The Sons of Hitler’s Generals Who Joined West Germany’s New Army JJ
In 1967, the West German army appointed a new Inspector of Panzer Troops, the officer responsible for its tank forces. His name was Heinz Günther Guderian. A generation earlier, his father had helped build Hitler’s panzer force, led it across Europe, and later became inspector general of its armoured troops.
Now the son held a comparable post in the army of democratic West Germany. But his was not the first case. The Bundeswehr’s first generation had already come from Hitler’s Wehrmacht; now the sons of its most famous commanders were joining too. How West Germany Rebuilt an Army From Hitler’s Officers On 12 November 1955, in a former barracks in Bonn, a hundred and one men in plain civilian coats received their appointment papers from the defence minister, Theodor Blank. Ninety-five were officers and six were sergeants.
The date was chosen with care — the two hundredth birthday of Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the Prussian reformer who had once rebuilt a beaten army from nothing. Ten years after the Reich was destroyed, West Germany had an army again. The hard question was who would lead it. As the Cold War intensified, the Western Allies wanted a West German force inside NATO, but the only Germans with real command experience had earned it in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
Planning had begun in secret in 1950, when former Wehrmacht officers met at the Himmerod monastery and drafted a blueprint for the new army. Even famous wartime commanders were consulted — among them Erich von Manstein, one of Hitler’s best-known field marshals. Rearmament was fought bitterly at home. Many Germans, worn out by one war, wanted no part in building another army; their slogan was ohne mich — “without me.
” But Chancellor Konrad Adenauer pushed it through, because an army was the price of West Germany’s place in the Western alliance. Two men stood at the centre of the rebuilt force. Adolf Heusinger had been the operations chief of the German army’s high command for most of the war, and was standing beside Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair when the July 1944 bomb went off.
Hans Speidel had been a senior staff officer in occupied France. In 1955 both put on the new uniform and became the Bundeswehr’s first full generals — Heusinger soon led the whole force, and Speidel took command of NATO’s ground troops in central Europe. They were not exceptions. By 1959, more than twelve thousand of the army’s roughly fifteen thousand professional officers were former Wehrmacht men, and every one of its first forty-four generals had worn the old uniform.
Its constitution was new; much of its senior officer corps was not. These men became the founding generation of the West German army. Soon they were joined by the actual sons of commanders whose names had filled the war’s headlines. Guderian’s Son and the Job His Father Held Few German military names were more closely tied to tank warfare than Guderian.
Heinz Guderian had built Germany’s armoured force in the 1930s, led it through the opening victories of the war, and finished as the army’s chief of the general staff. To the public he was the man who made the Blitzkrieg work. Less well known was that his son had entered the same branch of service. Heinz Günther Guderian was born in Goslar in 1914.
He entered the army as an officer cadet in 1933 and was commissioned two years later. He was wounded twice during the Battle of France in 1940, graduated from the General Staff College in 1942, and served in a string of armoured staff posts before becoming operations officer of the 116th Panzer Division — the Greyhounds — in 1944. When the fighting ended he was taken prisoner, and he was not released until 1947.
Heinz Guderian was dismissed by Hitler in the final weeks of the fighting and surrendered to the Americans. He was held for three years, released without charge, and died in 1954. There was no German army for the son to rejoin until the Bundeswehr was established in 1955. In 1956, Heinz Günther Guderian returned to uniform, commanding a tank battalion, then a tank brigade.
He climbed steadily — colonel in 1960, brigadier general in 1963, major general in 1968. By the late 1960s he had risen high enough for one of the army’s leading armoured posts. In 1967, he was appointed Inspector of Panzer Troops. The position closely resembled the armoured inspectorate his father had held under Hitler.
He remained in the post until his retirement in 1974, and for those seven years he helped shape how West Germany’s armoured forces were trained, organised, and equipped. His father had readied an armoured force for conquest; the son readied a NATO force to defend West Germany against the Soviet Union his father had invaded.
He later wrote a history of his old wartime division, and lived until 2004, dying at the age of ninety. Two Field Marshals’ Sons in a New Uniform Guderian’s son was the sharpest case, but not the only one. Walter Model had been one of Hitler’s most relentless commanders, a field marshal repeatedly sent to stabilise fronts that were already close to collapse.
In April 1945, his army encircled in the Ruhr, Model took his own life rather than surrender. He left behind a teenage son named Hansgeorg. Hansgeorg Model had been pulled into the war at its very end, entering the Wehrmacht as an officer cadet in December 1944. As an infant he had been baptised by Martin Niemöller, the pastor who became one of the regime’s most prominent prisoners.
In 1955 he went looking for his father. Walter Model lay in a hasty forest grave in the Ruhr, where he had died; his son found it and had the body reburied in the German war cemetery at Vossenack, in the Hürtgen Forest. A year later, in 1956, he joined the Bundeswehr and made a full career of it. He commanded a mechanised infantry brigade in Hamburg, later headed an army signals office, and retired in 1987 as a brigadier general.
It was a far less dramatic career than his father’s — three decades of commands and staff posts in a peacetime democratic army. Another famous field marshal’s family had its own link to the Bundeswehr. Erich von Manstein — the German commander many Allied officers considered the most dangerous of the war — was convicted of war crimes by a British court in 1949 and released in 1953.
Within a few years he was advising the West German government on how to rebuild its forces. The father helped design the new army from the outside — and one of his sons would serve inside it. That son was Rüdiger. His elder brother Gero had been killed on the Eastern Front in 1942; Rüdiger, born in 1929, served in the new army only as a reserve officer, reaching lieutenant colonel.
His role in the new army was slight. He had more influence over how his father would be remembered: he kept the family’s papers, and in 1981 helped publish a volume of the field marshal’s postwar writings. The Son Who Refused, and the Long Reckoning Not every general’s son entered the Bundeswehr.
Manfred Rommel was the only child of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel — the Desert Fox, the one German commander the Allies openly admired. In October 1944, Erwin Rommel was forced to take his own life over his suspected links to the plot against Hitler. His son, by then a teenager manning an anti-aircraft gun, left his unit in the war’s final months and gave himself up to French forces.
When West Germany built its army, Manfred Rommel did not join it. He went into civilian politics instead, rose through the Christian Democratic Union, and served for more than twenty years as the mayor of Stuttgart — known for tolerance, dry humour, and his friendships with the sons of the Allied generals who had once fought his father.
The most celebrated name in the Wehrmacht passed not into the new army, but into a democratic city hall. After his death in 2013, the city’s airport was renamed in his honour. The Bundeswehr had been created explicitly to be different from the Wehrmacht. Its founders built it around a new idea they called Innere Führung — inner leadership — shaped by reformers such as Wolf Graf von Baudissin and Ulrich de Maizière.
The soldier was to be a citizen in uniform, answerable to his conscience and the constitution, not an instrument of the state. Yet elements of the old army remained embedded in the new one. Many of the officers who shaped the new institution had served in the Wehrmacht, and the barracks bore the names of Wehrmacht commanders. The wartime records of some of them were also hard to ignore.
Adolf Heusinger, the Bundeswehr’s first Inspector General, had initialled wartime orders that stripped legal protection from captured Soviet officials; in the early 1960s, while he chaired NATO’s military committee, Moscow publicly demanded his extradition, accusing him of responsibility for civilian deaths during anti-partisan operations. He was never tried, and he retired with honours.
Heinz Günther Guderian retired in 1974, Hansgeorg Model in 1987. By then the Bundeswehr had become a genuinely different institution — but it had never fully resolved how to handle the men, traditions, and reputations it had taken over from the Wehrmacht. The issue returned sharply in 2017, when a young officer was arrested in a far-right plot and the inquiry that followed found Wehrmacht relics still on display in Bundeswehr barracks.
The next year the defence ministry reaffirmed that the Wehrmacht as an institution could not serve as a source of tradition for the Bundeswehr, and that a figure from that era could be honoured only if his life showed something beyond skill in battle.
Old names began to come down from barracks gates; one base honouring an Imperial-era general was renamed for a sergeant killed in Afghanistan. But one name survived. The base at Augustdorf is still the Rommel Barracks, named for the Desert Fox — the father Manfred Rommel had buried, and pointedly never followed into uniform. The men who had served Hitler were long gone. What they left behind, their country is still sorting out.
Thanks for watching. If you found this video insightful, watch “Hitler Promoted 12 Field Marshals in One Day — What Happened to Them?” next — the story of the famous field marshal ceremony of 19 July 1940. Like this video, subscribe, and hit the bell for more History Inside.
