The 22nd of June, 1941, before dawn, the silence along Europe’s eastern border was shattered by the roar of artillery and the flash of gunfire. Thousands of guns opened fire at once, lighting the horizon from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. German tanks surged forward through the mist as aircraft swarmed above, and the largest invasion in history began. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union, was underway.
More than three million German soldiers crossed the line into Soviet territory that morning. The campaign was presented as a crusade against Bolshevism, but it was in truth a war of annihilation. Behind the front lines followed the Einsatzgruppen, special units with orders to eliminate entire populations, including Jews, communists, and anyone deemed unworthy of life. The vast territory of the east became a landscape of fire, hunger, and execution.
The man at the center of this story was one of the many professional officers who served the Nazi regime. Erich von Manstein was born on the 26th of July 1891 in the town of Bautzen in the kingdom of Saxony, then part of the German Empire. He grew up in a traditional aristocratic family. His father, Heinrich von Edmansdorff, was a noble royal Saxon administrator and former cavalry captain, while his mother came from an old Saxon noble family.
The household valued duty, discipline, and loyalty to the monarchy. He had a younger brother, Godfried, who also served in the German military and later became a general. On the 1st of October 1910, Edmansdorff entered a Saxon light infantry unit of the German army. His diligence earned him steady promotion, and by August 1912 he had already become an officer.
When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, Edmansdorff was serving as a company officer. His battalion fought on the Western Front, where he was wounded on the 23rd of September 1914. After recovering, he returned to the front and served on both the western and eastern fronts over the next four years. His wartime service earned him several German and Austro-Hungarian decorations.
In 1917, he received the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of St. Henry, one of Saxony’s highest military honors, and by the war’s end, he held both classes of the Iron Cross. After the war, the Kaiser abdicated, and the monarchy was gone. The army that emerged from the ruins of the empire was small and limited by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 men, but it retained the traditions of professionalism and hierarchy.
During the Weimar Republic, Edmansdorff stayed in the army. In 1919, he married Helena Anna Elionore von Burgundorff, who came from an old aristocratic family. Throughout the 1920s, he moved between infantry and cavalry assignments, and he taught tactics at the infantry school in Dresden. When Hitler and the Nazi party took power in 1933, many professional officers, including Edmansdorff, greeted the new government with cautious optimism.
They were not Nazis, but they welcomed the regime’s promise to rebuild the army and restore national pride. The personal oath to Hitler introduced in 1934 bound them not just to the state, but to the Führer himself. By November 1938, Edmansdorff commanded his own regiment. When the Second World War began in September 1939, Edmansdorff led his regiment during the invasion of Poland.
His troops fought in the rapid campaign that crushed the Polish army in a matter of weeks. After the Polish campaign, he served on the Western Front in 1940, and later in the Soviet Union after June 1941. On the eastern front, Edmansdorff commanded an entire division and took part in the great encirclement battles at Białystok, Minsk, and Smolensk, where hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were captured. Conditions for these prisoners were brutal.
Tens of thousands died from hunger, exposure, and neglect. Edmansdorff’s division pushed toward Leningrad, enduring heavy fighting in the forests and marshes of the north. Villages burned, civilians were starved or shot, and entire regions were devastated. For his leadership in holding positions during the winter of 1941 to 1942 against Soviet counterattacks, Edmansdorff was awarded the German Cross in Gold, followed a few months later by the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, one of Nazi Germany’s highest military awards.
In early 1943, he was promoted to Generalleutnant. His experience and reliability made him a typical product of the Wehrmacht’s command system: efficient, loyal, and obedient. But the war was turning. Stalingrad fell to the Soviets in February 1943.
By 1944, Edmansdorff was briefly assigned to command army corps in Norway and was later sent to Yugoslavia. The Balkans were a nightmare for German occupation forces, since from the beginning there was partisan warfare, reprisals, and chaos. At the end of January 1945, Edmansdorff was appointed commanding general of the German Corps stationed in Yugoslavia. One of the units under his command was the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division, Uskok, notorious for its murderous behavior toward civilians.
The victims were shot, slaughtered, tortured, or burnt to death in burning houses. Infants with their mothers, pregnant women, and frail old people were murdered. On one occasion in the settlement of Velikare, a nine-year-old boy was skinned alive by two men. Almost all units under Edmansdorff’s command took part in brutal reprisals against civilians as part of the anti-partisan campaign.
Edmansdorff’s final campaign came in March 1945 during the Lake Balaton offensive in Hungary, one of Hitler’s last desperate attempts to halt the Soviet Red Army. The operation failed disastrously, and the remnants of his corps retreated westward hoping to surrender to the Western Allies. When Nazi Germany capitulated in May 1945, Edmansdorff was captured by the British. On the 4th of June 1945, he was handed over to the Yugoslav authorities, who accused him of responsibility for atrocities committed by German forces in the Balkans.
He was taken to Ljubljana in Slovenia along with three other German generals. There was no formal trial, and the four men were executed by firing squad on the 5th of June 1945. His wife did not learn of his death for several years.
When the partisans shot him for crimes committed by units under his command, he was 53 years old.
