Kleist, Field Marshal (Paul L.) Ewald von

Kleist, Field Marshal (Paul L.) Ewald von (1881–1954),German Army officer who during the First World War served as a staff officer and at the front, and who rose to command Army Group A during the German–Soviet war.

Promoted lt-general in August 1936, Kleist retired in February 1938, but was recalled the following August to command 22nd Corps, part of List's Fourteenth Army. The corps performed well in the Polish campaign and in February 1940 Kleist was given command of three panzer corps (including Guderian's 19th Corps) which played the crucial role in the Germans' western offensive of May 1940 (see FALL GELB).

Kleist was promoted general in July 1940 and his First Panzer Group, as his command was now designated, invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 (see Balkan campaign) and was part of Bock's Army Group Centre when the USSR was invaded that June (see BARBAROSSA). The group's success around Kiev delighted Hitler who redesignated it First Panzer Army in October 1941 when it was transferred to Army Group South (Army Groups A and B from July 1942). In May 1942 Kleist, in temporary command of what was to become Army Group A (First Panzer Army and Seventeenth Army), played a major role in the Kharkov battle of May 1942, before returning to command the First Panzer Army which spearheaded the German thrust towards the Caucasus that summer. When this offensive petered out List, the commander of Army Group A, was sacked and Hitler took direct control himself, but on 21 November gave command of it to Kleist. By then the position of Army Group A, isolated in the Caucasus, was precarious indeed.

But Kleist proved equal to the task of avoiding encirclement and destruction, and in February 1943 he was promoted field marshal as a reward for his generalship. His attitude towards the local population did much to ensure his Army Group's survival during this time. The previous September he had remarked on the vast hordes of people in the occupied areas, and had added: ‘We're lost if we don't win them over.’ He therefore ignored Hitler's orders to treat them as Untermenschen (sub-humans) and had on his staff experts who advised him on how best to gain their co-operation. Many in the occupied areas were anti-Stalinist and when sympathetically treated they joined the Germans in their tens of thousands (see deportations and Soviet exiles at war).

Kleist remained in the Kuban until September 1943 before being allowed to withdraw across the Kerch straits to the Crimea (see Black Sea). But his clashes with Hitler over the conduct of the war culminated in Kleist's threatening to override Hitler's orders if he were not allowed to withdraw his depleted forces from behind the River Bug. Having no alternative, Hitler acquiesced. But he abhorred the field marshal's policy of treating local populations humanely, his open disdain for the Nazis, and his independent outlook, and on 30 March Kleist was dismissed, and went into retirement.

In 1946 Kleist was tried in Yugoslavia for war crimes and was given a fifteen-year sentence. Two years later he was extradited to the USSR and was charged with alienating local Soviet populations ‘through mildness and kindness’ ( C. Davis, Von Kleist: From Hussar to Panzer Marshal, Houston, Texas, 1979, p. 26), and spent the rest of his life in a Soviet prison.

Bibliography

Mitcham, S. , Hitler's Field Marshals and their Battles (London, 1988).