Lothar Rendulic (23 October 1887 – 17 January 1971) was a Colonel-General of the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II.
Biography[]
Lothar Rendulic was born on 23 October 1887 in Wiener Neustadt, Austria-Hungary (present-day Austria) to a Croatian family. Rendulic enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1910 and fought in World War I against the Russian Empire. Rendulic studied law at the University of Vienna in postwar Austria and joined the Austrian Army, and in 1932 he joined the Nazi Party. Rendulic served as a military attache to France and the United Kingdom, and in 1938 he joined the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany after Austria was annexed by Adolf Hitler.
Rendulic was made the commander of the German 14th Infantry Division in 1940, but in 1943 he was held in reserve. He was later posted with the 2nd Panzer Army to Yugoslavia in 1943 and led the attempt to capture Josip Broz Tito on 25 May 1944. He very nearly captured him, but he narrowly failed. After the death of General Eduard Dietl in June 1944, Rendulic took over the German 20th Mountain Army in Norway and Finland and took served as the commander of German troops in the two countries. In October 1944 he ordered troops to destroy all houses except for private property in the Finnish town of Rovaniemi in revenge for the Finns making a separate peace with the Soviet Union, but Finnish commandos blew up a German train nearby, killing many German troops.
In 1945 Rendulic took over Army Group Courland in the Courland Peninsula of Latvia and later switched to command Army Group North in northern Germany, back to Army Group Courland, and later to Army Group South/Army Group Ostmark in Austria and Czechoslovakia. On 7 May 1945 he surrendered to the US Army during the Prague Offensive. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the scorching of Lapland in Finland and scorched earth policies, but was released in 1951, only three years after his trial in 1948. Rendulic worked as an author until his death in 1971.