Walther Model

Walther Model was Hitler's defensive specialist, sent wherever a front had broken, and he shot himself in a wood rather than surrender. He was not from a military family - his father taught music - and he was an abrasive, unpopular officer who owed his rise to competence and to the regime's willingness to promote outside the aristocratic staff tradition. He earned the reputation at Rzhev, holding a salient against repeated Soviet offensives through 1942 by ignoring orders to hold ground rigidly and instead trading it deliberately - and by telling Hitler to his face who commanded the army, which is said to have amused him. He planned the northern pincer at Kursk and argued against the operation before it began. He was given Army Group North, then Centre after its destruction in 1944, then the west after the Falaise pocket, and each appointment followed a catastrophe. At Arnhem in September 1944 he happened to be quartered nearby when the airborne landings began, saw them from his window, and had two SS panzer divisions refitting in the area - so the operation met exactly the commander and the units it had been planned on the assumption were not there. He was also loyal enough to sign an order of the day praising Hitler's survival of the July plot. Encircled in the Ruhr in April 1945 with over 300,000 men, he dissolved the army group rather than capitulate - discharging the oldest and youngest and leaving the rest to surrender individually, which was a way of obeying the letter of an order forbidding capitulation while ending the fighting. He shot himself in a wood near Duisburg on 21 April. He had said that a field marshal does not become a prisoner, and he had been named in Soviet demands as a war criminal for deportations carried out in his rear areas.

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