(4 of 4)
Did Rundstedt send Field Marshal von Witzleben, Colonel General Erich Hoepner, Major General Helmuth Stieff, Count Yorck von Wartenburg and the others to the gallows because he had no choice? Did he hope to shield other Wehrmacht generals by acting as the grand inquisitor? When known, the answers to these questions will form an interesting page of history. But they do not alter the fact that the Junker and the Nazis are both very close to the end of their respective ropes. Nor the fact that Germany is now a land divided against itself — although still held together by the frame of the gallows.
† This week Seydlitz' former commander, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, silent since his capture at Stalingrad, declared: "The war is lost for Germany. . . . Because of the state and military leadership of Hitler ... the war has been transformed into a senseless bloodshed."
* Hitler himself once confided to Hermann Rauschning that the Brown Shirts were bandy-legged incompetent rabble.