rank & year promotions dont work, except for new (later) scenarios. otherwise its completely unimportant what is coded there. far more important are the valuables "Ideal Rank" (red) and "Max Skill" (green) and "Skill" (yellow - means base skill)
Guderian;94;GER;1936;1938;1940;1990;1;9;148;5;0;5;0;Guderian_Heinz6a_colour_ger;1936;1952;x
so to translate this code, Heinz will gain XP faster when he has the rank of general or below, he has a starting skill of 5 (each point of this means +5% for units lead by him) and the ability to go up to skill 9 - which is very, very rare in HoI. it is by the way better to leave him in MGs rank as long as you can, since leaders gain XP slower in higher ranks (a FM will gain close to no XP, while a MG will rise up very fast. personally i only promote leaders with XP 6 or 7 to LGs, since they will gain XP slower afterwards).
you shouldnt promote above the ideal rank (which reflects what the officer historically led, not necessarily his historical rank. so you will have full generals with an ideal rank of a major general, and major generals with an ideal rank of a lieutenant general - in poland or the soviet union for instance - if its coded by me). this is one of the rare things that ai can judge better than the human player (since it is not obvious), except he lurks in the CSV or is some kind of generals-of-ww2-masterbrain.
so, in short if TRM starts in 1936 and there is no other later scenario you will have to do things by yourself or switch on auto-promotion (but again as far as i know auto promotion just follows a stupid code by the ai file which is not historical at all - its only promoting a certain percentage of leaders to other ranks but does not follow the code given by the leaders CSV).
