Heinrich Bennecke was born in Dresden, the son of a physician who also served as the senior medical officer in an Imperial German Army division.

Imbued with a sense of patriotism and love of the military from an early age, he worked from 1917 as a voluntary harvest worker during the First World War to replace the soldiers at the front.

In 1919, while still a student, he joined the part-time volunteer regiment of the city of Dresden, a reserve force to be used to quell civic unrest.

He was assigned to the SA regiment in Munich, commanded by Wilhelm Brückner, who would later become Adolf Hitler's chief adjutant.

On 9 November 1923, he participated with his regiment in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, for which he later would be decorated with the Blood Order.

[5] In July 1927, Bennecke joined the SA once again, and at age twenty-five was appointed Führer of SA-Standarte IV in Leipzig.

Also in 1930, he became the Gau press officer and editor of the Nazi daily newspaper Der Freiheitskampf [de] (The Freedom Struggle).

On 1 December 1944, he was transferred from Pomerania to become Führer of SA-Gruppe Südmark, commanding all SA units in Reichsgau Styria and headquartered in Graz.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, he entered active-duty military service as a Leutnant of reserves and saw action in the campaigns in Poland and France.

[11] He also wrote other books covering the period of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and he taught several classes at the Munich School of Politics and Public Policy from 1968.