Walther Heinrich Alfred Hermann von Brauchitsch (4 October 1881 – 18 October 1948) was a German Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) and Commander-in-Chief (Oberbefehlshaber) of the German Army during the first two years of World War II. Born into an aristocratic military family, he entered army service in 1901. During World War I, he served with distinction on the corps-level and division-level staff on the Western Front.
After the 1933 Nazi seizure of power, Walther von Brauchitsch was put in charge of Wehrkreis I, the military district for East Prussia. During this period, he borrowed immense sums of money from Adolf Hitler and ultimately became dependent on his financial help. By 4 February 1938, Brauchitsch was named Commander-in-Chief of the German Army. In this capacity, he oversaw the successful German invasions of Poland, Western Europe, Yugoslavia, and Greece. For his part in the Battle of France, he became one of twelve generals promoted to field marshal.
On 22 June 1941, Field Marshal Brauchitsch oversaw the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite initially presiding over a series of military victories, his forces were ultimately thrown back by a massive Soviet counteroffensive in December at the Battle of Moscow, thereby causing Barbarossa to end in failure. Enraged by this defeat, Hitler fired Brauchitsch from his command of the German Army. Thereafter, he spent the rest of the war in enforced retirement. Following the war's end, Brauchitsch was arrested on charges of war crimes, but he died of pneumonia in 1948 before he could be prosecuted.
Brauchitsch was born in Berlin on 4 October 1881 as the sixth child of Bernhard von Brauchitsch, a cavalry general, and his wife, Charlotte Bertha von Gordon. The Brauchitsch family had a long tradition of military service, and like his forefathers, Brauchitsch was raised in the tradition of the Prussian officer corps. His family moved in the leading social circles of Berlin's high society, and his family name and father's military rank put him on equal footing with any officer or official. In his teens, Brauchitsch was interested in politics and was fascinated by art. To help him pursue these interests, his father enrolled him at Französisches Gymnasium Berlin rather than a military academy.
In 1895 Brauchitsch joined the military academy in Potsdam. He later transferred to the Hauptkadettenanstalt Groß Lichterfelde, where in his final year he belonged to the top class for gifted students and was chosen, like his brother Adolf five years before, as a page by Empress Augusta Victoria. During his time serving the empress at court, he learned manners and bearing that were noted for the rest of his life.
Upon graduation in 1900 he received his commission as a lieutenant in an infantry regiment. Alternative sources suggest that upon graduation he became a lieutenant in the Royal Elizabeth Guard Grenadiers but got himself transferred from this "socialite outfit" to the Third Field Artillery Regiment. A medical condition made him unfit for service in the infantry, so he was transferred to an artillery regiment. He was put in charge of training recruits in riding and driving. He then joined the General Staff office in Berlin, where he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1909.
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Brauchitsch had reached the rank of captain. He was appointed staff officer to the XVI Army Corps, stationed near Metz. During World War I, he served with the 34th Infantry Division and Guards Reserve Corps. Between 1914 and 1916, he took part in the Battle of Verdun and Battle of the Argonne Forest. In the remaining two years of the conflict, Brauchitsch took part in the Third Battle of the Aisne, the Aisne-Marne offensive, the Second Battle of the Aisne, the Battle of Armentières, and the Battle of Flanders. Brauchitsch was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and the House Order of Hohenzollern, and ended the war with the rank of major.
In 1918, together with thousands of other officers, he was dismissed to the Reserve Corps. But the next year he was back as a major. The German military underwent a forced reduction in 1919 to comply with the Treaty of Versailles, but Brauchitsch managed to remain in service. He remained with the General Staff, where he had no opportunity to use his knowledge of artillery. Eventually, in 1920, he was permitted to transfer to the staff of the 2nd Artillery Regiment. The following year, he worked in the Ministry of the Reichswehr, in the Artillery Department.
Brauchitsch's assignment in the Artillery Department was to reorganize artillery formations and implement lessons learned in the closing months of the war. He added ideas of his own, including modifying the classification system for light, medium, and heavy artillery. Heavy artillery, formerly known as "corps artillery", now became "reinforcement artillery". He also added emphasis on the combination and cooperation between artillery and infantry.
After three years in the Artillery Department, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1925. As of 1 November 1927, Brauchitsch was appointed Chief of Staff of the 6th Infantry Division in Münster, Westphalia, one of the strongest garrisons in the west of Germany. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, he took over the Army Training Department and became a colonel (promoted in 1928). In October 1931, Brauchitsch received his major general promotion.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power and began to expand the military, in order to realize Hitler's military ambitions. On 1 February 1933, Brauchitsch was named commander of the East Prussian military district (Wehrkreis I) and chief of the 1st Division in Königsberg. As a consequence of the German re-armament the command position Befehlshaber im Wehrkreis I (Commander of the 1st military district) was expanded. Brauchitsch was promoted to lieutenant general in October 1933. The staff of the 1st Division formed the staff of the 1st Army Corps and Brauchitsch was appointed its first commanding general on 21 June 1935.
Although Brauchitsch felt at home in Prussia, he had a clash with Erich Koch, the local Gauleiter (party head and de facto head of civil administration of the province). Koch was known as something of a crook who greatly enjoyed the power he possessed, and who would bring violence to his enemies. As neither Koch nor Brauchitsch wanted to lose their jobs in the region, the two attempted to keep their feud unofficial. As a result, Berlin hardly learned of their dispute.
A dispute emerged a few years later when Brauchitsch learned that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler planned to replace the army guards in East Prussia with SS men, with the purpose of persecuting Jews, Protestant and Catholic churches in the district. Even though Brauchitsch managed to prevent the SS replacement of the army troops in the region, Himmler categorized him as "a junker", and informed Hitler of the disagreement. Brauchitsch claimed he had done his duty, saying laconically, "Civilians are not allowed to enter that area."
Brauchitsch obtained the rank of general of artillery in 1936. When the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Werner von Fritsch, was accused of homosexuality, Hitler promoted Brauchitsch to colonel general and appointed him the new army chief on the recommendation of the Army High Command on 4 February 1938. At the time of this promotion Brauchitsch was also granted cabinet-level rank and authority, though not the formal title of Reichsminister. The homosexual allegations were in reality a trap set by Hitler as an excuse to dismiss one of the aristocratic senior officers within the Army High Command. Fritsch's removal was a severe test of the stability of the German internal administration of that time.
Brauchitsch welcomed the Nazi policy of rearmament. The relationship between Hitler and Brauchitsch improved during Brauchitsch's confusion about whether to leave his wife for his mistress, in the middle of the Munich Crisis; Hitler set aside his usual anti-divorce sentiments and encouraged Brauchitsch to divorce and remarry. Hitler even lent him 80,000 Reichsmarks so he could afford the divorce. Over time, Brauchitsch became largely reliant on Hitler for financial help.