Ferdinand Heim Ferdinand Heim ( 27 February 1895 — 14 November 1977 ) was a World War II German general . War service . Heim served as a junior artillery officer in the XIII Corps during the whole of the First World War After 1918 he remained in the much smaller army as a career officer , reaching the rank of Oberst in June 1939 , just before the start of the Second World War . On September 3 , 1940 , Heim was appointed Chief of Staff to General Walther von Reichenau while the Sixth Army was concentrated on the Cotentin Peninsula awaiting the Invasion of Britain . He was subsequently prominent in the planning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ) . On 1 July 1942 , he was Commander of the 14th Panzer Division with distinction at Kharkov and at Rostov . As a consequence , he was given , on November 1 , 1942 , command of 48th Panzer Corps which was then part of the German 6th Army , at Stalingrad . Heim ' s role was to reinforce the Romanian divisions in the area . Heim is particularly noted as being the " scapegoat of Stalingrad " . Adolf Hitler , had ( against the prevalent advice of Army commanders ) ordered the Stalingrad campaign and subsequently refused to permit withdrawal . Consequently , the 6th Army was surrounded by Russian forces at Stalingrad . Heim ' s 48th Panzer Corps , at Kalach - na - Donu on the Don , with two under - strength Panzer Divisions and a poorly equipped Romanian Panzer Division and with orders countermanded by Hitler , had failed to stop the formidable Russian attack against the Romanian Army which covered the Sixth Army ' s left flank . After this , in January 1943 , Heim was , at Hitler ' s order , dismissed from the Army , arrested and placed in solitary confinement at Moabit , finally being released in April 1943 , when he was transferred to a military hospital at Ulm . In a post - war interview , Heim asserted that the only documentation for his arrest was Hitler ' s order – no indictment , sentence or explanation . He learned , unofficially , that Hitler had been unwilling to cast blame on the Romanians for the poor quality of their troops so a German scapegoat was needed . German army and army group commanders were too valuable , so the " . . . only person left was the corps commander , and that was me . " Heim was informed in May 1943 that his dismissal from the German army had been revoked , and that he had been classified as retired . In August 1944 , Heim returned to command German forces at the " fortress " of Boulogne , a " defend to the last " assignment . He was instructed to prepare significant defences but he arrived to find that nothing had been prepared and there were no suitable specialists to do the work . The ill - prepared and ill - suited garrison endured heavy bombardment and full - scale assaults and Heim surrendered to the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division on 23 September 1944 ( see Operation Wellhit ) . Post - war . Heim was sent to a series of POW camps ( including Island Farm ) in Britain and subsequently repatriated to Germany on 12 May 1948 . He died at Ulm on 14 November 1977 . Quote . " We must uphold the principle of only having carried out orders [ . . . ] We must stick to that principle if we are to create a more or less effective defence " - spoken in secret while prisoner to his fellow inmates regarding German atrocities in World War II