The Enigma of General Blaskowitz

📖 The Scoop

On February 5, 1948, General Johannes Blaskowitz died under mysterious circumstances while awaiting trial as a war criminal in Nurnberg. Was it suicide or murder at the hands of other prisoners? What was there about Blaskowitz's career that diehard Nazis among the prisoners would want to kill him? Dr. Giziowski uses the enigma of General Blaskowitz's last days as a starting point to examine one of the most remarkable military careers of the Third Reich. At the outbreak of WWI, Blaskowitz was captain of an infantry company involved in desperate fighting in France. Although he did not play a major role in the war, his administrative abiliity was recognized by the German command, and he was retained for the scaled-down army of the Weimar Republic. Blaskowitz was typical of the many German officers who acquiesced to Hitler without great enthusiasm for him. The campaign in Poland proved to be the turning point of Blaskowitz's life. He was given a demanding command of infantry corps where armored maneuver was paramount. Superbly motivated and organized, his infantrymen played a key role in the Polish defeat at Warsaw. As military commander in Poland, Blaskowitz witnessed the first of a long series of atrocities, carried out by SS security troops. Naively assuming that the SS were acting without authorization, Blaskowitz sent a detailed memo on atrocities to Hitler. The response to his memo made Blaskowitz increasingly disenchanted with the National Socialist regime and it is to his credit that he continued to protest atrocities, even after he realized that such actions were unwelcome and dangerous. Because of this he was out of favor for the rest of the war, and fortunate not to suffer harsher penalties, however, Blaskowitz's abilities were too badly needed for him to be entirely excluded from command. During the American invasion of southern France in 1944, Blaskowitz extricated the German forces from Allied encirclement in a masterful military operation, one of his greatest accomplishments. At the end of the war, Blaskowitz was in command of German forces cut off in the Netherlands by the advancing Allies, and probably written off by the more realistic German leaders. Given his record, it is ironic that Blaskowitz was under indictment for war crimes at the time of his still-unexplained death. -- Publisher description

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / Military (fancy, right?)