The Wind from Tauroggen

Near the East Prussian border with Lithuania stood the windmill of Tauroggen. Inside sat a disgusted Prussian general. He was about to commit treason. Across the table sat a Russian general, in command of Russia's forces in the Baltic. The Prussian had orders to take Riga, but he promised the Russians to sit out the war.

His name was Hans David Ludwig Yorck and the date was Dec. 30, 1812. Prussia was an ally of Napoleon at the time. The treasonable document he signed became known as the Convention of Tauroggen after Prussia turned against the Corsican. With the Russian general sat a young Prussian aide, Karl von Clausewitz, author later on of the world's most famous book of military theory, On War. With Yorck sat a Major von Seydlitz. At first, there was talk of court-martial for Yorck, but when Prussia's War of Liberation against Napoleon began, he became a national hero, was made Count von Wartenburg.

Last week among the eight officers hanged by Heinrich Himmler for conspiracy against the Nazis, was Count Yorck von Wartenburg, the patriotic traitor's great-grandson. Yorck von Wartenburg was hanged, among other things, because he was suspected of conspiracy with the head of Moscow's League of German Officers, General Walther von Seydlitz./-

Behind these strange historical coincidences lay profound historic causes. Once more the whole Junker caste had reached the windmill at Tauroggen. Once more the Junker, whose whole justification for being was their embodiment of the Prussian state, faced an age-old conflict--Prussia v. Russia, patrician v. plebeian, military honor v. treason.

By & large the Junker were perhaps the most able, intelligent and disciplined single group of men on the continent of Europe. Certainly they were the most ruthless, tough-minded, coldblooded. They needed to be. For never before had their caste so squarely faced the prospect of extermination.

They had abused their historic function as guiding intelligence of the German people by subjecting it to that evil thing--Nazi totalitarianism. The Frankenstein they had helped to power, their police spy in the absurd trench coat, Adolf Hitler, had at last split their solid ranks.

The man who embodied their great tradition and their desperate dilemma was the man who indicted Yorck von Wartenburg and his seven gallows-mates for treason against the Third Reich and conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler--Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt.

Judge of His Peers. No man had a better training for sitting in judgement on Germany's ruling class than Gerd von Rundstedt. The Rundstedts had been lords in the Altmark of Brandenburg since at least 1123. Rundstedt's father was a Prussian major general, his grandfather a major, his great-grandfather a lieutenant colonel.

From his birth Gerd von Rundstedt was destined for the army. Before he tired of playing with lead soldiers, under his father's approving eye, he found himself a freshman in the cadet school at Oranienstein. There and at Gross-Lichterfelde, the wiry, chilly stripling learned the code of selfless devotion to duty and class. At 17, Rundstedt became a lieutenant.

When World War I began, Rundstedt was a captain in command of a company, led his men "with great distinction" in small engagements in the Vosges. By November 1914, he was a major and back with the General Staff, the heart and mind of the German Army. There he stayed for the rest of the war, serving on the Russian front, in Turkey and under the Crown Prince at Verdun. The Crown Prince's memoirs call Rundstedt balanced, calm, efficient. Against Petain at Verdun the Crown Prince and his staff vainly hurled half a million men, and probably lost the war. Much later, in November 1942, Rundstedt was to have the pleasure of telling Marshal Petain that he was taking over all of France.

When Germany collapsed, Rundstedt was included in the brilliant little band of officers whom brilliant General Hans von Seeckt had chosen to rebuild the Reichswehr. Like most Junker, Rundstedt looked cross-eyed at the Weimar Republic, but he said little. Instead, he spent his time studying the true causes of Germany's defeat, concluded that the Allies' economic resources had been too much for Germany.

The Soldier v. Politicians. In 1923 the workers of Thuringia attempted to set up a Communist regime. Colonel Rundstedt acted with vigor: Reichswehr machine guns put down the Communists.

In 1932 his good friend, Kurt von Schleicher, Germany's most political general, gave Rundstedt a boost up the ladder making him commander of Group Command I (Berlin). As such he arrested Prussia's Socialist President Braun and Interior Minister Karl Severing, on the orders of wily Franz von Papen, who became Chancellor after Heinrich Bruening had failed to save the Republic. Rundstedt told the people of Berlin that he would be "as mild as possible" if his wishes were obeyed. The people obeyed.

Having jailed Prussians of the legitimate Government, Rundstedt joined the anti-Papen clique, helped make his old friend Schleicher Chancellor. The generals hoped to inaugurate a blissful period of Army rule. But the little man in the trench coat, now the adored leader of faceless millions, was waiting for the generals at history's crossroads. Schleicher lasted 60 days. Then Adolf Hitler surged into office. The Third Reich became a fact. Rundstedt, who had never troubled to conceal his patrician contempt for Hitler and the Nazis, often spoke of Storm Troopers as "brown filth."* But he now stopped his visible political dabbling, concentrated on German rearmament.

During Hitler's Blood Purge, Rundstedt said nothing when the Nazis murdered Schleicher and his wife, disposed of Roehm and those who thought the Army should knuckle under to the Storm Troopers. The purge of the Storm Troopers was the price that Hitler paid for the Wehrmacht's alliance. Silence was the price the Junker paid for Hitler's services.

The Marshal. In 1939 Rundstedt captured Warsaw. Next year he won a marshal's baton for his masterly conduct of the breakthrough at Sedan and the subsequent race to the English Channel.

When the invasion of Russia began, Rundstedt received command of an Army Group. His job was to overrun the Ukraine, and he did his job better than either of his colleagues in the center and the north. When winter came and a disappointed Hitler assumed direction of the war, Rundstedt was hustled off to France to prepare for possible British invasion. For two years he built his fortifications and trained his none-too-ample forces. He stopped the Dieppe raid. He failed to stop the invasion of Normandy. He also disagreed sharply with Hitler's favorite Rommel, was relieved of his command one month after Dday.

Rumors began to fly. Rundstedt was ill. He was well but under house arrest. He had sent his trusted aide, Lieut. Colonel von Harbour, to Lisbon to deal with Allied diplomats. The SS had caught and shot Harbour. Rundstedt had lost all hope of winning the war, had made contact with General von Seydlitz and Moscow's League of German Officers. But rumors about Rundstedt were nothing new.

Last week the Nazis said that Stauffenberg first took a bomb in Hitler's conference room the day that Rundstedt relinquished his command, but left again without exploding it. Had the Junker taken Rundstedt's removal as a signal that the time had come to strike against the Nazis? Three months ago Allied intelligence officers had heard reports of a Wehrmacht coup in the making. Rumors linked Rundstedt's name with men like Finance Wizard Hjalmar Schacht, onetime Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath, Baron von Weizsacker, Ambassador to the Vatican, former Oberbuergermeister Karl Goerdeler of Leipzig and numerous less well-known diplomatic, industrial and old-time Government figures.

In the light of Rundstedt's known dislike for: 1) the Nazis; 2) intuitive civilian direction of the war; 3) the risk of the destruction of the Wehrmacht if Germany was defeated, observers found it easy to credit whispered stories that Germany's No. 1 soldier was no longer loyal to Hitler. Once again, a strong wind was blowing from Tauroggen.

But the mills of the gods were grinding exceedingly small. This time the Junker conspirators had underestimated the striking power and cunning of the little man in the trench coat.

The Executioner. "I make use of the ruling class," Hitler had shouted at Hermann Rauschning long ago. "I keep them in fear and dependence. I am confident that I shall have no more willing helpers. And if they become refractory, I can resort to the ancient, classical method and . . . kill off the former ruling class."

Stauffenberg's bomb was no time bomb, but it dinned into Adolf Hitler's ears what time it was on history's relentless clock. The Junker felt that opportunism, the chief bond between them and Naziism now bound them to depose Hitler. For the time being Hitler restored the bond by a number of judicious hangings.

Hitler set up the Court of Honor to indict the Wehrmacht conspirators, used his People's Court to degrade the indicted by a civilian trial. With a mocking bow to the Army, Hitler named Rundstedt to a seat on the Court of Honor. The plebeian was still using the patrician.

Did Rundstedt send Field Marshal von Witzleben, Colonel General Erich Hoepner, Major General Helmuth Stieff, Count Yorck von Wartenburg and the others to the gallows because he had no choice? Did he hope to shield other Wehrmacht generals by acting as the grand inquisitor? When known, the answers to these questions will form an interesting page of history. But they do not alter the fact that the Junker and the Nazis are both very close to the end of their respective ropes. Nor the fact that Germany is now a land divided against itself -- although still held together by the frame of the gallows.

/- This week Seydlitz' former commander, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, silent since his capture at Stalingrad, declared: "The war is lost for Germany. . . . Because of the state and military leadership of Hitler ... the war has been transformed into a senseless bloodshed."

* Hitler himself once confided to Hermann Rauschning that the Brown Shirts were bandy-legged incompetent rabble.

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