The Rise and Fall of a Top German General

ByRobert Beckhusen

War is Boring

On Oct. 24, 1942, German Gen. Georg Stumme, commanding officer
of the Third Reich’s Panzer Army Africa — which included the famed Afrika Korps
— was riding in a car along a track with his signals officer, Col. Andreas
Buechting, near the front line for an inspection. It was day two of the Second
Battle of El Alamein, the enormous British-led offensive in Egypt which would
turn the tide in North Africa in the Allies’ favor.

How the monocle-wearing Prussian officer ended up in the car, in
command of all Axis forces in the theater, is an odd story. Three months
earlier, this Knight’s Cross recipient and veteran of the campaigns for France,
Yugoslavia and Greece was sitting in a jail cell facing five years in prison,
Hitler having relieved him of command and ordering his court martial after an
incident on the Eastern Front.

A court martial ordered by the Fuhrer, of course, always ended
in a guilty verdict. Stumme was found guilty.

But here was Stumme, free, and having replaced Erwin Rommel —
the Desert Fox — who had returned to Germany due to sickness and exhaustion.
And that is when Stumme, his driver and Buecthing appeared within sight of
Allied troops. Suddenly, a bullet struck Buechting in the head, killing him —
which was one of the last things Stumme witnessed in his life.

Back in June 1942, Stumme was the commander of the XXXX
Motorized (Panzer) Corps, part of the German forces preparing to push into
Southern Russia as part of Case Blue, the strategic offensive toward the Baku
oil fields and Stalingrad. Stumme, as a traditionalist German officer, wrote a
one-page summary of the upcoming offensive and distributed it out to the XXXX
Corps’ divisional commanders, according to historians David M. Glantz and
Jonathan House’s 2009 book To the Gates of Stalingrad [6].

At top — Stumme with Rommel. (Photo: German Federal Archive
photos, 247Sports)