Ferdinand Schörner (12 June 1892 – 2 July 1973) was a German military commander who held the rank of Generalfeldmarschall in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II.

[3] Serving in World War I, he was awarded the Pour le Mérite military order as a lieutenant when he took part in the Battle of Caporetto, which shattered the Italian lines in autumn 1917.

In 1923 he was adjutant to General Otto von Lossow, the commander of Wehrkreis VII (military district) in Munich and participated in the defeat of the Beer Hall Putsch.

During the 1941 Balkans campaign, he commanded the German 6th Mountain Division and earned the Knight's Cross for his role in breaching the Metaxas Line.

In 1942 as a General der Gebirgstruppe he took command of the XIX Mountain Corps, part of the German Army in Finland.

[4] This retreat occurred too late and the German–Romanian 17th Army that was holding Crimea suffered severe losses, with many men killed or captured while waiting on the piers to be evacuated.

He became a favorite of high-level Nazi leaders such as Joseph Goebbels, whose diary entries from March and April 1945 have many words of praise for Schörner and his methods.

On 5 April 1945, Schörner was promoted to field marshal and was named as the new commander-in-chief of the German Army High Command (OKH, Oberkommando des Heeres) in Hitler's last testament.

[7] In August 1951 he was charged with war crimes, and in February 1952 the Military Board of the Soviet Supreme Court sentenced him to 25 years imprisonment.

[3] Returning to West Germany, he was arrested and charged with executions of German Army soldiers accused of desertion.

[full citation needed] In The End (2012) Kershaw describes Schörner as "a fanatical (Nazi) loyalist", an indication of this being that he had served for a brief spell in March 1944 as Chief of the NS Leadership Staff of the Army.

[12] Schörner is commonly represented in historical literature as a simple disciplinarian and a slavish devotee of Adolf Hitler's defensive orders, after Germany lost the initiative in the second half of World War II in 1942/43.

[13] He was harsh against superiors as well as subordinates and carried out operations on his own authority against Hitler's orders when he considered it necessary, such as the evacuation of the Sõrve Peninsula.