Few German generals impressed Hitler and the Nazi leadership in the final months of World War II as much as Ferdinand Schörner. His reputation rested less on tactical brilliance than on brutality.
Schörner stood apart from nearly all of Hitler's senior army commanders because of his humble origins. Born in Munich in 1892 to a lower middle class family, he worked his way up from private soldier to general, a remarkable achievement in an army dominated by Prussian and Bavarian aristocrats.
He was brave and effective, but also an enormous brown noser and careerist who submerged much of his own personality and opinions to be accepted by the Junker class that ran the Army. During World War I he served alongside another German officer of humble origins, Erwin Rommel.
Like Schörner, Rommel would rise to great prominence under Hitler, becoming the epitome of the new German officer whose background was an advantage rather than a hindrance to high command. Hitler deeply distrusted the "Junkers," as he dismissively referred to the SS of wealthy titled families who made up a large proportion of the German officer corps in both world wars.
Schörner and Rommel were both awarded Imperial Germany's highest decoration for gallantry, the Pour le Mérite, both while fighting the Italians. Schörner also detested Rommel and took every opportunity to bad mouth him to superiors, right through to Rommel's appointment as commander of Hitler's bodyguard escort unit in the late 1930s, when Schörner, fearful of upsetting Hitler, backed off.
Schörner's Pour le Mérite ensured he was retained by the tiny Reichswehr, the army of the Weimar Republic, and by the time Hitler gained power he was a major. In 1939 he commanded a mountain regiment in the invasion of Poland, then as a Generalmajor a mountain division during the invasion of Greece in 1941, earning the Knight's Cross for breaching the main Greek defenses at the Metaxas Line.
In Russia in 1941, Schörner and his division fought in the Arctic region, and in 1942 he took command of the 19th Mountain Corps in Finland. Later that year he was promoted to General der Gebirgstruppe, commanding all mountain troops in Norway.
Schörner spent almost all of World War II on the Eastern Front, where he demonstrated a ruthless streak that brought him to the attention of the Nazi leadership. He commanded the 40th Panzer Corps and in March 1944 was given Army Group A, followed by command of Army Group South Ukraine.
One of his tasks was to hold the important port city of Sevastopol in the Crimea. Against Hitler's wishes, Schörner evacuated Sevastopol, but too late, causing the German and Romanian 17th Army in the Crimea extremely severe losses.
Further retreats followed, yet Schörner was nonetheless promoted to Generaloberst, or Colonel General, in May 1944, taking command of Army Group North, later renamed Army Group Kurland, the remnants of German forces in the Baltic States. In January 1945 he was appointed commander of Army Group Center, tasked with defending Czechoslovakia and the upper reaches of the Oder River.
During all this campaigning, Schörner was awarded at every level of the Knight's Cross, including the rarely awarded Diamonds to the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, one of only 29 officers so honored. During the final Soviet offensives he gained the nicknames "the Butcher," "Bloody Ferdinand," and "the Monster in Uniform" for his methods of instilling discipline in his over half a million strong army.
Morale was plummeting and desertions increasing as German soldiers realized the war was effectively lost, and understrength, underequipped, and often undertrained late-war units had little chance of stopping the Red Army. Many also did not fancy capture and imprisonment by the Soviets.
To stiffen the resolve of his officers and men, Schörner instituted a reign of terror. He ordered that any German soldier found behind the lines without proper authorization be court-martialled on the spot and hanged for desertion.
Flying court-martial groups of military police scoured the rear areas for suspects, and due to the confusion of war, many innocent soldiers ended up hanging from trees. Though a brilliant organizer and a good battle manager, his fanatical devotion to Hitler and the regime made his actions increasingly criminal as the war neared its end.
It also brought him the admiration of the regime's leadership, not least Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels. On March 11, 1945, Goebbels wrote admiringly in his diary of Schörner's methods, noting that deserters got no mercy from him and were hanged from the nearest tree with a placard reading that they had declined to defend German women and children.
Schörner often personally ordered such killings or shootings of officers and men he encountered while being driven around his army group's front lines. Hitler had long since developed a deep-seated distrust of army generals after the July 1944 attempt by a group of them to kill him.
In a reshuffle of the higher military commands as Hitler prepared to face the final showdown with the Soviets in Berlin, he seized upon Schörner as a future leader of the Army. In April 1945, before the final storm broke and the Soviets flung themselves at Berlin and elsewhere, Hitler promoted Schörner to Field Marshal, the last man so appointed in World War II.
Hitler also named Schörner to become commander-in-chief of the OKH, the Army High Command. That appointment was never really taken up, though Schörner held the position until May 8, 1945. In reality he spent all his time commanding his army group in its desperate fight in Czechoslovakia and along the Morava River line.
Berlin fell to the Soviets on May 2, 1945, and a series of German surrenders on the Western Front followed, culminating in the unconditional surrender of the German Armed Forces on May 8, 1945. Still resisting in Czechoslovakia, Schörner's Army Group Center faced a choice between annihilation in battle, becoming prisoners of the Soviets, or moving west and surrendering to the Americans.
The OKW, the Armed Forces High Command, had last heard from Schörner on May 2, when he reported that he and his army would fight their way west and surrender to the Americans. On May 8, the Americans permitted Colonel Wilhelm Meyer-Detring of the OKW, based now at Flensburg where Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz had succeeded Hitler as Reich President and controlled a rump Nazi government with the toleration of the British, to travel to Schörner's headquarters, located 60 miles north of Prague in Czechoslovakia.
Grand Admiral Dönitz had ordered forces fighting the Soviets to do everything in their power to reach the Western Allied lines and surrender. Now that the German capitulation would go into effect in the last hour of May 8, Meyer-Detring had to persuade the forces engaged in combat with the Red Army to lay down their arms, an unattractive option for German soldiers.
Meyer-Detring, accompanied by a US escort, was tasked with ensuring Schörner understood the situation and obeyed. He flew to Schörner's headquarters courtesy of the RAF, a Dakota taking him from Flensburg all the way to Czechoslovakia.
Schörner told the colonel that virtually no order would make his troops abandon their wounded comrades or voluntarily surrender to the Soviets. He warned Meyer-Detring that it would be difficult to control his men if the Czechs also attacked them, something that had already begun as Soviet forces pressed toward Prague.
Meyer-Detring was then flown back by the RAF to Flensburg to report directly to Dönitz and the OKW. It is at this point that things took a truly bizarre turn.
At some point in the evening of May 8, 1945, following his meeting with Meyer-Detring, Field Marshal Schörner made a cataclysmic decision. At 3:00 a.m. on May 9, he deserted.
Schörner arrived by car at the German airstrip at Písek, dressed not in his usual field marshal's uniform but in a dark civilian suit. A small amount of baggage was loaded aboard his personal Fieseler Fi 156 Storch communications aircraft, which he then boarded along with the pilot.
The Storch lifted off and flew into Austria, touching down at Zeltweg in the Tyrol. Schörner later claimed he flew there to see Colonel General Heinz Guderian, who was acting chief of the OKH but had been placed on leave by Hitler on March 28, 1945.
Schörner, however, did not see Guderian, who surrendered with his staff to the Americans on May 10. Instead Schörner flew on to Altaussee, a village near Bad Aussee in Austria.
After spending a few days hiding in an Alpine chalet, Schörner made his way to the local German headquarters of the First Army on May 15. They were less than impressed at seeing him and handed him over to the US Army on May 18, 1945, ten days after he deserted his command.
The question was whether he had actually deserted. Schörner told both other German officers and his American interrogators that he had not deserted, but rather was fulfilling an order given to him by Hitler on April 25, 1945, the day after his ceremony at Hitler's bunker in Berlin when the Führer had officially presented him with his field marshal's baton.
Schörner claimed Hitler had given him a verbal instruction to take command of German forces in the so-called Alpine Redoubt, the semi-mythical Nazi propaganda fantasy of a last stand in the Austrian and German Alps. If this were true, why did Schörner leave Czechoslovakia the day after his headquarters had been overrun by the Red Army?
Why did he travel in civilian clothing and not in his uniform? Why did he leave only with a pilot, when he usually moved about using a transport version of the Heinkel He 111 escorted by three Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, traveling with his personal staff, aides, and bodyguards?
And why did he hide in a mountain chalet for several days after reaching the Austrian Tyrol instead of taking immediate command of German forces in the mountains to continue the war against the Americans? The German Army did not buy Schörner's story any more than the Americans did.
Bloody Ferdinand, who had had hundreds of his own men hanged from trees for far less, had actually run away and abandoned his men to their fates, well over half a million of them. It was an extraordinary abrogation of his military duty, comparable to Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus jumping on the last plane out of Stalingrad.
For all his faults as a commander, Paulus had stayed with his men and gone with them into Soviet captivity. There are few examples of German generals deserting at war's end; most stayed at their posts and surrendered alongside their men, and in a few famous instances, like that of Field Marshal Walter Model, they shot themselves to avoid the disgrace of surrender.
The great irony in this story is that Schörner, no doubt hated by the men who had served under him, was handed over by the Americans to the Soviets in June 1945. Over the next few years he lived in a series of grim prisons, including the Lubyanka in Moscow, until in August 1951 the Soviets placed him on trial for war crimes.
In February 1952 he received a 25-year prison sentence. Two months later his sentence was reduced by the Soviet government to 12 and a half years.
In December 1954 the field marshal was transferred to East German custody and released in 1955, moving to West Germany. No sooner had he arrived in the Federal Republic than the West German government prosecuted Schörner for the executions of German soldiers under his command on charges of desertion.
He was found guilty of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter and sent to prison for four and a half years. Schörner was released in 1960 and kept a low profile, living in Munich.
He refused to answer any questions about his wartime activities and only discussed his World War I service with journalists and authors. Field Marshal Schörner died in 1973 at the age of 81, the last of Hitler's field marshals.