Word: mansteins
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...ablest of all German generals," British Military Historian Liddell Hart called him. "Our finest operational brain," said Panzer General Heinz Guderian, an exacting judge. Erich von Manstein charted the daring Panzer thrust through the Ardennes that split the Allied armies and defeated France, and was assigned to lead the German landing in Britain (Operation Sea-Lion ) that never happened (because the amazing British beat off Goring's air assault). In Russia, he opened the fortified gateway to the Crimean peninsula, stormed the Russian Black Sea naval bastion at Sevastopol, and led the counterattack that retook Kharkov in March...
Four years after the war, white-haired, Roman-nosed Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, ailing and half blind, sat in the dock of a British military court in Hamburg, charged with 17 war crimes in Poland and Russia (more than any other general indicted by the Western Allies): condoning the murder of Jews and other minorities, the execution without trial of Russian commissars, the deportation of Russians to slave labor. Many Britons considered the long-delayed trial unfair, and contributed ?1,620 to his defense (Winston Churchill sent ?25), but Manstein was convicted and sentenced to 18 years. Later...
...last August, old passions having subsided and new political considerations having arisen, Manstein was released on medical parole for an operation on his cataracts, and was allowed afterward to return to Schloss Freyberg, his sister's 60-room castle in the Swabian village of Allmendingen...
...transmitted the orders to the SS for the infamous Ardeatine caves massacre of 335 Italian hostages. Mackensen's boss in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, also sentenced to die for the Ardeatine massacre, were already out, released to secure medical treatment. So was Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, who drew 18 years for the murder of Russian prisoners. It was unlikely that either would ever return to jail...
Former German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein left the British military prison in Werl on a three-month parole to enter a Kiel hospital and have a cataract removed from his left...