Johannes Albrecht Blaskowitz (10 July 1883 – 5 February 1948) was a German Generaloberst (colonel general) during World War II. After joining the Imperial German Army in 1901, Blaskowitz served throughout World War I, where he earned the Iron Cross for bravery. During WWII, Blaskowitz led the 8th Army during the Invasion of Poland and was the Commander in Chief of Occupied Poland from 1939 to 1940. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords. He commanded Army Group G during the Allied invasion of Southern France and Operation Nordwind, the last major German offensive of World War II on the Western Front. Blaskowitz later commanded the remnants of Army Group H as it withdrew to Northern Netherlands before surrendering to Allied forces.
During the war, Blaskowitz wrote several memoranda to the German high command objecting to the Holocaust and criminal conduct of the SS Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, as well, he court-martialed SS members for war crimes against Jewish and Polish civilians. As a result of these actions against the SS, Adolf Hitler limited Blaskowitz's future commands and career advancement. After the war, he was charged with war crimes in the High Command Trial at Nuremberg. Despite the fact he would have most likely been acquitted, he died by suicide during the trial on 5 February 1948.
Johannes Blaskowitz was born on 10 July 1883 in the village of Paterswalde, Province of East Prussia, German Empire (now Bolshaya Polyana in the Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). He was the son of a Protestant pastor, Hermann Adam Franz Blaskowitz (1848–1919), and his wife (∞ 1874) Marie, née Kuhn (1852–1886). In 1894, Blaskowitz joined cadet school at Köslin (now Koszalin, Poland) and afterwards at Berlin Lichterfelde. In 1901, he started his military career as a Fähnrich in the Infanterie-Regiment "von Grolman" (1. Posensches) Nr. 18 in Osterode (Ostróda).
During World War I, Blaskowitz served on the Eastern and Western Fronts and was employed in the General Staff. He rose to command an infantry company by 1918, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery.
Blaskowitz's war service secured him a place in the small postwar Reichswehr during the Weimar Republic, through whose ranks he rose to the rank of General. His attitude towards the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933 was reportedly indifferent because he believed that the armed forces should be "politically neutral".
In early 1939 he commanded the German forces that occupied Czechoslovakia, and was promoted to General of Infantry and given command of the 8th Army just prior to the outbreak of World War II. He was mocked because of the poor Czech language used in the first decree as the occupation commander. It was immediately replaced by the corrected version of the decree.
During the invasion of Poland, the 8th Army under Blaskowitz's command was responsible for the northern part of the front under Army Group South, led by Gerd von Rundstedt. The 8th Army saw heavy combat during the Battle of the Bzura and later besieged the Polish capital of Warsaw. On 28 September 1939, Blaskowitz accepted the surrender of General Tadeusz Kutrzeba and the Polish forces in Warsaw. After the campaign, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, promoted to Generaloberst and appointed as Commander-in-Chief East in Poland on 20 October 1939.
As a traditional soldier, Blaskowitz kept firm control over the men under his command in their dealings with civilians and opposed Army participation in war crimes by the SS and Einsatzgruppen. He handed down death sentences to members of the SS for crimes against the civilian population, which were later rescinded by Adolf Hitler.
Between November 1939 and February 1940, he wrote several memorandums to higher military officials detailing SS atrocities in Poland, their negative effects on Wehrmacht soldiers and the German military’s reputation, the insolent attitude of the SS toward the Army. He warned that the SS "might later turn against their own people in the same way," and noted that “The attitude of the [Wehrmacht] troops to the SS and police alternates between abhorrence and hatred." However, his protests failed to produce results, merely earning him the scorn of Hitler, Hans Frank, Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, while Chief of Staff Alfred Jodl dismissed them as naive and "uncalled for".
Commander-in-Chief Walther von Brauchitsch forwarded Blaskowitz's first memorandum to Hitler on 18 November, who launched a tirade against Blaskowitz, denouncing his concerns about due process as "childish" and poured scorn on his "Salvation Army attitude." In February 1940, Blaskowitz prepared a list of 33 complaints against the SS. Among his complaints were strip searches and rape of Jewish women, a whipping orgy in Nasielsk affecting 1,600 Jews, and a clear case of race mixing committed by a junior SS officer. Blaskowitz concluded that "It is a mistake to massacre some 10,000 Jews and Poles, as is being done at present; for—so far as the mass of the population is concerned—this will not eradicate the idea of a Polish state, nor will the Jews be exterminated." Blaskowitz was relieved of his command on 29 May 1940. Having thus encountered Hitler's wrath, Blaskowitz was the only Generaloberst at that time who was not promoted to Generalfeldmarschall in summer 1940 after the fall of France.
Following the Fall of France in May 1940, Blaskowitz was initially slated to command the 9th Army for occupation duties, but the appointment was blocked by Hitler and instead he was appointed to a relatively minor position as Military Governor of Northern France, a position he held until October 1940, when he was transferred to the command of the 1st Army, on the southwest coast between Brittany and the Pyrenees.
On 10 November 1942, the 1st and 7th Army under Blaskowitz's command launched Case Anton, the military occupation of Vichy France. The 1st Army advanced from the Atlantic coast, parallel to the Spanish border, while the 7th Army advanced from central France towards Vichy and Toulon. The 50,000-strong Vichy French Army took defensive positions around Toulon, but when confronted by German demands to disband, it did so since it lacked the military capability to resist. By the evening of 11 November, German tanks had reached the Mediterranean coast. Anton marked the end of the Vichy regime as a nominally independent state. However, Blaskowitz's forces failed to secure the Vichy French fleet at Toulon, which was scuttled by the French.
In May 1944, following the appointment of Gerd von Rundstedt as Commander-in-Chief in the West, Blaskowitz was appointed the head of Army Group G. This comparatively small command, consisting of the 1st Army and the 19th Army, was given the task of defending southern France from the imminent Allied invasion. When in Normandy, he managed to convince Field Marshal Erwin Rommel that the "rumours" Rommel had heard about atrocities on the Eastern Front were actually true.
According to historian Christopher Clark, in France, Blaskowitz tried to "build a constructive relationship with the local population", even though the conditions for him to do so were worse than in Poland. He encouraged the troops deployed to support French agriculture to act "selflessly". On the one hand, he tried to ensure that German counterinsurgency would be conducted in accordance with international norms as far as possible. He publicly distanced himself from units that committed the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre. On the other hand, when the prefects in Toulouse complained about crimes against civilians in "counter-terrorism" procedures conducted by the SS, Blaskowitz defended the right of the German army to defend itself, even though he admitted sometimes innocent people were harmed. He recommended that the French authorities be told that "it is imperative that innocent people sometimes fall victim to the bullet [...]. Against such a struggle [namely on the part of the partisans of the Resistance], the Wehrmacht must and will defend itself under all the means of power at its disposal." After the July Bomb Plot, he sent a note that proclaimed loyalty to Hitler. Clark speculates that he might have feared that he was suspected. There was no evidence that suggests Blaskowitz ever protested the deportation of Jews from France. Although army appraisal forms, compiled by Rundstedt, described him as a National Socialist, Christopher Clark opines that Blaskowitz likely never had any ideological attachment to Nazism. According to Clark, professionalism enabled Blaskowitz to follow his own principles even against the political Zeitgeist, but the same professionalism made him unsuitable for political resistance. After a visit in October 1943, German resistance member Ulrich von Hassell lamented that it was not fruitful to discuss with Blaskowitz who saw everything from a military point-of-view. From this "very bounded standpoint", whatever one thought about the regime's moral character became overshadowed by duty to his superiors and his troops, as well as the people whose fate "now hung in balance."