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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 he’s there. But whatever rosy picture of the war he was given at the start falls apart as soon as Paul gets to the front lines and stays there until the end of the war.
The story is mostly about the soldiers and their lives in the trenches, but it also follows the higher-ups, some of whom are married to the idea of war. People like Matthias Erzberger are trying to stop the killing, but General Friedrichs keeps sending soldiers to their deaths right up until the end of the war. Here’s what you should know if the General’s bad behavior makes you wonder if people like him really do exist.
Was General Friedrichs a Real Person?
No, General Friedrichs is not based on a real German general from World War I. Instead, he is a stand-in for the officers who fought as long as they could. Director Edward Berger said that he learned about people like the character when he was doing research for the movie. He said, “The research 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 fix a hole in the map or to go home and tell their parents, wives, brothers, and sisters that they won the last battle,” the director said. Officials from Germany and France agreed to an armistice, and it was set to go into effect at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, just like in the movie. The news was sent to all war fronts so that everyone would know about it, and the war stopped everywhere at the same time. This gave time between when the document was signed and when the terms were actually put into place.
People hoped that the declaration of peace would end the fighting and stop people from dying needlessly. But in reality, things were very different. After four years of fighting against each other, both sides became very angry at each other. All the time the soldiers were in the trenches, they were told not to be kind to the enemy. All of a sudden, they were told to give up their weapons and get ready to go home. For some officers, the end of the war was not a reason to be happy.
Officers like General Friedrichs were driven by things like the need to show courage one last time, win one last battle, or just jump at the chance to kill an enemy one last time. The commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John Pershing, is known to have ignored the orders about the armistice. He didn’t like it, so he supposedly never sent the order to 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, though, thought that the enemy might not do what they said they would. Some people thought that the peace talks would end soon because an armistice is just a stop, not the end of a war. They wanted to be ready for battle, and it would really help their cause if more of the other side’s soldiers died. No matter what drove them, the soldiers fought until the clock struck eleven.
It is said that almost 11,000 soldiers had died by the time the dust settled. Some soldiers are said to have died just minutes before the armistice was signed because the situation was so bad. Investigators looked into why so many people died when peace was just around the corner, but nothing could explain this needless bloodshed. Many soldiers may have died on November 10 instead of November 11 to avoid the shame of the deaths on November 11.
Taking all of this into account, we can say that General Friedrichs is not based on a specific man during World War I. However, his character in “All Quiet on the Western Front” is based on and a good representation of the people who were responsible for the deaths of many soldiers who were forced into the war even though they could have come out of it alive and unharmed.
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Early years
Paulus, whose father was a 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 Imperial German Navy, and he studied law for a short time at Marburg University.
Since the 1940s, many English-language sources and publications have added the prefix “von” to Paulus’ family name. Mark Arnold-The Forster’s World at War, which is a companion book to the documentary of the same name, was published by Stein and Day in 1973 on pages 139–142. Other examples are Allen and Muratoff’s The Russian Campaigns of 1941–1943, which came out in 1944, and Peter Margaritis’s The World at War, which came out in 1975. (2019). This isn’t true, because Paulus’s family was never part of the nobility. Antony Beevor talks about Paulus’s “relatively humble birth,” which is the only thing he has in common with Rommel’s family.
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After dropping out of college without a degree, he joined the 111th Infantry Regiment in February 1910 as an officer-in-training. 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 started, Paulus’s regiment was part of the push into France. In the fall of 1914, he saw action in the Vosges and near Arras. After being sick for a while, he became a staff officer in the Alpenkorps and served in France, Romania, and Serbia. He was a captain by the end of the war.
Paulus was a brigade adjutant in the Freikorps after the Armistice. He was chosen to be one of only 4,000 officers in the Reichswehr, a defensive army that was limited to 100,000 people by the Treaty of Versailles. He was put in charge of a company in the 13th Infantry Regiment at Stuttgart. He worked in different staff jobs for over ten years (1921–33). 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 led a motorized battalion for a short time from 1934 to 1935. In October 1935, he was named chief of staff for Panzer headquarters. This was a new group in the German army that was led by Oswald Lutz. It was in charge of training and improving the Panzerwaffe, or tank forces.
In February 1938, Gen. Heinz Guderian gave Paulus the job of Chef des Generalstabes of the new XVI Armeekorps (Motorisiert), which took over Lutz’s command. Guderian said he was “brilliantly smart, conscientious, hard working, original, and talented,” but he had serious doubts about his ability to make decisions, his toughness, and his lack of command experience. He stayed in that job until May 1939, when he was made a major general and put in charge of the German Tenth Army, which served in Poland. The unit was changed to the Sixth Army and took part in offensives through the Netherlands and Belgium in the spring of 1940. In August of 1940, Paulus was given the rank of lieutenant general. He was named deputy chief of the German General Staff the following month (Oberquartiermeister I). In that job, 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 Paulus’s boss, became commander of the whole Army Group South, Paulus was promoted to General der Panzertruppe and put in charge of the Sixth Army. Before this, he had never been in charge of a unit bigger 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.
During that summer, Paulus led the attack on Stalingrad. His troops fought against the Soviet forces defending Stalingrad for more than three months. The fighting got more and more violent as time went on. In November 1942, when the Soviet Red Army started Operation Uranus, a huge counter-offensive, Paulus was surrounded by an entire Soviet Army Group. When the counteroffensive began, Paulus did not ask to leave the city.
Paulus did what Adolf Hitler told him to do and held his positions in Stalingrad no matter what, even though he was surrounded by strong Soviet forces. Army Group Don, led by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, started Operation Winter Storm in December as a relief effort. Paulus got ready to leave Stalingrad after getting the order to do so. In the meantime, he kept all of his soldiers in defensive positions. Manstein told Paulus that the Sixth Army would have to help with the relief, but the order to start the breakout never came. Paulus never wavered in his determination to do what he was told. Manstein’s forces couldn’t get to Stalingrad on their own, and Soviet offensives in other places on the front eventually stopped them.
The new head of the Army General Staff, Kurt Zeitzler, finally convinced Hitler to let Paulus escape, but only if he could hold on to Stalingrad, which was impossible.
Paulus and his men kept fighting for the next two months. But the German defense was slowly broken down by a lack of food and ammunition, lost equipment, and soldiers who were getting sicker and sicker. Hitler made Paulus a colonel general at the start 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 has to stay here as long as we keep fighting. They need these troops for a big offensive against Army Group “A” in the Caucasus and along the still-unstable front from Voronesh to the Black Sea. We have to keep them here until the very end so that we can stabilize the eastern front. Only if that happens, Germany has a chance of winning the war.
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