The Devil's General

Book excerpt: A detailed military biography of the most highly decorated Nazi regimental commander in WWII. The most highly decorated German regimental commander of World War II, Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz first won the Iron Cross in the Great War. He was serving with the 1st Panzer Division when the Polish campaign inaugurated World War II. Strachwitz’s exploits as commander of a panzer battalion during the French campaign earned him further decorations before he transferred to the newly formed 16th Panzer Division. There, he participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia and then Operation Barbarossa, where he earned the Knight’s Cross. At Stalingrad, he reached the Volga and fought on the northern rim of Sixth Army’s perimeter. Severely wounded during battle, he was flown out of the Stalingrad pocket and was thus spared the fate of the rest of Sixth Army. Upon recuperation, he was named commander of the Grossdeutschland Division’s panzer regiment and won the Swords to the Knight’s Cross during Manstein’s counteroffensive at Kharkov. Wounded twelve times during the war, and barely surviving a lethal car crash, Strachwitz finally surrendered to the Americans in May 1945. Historian Raymond Bagdonas, though impaired by the disappearance of 16th Panzer Division’s official records at Stalingrad, and the fact that many of the Panzer Graf’s later battlegroups never kept them, has written a vividly detailed account of this combat leader’s life, as well as ferocious armored warfare in World War II.