He served throughout the war, mostly on the Western Front, and mostly as a Staff Officer, though he was eventually given his own Corps and made a General der Infanterie.

Blumentritt was affable, friendly, and talkative, capable of great diplomacy, and in military terms, detail oriented—all of which made him an excellent staff officer, as well as a good complement to Rundstedt.

[3] He joined the Imperial German Army in 1911, in time to see action in the First World War, entering the 3rd Thuringian Infantry Regiment No.

Blumentritt's experiences on the Eastern Front in the First World War gave him a great deal of respect for the Russian soldiers.

The Russian soldier showed great skill in night operations and in forest fighting, and he preferred hand-to-hand combat.

After the military restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles came into effect, he was briefly a member of the Freikorps (paramilitary organization) formed by the veterans of the 3rd Thuringian, before transferring back to the regular army with the 22nd Reichswehr Rifle Regiment on 1 October 1919.

At this time, he was assigned to the Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command; OKH), and formed along with Manstein and Generalfeldmarshall Gerd von Rundstedt a "Working Staff" for the development of a plan for the invasion.

The shortcomings of the middle ranks are even greater...The effects of German weapons, whose prestige has increased with the campaign against Yugoslavia, will soon be felt!

[15]In another memo, Blumentritt wrote: On warfare and the inner value of the Russian opponent, the dull mass had two kinds of "ideas": the tsar and God.

[17][18] After the ultimate failure of Operation Barbarossa in January 1942, Blumentritt returned to Germany as Chief Quartermaster of the OKH.

[20] In this capacity, he was responsible for much of the planning to defend France against Allied invasion,[6] and in 1943 he sent a memo to the OKH expressing his concern about the depletion of German forces along the Atlantic Wall as the Eastern Front continued to bleed resources from the West.

As we did not anticipate that any landing would be made on the west side of the Cherbourg peninsula, that sector was held very lightly—we even put Russian units there.

"[22] Rundstedt was relieved of his command by Hitler on 2 July 1944, after suggesting that Germany should surrender, and was replaced as OB West by Kluge.

Blumentritt served as Chief of Staff under Kluge during the Anglo-Canadian offensive on Caen and the fighting in the Falaise Pocket.

[25] Shortly after the upheaval associated with the assassination attempt, Blumentritt returned to his position as Chief of Staff of OB West, first under Generalfeldmarshall Walter Model,[26] then once again under Rundstedt when he was restored to command.

Corps Group Blumentritt held almost 22 mi (35 km) of front northwest of Loverich (now part of Baesweiler), through Geilenkirchen all the way to the Meuse.

[14] From 8 April to the end of the war, he commanded "Army Group Blumentritt", an ad-hoc collection of depleted units from Hameln on the Weser river to the Baltic Sea.

On 2 May, after the death of Hitler on 30 April, Blumentritt ordered his men to cease resistance to the Allies and fall back gradually.

[2] In the early 1950s, he was active in the development of the new Bundeswehr army, though this rearmament was a controversial move among the civilian population of Germany, who felt they had been victimized by World War II.