Event Details

CWD Research Seminar - Col. Prof. Winfried Heinemann: General Eduard Dietl: The Hero of Narvik or the Nazi General?

Generaloberst Eduard Dietl was a southern German infantry officer in the Wehrmacht who did not come from the nobility - in other words, Hitler’s ideal officer. He came to know Hitler in 1920 and joined the Nazi Party. He trained the Munich stormtroopers in 1923, and during Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch he refused to defend the Weimar Republic. As a divisional commander in 1940, he was selected to lead the German attack on the Norwegian port of Narvik, where his leadership qualities won the day and brought him instant fame. Appointed to command an army comprising several corps attacking eastwards from Finland between 1941 and 1944, he was clearly out of his depth and never achieved his strategic aim: disrupting communications between Murmansk and the Soviet heartland. The archetypal “good Nazi” and a charismatic leader, he died in an air crash in June 1944. In many ways, he can be compared to the much more famous Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The lecture will explore similarities and differences between the two officers’ careers. To this day, the German Bundeswehr has two barracks named after Rommel, whereas the former Dietl barracks was renamed in 1995. What makes one a role model for the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of a modern democracy, but not the other?

Winfried Heinemann studied history in Bochum and at King’s College London. He holds a PhD from Bochum University. In 2018, he retired from the Bundeswehr with the rank of colonel, having served for many years as a historian at the German Armed Forces’ Centre of Military History, first in Freiburg and later in Potsdam. His research interests include the history of NATO, the military history of the GDR and the Warsaw Pact, and the history of German military opposition to Hitler. His many publications include Operation “Valkyrie”: A Military History of the 20 July 1944 Plot (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), The GDR and Its Military (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2025), and Suezkrise und Ungarischer Volksaufstand 1956 (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2026). He served as a professor of modern history at the Brandenburg University of Technology from 2014 until his retirement in 2025. He was Secretary General of the German Commission of Military History from 2004 to 2016 and again from 2022 to 2025. He is also the reviews editor of the International Journal of Military History and Historiography (Brill). Since January 2020, he has been an honorary researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster University.