1885–1971
○ Convicted war criminal, released 1954
A German general whose armoured successes were inseparable from crimes on the Eastern Front
In December 1942, Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army tried and failed to relieve the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad.
Hermann Hoth was a German general who carried the Prussian and imperial army tradition into the Wehrmacht and rose as a panzer commander. He directed rapid mobile operations in the invasions of France and the Soviet Union, and in 1942 commanded the Fourth Panzer Army during Case Blue and the failed attempt to relieve Stalingrad. Hoth understood the war against the Soviet Union as a war of annihilation and transmitted and implemented the Commissar Order and brutal measures against civilians. Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the OKW trial, he received fifteen years in prison and was released early in 1954.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1904Entered service in the Prussian Army
- 1914–1918Staff and field commands in the First World War
- 1935–1938Commanded the 18th Infantry Division
- 1939–1940Commanded XV Army Corps in the invasions of Poland and France
- 1941Commanded Panzer Group 3 in the capture of Minsk and Vitebsk
- 1941–1942Commander of the 17th Army
- 1942–1943Commander of the Fourth Panzer Army and its Stalingrad relief attempt
- 1948–1954Convicted at the OKW trial and imprisoned at Landsberg
- 1956Published Panzer Operations
- 1971Died in Goslar
Related historical events
After 1954: memoirs and the "clean Wehrmacht" myth
Released on parole in 1954, Hoth settled in Goslar. He took up walking the Harz mountains as a hobby and began writing on World War II, publishing Panzer-Operationen in 1956, an account of the 3rd Panzer Group he had commanded in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The book appeared in Russian translation in 1961 and in English in 2015. He also published articles in the journal Wehrkunde, in one of which he made what has been described as an almost hysterical appeal for the new West German Bundeswehr to mobilise strong tank divisions.
From the late 1950s, Hoth's activity shifted toward fighting the historians who had begun to study the war and expose Nazi crimes. He claimed that German veterans had the greater right to shape the perception of the war, and argued that accounts should not dwell on defeats but preserve a heroic image of the Wehrmacht, in order to protect its ability to motivate potential officers to enlist. He assisted Paul Carell, a wartime German propagandist, in writing Unternehmen Barbarossa (published 1963), a book that supported the myth of the clean Wehrmacht and, at Hoth's influence, portrayed Manstein's conduct of the Stalingrad campaigns favourably. He kept in contact with Wehrmacht officers recruited into the Bundeswehr, and from 1965 met regularly with Ulrich de Maizière, the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, with whom he shared the conviction that tank units should form the core of West Germany's military. In his last years he gave interviews to journalists and historians in an effort to preserve the German military's public image.
Hoth did not retract the defence he had mounted at his 1948 trial. He explained his November 1941 order as being aimed only at eliminating the Bolshevik-Jewish resistance and denied any knowledge of the Holocaust. The tribunal rejected that claim, pointing to the massacre at Artemovsk among the killings he had known about in his own area of command. Hoth died in Goslar on 25 January 1971.