On April 17, 1945, German Field Marshal Walter Model dissolved his 300,000-strong army group and sent his soldiers home. Four days later he went into a wood and shot himself. When Friedrich Paulus had capitulated at Stalingrad two years earlier, Model had told his son that it was wrong for field marshals to surrender. Model sought death with honor, imagining that he was emulating the virtue of an ancient Roman.
Ian Kershaw begs to differ. He points out that Model, far from being a noble warrior, was up to his neck in the Nazi regime. Model had expressed contempt for the "Jewish and democratic poison of materialist ideas" and only two weeks before his suicide had ordered an "examination" of the prisoners in the local jails that resulted in the deaths of more than 200 inmates: not a Roman, then, just another brutal fellow-traveler. Had he elected to go into captivity he might have seen himself arraigned for war crimes later—although in practice few of the generals, at least those captured by the western Allies, served long periods in prison.
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