Joachim Hermann August Lemelsen (28 September 1888 – 30 March 1954) was a German general during the Second World War. He was also a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves (German: Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub). The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and its higher grade Oak Leaves was awarded to recognise extreme battlefield bravery or successful military leadership.
Lemelsen and the 29th served in the Polish campaign {the 29th was involved in the Massacre in Ciepielów of 8 September 1939} and the early stages of the Battle of France. On May 28, 1940 Lemelsen was given command of the 5th Panzer Division with which he participated in the Dunkirk campaign.
On November 25, 1940, Lemelsen was given command of the new XLVII Motorized Corps, which he led in the capture of Smolensk and the battles of Kiev andBryansk. The Corps was designated a Panzer Corps in June 1942 and participated as such in anti-partisan operations and in the Battle of Kursk. Lemelsen made a strong but futile protest to the Wehrmacht High Command against the shooting of unarmed Russian prisoners during the early phases of Operation Barbarossa.
I am repeatedly finding out about the shooting of prisoners, defectors or deserters, carried out in an irresponsible, senseless and criminal manner. This is murder. Soon the Russians will get to hear about the countless corpses lying along the routes taken by our soldiers, without weapons and with hands raised, dispatched at close range by shots to the head. The result will be that the enemy will hide in the woods and fields and continue to fight--and we shall lose countless comrades.
After having commanded the XLVII Panzer Corps in Russia, Lemelsen was placed in the Army Leadership Reserve and temporarily commanded the Tenth Army in Italy for two months until the end of December 1943. Lemelsen was given command of the First Army, stationed near the Atlantic coast in France in May 1944. Only one month later, upon the Allies' capture of Rome and landing in Normandy on the same day, Lemelsen was transferred to Italy to take over command of theFourteenth Army to replace Eberhard von Mackensen who the theatre commander Albert Kesselring had dismissed. Lemelsen commanded the army in the Italian Campaign from June 1944 until mid October when he was given command of Germany's other major formation in Italy 10th Army. In February 1945 he returned to the leadership of 14th Army until the end of hostilities in Italy in early May.
Imprisoned by British forces after the war, Lemelsen in 1947 testified on behalf of his former commander, Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring, during Kesselring’s war crimes trial before a British military court convened at Venice, Italy. Soon thereafter, Lemelsen was freed from captivity. Kesselring, however, received a death sentence, immediately commuted to life imprisonment. Lemelsen's former commander was nevertheless released from prison five years later on health grounds.
For his service, Lemelsen was awarded the German Cross in Gold and the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oakleaves.
Released from captivity in 1947, General der Panzertruppen Joachim Lemelsen died in Göttingen in 1954.
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