The Rise & Fatal Fall of One Of Nazi Germany’s Most Feared Generals

By Robert Beckhusen

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].

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How Stumme distributed these orders was the problem — flying them by air. In January 1940, the German plans for the invasion of Belgium fell into Allied hands after a liaison plane crashed behind the lines.