Hermann Hoth

• 1. Introduction

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  Hermann Hoth was sentenced to 15 years in prison in October 1948 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, yet just six years later he walked free on parole. By the time he died in Goslar in January 1971, he had spent his final decades writing books and articles that helped build the myth of a clean Wehrmacht - a military untouched by the crimes of the Nazi state. The contradiction is stark. Historians considered Hoth one of the most gifted armoured commanders of the Second World War. His 3rd Panzer Group raced through Soviet border defenses in 1941, trapping hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers. His 4th Panzer Army fought at Stalingrad, at Kharkov, at Kursk. And all the while, in the same territories where his tanks rolled, units under his direct command murdered prisoners of war, Jewish civilians, and anyone suspected of partisan sympathies. How did a man shaped by Prussia's military academies become both a celebrated tactician and a convicted war criminal? And how did he spend his later years trying to erase the history he had helped make?

• 2. A Prussian Foundation

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  Neuruppin, the town where Hoth was born on the 14th of April 1885, stood in Prussia, and so did Demmin, where he grew up. His father was a Prussian staff officer surgeon, and the family's world was framed by uniform and rank from the start. Hoth entered the Cadet Corps at Potsdam and then the Royal Prussian Military Academy, completing his training there in 1904. He later recognised that this education had instilled in him a deep authority bias - something he acknowledged he never entirely shed. The cadets were also taught to reject social democracy, a lesson that would shape his politics for decades.

  His early military rise was slow. Commissioned as a Leutnant in 1903, he was not appointed Oberleutnant until 1912. At the Prussian Staff College from 1910 to 1913, he learned Russian - a skill that would define his first wartime assignment. His first son, Hans Joachim, was born in 1913, and by 1914, Hoth held a position at the German General Staff.

  World War I left deep marks on him without exposing him to much of its front-line violence. He spent almost all of the conflict in staff positions and only four weeks on the front line. Assigned to the 8th Army on the Eastern Front in August 1914 because of his Russian-language skills, he witnessed the Russian invasion of East Prussia that year. He came away believing the Russians waged war with what he called "bestial cruelty". He served under Paul von Hindenburg, including during the Battle of Tannenberg, and developed a lasting admiration for him. When Germany surrendered in 1918, Hoth felt more loyalty to Hindenburg than to the new democratic government in Berlin. That same year he married Lola Schubering, and his second son, Hermann, was born in 1923.

• 3. Embracing the New Order

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  Through the 1920s, Hoth remained in the Reichswehr, serving in the General Staff's organization department and rising to Major in 1924. In 1927, the army sent him to the Soviet Union on secret military cooperation missions. His promotion to Oberstleutnant followed in 1929. At this point in his career, Hoth had little interest in the Nazi Party, even viewing its activities as disruptive to the military.

  The 1930 German federal election changed his outlook. When the Nazi Party became the second-strongest political force in Germany, Hoth began to view Hitler's nationalist ambitions with approval. He was particularly struck by the Nazis' attention to workers, which he found unusual for a right-wing party. Like officers such as Heinz Guderian and Georg-Hans Reinhardt, Hoth hoped a Nazi-led government would let him push through his ideas on motorization and armoured warfare.

  His transition was not frictionless. After Hitler's seizure of power, Hoth - by then an Oberst - criticized the murder of Communists and Social Democrats in Braunschweig, which led to his transfer to Lubeck. According to his own account, he then spent the following years studying Nazi ideology in some depth. Historian Johannes Hurter noted this was quite unusual among senior German officers, most of whom believed they could remain apolitical. Hoth came to generally approve of the Nazi Party's aims and achievements, though he expressed some disquiet about the persecution of German Jews. He concluded, however, that the fate of Jews mattered less to him than the elimination of Communism and the restoration of Germany's standing in the world.

  He was promoted to Generalmajor in 1934, Generalleutnant in 1936, and General der Infanterie in 1938. That same year he led the 18th Infantry Division during the occupation of Sudetenland.

• 4. The Western Campaigns

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  In 1938, Hoth was given command of the XV Motorised Corps, which he led during the invasion of Poland the following year. The corps included two "light" divisions - mixed formations of tanks, infantry, and artillery. By the 4th of September 1939, his corps had routed three Polish divisions belonging to Operational Group Kielce and broken through toward the industrial center of Kielce. Historian Robert Forczyk described Hoth as a "hard-charging" commander during this campaign, and he received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his performance. Hoth believed his corps had "exceeded high expectations", though its light divisions were subsequently transformed into panzer divisions for the Western campaign, possibly because they had suffered "unnecessarily high losses".

  The invasion of France in May 1940 showcased what Hoth's armour could do on terrain suited to it. The initial German advance through the Ardennes placed Guderian's XIX Motorised Corps on the left and Hoth's corps on the right, the latter consisting of the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions. The 7th was commanded at this time by Generalmajor Erwin Rommel. Tasked with capturing Meuse crossings near Dinant, Hoth's forces secured two bridgeheads there on the 12th and the 13th of May, exploiting the disorganization of local French Army units. By the 14th and the 15th of May, the corps had broken out of the bridgeheads and was pushing into the left flank of the French 9th Army. French counter-attacks near Maubeuge on the 18th of May temporarily threatened the advance but ultimately failed, and Cambrai fell to Hoth's corps. Arras followed on the 21st of May. On the 27th of May, in the Battle of Dunkirk, the corps broke through the British Expeditionary Force's defensive line at La Bassee Canal, helping encircle the French 1st Army at Lille.

  On the 6th and the 7th of June, Hoth's divisions achieved a major breakthrough at Airaines and Forges-les-Eaux, effectively splitting the French 10th Army in two. After capturing Airaines, soldiers of the XV Corps murdered French prisoners of war, among them black colonial soldiers including Charles N'Tchorerere. The corps then pushed on to occupy Rouen and encircle a large Allied force at Saint-Valery-en-Caux, capturing about 10,000 British soldiers. Hoth's successes made him one of the Wehrmacht's most popular generals, and in July 1940, as part of what one account describes as an "orgy of promotions" by Hitler, he was elevated to Generaloberst.

• 5. Operation Barbarossa: Advance and Atrocity

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  Hoth commanded the 3rd Panzer Group when Operation Barbarossa began in 1941. The group fielded 626 tanks at the offensive's start, spread across four panzer divisions, three motorized divisions, and four infantry divisions. In his diaries, Hoth expressed no doubts about the invasion. He believed Russia had been overtaken by what he called "Jewish Bolshevism", which had transformed it into an expansionist, Asiatic, and despotic state set on a collision course with Germany. Historian Hurter argued that these beliefs showed remarkable similarities with Hitler's own.

  In the early stages, the 3rd Panzer Group broke through Soviet border defenses with relative ease. Together with Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group, it encircled Minsk, trapping 300,000 Red Army soldiers and capturing or destroying 2,500 tanks. Hoth secured vital crossings of the Daugava river on the 3rd and the 4th of July, and his group's breakthrough at the Daugava-Dnieper line allowed for the encirclement of three Soviet armies. His forces captured Vitebsk before moving on Smolensk, nearly outrunning their supply lines but keeping going by drawing on captured Soviet fuel depots.

  As the Wehrmacht advanced, questions about the treatment of suspected Red Army soldiers in civilian clothing reached Hoth's level. He ordered his officers to carry out limited examinations, and if they concluded a prisoner had been a Red Army soldier, that prisoner was to be shot. The 3rd Panzer Group also implemented the Commissar Order - the directive to execute Soviet political officers. After the war, Hoth was the only German general to admit he had agreed with the order, on the grounds that commissars could not be regarded as regular soldiers. Reports from subordinate units confirmed the order was carried out on a widespread basis.

  By September 1941, the constant fighting had reduced the 3rd Panzer Group to about 250 tanks from its original 626. During Operation Typhoon, the offensive aimed at Moscow, Hoth's force and the 9th Army came within 60 km of Vyazma before being stopped by counter-attacks ordered by General Ivan Konev on the 3rd of October. On the 6th of October, Hoth was able to restart the advance and seal the Vyazma-Bryansk pockets. He was then redirected north to capture Rzhev and Kalinin, effectively removing his force from the Battle of Moscow.

• 6. Command of the 17th Army

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  On the 9th of October 1941, Hoth was appointed commander of the 17th Army in Ukraine. The previous commander, Carl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel, had been criticized for "timid leadership". Army Group North commander Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb had described Hoth as "intelligent, deliberate, good mind for operational questions, leads very well". Hoth asked to stay with the 3rd Panzer Group, and Fedor von Bock also objected to losing what he called an "outstanding armoured commander", but the transfer proceeded regardless.

  Hoth was an active and vocal supporter of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. In November 1941, he issued an order of the day that opened with a lengthy discussion of history decrying Jewish influence on Europe, before extolling German victories as part of a mission to save European culture from what he called "Asiatic barbarism" and promising the complete "annihilation" of the Soviet Union. The order directed troops to exterminate, "immediately and pitilessly", any sign of active or passive resistance or "machinations on the part of Jewish-Bolshevik agitators". Researcher Marcel Stein argued the order "can cast doubt upon Hoth's sanity" and was "full of repetitive venom and hatred". Researcher Linden Lyons read in it Hoth's tendency to blame the German national trauma of World War I on Jewish Bolshevism, as well as an attempt to outdo the extremity of a similar order issued by Walter von Reichenau.

  Under Hoth's command, units of the 17th Army participated in the hunt for and murder of Jews in its territory of control. Hoth provided the Einsatzgruppen death squads with even more support than his predecessor had. In December 1941, Sonderkommando 4b and Einsatzkommando 6 initiated a series of massacres in the 17th Army's rear areas in the Donbas, killing thousands of civilians. On the 14th of December 1941, the Sicherheitsdienst murdered 1,224 Jews and 93 other prisoners at Artemovsk, in an area under Hoth's command; at his later trial, he admitted he had been informed of the killing.

  Hoth also ordered his soldiers to shoot any civilians found in the woods, as potential partisans, and agreed with orders for the mass requisitioning of food despite the starvation this caused in occupied cities. At the same time, he ordered his troops not to treat Ukraine as a colony, believing Ukrainians would become part of the new order in Europe.

• 7. Stalingrad and the Turning Point

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  In the Second Battle of Kharkov in May 1942, Hoth took over as commander of the 4th Panzer Army on the 15th of May. As part of Case Blue, the German summer offensive in the southern Soviet Union, his army broke through Soviet defensive lines of the Bryansk Front on the 28th of June 1942. By the 5th of July, the army had reached the Don River and assaulted Voronezh, quickly securing most of the city. A Soviet counter-offensive led by Alexander Lizyukov threatened to retake it, but by the 15th of July the attack had been repulsed.

  Hitler's subsequent decisions pulled Hoth's force in different directions. The 4th Panzer Army was redirected to support Army Group A in the Donbas rather than pressing toward Stalingrad, then the majority of its forces were transferred to assist the 6th Army. By the 31st of July, most of the 4th Panzer Army had been reassigned. Hoth attempted a flanking approach to Stalingrad from the south-west through the Kalmyk Steppe, but the encirclement attempt had failed by the 11th of August; he had too few forces to overcome the increasingly effective Soviet defenses. By the time the 4th Panzer Army linked up with the 6th Army and reached Stalingrad's outskirts, it was, in one description, a "panzer army in name" with just one weakened tank corps.

  Hoth was one of the few German commanders who anticipated that a Soviet attack from south of Stalingrad could threaten the 6th Army's survival. His warnings about the southern flank were largely ignored. In October 1942, Hitler ordered him to transfer his last full tank division to the 6th Army. By the 12th of November, Hoth had observed Soviet forces massing opposite his positions. Operation Uranus began on the 19th of November with a major Soviet attack on the Romanian Third Army in the north; the south followed, and the 6th Army was encircled at Stalingrad, as was half of Hoth's own force.

  Hoth outlined a relief plan called Operation Winter Storm and presented it on the 3rd of December. His understrength force began the attempt on the 12th of December under the overall command of Erich von Manstein's Army Group Don. Stalled at Verkhnekumsky until the 15th of December, the relief column could not reach the pocket before Operation Little Saturn - launched on the 16th of December by three Soviet armies - threatened Army Group Don's flank. By the 25th of December, Operation Winter Storm had failed. Hoth's forces were forced to retreat 600 km into eastern Ukraine.

• 8. Conviction, Release, and Denial

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  Hoth was tried at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in the High Command Trial. He faced four counts, including crimes against peace, war crimes against prisoners of war, crimes against humanity against civilians, and participation in a common plan to commit such crimes. At trial, he attempted to recast his November 1941 order as targeting only "Bolshevik-Jewish resistance" and insisted his troops had executed their orders with "clean hands". He claimed any Jews who died were killed because of their alleged connection to crimes against German forces. He argued he had been "compelled" to transmit the Commissar Order, even though he later admitted he agreed with it, and maintained that his troops would somehow have sensed his disapproval without him ever expressing it. His attorney submitted 92 affidavits attesting to his good character.

  The tribunal was not persuaded. It noted the Artemovsk massacre of the 14th of December 1941, which Hoth admitted knowing about, and concluded that he was fully aware of the SD's murders of Jews while the 17th Army continued handing prisoners to the SD. The tribunal found clear evidence that he had transmitted the Commissar Order with full knowledge and approval, and that he had been aware of the execution of hundreds of captured commissars. A report by the 17th Army's chief quartermaster, dated the 25th of November 1941, had outlined cases of murder, deliberate starvation, and the use of POWs as human shields; the tribunal found that Hoth had made no effort to counteract these conditions and had in some cases approved them. He had also ordered POWs to be used for forced labour and as ammunition loaders.

  On the 27th of October 1948, Hoth was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he served at Landsberg am Lech. He maintained his innocence throughout. A review of his sentence in January 1951 made no changes, but he was released on parole in April 1954, and his sentence was reduced to time served in 1957.

  After settling in Goslar, Hoth wrote Panzer-Operationen in 1956, later translated into English as Panzer Operations: Germany's Panzer Group 3 During the Invasion of Russia, 1941. He worked closely with Fritz Bayerlein and several former SS officers to assist Paul Carell - a wartime German propagandist - in writing Unternehmen Barbarossa, published in 1963. The book supported the myth of the clean Wehrmacht and ignored the Holocaust. Historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies later described the English translation, Hitler Moves East: 1941-1943, as portraying the "Wehrmacht as heroes" fighting "the Asiatic hordes of Communism" while blaming atrocities solely on Hitler. From 1965, Hoth maintained close contacts with Ulrich de Maiziere, then Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, who publicly praised him. Hoth died in Goslar on the 25th of January 1971, and was survived by his wife Lola.