Near the East Prussian border with Lithuania stood the windmill of Tauroggen. Inside sat a disgusted Prussian general. He was about to commit treason. Across the table sat a Russian general, in command of Russia's forces in the Baltic. The Prussian had orders to take Riga, but he promised the Russians to sit out the war.
His name was Hans David Ludwig Yorck and the date was Dec. 30, 1812. Prussia was an ally of Napoleon at the time. The treasonable document he signed became known as the Convention of Tauroggen after Prussia turned against the Corsican. With the Russian general sat a young Prussian aide, Karl von Clausewitz, author later on of the world's most famous book of military theory, On War. With Yorck sat a Major von Seydlitz. At first, there was talk of court-martial for Yorck, but when Prussia's War of Liberation against Napoleon began, he became a national hero, was made Count von Wartenburg.
Last week among the eight officers hanged by Heinrich Himmler for conspiracy against the Nazis, was Count Yorck von Wartenburg, the patriotic traitor's great-grandson. Yorck von Wartenburg was hanged, among other things, because he was suspected of conspiracy with the head of Moscow's League of German Officers, General Walther von Seydlitz.†
Behind these strange historical coincidences lay profound historic causes. Once more the whole Junker caste had reached the windmill at Tauroggen. Once more the Junker, whose whole justification for being was their embodiment of the Prussian state, faced an age-old conflict—Prussia v. Russia, patrician v. plebeian, military honor v. treason.
By & large the Junker were perhaps the most able, intelligent and disciplined single group of men on the continent of Europe. Certainly they were the most ruthless, tough-minded, coldblooded. They needed to be. For never before had their caste so squarely faced the prospect of extermination.
They had abused their historic function as guiding intelligence of the German people by subjecting it to that evil thing—Nazi totalitarianism. The Frankenstein they had helped to power, their police spy in the absurd trench coat, Adolf Hitler, had at last split their solid ranks.
The man who embodied their great tradition and their desperate dilemma was the man who indicted Yorck von Wartenburg and his seven gallows-mates for treason against the Third Reich and conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler—Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt.
Judge of His Peers. No man had a better training for sitting in judgement on Germany's ruling class than Gerd von Rundstedt. The Rundstedts had been lords in the Altmark of Brandenburg since at least 1123. Rundstedt's father was a Prussian major general, his grandfather a major, his great-grandfather a lieutenant colonel.
From his birth Gerd von Rundstedt was destined for the army. Before he tired of playing with lead soldiers, under his father's approving eye, he found himself a freshman in the cadet school at Oranienstein. There and at Gross-Lichterfelde, the wiry, chilly stripling learned the code of selfless devotion to duty and class. At 17, Rundstedt became a lieutenant.