The British cabinet (Attlee ministry), under pressure from the Soviet Union, finally decided in July 1948 to prosecute Manstein and three other senior officers—Walther von Brauchitsch, Gerd von Rundstedt, and Adolf Strauss—who had all been held in custody since the end of the war. Telford Taylor, recently promoted to Brigadier General and placed in charge of prosecuting war criminals on behalf of the United States, had during the course of the main Nuremberg trials collected a body of evidence against the four generals, falling into three broad categories: the killing of political commissars in the Soviet Union; poor treatment and killing of prisoners of war; and the extermination and enslavement of civilian populations. He filed a memorandum with the British public prosecutor, which was passed on to the War Ministry. Discussion among British cabinet ministers was heated; the Cold War was already under way, and Germany was seen as a bulwark against the spread of communism. While General Sir Brian Robertson, posted in Berlin, favoured discontinuing the prosecution of German generals as a way to initiate reconciliation with Germany, others, such as Foreign Affairs Minister Ernest Bevin and Minister of War Emanuel Shinwell, felt that the evidence was so convincing that a case must be filed. The Soviet Union requested in March 1948 that Manstein and Rundstedt be turned over for trial in that country, but the request was turned down. In July 1948 the decision was taken by the British cabinet to try the men on German soil, and they were transferred to Munsterlager to await trial. In October Winston Churchill, then Leader of the Opposition, spoke out against prosecuting any further German generals, as he felt it would interfere with the process of reconciliation with Germany. Brauchitsch died that month, and Rundstedt and Strauss were released on medical grounds in March 1949.
