Walther Von Reichenau - History

History

Reichenau was born in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg to a Prussian general and joined the German Army in 1903. During World War I he served on the Western Front. He was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and by 1918 had been promoted to the rank of captain.

Reichenau stayed in the army under the Weimar Republic as a General Staff officer. From 1931 he was Chief of Staff to the Inspector of Signals at the Reichswehr Ministry, and later served with General Werner von Blomberg in East Prussia. His uncle, an ardent Nazi, introduced him to Adolf Hitler in 1932 and von Reichenau became a convert, joining the Nazi Party soon after. Doing so was a violation of army regulations, which forbade army members from joining political parties.

Reichenau's family was quite wealthy, descended from a long line of German nobility. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the von Reichenau family owned and operated one of the largest furniture factories in Germany. In 1938, records indicate, the family donated the factory to the Nazi cause, transforming it into a munitions plant. During Allied attacks in 1945, the factory (located just outside Karlsruhe, Germany) was destroyed in an air raid, the last remaining vestiges of the von Reichenau family's wealth and prominence obliterated in the process.

He was married to Alix, daughter of Silesian Count Andreas von Maltzan. During the war, Alix's sister Maria (Marushka) hid her Jewish lover Hans Hirschel from the Gestapo in her Berlin flat; von Reichenau knew this, and visited them there. Maria also worked to hide underground Jews and political dissidents, sustain them, or help them escape from Germany.

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Blomberg became Minister of War and von Reichenau was appointed head of the Ministerial Office, acting as liaison officer between the Army and the Nazi Party. He played a leading role in persuading Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler that the power of Ernst Röhm and the SA must be broken if the Army was to support the Nazi regime. This led directly to the "Night of the Long Knives" of 30 June 1934.

In 1935 von Reichenau was promoted to major-general (generalleutnant) and was appointed Commander in Munich. By 1938, after the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair in which General Werner von Fritsch was forced out of the Army command, von Reichenau was Hitler's first choice to succeed him, but older leaders such as Gerd von Rundstedt and Ludwig Beck refused to serve under him, and Hitler backed down. Von Reichenau's enthusiastic Nazism repelled many of the generals who would not oppose Hitler but who did not care for the Nazi ideology.