Gotthard Heinrici

Gotthard Heinrici
Heinrici as Colonel General, 1943
Nickname(s)	Unser Giftzwerg (Our Poison Dwarf/Our tough Little bastard)
Born	(1886-12-25)25 December 1886 Gumbinnen, Kreis Gumbinnen, Province of East Prussia, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire (present-day Gusev, Gusevsky District, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia)
Died	10 December 1971(1971-12-10) (aged 84) Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany
Buried	Bergäcker Cemetery
Allegiance	German Empire Kingdom of Prussia (1905-1918) Weimar Republic (1918-1933) Nazi Germany (1933-1945)
Service / branch	Imperial German Army Prussian Army Reichsheer German Army
Years of service	1905–45
Rank	Generaloberst
Commands	16th Infantry Division 14th Company, 13th Württembergish Infantry Regiment III Battalion, 3rd Prussian Infantry Regiment XII Army Corps XXXXIII Army Corps 4th Army 1st Panzer Army Army Group Vistula
Battles / wars	See battles World War I Eastern Front East Prussian Campaign Battle of Tannenberg (1914) First Battle of the Masurian Lakes (1914) Battle of Łódź (1914) Western Front Battle of Verdun (1916) World War II Western Front Battle of France Eastern Front Operation Barbarossa Battle of Białystok-Minsk (1941) First Battle of Kiev (1941) Battle of Moscow (1941) Orsha offensives (1943) Battle of the Dukla Pass (1944) Battle of Berlin (1945) Battle of the Oder-Neisse (1945) Battle of the Seelow Heights (1945)
Awards	Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords
Relations	Georg Heinrici (uncle) Gerd von Rundstedt (cousin)
Signature

Gotthard Fedor August Heinrici (25 December 1886 – 10 December 1971) was a German general during World War II. Heinrici is considered as the premier defensive expert of the Wehrmacht. He was the commander-in-chief of the Army Group Vistula, formed from the remnants of Army Group A and Army Group Center to defend Berlin from the Soviet armies advancing from the Vistula River.

Early life and career

Heinrici was born in 1886 in East Prussia, the son of a minister of the (Protestant) Evangelical Church in Germany. Following graduation from secondary school in 1905, he joined the army on 8 March 1905 as a cadet in an infantry division. From 1905 to 1906, Heinrici attended a war school. During World War I, Heinrici fought in the German invasion of Belgium and earned the Iron Cross 2nd Class in September 1914. Heinrici's division was then transferred to the Eastern Front. There, he fought in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes and the Battle of Łódź, receiving the Iron Cross 1st Class in July 1915.

In May 1916, Heinrici took part in the Battle of Verdun. Beginning in September 1916, he served in General Staff positions with the XXIV Reserve Corps and the 115th Infantry Division. In March 1917, Heinrici was posted to the German General Staff. In September, he attended a General Staffs officer training course, and later served as a staff officer with VII Corps and the VIII Corps. In February 1918, Heinrici was posted to an infantry division, serving as a staff officer responsible for operations. In this position, he was awarded the Prussian Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords in August 1918.

Heinrici had two children, Hartmut and Gisela, with his wife Gertrude. He was devout Protestant who regularly visited the church. His religious faith and refusal to join the NSDAP made him unpopular with the Nazi hierarchy and led to clashes with Hitler and especially with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who scorned him. Because Heinrici's wife Gertrude had a Jewish parent, their children were labeled Mischlinge (partly Jewish) under Nazi racial law. However, Heinrici received a "German Blood Certificate" from Hitler himself, which validated their supposed "Aryan" status and protected them from discrimination.

World War II

During the Battle of France, Heinrici's command was part of General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb's Army Group C. He commanded the XII Army Corps which was part of the 1st Army. Heinrici's forces succeeded in breaking through the Maginot Line south of Saarbrücken on 14 June 1940.

In 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, Heinrici served in the 4th Army under Günther von Kluge as the commanding general of the XXXXIII Army Corps during the Battle of Białystok–Minsk, the Battle of Kiev and the Battle of Moscow. He received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross in 1941. Late in January 1942, Heinrici was given command of the 4th Army. On 24 November 1943 he was awarded the Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross for his leadership during the Battle of Orsha, when the 4th Army taking defensive positions near Orsha temporarily halted the advance of the Western Front led by General Vasiliy Sokolovsky. During the 4th Army's retreat, it inflicted heavy losses on the advancing Red Army. These successes contributed greatly to Heinrici's reputation as a defensive specialist. Later in 1943 he refused to obey an order to destroy the city of Smolensk by fire before the German army's retreat, and he was temporarily dismissed from his post as commander.

Field Marshal Günther von Kluge (left) and Heinrici, mid 1943

In 1944, after the previous successes of the Red Army in Ukraine, Heinrici repeatedly argued for the retreat of Army Group Center and a concomitant shortening of the front line, Hitler rejected these plans at a staff meeting on 20 May 1944. On 4 June Heinrici was relieved of command of the 4th Army, which was later encircled east of Minsk and nearly destroyed during Operation Bagration.

In the summer of 1944, after eight months of enforced retirement, Heinrici was sent to Hungary and placed in command of the 1st Panzer Army; as well as the Hungarian First Army which was attached to it. He was able to keep the 1st Panzer Army relatively intact as it retreated into Slovakia. Later in 1944 during the Battle of the Dukla Pass, the 1st Panzer Army prevented Soviet forces from linking up with Slovak rebel forces of the concurrent Slovak National Uprising. Heinrici was awarded the Swords to the Oak Leaves of his Knight's Cross on 3 March 1945.

Retreat from the Oder

On 20 March 1945, Adolf Hitler replaced Heinrich Himmler with Heinrici as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula on the Eastern Front. Indicating that he was ill, Himmler had abandoned his post on 13 March and retired to a sanatorium at Lychen. At this time, Army Group Vistula's front was less than 50 miles from Berlin.

Army Group Vistula consisted of two armies: the 3rd Panzer Army led by General Hasso von Manteuffel and the 9th Army led by General Theodor Busse. Heinrici was tasked with preventing a Soviet attack across the Oder River amid shortages of manpower and materiel. Only the terrain itself favoured Heinrici; he dug the 9th Army into three defensive lines atop Seelow Heights, overlooking the sandy, swampy banks of the Oder. Manteuffel's 3rd Panzer Army, which had fewer panzers than the 9th, was similarly positioned in the north to delay a possible flanking strike by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Byelorussian Front.

On 16 April the Battle of the Oder-Neisse began. The Soviets attacked with about 1,500,000 men for what they called the "Berlin Offensive Operation". During the Battle of Berlin, Heinrici withdrew his troops westward and made no attempt to defend the city. By late April, Heinrici ordered the retreat of his army group across the Oder River. Hitler only became aware of the retreat of Army Group Vistula around 21 April, after a puzzling request by Heinrici, who sought permission to move his headquarters to a new site, which was further west than Berlin.

Dismissal

On 28 April Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, was riding along the roads north of Berlin when he noticed that troops of the 7th Panzer Division and of the 25th Panzergrenadier Division were marching north, away from Berlin. These troops were part of General Hasso von Manteuffel's 3rd Panzer Army. As one of the two armies which made up Heinrici's Army Group Vistula, it was supposed to be on its way to Berlin. Instead, Heinrici was moving it northward in an attempt to halt the Soviet breakthrough at Neubrandenburg, contrary to orders of Keitel and his deputy, General Alfred Jodl. Keitel located Heinrici on a road near Neubrandenburg, accompanied by Manteuffel. The encounter resulted in a heated confrontation that led to Heinrici's dismissal by 29 April for disobeying orders.

Heinrici was replaced by General Kurt Student. General Kurt von Tippelskirch was named as Heinrici's interim replacement until Student could arrive and assume control of Army Group Vistula. Student was captured by the British before he could take command. The rapidly deteriorating situation that the Germans faced meant that Army Group Vistula's coordination of the armies under its nominal command during the last few days of the war was of little significance.

Heinrici was dismissed by Keitel for refusing to save Hitler. He was summoned to Berlin and would have decided to do so had Captain Hellmuth Lang not persuaded him to "drive as slowly as you can" to Plön instead, informing him that he would be murdered in Berlin like Rommel (who had been Heinrici's adjutant, and later Lang's commander). Heinrici then gave himself up to British forces on 28 May.

Post-war

After his capture, Heinrici was held at Island Farm, a British prisoner of war camp at Bridgend, South Wales, where he remained, except for a three-week transfer to a camp in the United States in October 1947, until his release on 19 May 1948. In the 1950s, he helped create the Operational History (German) Section of the United States Army Center of Military History, established in January 1946 to harness the operational knowledge and experience of German prisoners of war for the United States Army. He was also featured prominently in Cornelius Ryan's 1966 book, The Last Battle. Heinrici died in 1971 in Karlsruhe and was buried with full military honours at the Bergäcker cemetery in Freiburg im Breisgau.

In 2014, Heinrici's private letters and diaries were published in the book A German General on the Eastern Front: The Letters and Diaries of Gotthard Heinrici 1941-1942 edited by Johannes Hürter. In his writings, Heinrici revealed his growing doubts about Hitler's strategy and his mounting concern as the Wehrmacht was implicated in war crimes and the first actions of the Holocaust.

Assessment

Married to a half-Jewish (Mischling) woman, Heinrici supported many Nazi nationalistic and fascistic policies including the Lebensraum concept of territorial expansion, but disagreed with many of their racial policies. He was shocked by the anti-Jewish pogroms of Kristallnacht, although this did not lead him to distance himself from the Nazi regime. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, Heinrici, on receiving the Commissar Order, justified it as easing pressure on the front lines through the exercise of "preventive terror" in the rear. He repeatedly ignored "scorched-earth" orders, such as the order to destroy the historically significant city of Smolensk.

As a military commander, historians have described him as the premier defensive expert of the Wehrmacht and a genius admired by his peers, although little-known today because he was, in the words of Samuel W. Mitcham, "as charismatic as a 20-pound sack of fertilizer".

Awards

• Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords
  • Knight's Cross on 18 September 1941 as General der Infanterie and commanding General of XXXXIII Army Corps
  • Oak Leaves on 24 November 1943 as Generaloberst and Commander-in-Chief of the 4th Army
  • Swords on 3 March 1945 as Generaloberst and Commander-in-Chief of the 1st Panzer Army
• Prussian Royal House Order of Hohenzollern, Knight's Cross with Swords (9 August 1918)
• Prussian Iron Cross of 1914: 2nd Class (27 September 1914) & 1st Class (24 July 1915)
• 1939 Clasp to the Iron Cross: 2nd Class (13 May 1940) & 1st Class (16 June 1940)

References

Citations

Bibliography

• Beevor, Antony (2002). Berlin – The Downfall 1945. Viking-Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-670-03041-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Dollinger, Hans (1967) [1965]. The Decline and Fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. New York: Bonanza Books. ISBN 978-0-517-01313-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Duffy, Christopher (1991). Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March On Germany, 1945. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80505-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Evans, Richard J. (2008). The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN 978-0-14-311671-4.
• Frieser, Karl-Heinz; Schmider, Klaus; Schönherr, Klaus; Schreiber, Gerhard; Ungváry, Kristián; Wegner, Bernd (2007). Die Ostfront 1943/44 – Der Krieg im Osten und an den Nebenfronten [The Eastern Front 1943–1944: The War in the East and on the Neighbouring Fronts] (in German). Vol. VIII. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. ISBN 978-3-421-06235-2. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
• Hürter, Johannes (2014). A German General on the Eastern Front. The Letters and Diaries of Gotthard Heinrici 1941–1942. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military. ISBN 978-1-78159-396-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Rigg, Bryan Mark (2002). Hitler's Jewish soldiers: the untold story of Nazi racial laws and men of Jewish descent in the German military. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-1178-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ryan, Cornelius (1995). Slutstriden. Slaget om Berlin 16 april - 2 maj 1945. Stockholm, Sweden: Albert Bonniers Förlag. ISBN 978-91-0-056032-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Scherzer, Veit (2007). Die Ritterkreuzträger 1939–1945 Die Inhaber des Ritterkreuzes des Eisernen Kreuzes 1939 von Heer, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm sowie mit Deutschland verbündeter Streitkräfte nach den Unterlagen des Bundesarchives [The Knight's Cross Bearers 1939–1945 The Holders of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross 1939 by Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and Allied Forces with Germany According to the Documents of the Federal Archives] (in German). Jena, Germany: Scherzers Militaer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Stockert, Peter (1998). Die Eichenlaubträger 1939–1945 Band 4 [The Oak Leaves Bearers 1939–1945 Volume 4] (in German). Bad Friedrichshall, Germany: Friedrichshaller Rundblick. ISBN 978-3-932915-03-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Thomas, Franz (1997). Die Eichenlaubträger 1939–1945 Band 1: A–K [The Oak Leaves Bearers 1939–1945 Volume 1: A–K] (in German). Osnabrück, Germany: Biblio-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-7648-2299-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ziemke, Earl F. (1969). Battle for Berlin End of the Third Reich Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War II (Battle Book #6). Ballantine Books. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Ziemke, Earl F. (2002). Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East. Washington D.C.: Center of Military History, US Army. ISBN 978-1-78039-287-5.

External links

• Gotthard Heinrici in the German National Library catalogue
• Ullrich, Volker (7 September 2013). "Orgien der Gewalt" [Orgies of Violence: The records of General Gotthard Heinrici shed new light on the role of the German military elite in the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union]. Die Zeit (in German). ISSN 0044-2070. Retrieved 15 February 2016.
• "Die deutschen Heeresgruppen Teil 2, Zweiter Weltkrieg". German Federal Archives - Freiburg im Breisgau. Retrieved 15 February 2016.