In April 1915 his health recovered, and he was posted as chief of staff to the 86th Infantry Division which was serving as part of General Max von Gallwitz's forces on the Eastern Front.

The plan, devised by Hitler, was essentially for a re-run of the invasion of 1914, with the main assault to come in the north, through Belgium and the Netherlands, then wheeling south to capture Paris, leaving the French Army anchored on the Maginot Line.

A combination of bad weather, the arguments of his generals, and a breach of security when the details of the original plan fell into Allied hands, eventually led Hitler to agree to postpone the attack until early 1940, when it was again delayed by the invasion of Denmark and Norway.

[30] On 13 March, Himmler came to Koblenz to give the generals, including Rundstedt, an ideological lecture, in the course of which he made it clear that the atrocities against civilians which some of them had witnessed in Poland had been carried out on his orders, and with the approval of Hitler.

Hitler sent the chief of staff of the Armed Forces Supreme Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW), General Wilhelm Keitel, to Rundstedt's headquarters, to urge caution.

"[42][c] This gave the generals a clear warning that they would be expected not to obstruct Hitler's wider war aims in the east – the extermination of the Jews and the reduction of the Slavic peoples to serfdom under a new Herrenvolk (Master race) of German settlers.

[45] Barbarossa was initially scheduled for May, at the beginning of the Russian spring, but was postponed until June because unseasonably wet weather made the roads impassable for armour (not because of the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece in April, as is commonly supposed).

On 10 July Brauchitsch arrived at Rundstedt's headquarters at Brody, with instructions from Hitler that Kleist was turn south towards Vinnitsa and link up with Schobert's army there, rather than continue south-east to Kirovograd.

David Stahel, a recent historian of the Kiev campaign, wrote: "Germany had been handed a triumph far in excess of what its exhausted armoured forces could have achieved without Stalin's obduracy and incompetence.

After three months of continuous fighting, the German armies were exhausted, and the Panzer divisions were in urgent need of new equipment as a result of losses in battle and damage from the poorly-paved Ukrainian roads.

Nevertheless, during October Rundstedt's forces won another great victory when Manstein and Kleist's tanks reached the Sea of Azov, trapping two Soviet Armies around Mariupol and taking over 100,000 prisoners.

Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union had led the French Communist Party to abandon its previous neutrality (its slogan was "Neither Pétain nor de Gaulle"),[98] and launch active resistance against the Germans and the Vichy regime.

The catastrophe of Stalingrad prompted renewed efforts by dissident German officers to remove Hitler from power while there was still time, as they believed, to negotiate an honourable peace settlement.

There were several problems with this, particularly the lack of fuel for rapid movements of armour, the Allied air superiority which enabled them to disrupt the transport system, and the increasingly effective sabotage efforts of the French resistance.

[111] By the spring of 1944 Rommel had turned the mostly nonexistent 'Wall' into a formidable defensive line, but since he believed the invasion would come somewhere between Dunkirk and the mouth of the Somme, much of his work was directed at strengthening the wrong area, although in late 1943 he had focused on Normandy.

[119] It was during the desperate German attempts to bring reserve units to the front that men of the Das Reich SS Panzer Division destroyed the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France, in retaliation for partisan attacks in the area.

By June 1944 the conspirators had given up on him (and indeed on all the senior field commanders), so he was not approached by the group around Tresckow and Stauffenberg who hatched the unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler with a bomb at the Wolf's Lair (Wolfsschanze), his headquarters in East Prussia, and had no inkling of what was planned.

Joachim Fest, writing of Tresckow, said: "Even officers who were absolutely determined to stage a coup were troubled by the fact that everything they were contemplating would inevitably be seen by their troops as dereliction of duty, as irresponsible arrogance, and, worst, as capable of triggering a civil war.

[r] Field Marshal Walter Model, known as "the Führer's fireman" for his reputation for stabilising dangerous situations, was appointed both OB West and commander of Army Group B on 16 August, but even he could not do justice to both jobs.

[134] The Allies believed Rundstedt to be a far more powerful and influential figure than he in fact was, regarding him with "respect, almost awe" as the master strategist of the German Army – something he would not find helpful after the war.

Rundstedt believed even at this stage that an effective defensive line could only be established on the Rhine, but this would have meant giving up large areas of German territory, and Hitler would not countenance it.

With the failure of the British attempt to force a crossing of the Rhine at Arnhem (Operation Market Garden) in late September, the chance of invading Germany before the winter set in was lost, and Rundstedt was given time to consolidate his position.

"[145][146] Taking advantage of surprise and poor weather (which helped neutralise the Allies' command of the air), the offensive made initial progress, breaking through the weak American formations in this quiet sector of the front.

On 18 February, as the Allies entered Germany, Rundstedt issued an appeal to the German Army to resist the invader, urging the troops to "gather round the Führer to guard our people and our state from a destiny of horror."

Despite fierce resistance in places, the Germans were forced back from the West Wall during February, and a series of Allied offensives, rolling from north to south, drove across the Rhineland towards the great river.

There was no attempt at further escape: Rundstedt, accompanied by Bila and Hans Gerd and a few staff, stayed at Bad Tölz until it was occupied by American forces on 1 May, the day after Hitler's suicide in Berlin.

He was accused of responsibility for war crimes in Poland (the shooting of surrendered soldiers in 1939), the Soviet Union (the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in 1941), Britain (the Commando Order of 1942) and France (the Oradour massacre of 1944).

One interviewer wrote: "A limp, exhausted body racked by constant pain due to weakened arteries is now the remnant of the relentless figure that once waved a Marshal's baton.

"[169] Meanwhile, Rundstedt was in a hospital in Hanover with nowhere to live, and the new SPD administration in Lower Saxony had no interest in helping ex-Field Marshals of the Third Reich at a time when there was an acute housing shortage across Germany.

"[173] Von Rundstedt was left in no doubt by Hitler and Himmler what German occupation would mean for the people of Poland and the Soviet Union, yet he applied his military talents to the conquest of both countries.