Gerd von Rundstedt was the very model of the old Prussian officer, and his career is a case study in a comforting myth. The most senior field marshal in the German army, he commanded army groups in Poland, France, the Soviet Union and the West, right through to D-Day. He was no Nazi — an aristocratic professional who privately sneered at Hitler as the "Bohemian corporal" — and after the war the surviving generals built on men like him the legend of a "clean Wehrmacht" that had fought an honourable war, apart from the crimes of the SS. The truth is harsher. Rundstedt endorsed the criminal "Severity Order" on the Eastern Front and urged his subordinates to do likewise, and in 1944 he chaired the court that expelled the anti-Hitler plotters so they could be hanged. A professional soldier, and a servant of the regime to the end.

K&C's figure shows Rundstedt before the war, in the field-grey greatcoat and red-faced lapels of a senior army general on a tour of inspection, a baton in one gloved hand. He connects to the other great field marshal K&C has modelled, Erwin Rommel — whom he commanded as Commander-in-Chief West on D-Day — to the Hitler he privately despised yet loyally served, and to the SS men whose crimes the "clean Wehrmacht" story tried to wall the army off from, the Himmler and Heydrich set. In a command display he represents the professional army that made Hitler's conquests possible.

Model: LAH157 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set