In September of 1941, while Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Bayerlein was home on brief leave in his native city of Wurzburg, he passed a labor gang – Soviet prisoners of war — working on the railroad and saw a guard whipping a prisoner who was too weak to stand. Bayerlein took the whip and ordered the guards to carry the sick prisoner back to the barracks. A complaint was immediately filed at the local Nazi Party headquarters and forwarded to the Gestapo, who ordered a court martial of Bayerlein.

Bayerlein was immediately whisked off to Africa to become the Afrika Korps chief of staff. Guderian and Rommel both conspired in this, jointly pressing for a waiver to allow a (fairly junior) lieutenant colonel to serve as corps chief of staff. In due compliance with orders, the court martial was held in the spring of 1942, before the battle of Gazala. Rommel presided and Bayerlein was, not surprisingly, exonerated. But the result would almost certainly have been different had the court martial taken place in central Germany in the winter of 1941-42 and under the baleful glare of the Party and Gestapo.

Bayerlein was evacuated from Africa due to muscular rheumatism and hepatitis in early 1943. Once he recovered he took command of the 3rd Panzer Division, where he drew raised eyebrows from the Nazi Party faithful when he ordered that Russian refugees were to be fed from the division’s field kitchens. He led the division in its breakout from Kirovograd and then took command of the Panzer Lehr Division.

While commanding Panzer Lehr, stationed in Hungary between March and May of 1944, Bayerlein sheltered and protected Archbishop Seridi of Budapest, wanted by the SS and SD (Sicherheit Dienst, the security/intelligence branch of the SS) both for speaking out against the treatment of Jews and the actual harboring of them. Once Bayerlein’s division was ordered to France, however, the archbishop was killed by the SD in October of 1944.

His final notable act of defiance will raise a smile from anyone who has read or viewed Band of Brothers, particularly the episode entitled “The Last Patrol.” On April 3rd, 1945, Bayerlein, now commanding LIII Corps, evacuated the town of Winterburg and established his defensive line in the hills to the west. His reasoning was simple: the war was lost and Winterburg’s large hospitals were filled to overflowing with war wounded. Better to spare them one more needless fight and let the Americans take over their care.

Field Marshal Model, his commander, was outraged and demanded that LIII launch a full-scale attack to reoccupy Winterburg. Bayerlein assented, but instead of ordering an attack, he gave strict orders that no artillery, even harassing and interdiction (H&I), was to be fired on the town. The next morning he reported that the attack had been launched, as ordered, but had failed. What Major Winters of the 101st Airborne did with a squad-sized patrol, Bayerlein did with an entire corps!

The consequences of such an action, in the guttering twilight of the Third Reich, were potentially lethal and sudden. But in the confusion of the collapse his lie went unnoticed, and he survived to surrender his corps twelve days later.

Commendable moral courage? In an ordinary German, certainly, but Fritz Bayerlein was no ordinary German. According to the Nazi Nuremberg Law of 1935 he was Mischlinge second degree – one quarter Jewish (by way of his maternal grandfather). Who would ever have faulted him for simply keeping his head low and avoiding notice?

Well, he would have.

This is Part II of a two-part series. Read Part I here.

Suggested Reading
Spayd, P.A. Bayerlein: From Afrikakorps to Panzer Lehr. Schiffer Publishing, 2003.

About the Author: The major landmarks in Frank's historical interests range from ancient Persia through the Crimean War, World War II, and the modern U.S. Armed Forces, with a lot of stops in between. Frank is fascinated by the unusual, the overlooked, and the surprising. He is the New York Times number one best-selling author of the Desert Shield Fact Book (1991) and he is currently writing an historical novel on Alexander's conquest of Persia – from the Persian point of view.

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