Ernst Volckheim - Life

Life

Ernst Volckheim joined the Army in 1915 as a war volunteer and in 1916 was made an officer, at the rank of lieutenant. In 1917 he was given command of a machine gun company and served on the Western Front in the Imperial German Army, Reichswehr and Wehrmacht during the First World War. In April, 1918, as a member of the imperial tank corps, Volckheim fought in the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux and won the tank battle's armor insignia. Shortly before the end of the war he was severely wounded. With the end of World War I, Volkheim was elected to the newly established Reichswehr, and served in the rank of lieutenant in the Kraftfahrtruppe. With his transfer to an inspector of transport troops in 1923, Volckheim also began his theoretical work on the use of armored vehicle as an element of combat leadership. In 1925, Volckheim, a young lieutenant, was ordered to the officer school in Dresden and there began to teach armored combat theory and operational concepts including in the use of motorized troops. Between 1923 and 1927, he published numerous articles and books on the subject of armored combat in the military journal, Militär Wochenblatt. (Military Weekly). This work caught the attention of retired General Konstantin Altrock, the publisher of the newspaper, Militär Wochenblatt. Soon, Volckheim became the magazine's editor in chief and frequent contributor to the monthly magazine. From 1932 to 1933, Volckheim was a tactics instructor training Soviet military exchange officer instructors at the secret German-Soviet tank school "Kama" in Kazan. There, Volckheim both lectured and gained practical experience with tanks and motorized warfare. In the late 1930s, he worked on the development of the guiding principles of armored combat doctrine for the newly developed and still largely secret German armored forces.