Question: How many groups did von Rundstedt command?
About the article "Invasion of Normandy", section "Armoured reserves".

Candidate passages:
World War II.
German invasions.
On 7 May 1939, Blumentritt submitted to his superiors a working plan for the German Invasion of Poland.
At this time, he was assigned to the "Oberkommando des Heeres" (Army High Command; OKH), and formed along with von Manstein and "Generalfeldmarshall" Gerd von Rundstedt a "Working Staff" for the development of a plan for the invasion.
The plan he submitted was called "Fall Weiss" (Case White).
It was subsequently to be followed with little alteration.
Then on 2 September 1939, Blumentritt was transferred to the general staff of Army Group South (one of the two German Army Groups to carry out the invasion) in Silesia under von Rundstedt.
This collaboration began his long and intimate friendship with von Runstedt, which was to last for many years.
Blumentritt was von Rundstedt′s Chief of Operations, while von Manstein was Chief of Staff.
The invasion was put into motion, after some delays, on 1 September 1939, and by 6 October the entire country of Poland was subdued.
In 1940, Blumentritt—as the Operations Officer of Army Group A (again under von Rundstedt)—took part in the planning (with von Manstein and Henning von Tresckow) and execution of the invasion of France.
The plan he helped develop was called "Sichelschnitt" or "Sickle Cut", and was later referred to as the Manstein Plan.
The subsequent unmitigated success of the German "Blitzkrieg" in France and the complete collapse of the French defense shocked even the Germans.
However, as the German army closed in on complete victory, Blumentritt and von Rundstedt ignored conflicting orders from the OKH to advance on the British and French position at Dunkirk, and instead followed Adolf Hitler′s order to halt for three days, consequently allowing the evacuation of the British Forces.
Immediately after the German occupation of France, von Rundstedt, Blumentritt, and others were tasked with preparing for the invasion of Great Britain.
This plan, as handed down from high command, was designated Operation "Sea Lion".
Blumentritt helped with the details of the plan, and several exercises were carried out in preparation for it, but he never believed that it was a serious option, or that Hitler intended to carry it out.
He said that at the end of July or August "... Field-Marshal von Rundstedt was in Berlin, and Hitler stated quite clearly to him that he did not intend to carry out "Sea Lion"," and further, "By the end of September it was clear that the invasion of England was off.
"In 1941, Blumentritt, under General Günther von Kluge, was made Chief of Staff of the 4.
"Armee" and promoted to general, and despite the opposition he later professed to the plan, was involved with the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
On 18 April 1941, Blumentritt wrote:Maybe the Russians really intend to stand and fight the Germans between the western border and the Dnieper, a move which would be desirable...
Even the Imperial Army was no match for the German command, and the Russian commanders today are at an even greater disadvantage.
The shortcomings of the middle ranks are even greater...
The effects of German weapons, whose prestige has increased with the campaign against Yugoslavia, will soon be felt!
There will be fourteen days of heavy fighting.
Hopefully, by then we shall have made it.
In another memo, Blumentritt wrote:On warfare and the inner value of the Russian opponent, the dull mass had two kinds of "ideas": the tsar and God.
Today, there is neither.
Bolshevism has taken their place.
I consider that to be a weakness since I never believed that this idea means anything to the bulk of the Russian people.
That is why I do not believe that the people will be carried away by Bolshevism.
They will soon be indifferent and fatalistic.
Blumentritt′s command was part of Army Group Center, which suffered massive casualties and the 4th Army itself only narrowly escaped envelopment and annihilation by the Russians outside Moscow.
After the ultimate failure of Operation "Barbarossa" in January 1942, Blumentritt returned to Germany as Chief Quartermaster of the OKH.
Late in the year he personally recommended to his superiors that the Germans should withdraw from Stalingrad, receiving the support of Chief of Staff OKH—General Franz Halder—in this recommendation, but the idea of any withdrawal was rejected by Hitler. 
The attack began on 22 June.
Despite ample warning from intelligence sources and defectors, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Command were caught by surprise, and the Germans rapidly broke through the frontier defences, helped by their total command of the air.
But the Soviet commander in northern Ukraine, Colonel-General Mikhail Kirponos, was one of the better Soviet generals, and he commanded the Red Army's largest and best-equipped force: nearly a million men and 4,800 tanks.
The Germans soon encountered stubborn resistance.
Rundstedt testified at Nuremberg: "The resistance at the frontier was not too great, but it grew continually as we advanced into the interior of the country.
Very strong tank forces, tanks of a better type, far superior to ours, appeared."
The Soviet tank armies were in fact stronger than the German panzer divisions, and in the T-34 they possessed a superior tank: Kleist called it "the finest tank in the world."
Rundstedt said after the war: "I realised soon after the attack that everything that had been written about Russia was wrong."
But at this stage of the war the Red Army "tankisti" lacked the tactical skill and experience of the German panzer commanders, and after ten days of bitter fighting Kleist's armour broke through, reaching Zhitomir, only 130 km from Kiev, on 12 July.
By 30 July the Red Army in Ukraine was in full retreat.
Rundstedt and his commanders were confident that they could seize Kiev "off the march," that is, without a prolonged siege.
Despite these successes, the campaign did not go according to plan.
The front door was "kicked in", but the Red Army was not destroyed, and the Soviet state did not collapse.
Once this became apparent, at the end of July, Hitler and his commanders had to decide how to proceed.
All the Army leaders, including Rundstedt, argued for the main thrust to be in the centre, aimed at capturing Moscow, which was not only the Soviet capital but also a major industrial and transport centre.
In this they were following their training in the Prussian military tradition of Carl von Clausewitz, who had argued that the focus of the offensive must be the enemy's "centre of gravity" ("Schwerpunkt").
But Hitler saw the war more in geopolitical than strictly strategic terms.
He wanted to seize Leningrad to close off Soviet access to the Baltic, and Ukraine and the Caucasus to secure their food resources and oil.
After a month of wrangling, Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to pause at Smolensk, while the panzer divisions were shipped to the north and the south.
After the war, the influential military writer Basil Liddell-Hart argued that this decision cost the Germans their only chance of victory in the east in 1941.
Although Rundstedt opposed this diversion of forces, he was its beneficiary as attention was shifted to the southern front.
He also benefited from disastrous decisions made by the Soviets.
On 10 July Stalin appointed his old crony Marshal Semyon Budyonny commander in the Ukraine, with orders to stop the German advance at all costs.
Budyonny ordered Kirponos to push his forces forwards to Kiev and Uman, despite the danger of encirclement, rather than withdraw and make a stand on the Dnieper.
Rundstedt therefore decided to break off the advance towards Kiev, and to direct Kleist's armour south-eastwards, towards Krivoy Rog.
By 30 July the Germans were at Kirovograd, 130 km east of Uman, cutting off the Soviet line of retreat (which had in any case been forbidden by Stalin).
Meanwhile, Schobert's 11th Army was advancing north-eastwards from Bessarabia.
On 2 August the two armies met, trapping over 100,000 Soviet troops, virtually all of whom were killed or captured.
Southern Ukraine was thus left virtually defenceless, and by 25 August, when they entered Dniepropetrovsk, the Germans had occupied everything west of the Dnieper (except Odessa, which held out until October).
Nevertheless, this had all taken longer than expected, and the Red Army was showing no signs of collapse.
Rundstedt wrote to his wife on 12 August: "How much longer?
I have no great hope that it will be soon.
The distances in Russia devour us.
"Neither the success at Uman nor what followed at Kiev would have happened had Rundstedt not backed his subordinates and resisted Hitler's interference in the conduct of the campaign.
As during the French campaign, Hitler was panicked by his own success.
By early July he was full of anxiety that the German armour was advancing too quickly, without infantry support, and that it was exposed to Soviet counter-attacks.
On 10 July Brauchitsch arrived at Rundstedt's headquarters at Brody, with instructions from Hitler that Kleist was turn south towards Vinnitsa and link up with Schobert's army there, rather than continue south-east to Kirovograd.
This would still have trapped many Soviet divisions, but it would have allowed the mass of Soviet forces at Uman and Kiev to escape.
Rundstedt defended Kleist's ability to execute the larger encirclement, and persuaded Brauchitsch that he was right.
Brauchitsch then contacted Halder, who succeeded in persuading Hitler to support Rundstedt.
This was a sign that Rundstedt still had Hitler's respect, as were Hitler's two visits to Rundstedt's armies during this period.
After Uman Budyonny's forces massed around Kiev – over 700,000 men – were left dangerously exposed, with Kleist's 1st Panzer Army regrouping to the south-east and General Heinz Guderian's 2nd Panzer Army (part of Army Group Centre) smashing General Yeromenko's Briansk Front and advancing south from Gomel in White Russia, on a line well east of Kiev.
The danger of encirclement was obvious, but Stalin stubbornly refused to consider withdrawal, despite warnings from both Budyonny and Kirponos that catastrophe was imminent.
Budyonny has been freely blamed by postwar writers for the disaster at Kiev, but it is clear that while he was out of his depth as a front commander, he warned Stalin of the danger, and was dismissed for his pains.
On 12 September Kleist crossed the Dnieper at Cherkasy heading north-east, and on 16 September his tanks linked up with Guderian's at Lokhvitsa, nearly 200 km east of Kiev.
Although many Soviet troops were able to escape eastwards in small groups, around 600,000 men – four whole armies comprising 43 divisions, nearly one-third of the Soviet Army's strength at the start of the war – were killed or captured, and the great majority of those captured died in captivity.
Kiev fell on 19 September.
Kirponos was killed in action on 20 September, shortly before resistance ceased.
Rundstedt had thus presided over one of the greatest victories in the history of warfare.
But this catastrophe for the Red Army resulted far more from the inflexibility of Stalin than it did from the talents of Rundstedt as a commander or the skill of the German Army.
David Stahel, a recent historian of the Kiev campaign, wrote: "Germany had been handed a triumph far in excess of what its exhausted armoured forces could have achieved without Stalin's obduracy and incompetence."
In fact both the German Army and the Red Army were driven more by the dictates of their respective political masters rather than by the decisions of the military professionals.
Stahel sums the situation up with his chapter heading: "Subordinating the generals: the dictators dictate."
Kirponos could have withdrawn most of his army across the Dnieper in time had Stalin allowed him to do so, and Rundstedt himself acknowledged this.
Had this happened, Rundstedt's forces would have been in no state to give chase: they were exhausted after two months of ceaseless combat.
Despite their successes, they had sustained high levels of casualties and even higher levels of loss of equipment, both of which were impossible to replace.
By September the German Army in the Soviet Union had suffered nearly 500,000 casualties.
In a statement to the Army on 15 August, Rundstedt acknowledged: "It is only natural that such great effort would result in fatigue, the combat strength of the troops has weakened and in many places there is a desire for rest."
But, said Runstedt: "We must keep pressure on the enemy for he has many more reserves than we."
This was a remarkable admission so early in the Russian campaign, and it showed that Rundstedt was already well aware of how unrealistic the German belief in a quick victory had been. 
The Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943 removed Rundstedt's fears that France would be invaded that summer, but he could not have doubted that the massive build-up of American troops in Britain meant that a cross-channel invasion would come in 1944.
In October Rundstedt sent Hitler a memorandum on the defensive preparations.
He placed no faith in the Atlantic Wall, seeing it merely as useful propaganda.
"We Germans", he said, "do not indulge in the tired Maginot spirit."
He argued that an invasion could only be defeated by a defence in depth, with armoured reserves positioned well inland so that they could be deployed to wherever the invasion came, and launch counter-offensives to drive the invaders back.
There were several problems with this, particularly the lack of fuel for rapid movements of armour, the Allied air superiority which enabled them to disrupt the transport system, and the increasingly effective sabotage efforts of the French resistance.
Hitler was not persuaded: his view was that the invasion must be defeated on the beaches.
Characteristically, however, he told Rundstedt he agreed with him, then sent Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to France with orders to hasten the completion of the Atlantic Wall; while von Rundstedt remained the C-I-C in France, Rommel became the official commander of Army Group B. Rundstedt was extremely angered by this decision; although he admired Rommel's tactical skill, he knew from his colleagues that Rommel was notoriously difficult to work with and would mostly be able to ignore Rundstedt's authority thanks to his patronage by Hitler and Goebbels.
Rommel in fact agreed with Rundstedt that the Atlantic Wall was a "gigantic bluff", but he also believed that Allied air power made Rundstedt's proposed defense plan impossible.
By the spring of 1944 Rommel had turned the mostly-nonexistent 'Wall' into a very formidable defensive line, but since he believed that the invasion would come somewhere between Dunkirk and the mouth of the Somme, much of his work was directed at strengthening the wrong area- although in late 1943 he had focused on Normandy.
As fears of an imminent invasion mounted, conflict broke out among the commanders.
Rommel wanted the armoured divisions positioned close to the coast, mostly in the area he considered at highest risk.
The commander of armoured forces in France, General Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg, backed by Rundstedt, strongly disagreed, wanting his forces to be positioned inland to preserve their manoeuvrability.
Eventually Hitler intervened, and in his usual way imposed an unsatisfactory compromise: half the armour would be allocated to the Army Groups defending the beaches, and half would be kept in reserve under Geyr von Schweppenburg: but these could not be deployed without his direct order.
Hitler then made matters worse by appointing Rommel commander of Army Group B, covering all of northern France.
This unworkable command system was to have dire consequences when the invasion came.
The invasion duly came before dawn on 6 June 1944, in Normandy, far to the west of where Rundstedt and Rommel had expected.
Rommel was on leave in Germany, many of the local commanders in Normandy were at a conference in Rennes, and Hitler was asleep at Berchtesgaden.
But Rundstedt, now 68, was up before 3.00 am, trying to take charge of a confusing situation.
He immediately saw that the reported Allied airborne landings in Normandy presaged a seaborne invasion.
He contacted OKW and demanded that he be given authority to deploy the armoured reserves, but OKW could not agree to this without Hitler's approval.
Hitler's refusal came through at 10 am, followed by his change of mind at 2.30 pm, by which time the Allies were well ashore and the cloud cover had lifted, meaning that the armour could not move until dusk.
In mid afternoon Rundstedt ordered that "the Allies wiped out before the day's end, otherwise the enemy would reinforce and the chance would be lost", but it was too late.
Rundstedt's biographer concludes: "If Hitler had released the Panzer reserves as soon as von Rundstedt had asked for them, the Allies would have experienced a much harder day on 6 June than they did."
The historian Stephen E. Ambrose wrote: "The only high-command officer who responded correctly to the crisis at hand was Field Marshal Rundstedt, the old man who was there for window-dressing and who was so scorned by Hitler and OKW... Rundstedt's reasoning was sound, his actions decisive, his orders clear.
"Being right was little consolation to Rundstedt.
By 11 June it was evident that the Allies could not be dislodged from their beach-head in Normandy.
Their total command of the air and the sabotage of roads and bridges by the Resistance made bringing armoured reinforcements to Normandy slow and difficult, but without them there was no hope of an effective counter-offensive.
Supported by Rommel, he tried to persuade Keitel at OKW that the only escape was to withdraw from Normandy to a prepared defensive line on the Seine, but Hitler forbade any withdrawal.
On 17 June Hitler flew to France and met Rundstedt and Rommel at his command bunker near Soissons.
Both Field Marshals argued that the situation in Normandy required either massive reinforcements (which were not available) or a rapid withdrawal.
Remarkably, they both also urged that Hitler find a political solution to end the war, which Rommel told him bluntly was unwinnable.
Hitler ignored all their demands, requiring "fanatical" defence and a counter-attack with whatever was available.
It was during the desperate German attempts to bring reserve units to the front that men of the "Das Reich" SS Panzer Division massacred over 600 inhabitants of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France, in retaliation for partisan attacks in the area.
Rundstedt was German commander-in-chief in France, he had ordered "Das Reich" to head north to Normandy, and he had previous condoned tough action against partisans, including the shooting of hostages.
This was enough for the French government to demand after the war that he stand trial for the massacre at Oradour.
On 29 June Rundstedt and Rommel were summoned to Berchtesgaden for a further meeting with Hitler, at which they repeated their demands, and were again rebuffed.
On his return to Saint-Germain, on 30 June, Rundstedt found an urgent plea from Schweppenburg, who was commanding the armoured forced at Caen, to be allowed to withdraw his units out of range of Allied naval gunfire, which was decimating his forces.
Rundstedt at once agreed, and notified OKW of this decision.
On 1 July he received a message from OKW countermanding his orders.
In a fury, he phoned Keitel, urging him to go to Hitler and get this decision reversed.
Keitel pleaded that this was impossible.
"What shall we do?"
he asked.
Rundstedt replied ""Schluss mit dem Krieg, Idioten!""
This literally means "Finish with the war, idiots!
", but is usually translated as "Make peace, you fools!"
There has been some doubt raised as to whether Rundstedt actually said this, but Wilmot says the incident was recounted to him and Liddell-Hart by Blumentritt, who was present.
Keitel immediately reported Rundstedt's words to Hitler, whereupon Hitler dismissed him from his post, replacing him with Kluge.
It is likely that Hitler had already decided that Rundstedt should be replaced after the meetings of 17 and 29 June.
It was officially given out that Rundstedt was retiring on the grounds of age and ill-health.
Hitler wrote him a "very cordial" letter, and awarded him the Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross, one of the highest of the new decorations created in 1940.
Rundstedt departed Saint-Germain for the last time on 4 July, accompanied by his son, and was driven back to the sanatorium at Bad Tölz, to be reunited with his wife.
He told Rommel on departing that he would never hold another military command. 
On 25 October, Rundstedt took up his new post as commander of Army Group A, facing the French border in the Ardennes mountains sector, and based in Koblenz.
To his north Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock faced the Dutch and Belgian borders, while to his south Army Group C under General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb faced the French along the Maginot Line.
Manstein was again his chief of staff and Blumentritt his chief of operations, although Manstein soon departed to command an infantry corps and was replaced by General Georg von Sodenstern.
Rundstedt's main field commanders (from north to south) were Blaskowitz (9th Army), List (12th Army) and General Ernst Busch (16th Army).
Hitler's original plan was to attack in late November, before the French and British had time fully to deploy along their front.
The plan, devised by Hitler, was essentially for a re-run of the invasion of 1914, with the main assault to come in the north, through Belgium and the Netherlands, then wheeling south to capture Paris, leaving the French Army anchored on the Maginot Line.
Most senior officers were opposed to both the timing and the plan.
Rundstedt, Manstein, Reichenau (commanding 6th Army in Army Group B), List and Brauchitsch remonstrated with Hitler in a series of meetings in October and November.
They were opposed to an offensive so close to the onset of winter, and they were opposed to launching the main attack through Belgium, where the many rivers and canals would hamper armoured operations.
Manstein in particular, supported by Rundstedt, argued for an armoured assault by Army Group A, across the Ardennes to the sea, cutting the British and French off in Belgium.
This "Manstein Plan" was the genesis of the blitzkrieg of May 1940.
A combination of bad weather, the arguments of his generals, and a breach of security when the details of the original plan fell into Allied hands, eventually led Hitler to agree to postpone the attack until early 1940, when it was again delayed by the invasion of Denmark and Norway.
In February, Hitler finally accepted the Manstein Plan.
General Günther von Kluge's 4th Army and General Maximilian Reichsfreiherr von Weichs's 2nd Army were transferred from Army Group B to Rundstedt's command.
General Ewald von Kleist was now to command Panzer (Armoured) Group Kleist, consisting of three armoured corps, led by Heinz Guderian, Georg-Hans Reinhardt and Hermann Hoth.
These armoured corps were to be the spearhead of the German thrust into France.
Although Manstein is often credited for the change of plans, he himself acknowledged Rundstedt's decisive role.
"I would stress that my commander, Colonel-General von Rundstedt, agreed with my view throughout, and backed our recommendations to the full.
Without his sanction we could never have kept up our attempts to change OKW's mind.
"During this hiatus, the group of senior officers who were plotting against Hitler's war plans, led by Halder, renewed their efforts, convinced that an attack in the west would lead to a war which Germany would lose.
Brauchitsch agreed with Halder's fears, but continued to vacillate about opposing Hitler – he asked Reichenau and Rundstedt to remonstrate with Hitler, but they refused.
Witzleben suggested that Rundstedt, Leeb and Bock should jointly refuse to carry out Hitler's orders to carry out the attack.
Two of the conspirators, Abwehr officers Hans Oster and Hans Bernd Gisevius, discussed this with Leeb, who turned them down but did not report them.
On 13 March, Himmler came to Koblenz to give the generals, including Rundstedt, an ideological lecture, in the course of which he made it clear that the atrocities against civilians which some of them had witnessed in Poland had been carried out on his orders, and with the approval of Hitler.
"I do nothing that the Führer does not know," he said.
The attack was finally launched on 10 May.
By 14 May, Guderian and Hoth had crossed the Meuse and had broken open the Allied front.
As planned, the British and French had advanced into Belgium to meet Bock's offensive, and were in danger of being cut off there by a German thrust to the sea.
Both Hitler and Rundstedt had doubts about the safety of allowing the armoured corps to get too far ahead of their infantry support, however.
Hitler sent the chief of staff of the Armed Forces Supreme Command ("Oberkommando der Wehrmacht", OKW), General Wilhelm Keitel, to Rundstedt's headquarters, to urge caution.
In Halder's words, Hitler was "frightened by his own success... afraid to take any chance."
Guderian objected vehemently to being ordered to halt, and Rundstedt was forced to mediate between Hitler and his impetuous armoured commanders, who were backed by Halder.
By 20 May, Guderian's tanks had reached the sea at Abbeville and closed the trap on the British and French, who were already in retreat to the English Channel ports.
By this time, however, Kleist's armoured forces were thinly stretched and had suffered losses of up to 50% of their tanks.
Kleist asked Rundstedt for a pause while the armoured units recovered and the infantry caught up, and Rundstedt agreed to this.
At the same time, Göring attempted to persuade Hitler that the Luftwaffe could destroy the trapped Allied armies, freeing the German forces to turn south towards Paris.
Hitler accepted this view, and on 24 May issued what became known as the Halt Order, preventing the German armour from rapidly capturing Calais and Dunkirk.
The Luftwaffe were unable to destroy the Allied armies, however, and the halt allowed the British Expeditionary Force and many French troops to be evacuated from Dunkirk.
This decision, for which Hitler, Rundstedt and Kleist shared responsibility, proved very costly to Germany's war effort in the long term.
After the war, Rundstedt described the Halt Order as "an incredible blunder" and assigned full blame to Hitler.
His biographer concedes that this "does not represent the whole truth", because the original impetus for a pause came from Kleist and Rundstedt himself.
Attention then turned to the attack on the French armies to the south.
On 29 May, Hitler came to Rundstedt's headquarters at Charleville-Mézières to discuss the new offensive.
Bock's Army Group B on the right was to advance on Paris, while Rundstedt's Army Group A, now consisting only of List's 12th Army, Weichs's 2nd Army and Busch's 16th Army, was to attack towards Soissons and Rheims.
Rundstedt's attack began on 9 June, and within a few days had broken the French resistance.
By 12 June, his forces were across the Marne and advancing south-east towards Alsace.
Dijon fell on 16 June and Lyon on 20 June.
By this time French resistance was crumbling and on 22 June the French requested an armistice.
In July, Hitler announced that Rundstedt and a number of other field commanders were to be promoted to the rank of Field Marshal ("Generalfeldmarschall") during the 1940 Field Marshal Ceremony.
Although Rundstedt wished to resume his retirement, he was persuaded by Hitler to stay in France and set up headquarters at Saint-Germain-en-Laye about outside Paris.
There he oversaw the planning for the proposed invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion, but never took the prospects for this operation seriously, and was not surprised when Hitler called it off in September after the Luftwaffe's setback in the Battle of Britain.
Even then, Rundstedt was not to be allowed to retire, when in October Hitler appointed him Commander-in-Chief West ("Oberbefehlshaber West", or OB West). 
In March 1942 Hitler re-appointed Rundstedt OB West, in succession to Witzleben, who was ill.
He returned to the comfortable headquarters in the Hotel Pavillon Henri IV in Saint-Germain, which he had occupied in 1940–41.
Rundstedt's command of French and his good relationship with the head of the collaborationist Vichy regime, Marshal Philippe Pétain, were considerable assets.
But his position was to grow increasingly difficult.
Hitler did not intend giving him real authority, seeing him as a dignified figurehead.
Although he was commander of the German Army in the west, charged with defending the coasts of France and Begium against attack by the western Allies, the military governors in Paris and Brussels (Rundstedt's former subordinate Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel and Alexander von Falkenhausen respectively) were not under his direct command, and he had no control over the Navy or Air Force.
He also had no control over the SS and Gestapo operations in France: the HSSPF in Paris, Carl Oberg, answered only to Himmler.
Secondly, the internal situation in France had changed greatly since Rundstedt's departure in March 1941.
Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union had led the French Communist Party to abandon its previous neutrality (its slogan was "Neither Pétain nor de Gaulle"), and launch active resistance against the Germans and the Vichy regime.
The result was an escalating cycle of assassinations and reprisal killings that rapidly alienated the hitherto quiescent French population.
On 20 October French Communists assassinated the German commander in Nantes, Karl Hotz, triggering the execution of over 100 French hostages.
As military governor, Stülpnagel directed the policy of executing hostages.
Rundstedt had no direct control over the Army's response to Resistance attacks.
Nevertheless, many held him responsible, then and later.
Rundstedt had more direct responsibility for the Commando Order of 1942, which later served as the basis of war crimes charges against him.
There were in fact two German orders concerning captured Allied commandos.
The first was issued by Rundstedt in July 1942, and stated that captured Allied parachutists were to be handed over to the Gestapo, "whether in uniform or not", rather than made prisoners of war.
This was a response to the increasing number of British agents being parachuted into France by the Special Operations Executive.
The second was issued by Hitler personally in October, following the Dieppe Raid by the British and Canadians on the coast of France.
It stipulated that all captured Allied commandos were to be executed, again regardless of whether they were in uniform.
As a consequence, six British commandos captured in Operation Frankton, a raid on shipping at Bordeaux in December 1942, were executed by the German Navy.
Although Rundstedt neither ordered nor was informed of this action, he was later held responsible as German commander in France.
Meanwhile the military situation for the Germans was deteriorating.
The entry of the United States into the war in December 1941 raised the likelihood of an Allied invasion of France.
Hitler's response was to order the construction of the Atlantic Wall, a system of coastal fortifications from Norway to the French-Spanish border, to be constructed by the Organisation Todt using slave labour.
There was also a steady build-up of German forces in France, despite the demands of the eastern front.
By June Rundstedt commanded 25 divisions.
In November 1942 the Allied invaded French North Africa (Operation Torch).
When the Vichy authorities in Africa surrendered after token resistance, the Germans responded by occupying all of France and dissolving what remained of the French Army.
Rundstedt travelled to Vichy to placate Pétain, who threatened to resign but backed down after soothing words from Rundstedt.
At the same time, in the Soviet Union, Rundstedt's old command, Army Group South, was facing disaster at Stalingrad, the decisive battle of World War II in Europe.
The catastrophe of Stalingrad prompted renewed efforts by dissident German officers to remove Hitler from power while there was still time, as they believed, to negotiate an honourable peace settlement.
The conspirators were centered on Halder, Beck and Witzleben, but by 1943 all had been removed from positions of authority.
The real movers were now more junior officers: Henning von Tresckow, chief of staff of Army Group Centre, Friedrich Olbricht, Chief of the Armed Forces Replacement Office, and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a member of the Replacement Army staff.
Their strategy at this time was to persuade the senior field commanders to lead a coup against Hitler.
Their initial target was Manstein, now commanding Army Group Don, but he turned Tresckow down at a meeting in March 1943.
Several sources say that Rundstedt was also approached, although they do not say specifically who approached him.
In any case, he refused to get involved, although both Stülpnagel and Falkenhausen were recruits to the conspiracy.
By one account, he complained: "Why always me?
Let Manstein and Kluge do it."
He told Gerhard Engel, one of Hitler's adjutants, that he was "too old and had had enough."
This failure of moral leadership at a critical time, when Rundstedt was the most senior and respected officer in the German Army, was to count heavily against him after the war.
It was true, however, that Rundstedt was well past his best.
The military historian Chester Wilmot wrote soon after the war: "The truth was that Rundstedt had lost his grip.
He was old and tired and his once active brain was gradually becoming addled, for he had great difficulty in sleeping without the soporific aid of alcohol.".
Events in June 1944 were to show that this was an exaggeration: Rundstedt was still capable of clear thought and decisive action.
But his health was a matter of increasing concern to his staff and his family.
His son Major Hans-Gerd von Rundstedt was posted to his command as an aide-de-camp, partly to monitor his health and report back to Bila von Rundstedt in Kassel.
In one of his letters, Hans-Gerd referred to his father's "somewhat plentiful nicotine and alcohol consumption," but assured his mother that Rundstedt's health was basically sound.
Nevertheless, in May 1943 Rundstedt was given leave and was sent to a sanatorium at Bad Tölz, south of Munich, which was also the site of the SS Officer Candidate School.
Later he stayed some time at Grundlsee in Austria, and was received by Hitler at his summer house at Berchtesgaden, a sign of Hitler's continuing respect for him.
He was back at work by July.