Küchler, Georg von (1881–1968) KÜCHLER, GEORG VON (1881–1968) German field marshal He saw heavy fighting on the Western Front during World War I before becoming a staff officer After the war he joined a Freikorps and fought briefly in Poland He participated in the occupation of Memel in March 1939, and commanded 3rd Army in the invasion of Poland in September He led 18th Army in the invasion of Belgium in 1940, advancing to the Scheldt and taking Antwerp before turning south into France His troops were among those halted outside Dunkirk After the AngloFrench evacuation, 18th Army moved south to Paris and beyond Küchler again led 18th Army, through the Baltic states and into the Soviet Union, during Operation BARBAROSSA in 1941 His command formed the northernmost flank of Army Group North It was during this campaign that Küchler approved various war crimes, including use of Soviet prisoners to walk across minefields to clear them for his tanks, and enforcement of the Commissar order He was promoted to command Army Group North in December 1941 For the next two years he fought a mostly static battle centered on the long siege of Leningrad He was abruptly sacked and briefly “retired” in January 1944, on the order of Adolf Hitler His offense was to approve a wholly essential tactical withdrawal by 18th Army as the Red Army broke out of the Leningrad enclave He did so over enraged objections and a direct “stand fast” order by his Führer Captured by U.S forces at the end of the war, Küchler was convicted of war crimes in 1948 Sentenced to 20 years, he was released in 1955 KUGELERLASS “bullet order.” A Schutzstaffel (SS) decree issued by Ernst Kaltenbrunner on March 4, 1944, commanding that escaped prisoners of war were to be taken to Mauthausen concentration camp and shot Most escapees from the armed forces of the Western Allies were exempted, but not all The order was routinely enforced against Red Army men KULA GULF, BATTLE OF A minor night action in the Solomons provoked by a small U.S Navy task force seeking to intercept a destroyer transport run by the Tokyo Express on the night of July 6, 1943 The Japanese displayed still clearly superior night-fighting skills, exchanging one destroyer lost for an American cruiser sunk KULAKS “Tight-fisted ones.” A Bolshevik pejorative for “rich” peasants: those with property beyond subsistence or who employed other peasants as farm laborers They had benefited most from agrarian reforms in 1906 and again after 1917 They bitterly resisted collectivization of Soviet agriculture ordered by Joseph Stalin from 1931 to 1933 Stalin retaliated by ordering kulaks “liquidated as a class” and “dekulakization” of all agriculture The term “kulak” was never precisely defined, which suited Stalin’s simultaneous campaign against Ukrainian nationalism and his paranoid delusion that failure to meet unrealistic requisition quotas was due to kulak “sabotage” and “counterrevolution.” As a result, middle peasants were also swept into the net and destroyed By 1933 the scale of peasant resistance and state repression approached that of civil war, but it was a war that 648