Posies for the General

"The ablest of all German generals," British Military Historian Liddell Hart called him. "Our finest operational brain," said Panzer General Heinz Guderian, an exacting judge. Erich von Manstein charted the daring Panzer thrust through the Ardennes that split the Allied armies and defeated France, and was assigned to lead the German landing in Britain (Operation Sea-Lion ) that never happened (because the amazing British beat off Goring's air assault). In Russia, he opened the fortified gateway to the Crimean peninsula, stormed the Russian Black Sea naval bastion at Sevastopol, and led the counterattack that retook Kharkov in March 1943. Hitler, disliking his outspoken manners as much as he depended on his ability, finally fired him in 1944, first acknowledging: "Manstein is perhaps the best brain that the General Staff Corps has produced."

Four years after the war, white-haired, Roman-nosed Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, ailing and half blind, sat in the dock of a British military court in Hamburg, charged with 17 war crimes in Poland and Russia (more than any other general indicted by the Western Allies): condoning the murder of Jews and other minorities, the execution without trial of Russian commissars, the deportation of Russians to slave labor. Many Britons considered the long-delayed trial unfair, and contributed -L-1,620 to his defense (Winston Churchill sent -L-25), but Manstein was convicted and sentenced to 18 years. Later his sentence was cut by one-third.

By last August, old passions having subsided and new political considerations having arisen, Manstein was released on medical parole for an operation on his cataracts, and was allowed afterward to return to Schloss Freyberg, his sister's 60-room castle in the Swabian village of Allmendingen.

There last week went an envelope marked "On Her Majesty's Service." Inside, a brief note said: "You are notified a Remission Board Order has been signed today, terminating your sentence of imprisonment." On hearing the news, Allmendingen's Bu germeister promptly closed the village school and marched the children, town councilors and teachers up to the castle for an official "Welcome Home" for the old (65) soldier. As a band oompahed Im Schdnsten Wiesengrnmde (In the Beautiful Meadow), Manstein, sallow and strained, took a bouquet of lilacs and tulips from the kiddies and said: "We hope for the reconciliation of all peoples and for unification of Europe." It was the eighth anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender.

With Manstein's release, only one prominent German general still remains in an Allied jail for war crimes: General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, ex-chief of the Nazi occupation forces in Norway.

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