Lieutenant-General Ernst Baade.

Every army throws up its share of colourful eccentrics, even in the ranks of the generals, and there can have been few more idiosyncratic personalities during the last war than Lieutenant-General Ernst Baade. The son of a Brandenburg landowner, he farmed his own estate in Holstein where he bred horses. Before the war he and his wife were well-known international show-jumpers. In 1939 he was a squadron leader in Cavalry Regiment No. 3, which von Senger commanded. Senger found him 'an original character', and his disregard for pomp and circumstance would have found common cause with far more British officers than German ones. He fought in Poland, France, Russia, North Africa, and Italy.

As a colonel in 1942 he commanded the Combat Group of the Afrika Korps which forced a way into Bir Hakeim; and in 1943 he commanded the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division in Sardinia and Italy, under von Senger. Before becoming a general he had been known to lead patrols in Africa wearing a kilt, and to have signalled the end of a night raid by telling the British over their own radio network, 'Stop firing. On my way back. Baade'. At Cassino, where he was a general, it was rumoured that he had accepted an invitation to dine with the enemy at Christmas, and O.K.W. demanded in some agitation of von Senger if this was true. Von Senger denied it, but forebore to admit that Baade had signalled New Year Greetings to the enemy in English!

Baade gave Major-General Ryder's 34th U.S. Division a very bloody nose above Cassino in February 1944. His defence of Cassino and of the Hitler Line earned him a high reputation, and the 10th Army Commander, Colonel-General von Vietinghoff, thought Baade and Heidrich 'in a class by themselves' as divisional commanders. This very frontline General was promoted to command a Panzer Corps on the western front in 1945, but was to die from wounds received on the last day of the war in an air raid.