Gotthard Heinrici

Feodor August Gotthard Heinrici was born on 25 December 1886 and spent the Second World War becoming the German army's go-to expert when a position needed holding against long odds. By 1945, with the Reich crumbling, he was given Army Group Vistula — a formation scraped together from the shattered remnants of Army Group A and Army Group Center — and told to defend Berlin from Soviet forces pushing west from the Vistula River. It was the kind of assignment that defined his war: arrive late, inherit wreckage, delay the inevitable. He died on 10 December 1971.