Ferdinand Heim - War Service

War Service

Heim served as a junior artillery officer in the XIII Corps during the whole of the First World War After 1918 he remained in the much smaller army as a career officer, reaching the rank of Oberst in June 1939, just before the start of the Second World War.

On September 3, 1940, Heim was appointed Chief of Staff to General Walther von Reichenau while the Sixth Army was concentrated on the Cotentin Peninsula awaiting the Invasion of Britain. He was subsequently prominent in the planning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).

On 1 July 1942, he was Commander of the 14th Panzer Division with distinction at Kharkov and at Rostov. As a consequence, he was given, on November 1, 1942, command of 48th Panzer Corps which was then part of the German 6th Army, at Stalingrad. Heim's role was to reinforce the Romanian divisions in the area. Heim is particularly noted as being the "scapegoat of Stalingrad". Adolf Hitler, had (against the prevalent advice of Army commanders) ordered the Stalingrad campaign and subsequently refused to permit withdrawal. Consequently, the 6th Army was surrounded by Russian forces at Stalingrad. Heim's 48th Panzer Corps, at Kalach-na-Donu on the Don, with two under-strength Panzer Divisions and a poorly equipped Romanian Panzer Division and with orders countermanded by Hitler, had failed to stop the formidable Russian attack against the Romanian Army which covered the Sixth Army's left flank. After this, in January 1943, Heim was, at Hitler's order, dismissed from the Army, arrested and placed in solitary confinement at Moabit, finally being released in April 1943, when he was transferred to a military hospital at Ulm.

In a post-war interview, Heim asserted that the only documentation for his arrest was Hitler's order – no indictment, sentence or explanation. He learned, unofficially, that Hitler had been unwilling to cast blame on the Romanians for the poor quality of their troops so a German scapegoat was needed. German army and army group commanders were too valuable, so the "... only person left was the corps commander, and that was me."

Heim was informed in May 1943 that his dismissal from the German army had been revoked, and that he had been classified as retired. In August 1944, Heim returned to command German forces at the "fortress" of Boulogne, a "defend to the last" assignment. He was instructed to prepare significant defences but he arrived to find that nothing had been prepared and there were no suitable specialists to do the work. The ill-prepared and ill-suited garrison endured heavy bombardment and full-scale assaults and Heim surrendered to the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division on 23 September 1944.