Gerd Hermann Heinrich (7 November 1896 in Berlin, Germany – 16 December 1984 in Farmington, USA) was a German entomologist and ornithologist known for his studies of parasitic Hymenoptera of the Ichneumonidae family and for the description of several bird species in Celebes, Dutch East Indies.
His mother, Margarethe von Tepper-Ferguson, was the heiress of a 1,344 ha farm at Borowke, between Poznań and Gdańsk, Poland.
He sought the advice of the curator of entomology at the Museum für Naturkunde and was guided towards study of parasitic wasps of the family Ichneumonidae, a large, diverse, and at that time, taxonomically poorly known group of insects.
He enlisted in the German army as a cavalryman fighting on the Eastern front and earned the Iron Cross he then transferred to the Luftstreitkräfte and became a pilot.
After the war, Heinrich returned to Borowke, married a local girl, Annaliese Machatchek and lived there with his family.
In 1934, René Malaise, the Swedish entomologist, had organised a zoological expedition to the northeastern parts of Burma.
The abundance of bizarre, luxuriant, and unknown forms in this collection was so fascinating that Heinrich made his own expedition to the Chin Hills of Burma in 1937 and 1938.
Heinrich contacted zoological organizations in every corner of Europe but not one of them had the funds for publication of his monograph.
Heinrich received partial support from the Canadian Department of Agriculture to complete the seven volume work Synopsis of Nearctic Ichneumoninae Stenopneusticae (1962).
[2] The materials collected in his African expeditions were published in Synopsis and Reclassification of the Ichneumoninae of Africa, south of the Sahara through a grant from the National Science Foundation, by Farmington College Press.
[7][8] Heinrich described 1479 species and subspecies of Ichneumoninae from the Nearctic, Africa, Madagascar, Asia and the Palearctic.
The Heinrich collections are curated in Warsaw (C. G. H. I), Poland (Instytut Zoologiczny, Polska Akademia Nauk), Munich (C. G. H. II), Germany (Zoologische Staatssammlung München),[9] the collection of H. Townes (Gensville, Florida) and partially (species from Madagascar and some others) in the Museum für Naturkunde, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.