Background
Of the Sixth SS Panzer Army during World War II, Sepp Dietrich was bom in Hawangen on 28 May 1892, he was a son of a poor Bavarian peasant family.
Of the Sixth SS Panzer Army during World War II, Sepp Dietrich was bom in Hawangen on 28 May 1892, he was a son of a poor Bavarian peasant family.
In 1911 he joined the Bavarian Army with the 4. Bayerische Feldartillerie-Regiment "König" (4th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment) in Augsburg.
He served as a paymaster sergeant during World War I. After the war he drifted from one job to the next, joined the Oberland Freikorps and was an early member of the NSDAP. A participant in the Munich Beer-Hall putsch, his strong-arm prowess at Party political meetings brought him to Hitler’s attention and in 1928 he was made Commander of the Nazi leader’s bodyguard. Elected a member of the Reichstag for Lower Bavaria in 1930, he was promoted to SS Lieutenant-General a year later.
The tough Bavarian often acted as Hitler’s chauffeur on his auto¬mobile tours of Germany and, after the Nazis seized power, he was promoted rapidly. Head of the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler Regiment, he was made a General of the Waffen-SS, appointed to the Prussian State Council, and on 4 July 1934 he was given the rank of SS General for his prominent role in the Rohm purge.
As Chief of the Stabswache (staff guard), it was Dietrich who led the assassination squad which murdered Ernst Rohm and other SA leaders, some of whom were formerly personal comrades. During World War II, Sepp Dietrich was one of the few ‘old Nazis’ to make a name for himself as a soldier, holding commands in Poland, France. Greece, Russia, Hungary and Austria.
At the end of the war Dietrich's SS troops fought in Hungary and he was also entrusted by Hitler with the last-ditch defence of Vienna before the advancing Russian forces. His Sixth SS Army had to be withdrawn and he was finally captured by the American Seventh Army in May 1945. A year later he was tried and given a life sentence (commuted to twenty-five years) for his role in the massacre of the captured American soldiers at Malmedy. Dietrich was secretly released on 22 October 1955 from the American war crimes prison at Landsberg on the recommendation of a joint Allied- German clemency board (a decision that aroused some angry reactions at the time); he was re-arrested and charged in August 1956 with aiding and abetting in the murder of Rohm and six other leading Brownshirts over twenty years earlier. Found guilty by a Munich court of being an accessory to premeditated murder, he was sentenced to nineteen months’ imprisonment. He was released for reasons of health in February 1959. He died of a heart attack in Ludwigsburg on 21 April 1966.
Though lacking military experience and no great strategist, Dietrich displayed considerable powers of leadership, personal magnetism and a marked streak of ruthlessness. Dietrich's courage and hardness were never in doubt.
The legend of his military valour was consciously built up by Nazi propaganda during the war, ignoring the atrocities for which he was responsible as a divisional commander in the Kharkov-Kherson district between 1941 and 1943. As Commander of the First SS Panzer Corps in Normandy he was given the task of containing the Anglo-American beachhead, but proved unable to throw back the Allied forces. In December 1944 he was given command of the Sixth Panzer Army during the Ardennes counter-offensive. Hitler's last great gamble to turn the tide of the war by cutting the Allies off from their supply bases. Dietrich did his best but was aware that the task assigned to him was impossible, and by this time he was thoroughly disillusioned with Hitler's conduct of the war. At Malmedy (Belgium), during the Battle of the Bulge on 17 December 1944, he was responsible for the shooting dow n in cold blood by German tanks of nearly a hundred American prisoners of war, a crime for which he was later sentenced by an American military tribunal.
Quotes from others about the person
‘The role of Sepp Dietrich is unique. I have always given him the opportunity to intervene at sore spots. He is a man who is simultaneously cunning, energetic and brutal. Under his swashbuckling appearance, Dietrich is a serious, conscientious, and scrupulous character. ... He is a Bavarian Wrangel, someone irreplaceable. For the German people Sepp Dietrich is a national institution. For me personally there is also the fact that he is one of my oldest companions in the struggle.'
(Hitler, 1942)