The German General Who Finally Faced the Truth About His War

Описание: Field Marshal Erich von Manstein stood among Nazi Germany’s most brilliant commanders — a strategist revered for his intellect and mastery of battlefield maneuver. Yet behind his military genius lay a tragic blindness.
Born into Prussian nobility, Manstein embodied the rigid discipline and obedience that shaped the German officer corps. He engineered the audacious plan that crushed France in 1940 and later led crucial operations on the Eastern Front. His brilliance won him Hitler’s favor — until he began questioning the Führer’s catastrophic decisions.

After Stalingrad’s disaster, Manstein argued that Germany’s downfall stemmed not from weak soldiers, but from Hitler’s obsession with control and ideology over logic. Dismissed in 1944, he survived the war and claimed that the Wehrmacht fought “honorably,” denying its complicity in Nazi crimes.
His memoir Lost Victories painted him as a betrayed professional soldier and fueled the postwar illusion of a “clean Wehrmacht.” But later historians exposed how his armies cooperated with Nazi death squads, and how his silence became a form of guilt.

Manstein’s supposed truth — that Hitler doomed Germany by ignoring his generals — revealed only part of the story. The deeper truth was that blind obedience and moral surrender had doomed them all. He remains a haunting symbol: a man who understood warfare perfectly, but never understood humanity.

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