston Churchill, contributed to the costs of his defence.

He was found guilty on nine of the seventeen charges, including neglecting his duty to protect the civilian population, the deportation of civilians for forced labour and the scorched-earth tactic, and sentenced to eighteen years, later reduced to twelve. He was released in 1953. He advised the West German government on building up the Bundeswehr and died in June 1973. Only from the 1990s was his share in the crimes of the Wehrmacht widely acknowledged.