Erich Hoepner was born on September 14, 1886 in Frankfurt, Germany. In March 1905, he joined the army as a dragoon and in 1913 entered the War Academy to start officer training. During World War I he served on the Western Front and was part of the general staff at corps, division, and army levels. After the war, he remained in the military, holding various positions and climbing the ranks, reaching the rank of major general in 1936 and then lieutenant general in 1938. Like several other prominent German commanders of this time, Hoepner privately opposed Hitler and the Nazis despite being an anti-communist and an anti-Semite himself. He feared Germany was headed for a war it could not win due to Hitler’s repeated territorial demands and antagonism of France and the United Kingdom. He joined a clique of senior military officers centered around intelligence chief Hans Oster that conspired to resist Hitler, but British and French appeasement meant Hitler’s behavior until 1939 reaped rewards and not war. This meant that opposition to Hitler never solidified, and instead many of his conservative critics had to concede that Hitler was reversing German decline.

When war finally did break out in September 1939, Hoepner led 16th Army Corps, assigned to the 10th Army in the German invasion of Poland and to Army Group B during the invasion of France. During this latter campaign, he clashed with members of the SS Division Totenkopf, which on May 27, 1940 massacred 97 British soldiers belonging to the Royal Norfolk Regiment in Le Paradis, a village in northern France. German army commanders tended to see the Waffen-SS as a rival, substandard paramilitary organization, and Hoepner considered the massacre evidence of this unprofessionalism. He tried to have the commander of the SS Division, Theodor Eicke, dismissed if charges of misconduct or the massacre of prisoners could be brought. However, none of these investigations were ever successful, and despite his knowledge of this behavior, Hoepner did not resign his commission or make a sustained effort to hold those responsible accountable.

Hoepner became commander of Fourth Panzer Group in the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. In May 1941, he released a statement to his troops ordering them not to spare “adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system,” foreshadowing the infamous Commissar Order that decreed the summary execution of all captured Soviet political officers. While no acolyte of Hitler and National Socialism, Hoepner was no less a rabid anti-communist and anti-Semite, as were many German conservatives. He was an ardent believer the “Judeo-Bolshevik” anti-Semitic canard that claimed Jews dominated the international communist movement and were using it to weaken Germany and the German people. Regardless of his distaste for the populist Nazi government, Hoepner shared Hitler’s claim that war with the Soviet Union would be a “total war” with no mercy.

In June 1941, Hoepner and Fourth Panzer Group advanced through the Baltic states toward Leningrad during Operation Barbarossa. On June 27, he participated in the German defeat of Soviet armor at the Battle of Raseiniai in present-day Lithuania. By late July Hoepner’s group had reached Narva in present-day Estonia. In the meantime, Hoepner implemented the Commissar Order, having over a hundred commissars shot over six days alone, in addition to collaborating with Einsatzgruppe A, a roaming SS death squad already acting behind German lines. The death squad’s command described relations with Hoepner as “close” and “warm,” enabling the Einsatzgruppe to efficiently arrange pogroms of local Jews. In the first few weeks of Operation Barbarossa, around forty pogroms killed around 10,000 Jews.

From August through September Fourth Panzer Group struggled to capture Leningrad and continued to face heavy Soviet resistance. With the city encircled and its surrender appearing imminent, Hoepner and his group were transferred south to Army Group Center to finish off Kiev and then take Moscow before winter. A combination of deteriorating infrastructure, logistical difficulties, and dogged Soviet defenses halted the German forces during Operation Typhoon, the final-ditch effort to capture the Soviet capital. Like his fellow panzer commander Heinz Guderian, Hoepner would blame others (especially Hitler) for the failure to take Moscow, but the strained, under-supplied German forces stood little chance of a successful urban assault.

In early 1942 Hoepner sought permission to withdraw his forces from the outskirts of Moscow, having been badly mauled by a Soviet counteroffensive in the preceding December. On his own initiative, he withdrew before Hitler permitted it, and for this was relieved of his command and discharged from the army. Denied his pension, he successfully appealed in the courts and had it restored. He remained a private citizen but was implicated in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. He was arrested and made to wear ill-fitting clothes in a show trial before being executed, hanged by wire mounted from meat hooks. His family was also harassed, threatened, and detained as part of the Nazi doctrine of collective punishment.

For his part in the July 20 plot, Hoepner was considered a martyr of the German anti-Hitler opposition by some, and in 1956 a school in Berlin was named for him. Due to Hoepner’s own stated views and conduct during the German-Soviet war, however, the name was controversial, with teachers and parents deciding in 2009 to rename the school after a Jewish art dealer who fled Berlin in 1936: Nazi era lives on in German schools

Sources

Barnett, Correlli. 2003. Hitler’s Generals. Grove Press.

Glantz, David. 2012. Operation Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia 1941. The History Press.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2006. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Rowman & Littlefield.

Mitcham, Samuel. 2009. Men of Barbarossa: Commanders of the German Invasion of Russia, 1941. Casemate.

Stahel, David. 2013. Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Stahel, David. 2015. The Battle for Moscow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.