Is General Friedrichs based on a real World War I German general?

All Quiet on the Western Front is a Netflix show about a 17-year-old boy named Paul Baumer. It takes place during the First World War.

He joins the army because he wants to help his country and do heroic things while there. But whatever rosy picture of the war was given to him at the outset, it disintegrates as soon as Paul arrives at the front and remains there until the end of the war.

The story is mainly about the soldiers and their lives in the trenches, but it also follows the higher up, some of whom are married to the idea of ​​war. People like Matthias Erzberger try to stop the killing, but General Friedrichs continues to send soldiers to their deaths until the end of the war. Here’s what you need to know if the General’s bad behavior makes you wonder if people like him really exist.

Was General Friedrichs a real person?

No, General Friedrichs is not based on a real World War I German general. Instead, he is a stand-in for the officers who have been fighting for as long as they could. Director Edward Berger said he learned about people like the character while doing research for the film. He said: “The investigation showed that the last attack was led by the generals, and that happened a lot, whether it was by the Germans or the Americans. Generals and officers from the United States also led their troops into battle.

“Just to punch a hole in the map or to go home and tell their parents, wives, siblings that they won the last battle,” the director said. Officials from Germany and France agreed to an armistice and it was to take effect at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, just like in the movie. The news was sent to all the war fronts for everyone to know, and the war ended everywhere at once. This gave time between when the document was signed and when the terms were actually put in place.

People hoped that the declaration of peace would end the fighting and prevent people from dying unnecessarily. But in reality everything was very different. After fighting each other for four years, both sides became very angry with each other. All the time the soldiers were in the trenches, they were told not to be nice to the enemy. Suddenly they were told to give up their weapons and get ready to go home. For some officers, the end of the war was no reason to be happy.

Officers like General Friedrichs were driven by such things as the need to show courage one last time, win one last battle, or simply seize the opportunity to kill an enemy one last time. The commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John Pershing, is known to have disobeyed ceasefire orders. He didn’t like it, so he would never have ordered his men to stop doing anything else.

Some people, like Pershing, were motivated by a desire for blood and a false sense of pride in their country. Others, however, thought the enemy might not do what they said they would. Some people thought that the peace talks would soon end because a truce is just the end, not the end of a war. They wanted to be ready for battle, and it would really help their cause if more soldiers from the other side died. Whatever drove them, the soldiers fought until the clock struck eleven.

Nearly 11,000 soldiers are said to have died by the time the dust settled. Some soldiers are said to have died minutes before the armistice was signed because the situation was so bad. Researchers have investigated why so many people died when peace was near, but nothing could explain this unnecessary bloodshed. Many soldiers may have died on November 10 instead of November 11 to avoid the disgrace of the dead on November 11.

Taking all this into account, we can say that General Friedrichs is not based on a specific man during the First World War. However, his character in “All Quiet on the Western Front” is based on and a good portrayal of the people responsible for the deaths of many soldiers who were forced into the war, even though they could have come out alive and unharmed.

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Early years

Paulus, whose father was treasurer, was born in Guxhagen and grew up in Kassel, Hesse-Nassau. He tried but failed to get a position as a cadet in the German Imperial Navy, and he briefly studied law at the University of Marburg.

Since the 1940s, many English-language sources and publications have added the “von” prefix to Paulus’ family name. Mark Arnold-The Forster’s World at War, an accompanying book to the documentary of the same name, was published in 1973 by Stein and Day on pages 139-142. Other examples include Allen and Muratoff’s The Russian Campaigns of 1941-1943, which came out in 1944, and The World at War by Peter Margaritis, which came out in 1975. (2019). This is not true, because Paul’s family was never part of the nobility. Antony Beevor talks about Paul’s “relatively humble birth,” the only thing he has in common with Rommel’s family.

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After leaving college without a degree, he joined the 111th Infantry Regiment in February 1910 as a trainee officer. On July 4, 1912, he married Constance Elena Rosetti-Solescu, who was from Romania. She was the sister of a soldier in the same regiment. When World War I began, Paulus’ regiment was part of the advance towards France. In the autumn of 1914 he saw action in the Vosges and near Arras. After being ill for a while, he became a staff officer in the Alpine Corps and served in France, Romania and Serbia. By the end of the war he was a captain.

Paulus was a brigade adjutant in the Freikorps after the armistice. He was chosen as one of only 4,000 officers in the Reichswehr, a defensive army limited to 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles. He was put in charge of a company of the 13th Infantry Regiment in Stuttgart. He worked for more than ten years in various staff positions (1921-1933). In the 1920s, Paulus gave guest lectures in Moscow, Soviet Union, as part of the military cooperation between the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union. This was done to get out of the Treaty of Versailles.

Later, Paulus briefly led a motorized battalion from 1934 to 1935. In October 1935, he was appointed chief of staff at Panzer headquarters. This was a new group in the German army led by Oswald Lutz. It was responsible for training and improving the Panzerwaffe, or tank troops.

In February 1938 General Heinz gave Guderian Paulus the post of Chef des Generalstabes of the new XVI Armeekorps (Motorisiert), which took over command from Lutz. Guderian said he was “brilliantly smart, conscientious, hardworking, original and talented”, but he had serious doubts about his ability to make decisions, his toughness and his lack of commando experience. He remained in that job until May 1939, when he was appointed Major General and put in charge of the German Tenth Army, which served in Poland. The unit was transformed into the Sixth Army and took part in offensives through the Netherlands and Belgium in the spring of 1940. In August 1940, Paulus was given the rank of lieutenant general. The following month he was appointed Deputy Chief of the German General Staff (Oberquartiermeister I). In that capacity, he helped write the plans for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Stalingrad and the Eastern Front

In November 1941, when Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, who was in charge of the German Sixth Army and Paul’s boss, became commander of the entire Army Group South, Paulus was promoted to General der Panzertruppe and placed in charge of the Sixth Army. Before that, he had never been in charge of a unit larger than a battalion. But he didn’t start his new job until January 20, six days after Reichenau’s sudden death. This left him alone and without the help of his more experienced sponsor.

In that summer, Paulus led the attack on Stalingrad. His troops fought for more than three months against the Soviet forces defending Stalingrad. The fighting became more and more violent as time went on. In November 1942, when the Soviet Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a massive counter-offensive, Paulus was surrounded by an entire Soviet army group. When the counter-offensive began, Paul did not ask to leave the city.

Paulus did as Adolf Hitler told him and in any case retained his positions in Stalingrad, even though he was surrounded by strong Soviet troops. Army Group Don, led by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, began Operation Winter Storm in December as an emergency response. Paulus was preparing to leave Stalingrad after being ordered to do so. Meanwhile, he kept all his soldiers in defensive positions. Manstein told Paulus that the Sixth Army should help with the relief, but the order to start the breakout never came. Paul never wavered in his determination to do as he was told. Manstein’s troops could not reach Stalingrad on their own, and Soviet offensives elsewhere on the front eventually stopped them.

The new Chief of the Army General Staff, Kurt Zeitzler, eventually convinced Hitler to let Paulus escape, but only if he could hold Stalingrad, which was impossible.

Paul and his men continued to fight for the next two months. But the German defenses were slowly being broken down due to a lack of food and ammunition, lost equipment and soldiers getting sicker and sicker. Hitler made Paulus a colonel general at the beginning of the new year.

What would happen to the war if our Caucasus army was also surrounded? This threat is real. But the Red Army must stay here as long as we keep fighting. They need these troops for a major offensive against Army Group “A” in the Caucasus and along the still unstable front from Voronesh to the Black Sea. We need to keep them here until the end so we can stabilize the Eastern Front. Only if that happens does Germany stand a chance of winning the war.

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