Why Did Manstein Refuse to Join the Plot to Kill Hitler?

This video takes that moment apart with the documents.
The Prussian honor explanation of Manstein's refusal is not a finding of historical research. It is a postwar product, manufactured between 1945 and 1958 by Manstein himself, by his defense counsel Reginald Paget, by Liddell Hart, and by a Cold War political environment that needed a usable past for the founding of the West German army. Strip the apparatus away, and what the documents support is something far more uncomfortable: a refusal over-determined by oath, by career calculation, by ideological proximity to the war in the East, by personal ambition for higher command under Hitler, and by the structural protection of a paper trail that ran through the Crimea, through Einsatzgruppe D, and through Manstein's own signature on the order of November 20, 1941.
We walk through the three documented approaches by the conspirators (Tresckow at Army Group Don in November 1942, Stauffenberg at Taganrog in January 1943, Gersdorff in early 1943), the contemporary verdicts of the resisters themselves (Tresckow: "the most brilliant brain of the General Staff, but no backbone"), the Eleventh Army criminal-orders trail in the Bundesarchiv, the Simferopol massacre of December 1941, the Hamburg trial verdict of 1949, the Manstein Fund and Churchill's contribution, and the Bundeswehr honor guard at his funeral in 1973.
This is not the Manstein of Lost Victories. This is the Manstein of the war diary.
KEY HISTORIANS CITED IN THIS VIDEO:
Oliver von Wrochem, Erich von Manstein. Vernichtungskrieg und Geschichtspolitik (2006)
Marcel Stein, Field Marshal von Manstein. A Portrait. The Janus Head (2007)
Mungo Melvin, Manstein. Hitler's Greatest General (2010)
Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer (2006)
Christian Hartmann, Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg (2009)
Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht. History, Myth, Reality (2002 / 2006)
Peter Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance 1933 to 1945 (3rd ed.)
Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A Family History of Self-Assassination (2003)
Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler's Death (1996)
Geoffrey Megargee, Inside Hitler's High Command (2000)
Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D (2003)
Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden (1978)
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988)
Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front (2008)
Robert Citino, The Wehrmacht's Last Stand (2017)
David Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr (1991)
PRIMARY SOURCES REFERENCED:
Erich von Manstein, Verlorene Siege (1955) / Lost Victories (1958)
Eleventh Army war diary, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, RH 20-11
Order of November 20, 1941, "Verhalten der Truppe im Ostraum," Nuremberg document NOKW-1692
AOK 11 Befehl Nr. 24, September 29, 1941
Otto Ohlendorf testimony, International Military Tribunal, January 3, 1946
Hamburg trial records, UK National Archives, WO 235/586 to 595
Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler (1946)
Alexander Stahlberg, Die verdammte Pflicht / Bounden Duty (1987)
Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang (1977)
Liddell Hart Papers, King's College London, LH 1/494

Видео Why Did Manstein Refuse to Join the Plot to Kill Hitler? канала German High Command