Leeb, Field Marshal Wilhelm, Ritter von

Leeb, Field Marshal Wilhelm, Ritter von (1876–1956),anti-Nazi German officer who fought with great bravery during the First World War. An authority on defensive warfare, he rose quickly in rank and by 1934 was a lt-general. Hitler found him ‘an incorrigible anti-Nazi’ and he was one of sixteen high-ranking German army officers forced into retirement in January 1938.

However, during the Czechoslovakian crisis of August 1938 (see origins of the war) Leeb, who had been promoted general on retirement, was recalled and given command of Twelfth Army, part of which occupied the Sudetenland after the Munich agreement. He then went back into retirement, but was again recalled in September 1939, this time to command Army Group C which faced the Maginot Line from Luxembourg southwards.

From the time Hitler first proposed a western offensive in the autumn of 1939 (see FALL GELB) Leeb bitterly opposed it. He argued that if the Germans were to violate Belgium's neutrality again every civilized country would turn against them. He therefore supported Halder's proposed coup against Hitler, and tried to persuade the Cs-in-C of the other two army groups to join in resigning with him, but without success.

When FALL GELB was finally launched on 10 May 1940, Leeb's defeat of the French in Alsace-Lorraine brought him promotion to field marshal that July. Army Group C became Army Group North for the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) and despite slow progress on occasions—Leeb was unaccustomed to handling panzer formations—by September he was close to capturing Leningrad. But then Hitler ordered him to starve it into surrender instead, ‘one of the greatest tactical blunders of the war’ ( S. Mitcham, Hitler's Field Marshals and Their Battles, London, 1988, p. 141). In January 1942, after the Red Army had launched a large counter-offensive against his Army Group (see German–Soviet war, 3) Leeb requested permission to withdraw from the Leningrad area in order to shorten his lines of communication and establish a coherent defensive line. Hitler refused and Leeb asked to be relieved. This was granted, and he was never re-employed. In October 1948 he was sentenced by an Allied military court to three years' imprisonment for minor war crimes. Ritter is a German hereditary knighthood.