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Death of Walter Von Reichenau - Fanatical Nazi Field Marshal & Hitler's Protegee - World War 2.
At the beginning of the First World War , Walter von Reichenau served as Adjutant of the 1st Guards Field Artillery Regiment before being transferred to the German General Staff. For gallantry in action, he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and 1st Class. However, Reichenau was not only progressively minded but also brutal.
He ordered soldiers, if absent from their post without a valid pass, liberty or leave, to be executed even in times of peace.
The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France
In the new Weimar Republic, which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, Walter von Reichenau was a General Staff officer with the paramilitary Freikorps units.
In 1919 Reichenau joined in the newly established Reichswehr - the German Army - of the Weimar Republic.
In April 1932, Reichenau's uncle, a diplomat and an ardent Nazi, introduced him to Adolf Hitler. Reichenau joined the Nazi Party, although doing so was a violation of the army regulations. Reichenau himself was an anti-Semite who equated Jewry with Bolshevism and a perceived Asian threat to Europe.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933. In New Nazi Germany, Blomberg became Minister of War and Walter von Reichenau was promoted to head the powerful Ministerial Office, acting as liaison officer between the Army and the Nazi Party.
Along with Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, Reichenau belonged to the "terrible triumvirate” that decided who would or would not die during the Night of the Long Knives..
In 1935, Reichenau was promoted to lieutenant general and was also appointed to command the military forces in Munich. In 1936 he participated in the organization of the Olympic Games in Berlin.
For two weeks in August 1936, Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship camouflaged its racist, militaristic character while hosting the Summer Olympics.
In May 1939, Reichenau commanded the German Tenth Army with which he took part in the invasion of Poland which began on the 1st of September 1939 and marked the beginning of the Second World War.
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on Sunday the 22nd of June 1941.
During the invasion, as commander of the 6th Army, Reichenau led his army into the heart of Russia during the summer of 1941.
Von Reichenau, while in command of the 6th Army had issued the notorious Severity Order, also called the Reichenau Order, which supported Nazi genocidal policies and advocated for punishment against the so called “subhuman species” of Jews and the extermination of Jewish Bolshevism in Europe. The order paved the way for mass murder of Jews and encouraged German soldiers to murder Jewish civilians on the Eastern Front.
As commander of the 6th Army, Reichenau bore co-responsibility for massacres in his area.
On the 10th or 11th of August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln the Higher SS and Police Leader of Southern Russia, ordered Paul Blobel, commanding officer of the Sonderkommando 4A, to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine on behalf of Adolf Hitler.
On the 22nd of August 1941, with the consent of Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen murdered betweeen 4,000 and 5,000 Jews.
Due to close contacts between Paul Blobel and Walter von Reichenau, there was also close cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the Sonderkommando in the largest massacre in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II.
On the 29th and 30th of September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, under the guidance of the members of Einsatzgruppe C, murdered a significant number of the Jewish population who remained in Kyiv. This massacre which belongs to one of many mass shootings perpetrated by the Nazi Germans beginning in 1941, occurred at a ravine called Babi Yar or Babyn Yar.
In November 1941 Hitler relieved Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt from his command of Army Group South and promoted Reichenau to take his place.
On the 15th of January 1942 Reichenau collapsed with a severe stroke. When Walter von Reichenau died on the 17th of January 1942, he was 57 years old.
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