Heinrich Eberbach (24 November 1895 – 13 July 1992) was a General of the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II.
Biography[]
Heinrich Eberbach was born on 24 November 1895 in Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, in the German Empire (present-day Germany). He served in World War I as a corporal in the Imperial German Army in 1914 and in 1915 he lost his nose to a French bullet, requiring a rubber replacement. He was posted to Palestine in 1918 to assist the Ottoman Empire, and he served on the staff of the Turkish 8th Army due to his knowledge of Turkish. From 1920 to 1935 he was an officer in the police of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany and he joined the Wehrmacht in 1935, and in 1937 he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel.
During the early stages of World War II, he assisted in the invasion of Poland in command of German tanks and was a panzer commander in the Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union. In late 1943, having fought for Nikopol at Zhitomyr in Ukraine, he returned home to Germany due to a kidney disease. He was made the Inspector-General of Panzertruppen and was dispatched to France in 1944 to take command of the armor of the German forces there, and he led the counterattack at Mortain. He had no confidence in Gunther von Kluge's reluctant attack at Adolf Hitler's orders, and his panzer army was surrounded by Allied troops in the Falaise Gap. He was captured on 31 August despite having escaped the gap ten days earlier, and was held in a POW camp until 1948. Eberbach later joined a Protestant charity organization and assisted in the reformation of the Bundeswehr of West Germany. He died on 13 July 1992 in Notzingen, Germany at the age of 96.