Field Marshal Model – Hitler's "Fireman"

France, Ukraine, Belarus, Moscow, Kursk, Leningrad, Warsaw, Market-Garden, Aachen, the Ardennes, the Ruhr: Walter Model was present in every campaign of the Third Reich.

Known for his fanatical devotion to Hitler — who had brought him into the team he assembled at the turning point of the war to replace the traditional officer corps — this hard, rough and blunt soldier rose with meteoric speed: a general in 1941, he distinguished himself at the head of an armoured division, then of an army in 1942–1943. Appointed field marshal and Manstein's successor at the head of an army group, he conducted numerous defensive battles as far as the Vistula. Finally sent as a "fireman" to the West after the Normandy landings, he succeeded in re-establishing a front at the German border. Regarded as the finest defensive tactician of the Wehrmacht, he distinguished himself above all by his uncompromising fanaticism — which embodied the blind devotion of the Nazi regime's servants, including their extreme harshness, sometimes described as sadism, towards their own men. A major war criminal, whose responsibilities in the USSR are here demonstrated for the first time without the slightest ambiguity, he shot himself on 21 April 1945 after the capitulation of his encircled forces in the Ruhr, fully aware that his systematic atrocities on a massive scale would not be forgiven by the victor.

A seasoned expert on the period, and drawing on the subject's personal papers as well as hitherto little-explored archives, Daniel Feldmann brilliantly reconstructs the paroxysmal career of a soldier who became a war criminal.

Daniel Feldmann, a strategy consultant and doctoral candidate at the EHESS, co-authored the first biography of Montgomery in French, as well as an innovative study of the 1945 campaign in the West. He is also the author, published by Perrin, of the work They Led the Allies to Victory.