Ferdinand Schörner

Johannes Ferdinand Schörner (Munich, present-day Germany, June 12, 1892-ibid, July 2, 1973) was a German military commander who held the rank of Generalfeldmarschall in the German Wehrmacht. Nazi during World War II. He led several army groups and was the last commander-in-chief of the German army.

Historical literature often depicts Schörner as a simple disciplinarian and a slavish devotee of Adolf Hitler's defensive orders, after Germany lost the initiative in the second half of World War II in the years 1942/43. More recent research by American historian Howard Davis Grier and German historian Karl-Heinz Frieser describes Schörner as a talented commander with "astonishing" to lead an army group of 500,000 men during the late 1944 fighting on the Eastern Front. He was harsh with both superiors and subordinates and carried out operations on his own against Hitler's orders when he wanted to. considered necessary, such as the evacuation of the Sõrve peninsula.

Schörner was a fervent Nazi militant and became famous for his cruelty. At the end of World War II, he was Hitler's favorite commander. After the war he was convicted of war crimes by courts in the Soviet Union and West Germany, and was imprisoned in the Soviet Union, East Germany and West Germany. At his death in 1973, he was the last living German field marshal.

Biography

Schörner was born in Munich (Bavaria), cradle of National Socialism. He volunteered to join the King's Bavarian Infantry Regiment and then studied philosophy and modern languages at the universities of Munich, Lausanne and Grenoble.

First World War

When the First World War broke out he was a sergeant and aspiring officer in that regiment. In November 1914 he was promoted to reserve lieutenant and company leader. Together with his unit he fought in France, Tyrol, Serbia, Romania and Italy, where he received the coveted Blue Max for the successful attack on Mount Matajur in November 1917 (a decoration that Lieutenant Erwin Rommel also obtained on that occasion). In 1918 he was promoted to first lieutenant. During the fight he was seriously injured three times.

He took the General Staff course and in 1926 with the rank of captain he commanded companies in Landshut and Kempten. Since he knew Italian, he spent time as an interpreter with the Alpini. He later became a professor of tactics at the Dresden war academy.

During the Nazi era, he played a crucial role in the process of transforming the Waffen-SS from a paramilitary organization to an elite unit that would fight alongside the Wehrmacht.

World War II

In 1937 he was a lieutenant colonel in the 98th Mountain Hunter Regiment, with which he participated in the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and in the invasion of Poland in 1939. As a colonel, he received command of the 6th Mountain Division, with which he took part in the Battle of France in 1940, rising to major general.

With the 6th Division he intervened in the Balkan Front and in 1941 he received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for having crossed the Metaxás line that defended Greece. One of his vanguard units raised the war flag over the Acropolis.

In the autumn of 1941 he moved with the 6th Division to the Arctic Ocean, and obtained the appointment of commander of the Mountain Corps in Norway (later XIX Mountain Corps).

At the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Schörner commanded part of the German troops in Finland and led a failed attempt to take the Arctic city of Murmansk. At this time he uttered the famous phrase: "There is no such thing as the Arctic", ensuring that the extreme cold of northern Scandinavia should not be a problem for the German soldier.

From November 16, 1943 to January 31, 1944, he commanded the XL Panzer Corps on the Eastern Front. In March 1944 he was appointed commander of Army Group A and then commander of Army Group South Ukraine. When the Soviets began the Crimean offensive, Schörner assured that the Germans could hold out for a while in Sevastopol. However, he later changed his mind and ordered the evacuation of the port. This late decision caused the Romanian and German soldiers who were defending the port to suffer casualties while waiting for the evacuation ships. Since then Schörner fought a series of defensive battles, with the aim of stabilizing the front in Romania.

In July Schörner was appointed commander of Army Group North until January 1945, when he was given command of Army Group Center, with the mission of defending Czechoslovakia and the upper part of the Oder River. However, the Soviet offensive was unstoppable and when Berlin was besieged, Hitler appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Army in his political will.

However, the Third Reich was already coming to an end, and Schörner's new position was merely nominal. Schörner's motto was: "Strength comes from fear," and he was only satisfied when his soldiers feared his punishment more than the enemy. On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. At that time General Ferdinand Schörner was near Prague, but later the Americans were unable to assure him of his personal integrity and that of his army.

His army continued fighting in Prague in the hope that the Americans and not the Soviets would occupy the city (in order to capitulate to US troops and avoid captivity in the USSR). However, they could not withstand the advance of the Red Army, so Schörner agreed to the surrender of his Army Group to the Americans on May 8, and on the night of that same day he headed in a one-person plane to Tyrol, reporting of this only to a very small group of officers and disguised as peasants from that area, alleging that this trip served to organize the defense of the Alpenfestung (the supposed "Alpine stronghold" that should be the last Nazi stronghold in Europe). Although Schörner no longer believed in victory, he assured years later that he continued fighting, since he had promised Hitler days before he committed suicide that he would take charge of the Alpenfestung. After spending a few days in Tyrol and becoming convinced of the futility of his actions, in the absence of men willing to follow him, he surrendered to the British.

Schörner was immediately handed over to the Soviet Union and sent to a prisoner of war camp, where he spent 10 of the 25 years imposed on him. Upon his release, on January 17, 1955, he was allowed to go to West Germany, but there he was arrested again in 1959 and tried for ordering the arbitrary execution without evidence of two officers and a soldier who had committed suicide. fell asleep drunk while driving, through sentences he had pronounced while he was a general of the Wehrmacht during the war. Found guilty, Schörner returned to prison and was finally released in 1963 and settled in Munich, where he lived serenely and died in 1973.

During his life after the war, Schörner suffered the scorn of former comrades, as his trip to Tyrol and abandonment of his post in Prague was seen as cowardice or desertion by other senior officers, to the detriment of his subordinates who They fell prisoners of the Soviets. He was accused of desertion for leaving his command post without proving that a superior order justified it, this being aggravated by fleeing, renouncing his uniform and disguising himself as a civilian (while Schörner himself ordered his subordinates to be shot if he discovered them wearing civilian clothing). on the fighting front); He was also accused of cowardice for using the pretext for his escape to carry out an unlikely mission in the Alpenfestung (which at the end of April had already been taken by American and French soldiers), and they accused him of having abandoned maliciously to his men on the front line for fear of himself falling into the hands of the Red Army.

Decorations

• Iron Cross (1914) of 2.do (22 December 1914) and 1.♪ (27 January 1917)
• Pour le Mérite (5 December 1917)
• Cross to the Military Merit of 1.♪ degree with War Decoration (Austria-Hungary, April 20, 1916)
• Order to the Military Merit, 4th grade with Brides and Crown (Baviera, October 24, 1917)
• Brooch of the Iron Cross (1939) of 2.do grade (12 September 1939) and 1.♪ degree (20 September 1939)
• Eastern Front Medal 1941/42 (20 August 1942)
• Golden Plate of the Party (30 January 1943)
• Order of the Cross of Freedom of 1.♪ (Finland, 1 July 1942)
• Cross of Iron Cross with Roble Sheets, Swords and Diamonds
  • Cruz de Caballero, on 20 April 1941 as Generalmajor and commander of the 6th Mountain Division.
  • 398.o Roble leaves on 17 February 1944 as General der Gebirgstruppe and commander of the XXXX Panzer Corps
  • 93.o Swords, August 28, 1944 as Generaloberst and commander of the North Army Group
  • 23. Diamonds, January 1, 1945 as Generaloberst and commander of the North Army Group