German Forces

Railway Man.

Bundesarchiv.

General of Infantry Rudolf Gercke, a formal studio portrait made , presumably, in connection with his award of the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords, 1943. Rommel and Guderian had hard jobs, but Gercke could claimed to have had a pretty hard task himself - he spent pretty well the whole of the war as Army Chief of Transport, with particular responsibility for managing, expanding and (increasingly) rebuilding the capacity of the railway system in Germany and her occupied territories. This can never have been an easy job, once the war got going. There were, for example, the difficulties of integrating the practices and technologies of a number of railway systems, some of which had been developed with the idea of war with Germany from day one. For example, those parts of the Polish/Ukrainian railway system that lay within the control of the Russian Empire before WW1 were developed sparsely in the west of the territory, and more heavily in the east - the idea being that this pattern would hamper a German invasion and facilitate a strategy of deep defence on the part of the Russians. Also, there basic incompatibilities between track sizes and gauges in some cases; and Germany's failure to capture Moscow deprived them of control of a crucial railway hub, making the prospect of "expanding capacity" daunting. Of course, as the war proceeded, problems of this sort were supplemented by those created by Allied bombing and, in the occupied territories, partisan and resistance attacks. It all added up to a labour worthy of Hercules to keep this system going, let alone "expand capacity", under these conditions. Not that Gercke went entirely unrewarded for his efforts. In the course of the war, he rose from the rank of Oberst to that of General of Infantry and, of course, was awarded the War Merit Cross with Swords in all grades apart from the (never awarded) version in Gold. He became a prisoner of the US Army in 1945, and died in a US military hospital in 1947. He was probably worn out ... Best regards, JR.