Biography
Born in Fischhausen, East Prussia, Saucken joined the German Army as a Fahnenjunker (ensign) in 1910 and was commissioned a second lieutenant on June 19, 1912. After the First World War, he served as a colonel in the pre-war Wehrmacht and was promoted to major general on January 1, 1942. Appointed to command the 4th Panzer Division at the end of 1941, he later served as commandant of the German School for Mobile Troops (Schule für Schnelle Truppen).
In late June, 1944, as deputy commander of the III Panzer Corps on the Eastern Front, Saucken formed an ad hoc unit known as "Group von Saucken" from the remnants of several units that had been smashed in the Soviet assault on Army Group Centre. This grouping (later designated the XXXIX Panzer Corps) attempted to defend the occupied city of Minsk and temporarily maintained an escape route across the Berezina River for retreating German soldiers in the face of overwhelmingly superior Soviet forces.
In the last months of the war, Saucken led the Second Army in its defence of East and West Prussia, ordering the surrender of his army one day after the unconditional surrender of all German forces on May 8, 1945. After surrendering on the Hel Peninsula, Saucken went into Soviet captivity. Initially he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka Building before he was transferred to the Tsentral-prison in Oryol. His captors sentenced him to 25 years' hard labour, later commuted to 30 months.
Saucken was the last German officer to receive the Knight's Cross with Oakleaves, Swords, and Diamonds during the Second World War. His oldest son, Leutnant Hans-Erich von Saucken (born on May 29, 1924), was killed in action on May 30, 1944, in Romania. Saucken was released from Soviet captivity in 1955. He died near Munich, Germany, in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Dietrich Von Saucken
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldnt be. He is too many people, if hes any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, memoirs to serve for a history, which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (18851967)