FIELD MARSHALS OF THE REICH: EXCEPTIONAL CAREERS

For the first time in the French language, this volume presents the biographies of the twenty-eight field marshals and indispensable figures of the Second World War. With nearly three hundred archival images and photographs, this album offers a synthesis of the great commanders of the Wehrmacht, from its resurgence in the mid-1930s to its collapse in 1945.

From 1804 to 1815, Napoleon elevated twenty-six generals to the rank of Marshal, eighteen of them at once in June 1804. Just over a century later, from 1936 to 1945, Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich, did likewise with twenty-seven generals, twelve of them in July 1940. But the similarities end there. While the marshals of the First French Empire were fully associated with the glory of the Empire and entered into Napoleonic legend, those of the Third Reich, marked by the stamp of the Hitlerian regime, have fallen into oblivion.

Beyond Rommel (the "desert hero," immortalised several times on screen), Göring (Hitler's principal lieutenant), Paulus (because of Stalingrad), Dönitz (Hitler's successor), or perhaps Manstein (the strategist) and Keitel (the man who signed the surrender of German forces in May 1945) — who today still remembers the field marshals of the Reich?

Present for the most part in the major dictionaries published in the aftermath of the war, the field marshals of the Reich have disappeared from subsequent publications, and some do not even appear in specialist dictionaries. Apart from Rommel, Göring, Dönitz and Manstein, none has been the subject of biographies written or translated into our language.