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Changing the Guard. Three months later, with Eisenhower's armies rushing toward the Siegfried Line, von Rundstedt was reinstated. When Hitler launched his last, convulsive counterstroke in the Ardennes—the Battle of the Bulge—the Allied generals assumed that von Rundstedt was masterminding the job. Actually, it was conceived and timed by Adolf Hitler, and mainly executed by Model, von Manteuffel and the SS's tough-guy General Sepp Dietrich. Von Rundstedt knew in advance that it would fail; by then a figurehead, he said, "My only prerogative was to change the guard at the gate." Six days before V-E day, the British captured him at Bad Tölz near Munich. They held him in custody for several years, intending to try him for war crimes, freed him in 1949 on the ground of ill health.
Embittered by the way the war had gone and saddened by the recent deaths of both his wife and son, General von Rundstedt had lately been living at Han-over-Klefeld in a modest third-floor flat over a shoeshop. He never wrote his memoirs. Last week, in a quiet and gentlemanly way, he died at 77.
Since West Germany has no army, there was no semblance of a military funeral. The handful of old Wehrmacht officers who appeared wore top hats instead of their high-peaked military caps. Instead of a gun-carriage, a common horse-drawn hearse carried the coffin. Said Dr. Ernst Strasser, the officiating clergyman: "We are burying the last of the great Prussians."