HISTORICAL NOTES: Last of the Great Prussians

In World War II, General Eisenhower and Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery did not see eye to eye on all things military, but they agreed that the best of the German generals they faced was Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. The stiff, cold, duty-obsessed old Prussian never joined any plots against Hitler, but he often opposed the Führer's plans and acts, was three times removed from command, and in the end came to despise a man he sometimes called "Corporal Hitler." B. H. Liddell Hart says that von Rundstedt was an abler soldier than Field Marshal von Hindenburg—of World War...

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