‘Britain’s Nazi chief’ and a corner of England that will forever be the Third Reich
Field marshal who would have ruled Britain among prominent Nazis buried in Midlands. reports
AMONG the 5,000 graves at a military cemetery hidden in the heart of Staffordshire is a grey slab so bland it belies the importance of the individual buried in the soil below.
The only words on the headstone at the German War Cemetery on Cannock Chase are: “Ernst Busch, Gen: Feld M, 6.7.85 to 17.7.45”.
But those words hide the true significance of grave 112. For Field Marshal Ernst Busch was one of Third Reich’s most powerful individuals, a man held in such high regard by Hitler that he was to be Britain’s ruler – Reichsprotektor – should an invasion take place.
Busch, described as “a Nazi to his bootstraps and a devout follower of Hitler”, died of a heart attack at Aldershot prison camp on July 17, 1945. Had he survived, Busch would have been tried for war crimes at Nuremberg.
Busch – recipient of the Third Reich’s greatest honours, the Knights Cross and Iron Cross – earned his spurs and his lofty status as Field Marshal on the Eastern Front. On September 8, 1941, his 16th Army took Demyansk before becoming locked in the siege of Leningrad.
Busch fell out of favour following the Nazi’s humiliation by the Red Army – he lost 300,000 men in battles at Vitebsk and Minsk.
Operation Barbarossa both made and destroyed his reputation. The Allies accused him of ordering the execution of thousands of Russian civilians, while Hitler blamed him for Germany’s failures in Russia.
The Fuhrer sacked him in July 1944, after Army Group Centre were destroyed in the Soviet summer offensive.
But he was re-instated in March the following year and tasked with staving-off the Allied advance into Germany.
Busch handed himself in to Montgomery and his final act as a serving soldier was to sign the surrender on May 4, 1945. He was the last German general to surrender.
Broken and humiliated, he died in a PoW camp just two months later, aged 60. He was placed in an unmarked grave, exhumed many years later and reburied on Cannock Chase.
But Busch is not the only Nazi VIP laid to rest on Cannock Chase. There is also a headstone to SS General Maximilian von Herff, who ran the personal office of evil Heinrich Himmler from which orders were issued for the running of the concentration camps and gas ovens, co-ordinating the murder of millions.
He infamously supervised the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in May 1943.
Von Herff was captured by British forces in 1945 and held at Grizedale Hall PoW camp.
He died of a stroke at nearby Conishead Priory Hospital.
Busch and von Herff may be the biggest names at the German War Cemetery, but there are plenty of lesser known Nazis laid to rest with fascinating stories – men such as Wolfgang Rosterg, who, with jam-jar thick pebbled glasses, looked anything but a member of the master race.
Rosterg is believed to be the only German trooper in the graveyard