Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist (8 August 1881 – 13 November 1954) was a German Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) of the Wehrmacht during World War II.

Recalled to active duty at the beginning of World War II, Kleist commanded a motorised corps in the Invasion of Poland.

During the Battle of France, units under Kleist's command included Heinz Guderian's armoured corps and spearheaded the "blitzkrieg" attack through the Ardennes forest, outflanking the Maginot Line.

Kleist was appointed commander-in-chief of Army Group A during the last days of Case Blue, the 1942 German summer offensive in southern Russia.

He was the son of Geheimer Studienrat Christof Hugo Albrecht August von Kleist (1848-1886), a high-ranking civil servant, and his wife, Elisabeth Gley (b.

After attending the cavalry school at Hanover from 1908 to 1909, he was promoted to oberleutnant in 1910 and was sent to the prestigious War Academy in Berlin, to undergo general staff training.

[7] On February 5, 1938, during the Blomberg–Fritsch affair when Hitler purged the army of staff who were unsympathetic to the Nazi regime, Kleist was forced to retire from service for his monarchist attitudes.

[10] At the outbreak of the Second World War, Kleist was recalled to active duty and led the XXII Motorised Corps in the Invasion of Poland.

Guderian saw things differently, and pointed out that a thrust along the lines of Kleist's plan would put the flank of the advance within range of the fortress artillery at Charleville-Mézières, some 25 kilometres (16 mi) northwest of Sedan.

The shift of operations further north would also disperse concentration (or Schwerpunkt) and disrupt the intense planning of the German tactical units, who had been in training for the Sedan attack and an advance north-west, for months.

"[17] After operations at Kiev concluded, Kleist's 1st Panzer Army advanced east to capture the important industrial Donbas region.

[18] The 1st Panzer Army then attacked east along the shore of the Sea of Azov toward Rostov near the mouth of the Don river, the last barrier before the Caucasus.

Army Group A advanced deep into Southern Russia, capturing Rostov-on-Don, the oil city of Maykop, Krasnodar and the Kuban region.

[24] On 22 November 1942, Kleist replaced Field Marshal Wilhelm List as commander of Army Group A near the end of Case Blue.

It was only of importance as a convenient place, in the bottleneck between Don and the Volga, where we could block an attack on our flank by Russian forces coming from the east.

At the start, Stalingrad was no more than a name on the map to us.Kleist also said that he tried to persuade Hitler against using Romanian, Hungarian and Italian troops to cover the advancing German armies' long exposed flank.

Kleist, who personally opposed Hitler on the question of holding the Crimea,[28] called Jaenecke on the 28th and said to him: "As a soldier I have often had to struggle with myself in similar situations.

This attitude only undermines the confidence of the troops..."[29] In November 1943, the Soviets eventually cut off the land-based connection of 17th Army through the Perekop Isthmus.

By December 1943, the Soviets had conquered the west bank of the Dnieper, and Kleist's Army Group A was forced to retreat to southwest Ukraine.

In December 1943, the Soviets launched the Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive against Erich von Manstein's re-constituted Army Group South, intending to capture all of the Ukrainian and Moldavian territories under the Axis forces.

[33] Hitler blamed his generals for the overall strategic success of Soviet armies, and on 30 March 1944, Kleist was dismissed and replaced by Ferdinand Schörner.

[25] After the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler failed (1944), the Gestapo implicated and arrested Kleist due to the involvement of his cousin Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin in the Oster conspiracy.

"[35] He appointed two former military attachés to Moscow to his staff, Ernst August Köstring and Oskar von Niedermayer, who advised Kleist on the treatment of non-Russian ethnic minorities.

[34] These men included minorities such as Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Georgians, and Cossacks, many of whom would serve in Ostlegionen and Russian Liberation Army units.

[34][9] Mitcham writes that Kleist once ordered subordinates to make sure that 'voluntary' labor recruitment programs in his area were actually voluntary, which enraged Sauckel and Koch.

[9] Under Kleist's supervision, the Mountain Jews of Nalchik established a council which succeeded in convincing the Germans that they were not Jewish, but part of the indigenous population of the Caucasus.

[37] Although in early 1944, Bessarabia and its capital Kishinev (Chișinău) was an area occupied by some units under his command, he claimed that he thought the Romanian forces had committed such massacres alone.

[38] He further claimed that he had only heard of the atrocities committed in Auschwitz after the war, although he was aware of the Oranienburg and Dachau concentration camps, where some of his friends and relatives were interned for political reasons.

The historian Khavkin opines that Kleist's trial and the evidence brought against him were partly political and that, although the Germans committed terrible war crimes in Yugoslavia, his personal guilt could not be proven.

[9] The verdict stated that in the Krasnodar territory alone, German forces, including units under the command of Kleist, killed more than 61,000 Soviet citizens, destroyed more than 63,000 industrial and economic buildings, looted from collective farms, stole hundreds of thousands of livestock, burned dozens of villages and destroyed many schools, hospitals and children's institutions.