Word: rundstedts
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When Adolf Hitler was still a mousy plotter, Gerd von Rundstedt was already one of the Reich's first soldiers. Impersonally affable, yet detached and consciously superior, he was not a man to let other officers call him by his first name or use the familiar Du. He was known far & wide, and with vast respect, as der General...
During the Prussian parliamentary crisis in the summer of 1932, Rundstedt took charge of Berlin on Hindenburg's order to see that order was kept. His reward was command of Army Group I, with headquarters in Berlin. He was still in command in 1935 when the hollow-cheeked, ascetic Leeb took over Group II (based on Kassel) and the chill-eyed, death-glorifying Bock became commander of Group III (Dresden...
There was prophecy in this alignment, but its fulfillment was delayed. Rundstedt was like Bock and Leeb, but there were other variations from the Junker pattern. Broad-faced Brauchitsch truckled to Hitler, became Commander in Chief of the German Army in 1938. Jaunty, rakehell Keitel made compromises, became Chief of the Supreme Command. Haider became Chief of the General Staff...
...Rundstedt announced that he was ill and retired. He returned to service only when the invasion of Poland was in the planning. It was the kind of war the Junkers love because it was to be a swift stab without warning, crushing, yet almost daintily precise...
...Horses. Now the horses of war were ready to ride. Bock took over the northern group of armies on the Polish border, Rundstedt the southern. Against the bewildered Poles, with their pennoned lances and their military roots still in the '90s, the two generals had little more than maneuver exercise. But they took their medals and they wore them. And Rundstedt, the exquisite, stayed in Poland as military administrator, saw and approved the massacre of civilians, the wholesale deportation of families, without ruffling one of his neatly parted hairs...