[4] He was promoted to Fähnrich on 19 November 1909, and was admitted to the army officer cadet school (Kriegsschule) in Neisse (now Nysa, Poland), where he was an unexceptional student, and was commissioned a Leutnant (2nd lieutenant) in the 52nd Infantry Regiment on 22 August 1910.

[8] In late 1917 he was part of a group of junior staff officers who accompanied Colonel Hans von Seeckt to Constantinople to assess the Ottoman Empire's ability to continue prosecuting the war and the possibility of employing German troops in the Middle East.

[16][17] Following von Seeckt's example, Model kept aloof from politics in the chaotic period that marked the birth of the Weimar Republic,[15] but the experience of the early 1920s left him with an abhorrence of communism.

The Sixteenth Army's mission was still to cover the flank, but its frontage became much wider, and the imperative for a rapid advance meant that Model spent much of his time overseeing logistical arrangements.

[40] Model was a whirlwind of energy, touring the front and exhorting his troops to greater efforts: he also ran roughshod over the niceties of protocol and chains of command, and, in general, left his staff trailing in his wake.

[41] Just as the Germans had made the halt decision, the Soviet Kalinin, Western and Southwestern Fronts launched a massive counteroffensive, aimed at driving Army Group Centre back from Moscow.

Therefore, he ordered his men to spread themselves out, which exploited his corps' advantage in artillery over the Soviets, while he created small mechanised kampfgruppen or alarmeinheiten (alarm units) to deal with any breakthrough.

His defensive doctrine, which combined conventional thinking with his own tactical innovations, was based on the following principles: The expediency of preparing rearward defence lines, although these went against the express wishes of Hitler, meant that Model's influence was felt even when he was absent from the battlefield.

In its wake, Model personally ordered the deportation of all male civilians, wells poisoned, and at least two dozen villages razed in a scorched earth policy to hinder the Red Army's follow up in the area.

[61] The Soviet preponderance of strength was such that Stavka expected it to take only 48 hours to reach Orel, splitting the German forces into three parts;[62] instead, the battle ended three weeks later with Model's orderly withdrawal from the salient.

Historians have since debated their significance, some claiming that Shield and Sword was Hitler's invention,[72] while others say they were a calculated ploy by Model to disguise his true intent—to pull back to the Panther Line.

Without OKH's notice or approval, he constructed a series of interim defensive lines to cover its retreat, slowing down and inflicting heavy losses on the pursuing Soviet forces in the process.

[10] On 30 March 1944, Model was placed in command of Army Group North Ukraine in Galicia, which was withdrawing under heavy pressure from Zhukov's 1st Ukrainian Front, vice Manstein, who had fallen out of favour with Hitler.

[91][92] However, he quickly changed his mind, convincing Hitler to authorise the immediate escape of the German Seventh Army and Panzer Group Eberbach—something that Kluge, with his limited political clout, had not been able to do.

[96] On 17 September, his lunch was interrupted when the British 1st Airborne Division dropped into the town launching Operation Market Garden, the Allied attempt to capture the bridges on the lower Rhine, Maas and Waal.

[101][102][100] Following the Wehrmacht's recent defensive victories in the West, Hitler decided to launch a last-ditch offensive aiming to catch the Anglosphere forces by surprise, with the objective of retaking Antwerp,[103] striking the seam between the British and Americans that leads to political as well as military disharmony between the Allies, isolate the 21st Army Group, thereby allowing their encirclement and destruction before the American leadership (particularly the political leadership) could react, thereby erasing the enemy ground threat to the Ruhr.

Thus, he prepared Operation Herbstnebel, a less ambitious attack that did not aim to cross the Meuse, but would still, if successful, have inflicted a severe setback on the Western Allied Army groups now bearing down on the Franco-German border.

"[114][115] The operation was launched on 16 December 1944 and enjoyed initial success, but it quickly suffered from a lack of air cover and the inexperience in some of its infantry component, and critically short fuel supply.

Any suggestion of its withdrawal back to the river Rhine to obtain a better fighting position—given the Third Reich's weakening strength against the Allied torrent of men and material—was forbidden, and it was ordered to conduct its actions from now on upon the strategic basis of not yielding an inch of ground and an abandonment of tactical maneuver.

[117] By mid-March Model and Army Group B had been forced back into attritional warfare with the Americans across the Rhine river into Germany itself after the stunning failure to destroy the Ludendorff Bridge during the Battle of Remagen.

On 20 April, Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry in Berlin publicly denounced Army Group B as traitors to the Reich, marking the final act between Model and the Nazi regime he had served.

[121][125][126] His decision to commit suicide was sealed when he learned that the Soviets had indicted him for war crimes, specifically the deaths of 577,000 people in concentration camps in Latvia and the deportation of 175,000 others as slave labor.

[further explanation needed][135] The statement that he was no strategist can find merit as it was observed that he showed little inclination to contemplate those stretches of the front he did not command and therefore disregarding the strategic field to conduct warfare.

[139] Before the war he was put in charge of analyzing technical advances at home and abroad and his enthusiasm for innovation earned him the nickname Armee Modernissimus ("the army modernization fanatic").

Model fought nearly all his battles in the northern and central parts of the Eastern Front; he was never tested on the steppes of southern Russia, where the open terrain would have made mobile warfare a more attractive proposition.

Großdeutschland took nearly 10,000 casualties out of a strength of 18,000 men, and at one point was reportedly close to mutiny; but from Model's viewpoint these losses were acceptable because they meant that Ninth Army's own troops did not have to suffer them.

[150] This exceptional skill at defensive tactics earned Model the nickname of Hitler's "Feuerwehrmann" ("fireman"), due to his repeated successful rescue of the Third Reich from dire military situations as the war began to turn against Germany.

[137][156] As one of the few German generals of middle class upbringing, Model's background appealed to Hitler, who distrusted the old Prussian aristocratic order that still dominated the Wehrmacht's officer corps.

[137] Helped by his defensive successes, he thus gained Hitler's full trust and confidence; the Führer called him "my best field marshal" and (after Operation Bagration) "the savior of the Eastern Front".

He frequently disputed, ignored or bypassed orders that he felt unsupportable: at Rzhev and Oryol he had constructed defensive fortifications in defiance of a ban, and his use of Shield and Sword tactics while at Army Group North proved to be simply a cover for a staged withdrawal.