Franz Halder

Franz Halder entered military service in 1914 and by 1937 had become a supporter of Adolf Hitler. Appointed chief of staff of the Army High Command in 1938, he planned the 1939 invasion of Poland with provisions allowing the SS to imprison or execute Poles, then turned to plotting the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. In July 1940 he began the Barbarossa planning; his staff drafted the Commissar Order and the Barbarossa decree, signed in spring 1941, which permitted German soldiers to execute Soviet citizens without prosecution. The directives fed the radicalisation of warfare on the Eastern Front and led to systematic atrocities during the campaign that opened 22 June 1941. A strategic dispute with Hitler led to his removal in September 1942. Arrested after the July 1944 assassination attempt when earlier plotting came to light, he survived to become a lead consultant for the US Army Historical Division after the war, directing 700 former officers in writing over 2,500 documents scrubbed of incriminating material and building the myth of a clean Wehrmacht. The Americans valued his Cold War insights on the Soviets enough to overlook the apologia; in 1961 they g