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Benedict's reagent

Benedict's reagent (often called Benedict's qualitative solution or Benedict's solution) is a chemical reagent and complex mixture of sodium carbonate, sodium citrate, and copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate. It is often used in place of Fehling's solution to detect the presence of reducing sugars. The presence of other reducing substances also gives a positive result. Such tests that use this reagent are called the Benedict's tests. A positive test with Benedict's reagent is shown by a color change from clear blue to brick-red with a precipitate.

Generally, Benedict's test detects the presence of aldehyde groups, alpha-hydroxy-ketones, and hemiacetals, including those that occur in certain ketoses. Thus, although the ketose fructose is not strictly a reducing sugar, it is an alpha-hydroxy-ketone which results to a positive test because the base component of Benedict converts it into aldoses glucose and mannose. Oxidizing the reducing sugar by the cupric (Cu2+) complex of the reagent produces a cuprous (Cu+), which precipitates as insoluble red copper(I) oxide (Cu2O).

The test is named after American chemist Stanley Rossiter Benedict.

Composition and preparation
Benedict's reagent is a deep-blue aqueous solution. Each litre contains: Separate solutions of the reagents are made. The sodium carbonate and sodium citrate are mixed first, and then the copper sulfate is added slowly with constant stirring.
 * 17.3 g copper sulfate
 * 173 g sodium citrate
 * 100 g anhydrous sodium carbonate or, equivalently, 270 g sodium carbonate decahydrate

Sodium citrate acts as a complexing agent which keeps Cu2+ in solution, since it would otherwise precipitate. Sodium carbonate serves to keep the solution alkaline. In the presence of mild reducing agents, the copper(II) ion is reduced to copper(I), which precipitates in the alkaline conditions as very conspicuous red copper(I) oxide.

Organic analysis
To test for the presence of monosaccharides and reducing disaccharide sugars in food, the food sample is dissolved in water and a small amount of Benedict's reagent is added. During a water bath, which is usually 4–10 minutes, the solution should progress through the colors of blue (with no reducing sugar present), orange, yellow, green, red, and then brick red precipitate or brown (if a high concentration of reducing sugar is present). A color change would signify the presence of a reducing sugar.

The common disaccharides lactose and maltose are directly detected by Benedict's reagent because each contains a glucose with a free reducing aldehyde moiety after isomerization.

Sucrose (table sugar) contains two sugars (fructose and glucose) joined by their glycosidic bond in such a way as to prevent the glucose undergoing isomerization to an aldehyde, or fructose to alpha-hydroxy-ketone form. Sucrose is thus a non-reducing sugar which does not react with Benedict's reagent. However, sucrose indirectly produces a positive result with Benedict's reagent if heated with dilute hydrochloric acid prior to the test, although it is modified during this treatment as the acidic conditions and heat break the glycosidic bond in sucrose through hydrolysis. The products of sucrose decomposition are glucose and fructose, both of which can be detected by Benedict's reagent as described above.

Starches do not react or react very poorly with Benedict's reagent because of lesser number of reducing sugar components that occur at the ends of the carbohydrate chains. Other carbohydrates which produce a negative result include inositol.

Benedict's reagent can also be used to test for the presence of glucose in urine, elevated levels of which is known as glucosuria. Glucosuria can be indicative of diabetes mellitus, but Benedict's test is not recommended or used for diagnosis of the aforementioned condition. This is due to the possibility of a reaction in which the presence of other reducing substances such as ascorbic acid, drugs (levodopa, contrast used in radiological procedures) and homogentisic acid (alkaptonuria) creates a false positive.

As color of the obtained precipitate can be used to infer the quantity of sugar present in the solution, the test is semi-quantitative. A greenish precipitate indicates about 0.5 g% concentration; yellow precipitate indicates 1 g% concentration; orange indicates 1.5 g% concentration; and red indicates 2 g% or higher concentration.

Quantitative reagent
Benedict's quantitative reagent contains potassium thiocyanate and is used to quantitatively determine the concentration of reducing sugars. This solution forms a copper thiocyanate precipitate which is white and can be used in titration. The titration should be repeated with 1% glucose solution instead of the sample for calibration.

Net reaction
The net reaction between an aldehyde (or an alpha-hydroxy-ketone) and the copper(II) ions in Benedict's solution may be written as:
 * RCHO + 2 Cu(2+) + 5 OH- → RCOO- + Cu2O + 3 H2O.

The hydroxide ions in the equation forms when sodium carbonate dissolves in water. With the citrate included, the reaction becomes:
 * RCHO + 2 Cu(C6H5O7)- + 5 OH- → RCOO- + Cu2O + 2 C6H5O7(3-) + 3 H2O.

title: Benedict's reagent


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Paul Zenon

Paul Zenon (born Paul Collins) is an English stage and TV magician, comedian, presenter and writer.

He is the author of three books on magic, proposition bets and practical jokes, and an expert on the history of magic and magicians, variety, and unusual entertainments. His specialist subjects include magician and escape artiste Harry Houdini, faux Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo, and Jasper Maskelyne, the 'War Magician'. He is a sceptic with strong views on claims of psychic abilities and the paranormal.

Zenon is a Member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star status and was the recipient of the Carlton Award for Comedy in 2015, the Sir Ken Dodd Comedy Award in 2017, presented by the man himself, the Neville King Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019 and the David Berglas Award for Outstanding Contribution to Magic, also in 2019.

Career
Throughout his teenage years, Zenon spent the summer holidays working in the Blackpool magic and joke shop 'The House of Secrets' which was run by Bill Thompson, who became his friend and mentor. His solo theatre piece 'Linking Rings' covers this story, together with the parallel one of Houdini and his righthand man Jim Collins, his family namesake. 'Linking Rings' has been performed at Edinburgh and Brighton Fringe Festivals with additional short seasons at Jermyn Street Theatre in London's West End, The Secret Cellar (by Waterloo Vaults), and a performance at the 2017 Blackpool Magicians' Convention.

After early performances at seaside hotels, with several dates supporting rock band Hawkwind on tour and being the lead singer in Blackpool band Crackousrockanroll, at the age of 19 Zenon travelled around Europe as a street performer, performing magic and fire-eating and supplementing his income with fortune-telling. On his return to the UK, he began performing in summer seasons and comedy clubs. He went on to host tours for the British, UN and US Forces in locations including Germany, Gibraltar, Benbecula, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Belize, Argentina, the Falkland and Ascension Islands and on board the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible.

Zenon has performed and presented at corporate events worldwide since the early eighties and more recently has been a regular performer at international Arts and Fringe Festivals including Edinburgh, Brighton, London, Dublin, Cork, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland, both as guest performer and with his own solo shows, 'Turning Tricks', 'Off the Street, On the Road', 'Cabinet of Curiosities' 'Linking Rings' and 'Paul Zenon's Hellfire Club', 'Lounge Wizard' and 'Linking Rings'. Since its inception in 2003, he has been a long-term regular cast member and Ringmaster in the Olivier award-winning New Variety show 'La Clique' and its spin-off production 'La Soiree'.

Since 1980, Zenon has appeared on television as performer, presenter and pundit, including a Royal Command Performance, four one-man 'specials' on Channel 4 and ITV, and as a regular Dictionary Corner guest on Channel 4's 'Countdown, with around 120 appearances to date.

He is a Member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star status. He is the author of three books. In 2012, Zenon collaborated with cult comic book artist Vince Ray to produce a custom deck of playing cards: the Z-Ray Deck, printed by the United States Playing Card Company, as part of their 'Bicycle' brand.

Zenon has given live talks, including TedX Salford, Centre for Inquiry, Goldsmiths, University of London, Ratio Conference Bulgaria, and in 2014 he hosted the QED Conference in Manchester.

In parallel with his career in magic and comedy, Zenon has also worked as an actor; in addition to his early roles in Tricky Business on Children's BBC, he has made cameo appearances in short films, and has written, produced and performed his first one-man stage drama, 'Linking Rings', at Brighton and Edinburgh Festivals which received 5 star reviews from The Edinburgh Evening News, The List and FringeReview. In 2016, Zenon made his one-man West End debut in 'Linking Rings' at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London. In 2015, he was presented with the Carlton Award for Comedy at a ceremony at The Magic Circle's London headquarters. In 2017, while MCing the gala show of the Blackpool Magicians' Convention at the Opera House, Paul was presented with the Sir Ken Dodd Comedy Award, by Ken Dodd himself.

Television
Zenon's early TV appearances included Fun Factory (Granada) in 1980, and New Faces of '86 (ITV).

In 1990/1991, Zenon starred in two series of the BBC Children's drama Tricky Business, playing the role of Micky. In 1992/1993, he was the presenter of Tricks n Tracks on BBC One, a programme on which he also acted as Magic Consultant. In 1993, Paul wrote, produced and presented Magic You Can Do for retail release.

He created, wrote and produced Crazy Cottage, an ITV game show which ran for three series between 1996 and 1998. Zenon was given his own Channel 4 'Comedy Lab' episode Paul Zenon – Turning Tricks, in 1998 resulting in the commissioning of his first one-man hour-long Street Magic special of the same name in 1999. This was followed by consecutive specials Paul Zenon's Tricky Christmas (C4, 1999), Paul Zenon's Trick or Treat (C4, set in Prague, 2000) and White Magic with Paul Zenon (ITV1, set in Lapland, 2003), where he acted as writer, presenter and executive producer.

In 2005 he wrote, presented and executive-produced a prank special involving hidden cameras Paul Zenon's Revenge Squad, broadcast on ITV. Since 2004, He has been a regular guest contributor in Dictionary Corner on Channel 4's Countdown and has also appeared on The One Show (BBC1), The Culture Show (BBC2), The Story of Light Entertainment (BBC2), Magic (BBC2) Surviving D-Day (Discovery), Crafty Tricks of War (BBC2), The Gadget Show (C5),  The Big Stage (C5), It Shouldn't Happen to a TV Performer (ITV1), and 50 Greatest Magic Tricks, Duck Quacks Don't Echo (Sky1), When Magic Goes Horribly Wrong (C5), BBC News and Mysteries at the Museum (Travel Channel).

Charity
He is the founder of The Wonderbus, a Registered Charity which takes older people from homes and sheltered housing on days out to see live entertainment and events.

After an early fundraising show at The London Comedy Store featuring comedian Stewart Lee, in the summer of 2008 he toured British theatres with comedians Harry Hill and Lee Mack to raise funds for the organisation. In 2009 he put together and hosted a benefit show at the London Palladium featuring comedians Dara Ó Briain, Sean Lock, Lee Mack and Dave Spikey.

Scepticism
During his early career, Zenon worked as a fortune-teller and since then has been a long-term sceptic with regard to the paranormal and the supernatural.

In 2011, he wrote an article in the Daily Mail suggesting that psychic Sally Morgan might be using an earpiece through which she could be fed information about members of her audience. This was after members of the public had called a radio station claiming to have heard her appearing to repeat back information that they said moments earlier they'd overheard coming from the theatre lighting box during one of Morgan's shows at The Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin.

Shortly after the article was published, Zenon saw video footage of Morgan walking off a theatre stage and appearing to remove an earpiece. He announced this finding on live television on This Morning (ITV1). Shortly afterwards Morgan made a statement on her Facebook page saying: "I have done and will continue to wear an earpiece... This is entirely normal and allows me to take stage directions and cues from my Stage Director. Just to be clear, I have never received anything other than stage direction or cues from my Stage Director through an earpiece."

Citing "substantial damage to her reputation, as well as hurt, distress and embarrassment" Morgan filed a complaint to Associated Newspapers and sued for damages over their allegations made via a number of articles about the subject. The Daily Mail eventually agreed to pay a smaller figure as settlement and retracted the allegation that an earpiece was specifically used to receive information about members of the audience.

Zenon continues to be an outspoken critic of those who purport to be psychic, particularly with regard to claims of receiving communications from beyond the grave. He has contributed to many debates on the subject both at live events including those hosted by Edinburgh Skeptics, Skeptics in the Pub (various), Center for Inquiry (London), Goldsmiths, University of London and Ratio Conference, Bulgaria as well as numerous radio and television programmes. In April 2014 he hosted the QED Conference in Manchester, also co-writing and appearing in the opening film.

Books
Paul is the author of three books:

 * 100 Ways to Win a Tenner: Scams, Cons, Games You Can't Lose! (2003).
 * Paul Zenon's Dirty Tricks: Pranks, Wind-Ups and Practical Jokes – A Guide to Getting Your Own Back! (2004).
 * Street Magic: Great Tricks and Close-up Secrets Revealed (2005).

Street Magic was re-published in 2008 in a smaller format, with illustrations rather than photographs. it was also sub-divided into smaller sections which were released as individual volumes under various titles.

100 Ways to Win a Tenner was released in the States under the title 100 Ways to Win a Ten-Spot and in Australia as Bar Bets.

Condensed versions of Paul Zenon's Dirty Tricks and Street Magic were re-released in 2016 as Paul Zenon's Practical Jokes and Paul Zenon's Practical Magic.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Paul Zenon


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Andrew R. Cobb

Andrew Randall Cobb, ARCA, FRIBA (13 June 1876 – 2 June 1943) was a Canadian-American architect based in Nova Scotia.

In his day, Cobb was one of the most renowned architects in Atlantic Canada. He is one of the first élèves of the École des Beaux Arts to practice architecture in the region and his homes and buildings are famous for their exterior aesthetic appeal, comfortable interiors, well-crafted details and built-in furniture.

Andrew Cobb was born in Brooklyn, New York, son of an American father and a Canadian mother. He was 14 when his father died, and he moved to his mother's home province of Nova Scotia, settling in Greenwich, Kings County. He completed his schooling in nearby Horton School and later attended Acadia University. He won a scholarship to the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned BSc and MSc degrees (1904).

He worked in Cleveland, Ohio for the next few years, contributing to the design of, among other projects, the Cuyahoga County Court House. He spent 1907, 1908, and 1909 in Paris where he attended the École des Beaux Arts. During his vacations, he "toured the Continent", spending time in Italy, France and England studying architecture.

Returning to Halifax from Paris he entered into a partnership with Halifax-born architect Sydney P. Dumaresq. The partnership was dissolved in 1912 by which time both men had established sufficient reputations to strike out on their own.

He worked mainly in Nova Scotia and was busy until he was killed at the age of 68. He and three others were killed instantly when the city bus on which they were travelling was struck by a car.

Cobb's work and career was documented by Halifax historian Janet Kitz in a 2014 biography, Andrew Cobb: Architect and Artist.

Major works

 * Dingle Tower, Halifax, 1911 (with Sydney Dumaresque)
 * Dalhousie University's Studley Campus and the University of King's College campus (1913–1928) plans and many of the buildings
 * Dalhousie University's Studley Campus buildings include the Science Building, 1913–15; MacDonald Memorial Library, 1914–15; Shirreff Hall Women's Residence, 1920; Arts Building, 1921–22; Medical Science Laboratory, 1921–22; Provincial Archives Building (now the Chase Building), 1929; Gymnasium Building, 1931.
 * University of King's College buildings include main building and chapel, 1928; dormitory, 1931.
 * Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, including:
 * Raynor Hall Residence, 1916
 * EmmersonHall.jpg.]]Emmerson Hall, built in 1913, is particularly interesting for the variety of building stones used. In 1967 Emmerson Hall was converted to classrooms and offices for the School of Education. It is a registered Heritage Property.
 * Horton House, designed by Cobb in the Georgian style, and built by James Reid of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia was opened in 1915 as Horton Academy. Today, Horton House is a co-educational residence.
 * Neptune Theatre, Halifax, built in 1915 it was originally known as the Strand Theatre and is reputed to be the first vaudeville house in Canada designed and built specifically as a theatre.
 * Dartmouth, Nova Scotia buildings
 * Greenvale School, Dartmouth, built in 1915 after a fire had destroyed the previous school in 1914. Built by Rhodes and Curry of Amherst, Nova Scotia, it was used as an infirmary and a sanctuary for the homeless after the Halifax Explosion. Dozens of trees were planted surrounding the building and they are now protected as heritage trees. Greenvale School has a list of firsts, including the first kindergarten class in Canada. It was Dartmouth's first high school in 1934.
 * First Baptist Church of Dartmouth, built in 1922, (replacing the original church, which was built in 1843 and destroyed in the 1917 explosion). The stones used are rubble stone and the walls are 30-inches thick, which enabled the building to withstand the concussions of another explosion (at the military magazine) in July 1945 without damage.
 * Corner Brook, Newfoundland - the largest commission of his career, he designed worker housing for the Newfoundland Pulp and Paper Company, which was constructing what was, up to that time, the largest project ever undertaken in the history of paper making. Many of the structures were inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement. Townsite, as the development was known, contained over 175 houses and was laid out by Thomas Adams.
 * The Glynmill Inn, designed in 1923. Constructed by the English firm of Armstrong-Whitworth Co., is certainly the town's best-known building. Designed as a staff residence for Armstrong-Whitworth supervising employees. Cobb designed the Tudor-style house and in his honor the street leading to it was named Cobb Lane. A spot was reserved for the inn on the outskirts of Corner Brook between the townsite and the mill. Glynmill Inn is the finest building of its type in Western Newfoundland, and one of the best examples of a Tudor-inspired building in the province. The original Tudor Style half-timbering is still in place. The interior design was influenced by the Craftsman Style and remains relatively intact with few alterations.
 * 710 Prince Street, Truro, Nova Scotia, built 1924. This is an example of a well-designed and well-crafted Tudor Revival House.
 * Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick
 * Mount Allison Centennial Hall is the second oldest building on the University's central campus. Originally built in 1883 it housed administrative offices and college classrooms as well as a chapel and the college library. In March 1933 the building suffered extensive damage in a fire. After the fire, the foundation and some walls remained standing and Cobb incorporated them into the reconstructed building which officially opened in January 1934. It is currently in excellent condition and an extensive project was completed in recent years on the foundation to prevent deterioration due to water infiltration to ensure that the building remains that way over the long term.
 * Mount Allison Science Building: In the early 1930s, Cobb was selected to design Mount Allison's Science Building (now known as the Biology Building.) The University has done extensive work on the exterior in recent years to ensure that the building can be maintained over the long term. Work has included installation of a 50-year roof, re-pointed stonework, and land contour work to ensure that water flows away from and not towards the building as it had done previously. Mount Allison has also done three major projects on the inside of the building in recent years, including most recently a project to renew one of the research laboratories in the building.
 * Memorial Hall (originally Memorial Library, renamed the University Centre in 1970), Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick was constructed in 1927 in the Tudor Revival style. The original set of brass plaques that were located in the building have been moved to the Wallace McCain Student Centre and registered with the Canadian Forces' National Inventory of Canadian Military Memorials (#13002-004). In May 2011, the New Brunswick government issued notice of its intention to designate the building a Provincial Heritage Place, giving it protection from alteration or destruction; then, following a submission from the university, the Minister withdrew his notice, claiming that neither the building's heritage value nor its memorial nature met provincial criteria for provincial designation. The government has so far refused to release the evidence on which it based its decision, citing "privacy and financial issues". In October 2011, it was reported in the Argosy newspaper that the university refused a donation from philanthropist and alumna Joan Carlisle-Irving the previous August of $5 million to preserve Memorial Hall, which was the amount the university claimed was needed to restore the building. The University categorically denied that it was ever offered a donation from a donor to retain the building. The building was demolished in November 2011.

Other contributions

 * First president of the Nova Scotia Association of Architects (1932).
 * Founding member and twice president of the Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts (later the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia)
 * Fellow, Royal Institute of British Architects.
 * Associate, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1942).

title: Andrew R. Cobb


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User:Dommkopf

Greetings and salutations (in the words of Charlotte from Charlotte's Web)!

I was born in Houston, Texas and lived there for some years. I've also resided in Baytown and Highlands, but am now in Puerto Rico. I graduated in 2006 with a B.S. in General Science, although I picked up an unofficial minor in Art History. While everyone else is sleeping, I am a Mail Processing Clerk with the USPS.

My interests include the following:
 * Art history
 * Félix Bonilla-Norat
 * Cats
 * Cello
 * Chococat
 * Digital humanities
 * DIY
 * eBay
 * Futurism
 * James Joyce
 * Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
 * Nintendo
 * Pai Mei
 * Please Save My Earth
 * Selling at Amazon
 * Stamps
 * Stream of consciousness
 * Synesthesia
 * USPS
 * Yoshi
 * ZIP codes

title: User:Dommkopf


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Eurozone

The euro area, commonly called the eurozone (EZ), is a currency union of 20 member states of the European Union (EU) that have adopted the euro (€) as their primary currency and sole legal tender, and have thus fully implemented EMU policies.

The 20 eurozone members are:
 * Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.

The seven non-eurozone members of the EU are Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden. They continue to use their own national currencies, although all but Denmark are obliged to join once they meet the euro convergence criteria.

Among non-EU member states, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City have formal agreements with the EU to use the euro as their official currency and issue their own coins. In addition, Kosovo and Montenegro have adopted the euro unilaterally, relying on euros already in circulation rather than minting currencies of their own. These six countries, however, have no representation in any eurozone institution.

The Eurosystem is the monetary authority of the eurozone, the Eurogroup is an informal body of finance ministers that makes fiscal policy for the currency union, and the European System of Central Banks is responsible for fiscal and monetary cooperation between eurozone and non-eurozone EU members. The European Central Bank (ECB) makes monetary policy for the eurozone, sets its base interest rate, and issues euro banknotes and coins.

Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the eurozone has established and used provisions for granting emergency loans to member states in return for enacting economic reforms. The eurozone has also enacted some limited fiscal integration; for example, in peer review of each other's national budgets. The issue is political and in a state of flux in terms of what further provisions will be agreed for eurozone change. No eurozone member state has left, and there are no provisions to do so or to be expelled.

Eurozone
In 1998, eleven member states of the European Union had met the euro convergence criteria, and the eurozone came into existence with the official launch of the euro (alongside national currencies) on 1 January 1999 in those countries: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Greece qualified in 2000 and was admitted on 1 January 2001.

These twelve founding members introduced physical euro banknotes and euro coins on 1 January 2002. After a short transition period, they took out of circulation and rendered invalid their pre-euro national coins and notes.

Between 2007 and 2023, eight new states have acceded: Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Dependent territories of EU member states not part of the EU
Three French dependent territories that are not part of the EU have adopted the euro, with France ensuring eurozone laws are implemented:
 * Territorial collectivity of Saint Barthélemy
 * Overseas Collectivity of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon
 * French Southern and Antarctic Lands

With formal agreement
The euro is also used in countries outside the EU. Four states (Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City) have signed formal agreements with the EU to use the euro and issue their own coins. Nevertheless, they are not considered part of the eurozone by the ECB and do not have a seat in the ECB or Euro Group.

Akrotiri and Dhekelia (located on the island of Cyprus) belong to the United Kingdom, but there are agreements between the UK and Cyprus and between UK and EU about their partial integration with Cyprus and partial adoption of Cypriot law, including the usage of euro in Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

Several currencies are pegged to the euro, some of them with a fluctuation band and others with an exact rate. The Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark was once pegged to the Deutsche mark at par, and continues to be pegged to the euro today at the Deutsche mark's old rate (1.95583 per euro). The Bulgarian lev was initially pegged to the Deutsche Mark at a rate of BGL 1000 to DEM 1 in 1997, and has been pegged at a rate of BGN 1.95583 to EUR 1 since the introduction of the euro and the redenomination of the lev in 1999. The West African and Central African CFA francs are pegged exactly at 655.957 CFA to 1 EUR. In 1998, in anticipation of Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union, the Council of the European Union addressed the monetary agreements France had with the CFA Zone and Comoros, and ruled that the ECB had no obligation towards the convertibility of the CFA and Comorian francs. The responsibility of the free convertibility remained in the French Treasury.

Without formal agreement
Kosovo and Montenegro unilaterally adopted the euro as their sole currency without an agreement and, therefore, have no issuing rights. These states are not considered part of the eurozone by the ECB. However, sometimes the term eurozone is applied to all territories that have adopted the euro as their sole currency. Further unilateral adoption of the euro (euroisation), by both non-euro EU and non-EU members, is opposed by the ECB and EU.

Historical eurozone enlargements and exchange-rate regimes for EU members
The chart below provides a full summary of all applying exchange-rate regimes for EU members, since the birth, on 13 March 1979, of the European Monetary System with its Exchange Rate Mechanism and the related new common currency ECU. On 1 January 1999, the euro replaced the ECU 1:1 at the exchange rate markets. During 1979–1999, the Deutsche Mark functioned as a de facto anchor for the ECU, meaning there was only a minor difference between pegging a currency against the ECU and pegging it against the Deutsche Mark.

The eurozone was born with its first 11 member states on 1 January 1999. The first enlargement of the eurozone, to Greece, took place on 1 January 2001, one year before the euro physically entered into circulation. The next enlargements were to states which joined the EU in 2004, and then joined the eurozone on 1 January of the year noted: Slovenia in 2007, Cyprus in 2008, Malta in 2008, Slovakia in 2009, Estonia in 2011, Latvia in 2014, and Lithuania in 2015. Croatia, which acceded to the EU in 2013, adopted the euro in 2023.

All new EU members joining the bloc after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 are obliged to adopt the euro under the terms of their accession treaties. However, the last of the five economic convergence criteria which need first to be complied with in order to qualify for euro adoption, is the exchange rate stability criterion, which requires having been an ERM-member for a minimum of two years without the presence of "severe tensions" for the currency exchange rate.

In September 2011, a diplomatic source close to the euro adoption preparation talks with the seven remaining new member states who had yet to adopt the euro at that time (Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania), claimed that the monetary union (eurozone) they had thought they were going to join upon their signing of the accession treaty may very well end up being a very different union, entailing a much closer fiscal, economic, and political convergence than originally anticipated. This changed legal status of the eurozone could potentially cause them to conclude that the conditions for their promise to join were no longer valid, which "could force them to stage new referendums" on euro adoption.

Future enlargement
Seven countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden) are EU members but do not use the euro.

Before joining the eurozone, a state must spend at least two years in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II). , the Danish central bank and the Bulgarian central bank participate in ERM II.

Denmark obtained a special opt-out in the original Maastricht Treaty, and thus is legally exempt from joining the eurozone unless its government decides otherwise, either by parliamentary vote or referendum. The United Kingdom likewise had an opt-out prior to withdrawing from the EU in 2020.

The remaining six countries are obliged to adopt the euro in future, although the EU has so far not tried to enforce any time plan. They should join as soon as they fulfill the convergence criteria, which include being part of ERM II for two years. Sweden, which joined the EU in 1995 after the Maastricht Treaty was signed, is required to join the eurozone. However, the Swedish people turned down euro adoption in a 2003 referendum and since then the country has intentionally avoided fulfilling the adoption requirements by not joining ERM II, which is voluntary. Bulgaria joined ERM II on 10 July 2020.

Interest in joining the eurozone increased in Denmark, and initially in Poland, as a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. In Iceland, there was an increase in interest in joining the European Union, a pre-condition for adopting the euro. However, by 2010 the debt crisis in the eurozone caused interest from Poland, as well as the Czech Republic, Denmark and Sweden to cool.

Expulsion and withdrawal
In the opinion of journalist Leigh Phillips and Locke Lord's Charles Proctor, there is no provision in any European Union treaty for an exit from the eurozone. In fact, they argued, the Treaties make it clear that the process of monetary union was intended to be "irreversible" and "irrevocable". However, in 2009, a European Central Bank legal study argued that, while voluntary withdrawal is legally not possible, expulsion remains "conceivable". Although an explicit provision for an exit option does not exist, many experts and politicians in Europe have suggested an option to leave the eurozone should be included in the relevant treaties.

On the issue of leaving the eurozone, the European Commission has stated that "[t]he irrevocability of membership in the euro area is an integral part of the Treaty framework and the Commission, as a guardian of the EU Treaties, intends to fully respect [that irrevocability]." It added that it "does not intend to propose [any] amendment" to the relevant Treaties, the current status being "the best way going forward to increase the resilience of euro area Member States to potential economic and financial crises. The European Central Bank, responding to a question by a Member of the European Parliament, has stated that an exit is not allowed under the Treaties.

Likewise there is no provision for a state to be expelled from the euro. Some, however, including the Dutch government, favour the creation of an expulsion provision for the case whereby a heavily indebted state in the eurozone refuses to comply with an EU economic reform policy.

In a Texas law journal, University of Texas at Austin law professor Jens Dammann has argued that even now EU law contains an implicit right for member states to leave the eurozone if they no longer meet the criteria that they had to meet in order to join it. Furthermore, he has suggested that, under narrow circumstances, the European Union can expel member states from the eurozone.

Administration and representation

The monetary policy of all countries in the eurozone is managed by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Eurosystem which comprises the ECB and the central banks of the EU states who have joined the eurozone. Countries outside the eurozone are not represented in these institutions. Whereas all EU member states are part of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), non EU member states have no say in all three institutions, even those with monetary agreements such as Monaco. The ECB is entitled to authorise the design and printing of euro banknotes and the volume of euro coins minted, and its president is currently Christine Lagarde.

The eurozone is represented politically by its finance ministers, known collectively as the Eurogroup, and is presided over by a president, currently Paschal Donohoe. The finance ministers of the EU member states that use the euro meet a day before a meeting of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (Ecofin) of the Council of the European Union. The Group is not an official Council formation but when the full EcoFin council votes on matters only affecting the eurozone, only Euro Group members are permitted to vote on it.

Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, the Euro Group has met irregularly not as finance ministers, but as heads of state and government (like the European Council). It is in this forum, the Euro summit, that many eurozone reforms have been decided upon. In 2011, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed for these summits to become regular and twice a year in order for it to be a 'true economic government'.

Reform
In April 2008 in Brussels, future European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker suggested that the eurozone should be represented at the IMF as a bloc, rather than each member state separately: "It is absurd for those 15 countries not to agree to have a single representation at the IMF. It makes us look absolutely ridiculous. We are regarded as buffoons on the international scene". In 2017 Juncker stated that he aims to have this agreed by the end of his mandate in 2019. However, Finance Commissioner Joaquín Almunia stated that before there is common representation, a common political agenda should be agreed upon.

Leading EU figures including the commission and national governments have proposed a variety of reforms to the eurozone's architecture; notably the creation of a Finance Minister, a larger eurozone budget, and reform of the current bailout mechanisms into either a "European Monetary Fund" or a eurozone Treasury. While many have similar themes, details vary greatly.

Inflation
HICP figures from the ECB, overall index:

Interest rates
Interest rates for the eurozone, set by the ECB since 1999. Levels are in percentages per annum. Between June 2000 and October 2008, the main refinancing operations were variable rate tenders, as opposed to fixed rate tenders. The figures indicated in the table from 2000 to 2008 refer to the minimum interest rate at which counterparties may place their bids.

Public debt
The following table states the ratio of public debt to GDP in percent for eurozone countries given by EuroStat. The euro convergence criterion is to not exceed 60%.

Fiscal policies
The primary means for fiscal coordination within the EU lies in the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines which are written for every member state, but with particular reference to the 20 current members of the eurozone. These guidelines are not binding, but are intended to represent policy coordination among the EU member states, so as to take into account the linked structures of their economies.

For their mutual assurance and stability of the currency, members of the eurozone have to respect the Stability and Growth Pact, which sets agreed limits on deficits and national debt, with associated sanctions for deviation. The Pact originally set a limit of 3% of GDP for the yearly deficit of all eurozone member states; with fines for any state which exceeded this amount. In 2005, Portugal, Germany, and France had all exceeded this amount, but the Council of Ministers had not voted to fine those states. Subsequently, reforms were adopted to provide more flexibility and ensure that the deficit criteria took into account the economic conditions of the member states, and additional factors.

The Fiscal Compact (formally, the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union), is an intergovernmental treaty introduced as a new stricter version of the Stability and Growth Pact, signed on 2 March 2012 by all member states of the European Union (EU), except the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and Croatia (subsequently acceding the EU in July 2013). The treaty entered into force on 1 January 2013 for the 16 states which completed ratification prior of this date. As of 1 April 2014, it had been ratified and entered into force for all 25 signatories.

Olivier Blanchard suggests that a fiscal union in the eurozone can mitigate devastating effects of the single currency on the eurozone peripheral countries. But he adds that the currency bloc will not work perfectly even if a fiscal transfer system is built, because, he argues, the fundamental issue about competitiveness adjustment is not tackled. The problem is, since the eurozone peripheral countries do not have their own currencies, they are forced to adjust their economies by decreasing their wages instead of devaluation.

Bailout provisions
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 prompted a number of reforms in the eurozone. One was a U-turn on the eurozone's bailout policy that led to the creation of a specific fund to assist eurozone states in trouble. The European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stability Mechanism (EFSM) were created in 2010 to provide, alongside the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a system and fund to bail out members. However, the EFSF and EFSM were temporary, small and lacked a basis in the EU treaties. Therefore, it was agreed in 2011 to establish a European Stability Mechanism (ESM) which would be much larger, funded only by eurozone states (not the EU as a whole as the EFSF/EFSM were) and would have a permanent treaty basis. As a result of that its creation involved agreeing an amendment to TEFU Article 136 allowing for the ESM and a new ESM treaty to detail how the ESM would operate. If both are successfully ratified according to schedule, the ESM would be operational by the time the EFSF/EFSM expire in mid-2013.

In February 2016, the UK secured further confirmation that countries that do not use the Euro would not be required to contribute to bailouts for eurozone countries.

Peer review
In June 2010, a broad agreement was finally reached on a controversial proposal for member states to peer review each other's budgets prior to their presentation to national parliaments. Although showing the entire budget to each other was opposed by Germany, Sweden and the UK, each government would present to their peers and the Commission their estimates for growth, inflation, revenue and expenditure levels six months before they go to national parliaments. If a country was to run a deficit, they would have to justify it to the rest of the EU while countries with a debt more than 60% of GDP would face greater scrutiny.

The plans would apply to all EU members, not just the eurozone, and have to be approved by EU leaders along with proposals for states to face sanctions before they reach the 3% limit in the Stability and Growth Pact. Poland has criticised the idea of withholding regional funding for those who break the deficit limits, as that would only impact the poorer states. In June 2010 France agreed to back Germany's plan for suspending the voting rights of members who breach the rules. In March 2011 was initiated a new reform of the Stability and Growth Pact aiming at straightening the rules by adopting an automatic procedure for imposing of penalties in case of breaches of either the deficit or the debt rules.

Criticism
In 1997, Arnulf Baring expressed concern that the European Monetary Union would make Germans the most hated people in Europe. Baring suspected the possibility that the people in Mediterranean countries would regard Germans and the currency bloc as economic policemen.

In 2001, James Tobin thought that the euro project would not succeed without making drastic changes to European institutions, pointing out the difference between the US and the eurozone. Concerning monetary policies, the system of Federal Reserve banks in the US aims at both growth and reducing unemployment, while the ECB tends to give its first priority to price stability under the Bundesbank's supervision. As the price level of the currency bloc is kept low, the unemployment level of the region has become higher than that of the US since 1982. Concerning fiscal policies, 12% of the US federal budget is used for transfers to states and local governments. The US government does not impose restrictions on state budget policies, whereas the Treaty of Maastricht requires each eurozone member country to keep its budget deficit below 3% of its GDP.

In 2008, a study by Alberto Alesina and Vincenzo Galasso found that the adoption of euro promoted market deregulation and market liberalization. Furthermore, the euro was also linked to wage moderation, as wage growth slowed down in countries that adopted the new currency. Oliver Hart, who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016, criticized the euro, calling it a "mistake" and emphasising his opposition to monetary union since its inception. He also expressed opposition to European integration, arguing that the European Union should instead focus on decentralisation as it has “gone too far in centralising power”. In 2018, a study based on DiD methodology found that the adoption of euro produced no systematic growth effects, as no growth-enhancing effects were found when compared to European economies outside the eurozone.

The eurozone has also been criticized for deepening inequality in Europe, particularly between the richest and poorest countries. According to a study by Bertelsmann Stiftung, countries such as Austria and the Netherlands benefited significantly from the common currency, while southern and eastern European members of the eurozone gained very little, and some countries are considered to have suffered adverse effects from adopting the euro. In an article for the Politico, Joseph Stiglitz argues: "The result for the eurozone has been slower growth, and especially for the weaker countries within it. The euro was supposed to usher in greater prosperity, which in turn would lead to renewed commitment to European integration. It has done just the opposite — increasing divisions within the EU, especially between creditor and debtor countries." Matthias Matthijs believes that the euro resulted in a "winner-take-all" economy, as national income differences between eurozone members have widened further. He argues that countries such as Austria and Germany have gained from the eurozone at the expense of southern countries like Italy and Spain.

By adopting the euro and abandoning their national currencies, eurozone countries gave up their ability to conduct independent monetary policy; as such, monetary policies used to combat recession, such as monetary stimulus or currency devaluation, are no longer available. During the European debt crisis, several eurozone countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus) were unable to repay their debt without third-party intervention by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In order to grant the bailout, the ECB and the IMF forced the affected countries to adopt strict austerity measures. The European bailouts were largely about shifting exposure from banks onto European taxpayers, and exacerbated issues such as high unemployment and poverty.

In 2019, a study from the Centre for European Policy concluded that while some countries had gained from adopting the euro, several countries were poorer than they would have been had they not adopted it, with France and Italy being particularly affected. The publication prompted a large number of reactions, pushing its authors to put out a statement clarifying some points. In 2020, a study from the University of Bonn reached a different conclusion: the adoption of the euro made “some mild losers (France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal) and a clear winner (Ireland)”. Both studies used the synthetic control method to estimate what might have happened if the euro hadn't been adopted.

title: Eurozone


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Thrush (bird)

The thrushes are a passerine bird family, Turdidae, with a worldwide distribution. The family was once much larger before biologists reclassified the former subfamily Saxicolinae, which includes the chats and European robins, as Old World flycatchers. Thrushes are small to medium-sized ground living birds that feed on insects, other invertebrates, and fruit. Some unrelated species around the world have been named after thrushes due to their similarity to birds in this family.

Characteristics
Thrushes are plump, soft-plumaged, small to medium-sized birds that inhabit wooded areas and often feed on the ground. The smallest thrush may be the shortwings, which have ambiguous alliances with both thrushes and Old World flycatchers. The lesser shortwing averages 12 cm. The largest thrush is the great thrush at 128 to 175 g and 28 to 33 cm; the larger, commonly recognized blue whistling thrush is an Old world flycatcher. The Amami thrush might, however, grow larger than the great thrush. Most species are grey or brown in colour, often with speckled underparts.

They are insectivorous, but most species also eat worms, land snails, and fruit (usually berries). Many species are permanently resident in warm climates, while others migrate to higher latitudes during the summer, often over considerable distances.

Thrushes build cup-shaped nests, sometimes lining them with mud. They lay two to five speckled eggs, sometimes laying two or more clutches per year. Both parents help raise the young. In almost all cases, the nest is placed on a branch; the only exceptions are the three species of bluebird, which nest in holes.

Ecology
Turdidae species spread the seeds of plants, contributing to the dispersal of many species and the recovery of ecosystems.

Plants have limited seed dispersal mobility away from the parent plant and consequently rely upon a variety of dispersal vectors to transport their propagules, including both abiotic and biotic vectors. Seeds can be dispersed away from the parent plant individually or collectively, as well as dispersed in both space and time.

Many bats and birds rely heavily on fruits for their diet, including birds in the families Cotingidae, Columbidae, Trogonidae, Turdidae, and Ramphastidae. While eating fruit, these animals swallow seeds and then later regurgitate them or pass them in their faeces. Such ornithochory has been a major mechanism of seed dispersal across ocean barriers.

Other seeds may stick to the feet or feathers of birds and, in this way may travel long distances. Seeds of grasses, spores of algae, and the eggs of molluscs and other invertebrates commonly establish in remote areas after long journeys of this sort. The Turdidae have a great ecological importance because some populations migrate long distances and disperse the seeds of endangered plant species at new sites, helping to eliminate inbreeding and increasing the genetic diversity of local flora.

Taxonomy
The family Turdidae was introduced (as Turdinia) by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1815. The taxonomic treatment of this large family has varied significantly in recent years. Traditionally, the Turdidae included the small Old World species, like the nightingale and European robin in the subfamily Saxicolinae, but most authorities now place this group in the Old World flycatcher family Muscicapidae. Molecular phylogenetic analysis has shown that the family Turdidae is a member of the superfamily Muscicapoidea and is sister to the family Muscicapidae. The two families diverged in the Miocene around 17 million years ago.

The family formerly included more species. At the time of the publication of the third edition of Howard and Moore Complete Checklist of the Birds of the World in 2003, the genera Myophonus, Alethe, Brachypteryx and Heinrichia were included in Turdidae. Subsequent molecular phylogenetic studies have shown that the species in these four genera are more closely related to species in the family Muscicapidae. As a consequence, these four genera are now placed in Muscicapidae. In contrast, the genus Cochoa which had previously been placed in Muscicapidae, was shown to belong in Turdidae.

Genera
The family contains 175 species, which are divided into 17 genera:
 * Grandala – grandala
 * Sialia – bluebirds (3 species)
 * Stizorhina – rufous thrushes (2 species)
 * Neocossyphus – ant thrushes (2 species)
 * Pinarornis – boulder chat
 * Myadestes – solitaires (12 species, including one recently extinct)
 * Chlamydochaera – fruithunter
 * Cochoa – cochoas (4 species)
 * Ixoreus – varied thrush
 * Ridgwayia – Aztec thrush
 * Cichlopsis – rufous-brown solitaire
 * Entomodestes – solitaires (2 species)
 * Hylocichla – wood thrush
 * Catharus – typical American thrushes and nightingale-thrushes (13 species)
 * Zoothera – Asian thrushes (21 species, including one recently extinct)
 * Geokichla – (21 species)
 * Turdus – true thrushes (88 species, including one recently extinct)

See list of thrush species for more detail.

Cooking
The thrush is one of the many kinds of small bird that have in the past been trapped and eaten in much of Europe; the practice is now rare. Among traditional ways of cooking thrush were with polenta or grilled on a skewer, in Italy; with juniper berries in Belgium; and made into a pâté or terrine. The French cook and cookery writer Marie-Antoine Carême recommended cooking thrushes in crépinettes and serving with sauce Périgueux.

title: Thrush (bird)


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Heinz Guderian

Heinz Wilhelm Guderian (17 June 1888 – 14 May 1954) was a German general during World War II who, after the war, became a successful memoirist. An early pioneer and advocate of the "blitzkrieg" approach, he played a central role in the development of the panzer division concept. In 1936, he became the Inspector of Motorized Troops.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Guderian led an armoured corps in the Invasion of Poland. During the Invasion of France, he commanded the armoured units that attacked through the Ardennes forest and overwhelmed the Allied defenses at the Battle of Sedan. He led the 2nd Panzer Army during Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The campaign ended in failure after the German offensive Operation Typhoon failed to capture Moscow, after which Guderian was dismissed.

In early 1943, Adolf Hitler appointed Guderian to the newly created position of Inspector General of Armoured Troops. In this role, he had broad responsibility to rebuild and train new panzer forces but saw limited success due to Germany's worsening war economy. Guderian was appointed Acting Chief of the General Staff of the Army High Command, immediately following the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler.

Guderian was placed in charge of the "Court of Honour" by Hitler, which in the aftermath of the plot was used to dismiss people from the military so they could be tried in the "People's Court" and executed. He was Hitler's personal advisor on the Eastern Front and became closely associated with the Nazis. Guderian's troops carried out the criminal Commissar Order during Barbarossa, and he was implicated in the commission of reprisals after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Guderian surrendered to the United States forces on 10 May 1945 and was interned until 1948. He was released without charge and retired to write his memoirs. Entitled Panzer Leader, the autobiography became a bestseller, widely read to this day. Guderian's writings promoted several post-war myths, including that of the "clean Wehrmacht". In his autobiography, Guderian portrayed himself as the sole originator of the German panzer force; he omitted any mentions of crimes that he authorised or condoned. Guderian died in 1954 and was buried in Goslar.

Early life and World War I
Guderian was born in Kulm, West Prussia (since 1920 Poland), on 17 June 1888, the son of Friedrich and Clara (née Kirchhoff). His father and grandfathers were Prussian officers and he grew up in garrison towns surrounded by the military. In 1903, he left home and enrolled at a military cadet school. He was a capable student, although he performed poorly in his final exam. He entered the army as an officer cadet on 28 February 1907 with the 10th Hanoverian Light Infantry Battalion (Hannoversche Jäger-Bataillon Nr. 10), under his father's command. He became a second lieutenant on 27 January 1908, receiving his patent backdated to 22 June 1906. On 1 October 1913 he married Margarete Goerne, with whom he had two sons: Heinz Günther (1914–2004) and Kurt (1918–1984).

At the outbreak of World War I, Guderian served as a communications officer and the commander of a radio station. In November, 1914 he was promoted to first lieutenant. Between May, 1915 and January, 1916 Guderian was in charge of signals intelligence for the 4th Army. He fought at the Battle of Verdun during this period and was promoted to captain on 15 November 1915. He was then sent to the 4th Infantry Division before becoming commander of the Second Battalion of Infantry Regiment 14. On 28 February 1918, Guderian was appointed to the General Staff Corps. Guderian finished the war as an operations officer in occupied Italy. He disagreed with Germany signing the armistice in 1918, believing that the German Empire should have continued the fight.

Interwar period
Early in 1919, Guderian was selected as one of the four thousand officers allowed by the Versailles Treaty in the reduced-size German army, the Reichswehr. He was assigned to serve on the staff of the central command of the Eastern Frontier Guard Service which was intended to control and coordinate the independent freikorps units in the defense of Germany's eastern frontiers against Polish (who were not attacking Germany) and Soviet forces engaged in the Russian Civil War in conjunction with the Estonian War of Independence. In June, 1919 Guderian joined the Iron Brigade (later known as the Iron Division) as its second General Staff officer.

In the 1920s, Guderian was introduced to armored warfare tactics by Ernst Volckheim, a World War I tank commander and a prolific writer on the subject. He studied the leading European literature on armored warfare and, between 1922 and 1928, wrote five papers for Military Weekly, an armed forces journal. While the topics covered were mundane, Guderian related them to why Germany had lost World War I, a controversial subject at the time, and thus raised his profile in the military. There were some trial maneuvers conducted in the Soviet Union and Guderian academically evaluated the results. Britain was experimenting with armoured units under General Percy Hobart, and Guderian kept abreast of Hobart's writings. In 1924, he was appointed as an instructor and military historian at Stettin. As a lecturer he was polarizing; some of his pupils enjoyed his wit, but he alienated others with his biting sarcasm.

In 1927, Guderian was promoted to major and in October he was posted to the transport section of the Truppenamt, a clandestine form of the army's General Staff, which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. By the autumn of 1928, he was a leading speaker on tanks; however, he did not set foot in one until the summer of 1929, when he briefly drove a Swedish Stridsvagn m/21-29. In October, 1928 he was transferred to the Motor Transport Instruction Staff to teach. In 1931, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and became chief of staff to the Inspectorate of Motorized Troops under Oswald Lutz. This placed Guderian at the center of Germany's development of mobile warfare and armored forces.

Panzer Division and mobile warfare
In the 1930s, Guderian played a significant role in the development of both the panzer division concept and a doctrine of mechanized offensive warfare that would later become known as blitzkrieg. Guderian's 3rd Motor Transport Battalion became the blueprint for the future German armored force. However, his role was less central than he claimed in his memoirs and that historians repeated in the postwar era.

Guderian and his immediate superior Lutz had a symbiotic relationship. Both men worked tirelessly with the shared aim of creating a panzer force. Guderian was the public face advocating mechanized warfare and Lutz worked behind the scenes. Guderian reached into the Nazi regime to promote the panzer force concept, attract support and secure resources. This included a demonstration of the concept to Hitler himself. Lutz persuaded, cajoled and compensated for Guderian's often arrogant and argumentative behavior towards his peers. The modern historian Pier Battistelli writes that it is difficult to determine exactly who developed each of the ideas behind the panzer force. Many other officers, such as Walther Nehring and Hermann Breith, were also involved. However, Guderian is widely accepted as having pioneered the communications system developed for the panzer units. The central tenets of blitzkrieg – independence, mass and surprise – were first published in doctrinal statements of mechanized warfare by Lutz.

During the autumn of 1936, Lutz asked Guderian to write Achtung – Panzer! He requested a polemical tone that promoted the Mobile Troops Command and strategic mechanized warfare. In the resulting work, Guderian mixed academic lectures, a review of military history and armored warfare theory that partly relied on a 1934 book on the subject by Ludwig von Eimannsberger. While limited, the book was in many respects a success. It contained two important questions which would require answering if the army was to be mechanized: how will the army be supplied with fuel, spares and replacement vehicles; and how to move large mechanized forces, especially those that are road-bound? He answered his own questions in discussions of three broad areas: refueling; spare parts; and access to roads.

In 1938, Hitler purged the army of personnel who were unsympathetic to the Nazi regime. Lutz was dismissed and replaced by Guderian. In the spring of that year, Guderian had his first experience of commanding a panzer force during the annexation of Austria. The mobilization was chaotic: tanks ran out of fuel or broke down and the combat value of the formation was non-existent. Had there been any real fighting Guderian would certainly have lost. He stood beside the Führer in Linz as Hitler addressed Germany and Austria in celebration. Afterwards, he set about remedying the problems that the panzer force had encountered. In the last year before the outbreak of World War II, Guderian fostered a closer relationship with Hitler. He attended opera with the Führer and received invitations to dinner. When Neville Chamberlain, in his policy of appeasement, gave Hitler the Sudetenland, it was occupied by Guderian's XVI Motorized Corps.

Invasion of Poland
During August, 1939 Guderian took command of the newly formed XIX Army Corps. At short notice he was ordered to spearhead the northern element of the invasion of Poland which began on 1 September. Under his corps command was one of Germany's six panzer divisions; Guderian's corps controlled 14.5 per cent of Germany's armoured fighting vehicles. His task was to advance through the former West Prussian territory (which included his birthplace of Kulm), then travel through East Prussia before heading south towards Warsaw. Guderian used the German concept of "leading forward", which required commanders to move to the battlefront and assess the situation. He made use of modern communication systems by travelling in a radio-equipped command vehicle with which he kept himself in contact with corps command.

By 5 September, XIX Corps had linked up with forces advancing west from East Prussia. Guderian had accomplished his first operational victory and he gave a tour of the battlefield to Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. The next day, he shifted his corps across East Prussia to participate in the advance on Warsaw. On 9 September his corps was reinforced by 10 Panzer Division and he continued deeper into Poland, finishing at Brest-Litovsk. In ten days Guderian's XIX Corps advanced 330 km, at times against strong resistance. The tank had proven itself to be a powerful weapon, with only 8 destroyed out of 350 employed. On 16 September, Guderian launched an attack on Brest Litovsk; the next day the Soviet Union invaded Poland. He issued an ultimatum to the city—surrender to the Germans or Soviets – the garrison capitulated to the Germans. The Soviet Union's entry into the war shattered Polish morale and Polish forces began to surrender en masse to Guderian's troops. At the conclusion of the campaign, Guderian was awarded a Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.

The historian Russell Hart writes that Guderian supported the invasion because he "despised the Catholic, Slavic Poles who now occupied parts of his native, beloved Prussia". Foremost in his mind was the "liberation" of his former family estate at Gross-Klonia; Guderian ordered the advance on Gross-Klonia at night and through fog, leading to what he subsequently admitted were "serious casualties".

During the invasion, the German military mistreated and killed prisoners of war, ignoring both the Geneva Convention and their own army regulations. Guderian's corps withdrew before the SS began its ethnic cleansing campaign. He learned of murder operations and of Jews being forced into Nazi ghettos from his son, Heinz Günther Guderian, who had witnessed some of them. There is no record of his having made any protest.

Invasion of France and the Low Countries

Guderian was involved in the strategic debates that preceded the invasion of France and the Low Countries. The plan was being developed by his classmate at the 1907 War Academy, Erich von Manstein. The Manstein Plan shifted the weight of the armoured formations away from a head-on attack through the Low Countries to one through the Ardennes. Guderian confidently proclaimed the feasibility of taking armor through the hilly Ardennes Forest and was subsequently told he may have to command the spearhead of the attack himself. He then complained about the lack of resources until he was given seven mechanized divisions with which to accomplish the task. The plan established a force for the penetration of the forest that comprised the largest concentration of German armor to that date: 1,112 out of Germany's total of 2,438 tanks.

Guderian's corps spearheaded the drive through the Ardennes and over the Meuse River. He led the attack that broke the French lines at the Battle of Sedan. Guderian's panzer group led the "race to the sea", ending with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and French forces trapped at Dunkirk. A British counter-attack at Arras on 21 May slowed down the German advance and allowed the BEF to establish defenses around points of evacuation, while Hitler, conscious of potential reverses and of allowing unsupported armor into urban fighting, issued the order to halt. A general resumption of the attack was ordered on 26 May, but by that time the Allied forces rallied, offering stiff resistance. On 28 May, with his losses mounting, Guderian advised the abandonment of the armoured assault in favor of a traditional artillery-infantry operation. Guderian was then ordered to advance to the Swiss border. The offensive started at the Weygand Line on 9 June and finished on 17 June with the encirclement of the Maginot Line defences and the remaining French forces.

Despite the success of the invasion, French defeat was not inevitable; the French had better, more numerous military equipment and were not overwhelmed by a numerically or technologically superior military force. Instead, the French loss stemmed from poor army morale, faulty military strategy and a lack of coordination among Allied troops. Hitler and his generals became overconfident after their historic victory, and came to believe they could defeat the Soviet Union: a country with significantly more natural resources, manpower and industrial capacity.

Invasion of the Soviet Union

In Guderian's 1937 book Achtung – Panzer! he wrote that "the time has passed when the Russians had no instinct for technology" and that Germany would have to reckon "with the Eastern Question in a form more serious than ever before in history". However, during the planning for Operation Barbarossa—the German invasion of the Soviet Union—he had become optimistic about the supposed superiority of German arms. By May, 1941 Guderian had accepted Hitler's official position that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike. He had accepted some core elements of National Socialism: the Lebensraum concept of territorial expansion and the destruction of the supposed Judeo-Bolshevik threat.

Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group began its offensive on 22 June by crossing the Bug River and advancing towards the Dnieper. The combined forces of 2nd and 3rd Panzer Groups closed the Minsk pocket, taking 300,000 prisoners before attacking towards Smolensk. Guderian was awarded a Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves on 17 July 1941. Following the conclusion of the Battle of Smolensk, which ended with the encirclement and destruction of the Soviet 16th, 19th and 20th Armies, General Franz Halder, Chief-of-Staff of the OKH, argued in favor of the all-out drive toward Moscow. Halder had Guderian fly to Führer Headquarters to argue the Army's case for continuing the assault against Moscow. Guderian, who had just recently been vehemently opposed to Hitler's plan for the drive to the south, unexpectedly sided with the dictator. This abrupt change of heart angered both Halder and Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander of Army Group Centre, and turned Guderian into somewhat of a pariah amid Army leaders.

By 15 September, German forces including the 1st and 2nd Panzer Groups had completed the largest encirclement in history: the Battle of Kiev. Owing to the 2nd Panzer Group's southward turn during the battle, the Wehrmacht destroyed the entire Southwestern Front east of Kiev, inflicting over 600,000 losses on the Red Army by 26 September. However, the campaign had been costly; the German forces had just half the tanks they had three months earlier. They were bogged down in a war of attrition for which the Wehrmacht was not prepared. Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group was in the worst shape; it had just 21 per cent of its tanks in working order. In mid-September, he was ordered to make a drive for Moscow. On 30 September the Battle of Moscow began. On 4 October, the 4th Panzer Division, part of the 2nd Panzer Group, suffered a severe setback at Mtsensk, near Oryol. Guderian demanded an inquiry into the realities of tank warfare on the Eastern Front, eventually suggesting in November to senior German tank designers and manufacturers that the quickest solution was to produce a direct copy of the Soviet T-34 tank.

By November, the attack by the 2nd Panzer Group on Tula and Kashira, 125 km south of Moscow, achieved limited success, while Guderian vacillated between despair and optimism, depending on the situation at the front. Facing pressure from the German High Command, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge finally committed the weaker south flank of his 4th Army to the attack on 1 December. In the aftermath of the battle, Guderian blamed slow commitment of 4th Army to the attack for the German failure to reach Moscow. This assessment grossly overestimated the capabilities of Kluge's remaining forces. It also failed to appreciate the reality that Moscow was a metropolis that German forces lacked the numbers to either encircle or to capture in a frontal assault. In the aftermath of the German failure, Guderian refused to pass on Hitler's 'stand fast' order and fell out with Kluge, the new commander of the Army Group Centre. Guderian was relieved of command on 25 December.

The German formations on the Eastern Front ubiquitously implemented the criminal Commissar Order and the Barbarossa Decree. For all divisions within Guderian's panzer group where files are preserved, there is evidence of illegal reprisals against the civilian population. In his memoirs, Guderian denied having given the Commissar Order. However, General Joachim Lemelsen, a corps commander within Guderian's panzer group, is documented as saying "prisoners, who could be shown to have been commissars, had to be immediately taken aside and shot" – and that the order came directly from Guderian. Reporting to the OKW, Guderian is documented as saying his panzer group had "shunted off" 170 commissars by the beginning of August.

Inspector General of Armoured Troops
On 1 March 1943, after the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler appointed Guderian to the newly created position of Inspector General of Armoured Troops. The latter had successfully lobbied to be reinstated, resulting in the new posting. Guderian's responsibilities were to oversee the panzer arm and the training of Germany's panzer forces. He established a collaborative relationship with Albert Speer regarding the manufacture and development of armored fighting vehicles. The military failures of 1943 prevented Guderian from restoring combat power to the armored forces to any significant degree. He had limited success with improved tank destroyers and fixing flaws in the third generation of tanks, the Panther and the Tiger.

Operation Citadel, the last major German offensive operation in the east, was an attempt by the German army to regain the initiative. Guderian opposed the offensive, on the grounds that a victory would be extremely costly and would achieve little, saying "it is a matter of profound indifference to the world whether we hold Kursk or not". In a conversation with Hitler prior to the offensive, Guderian said: "Why are we attacking in the east at all this year?" Hitler responded, "You are right. Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over." Guderian concluded, "Then you have the right attitude towards this situation. Leave it alone."

Acting Chief of Army General Staff
Guderian became the Acting Chief of the General Staff of the Army High Command with the responsibility of advising Hitler on the Eastern Front. He replaced General of the Infantry Kurt Zeitzler, who had abandoned the position on 1 July after losing faith in Hitler's judgement and suffering a nervous breakdown.

Germany was already heading to inevitable defeat, and Guderian could not shape the military situation nor Hitler's strategic decisions. Hitler placed Guderian in charge of the "Honour Court": a kangaroo court for those accused of involvement in the 20 July Plot. Guderian himself denied any involvement with the plot; nevertheless, he had unexpectedly retired to his estate on the day of the assassination attempt. The court discharged those found guilty of participating in the plot from the armed forces so that they could be tried by the People's Court, set up for the purpose of prosecuting the alleged plotters. Those accused were tortured by the Gestapo and executed by hanging. Some plotters were hanged by a thin hemp rope, by Hitler's direct orders, so that they slowly strangled to death after a lengthy agony.

Post-war, Guderian claimed that he had attempted to get out of this duty and that he had found the sessions "repulsive". In reality, Guderian had applied himself to the task with the vigour of a Nazi adherent, which perhaps was due to the desire to deflect attention from himself. Hart writes that he fought to save Rommel's chief of staff, Hans Speidel, because Speidel could have implicated Guderian in the plot.

As head of the OKH, Guderian was faced with the pressing issues of the staff work being impacted by arrests, which among the OKH staff and their families eventually ran into the hundreds. Guderian had to fill serious gaps, such as one created by the suicide of General Eduard Wagner, the quartermaster general, in July. Even with vacancies filling up, a key problem remained: too many of the personnel were new to their roles and lacked institutional knowledge, including Guderian himself. Guderian relied heavily on Colonel Johann von Kielmansegg who was the most senior staff officer with experience at the OKH, but he was himself arrested in August. The situation was not improved by Guderian's long-standing bias against the General Staff which he blamed for having allegedly opposed his attempts to introduce modern armored doctrine into the army back in the 1930s. The latter months of 1944 were marked by the ever-increasing strife between the OKH and the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), as the two organizations competed for resources, especially in the run-up to the last-ditch German December, 1944 offensive on the Western Front. After the war, Guderian blamed Hitler for frittering away the last German reserves in the operation; nonetheless, Germany's strategic situation was such that even twenty or thirty extra divisions would not have helped.

Guderian completed the total Nazification of the army general staff with a 29 July order that demanded that all officers join the party. He also made the Nazi salute obligatory throughout the armed forces. He supported the politicization of the military, but failed to see why other officers perceived him as a Nazi. As chief-of-staff of the OKH, Guderian did not object to the orders that Hitler and Himmler issued during the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising nor the atrocities being perpetrated against the civilian population of the city. At a Volkssturm rally in November, 1944, Guderian said that there were "95 million National Socialists who stand behind Adolf Hitler".

After the war, Guderian claimed that his actions in the final months as head of the OKH were driven by a search for a solution to Germany's increasingly-bleak prospects. This was supposedly the rationale behind Guderian's plans to turn major urban centers along the Eastern Front into so-called fortress cities (feste Plätze). This fantastical plan had no hope of succeeding against the mobile operations of the Red Army. In any event, most of the "fortresses" were poorly provisioned and staffed by older garrison troops. On 28 March, following the failed operation to retake the town of Küstrin (now Kostrzyn nad Odrą in Poland), Guderian was sent on leave. He was replaced by General Hans Krebs.

Guderian cultivated close personal relationships with the most powerful people in the regime. He had an exclusive dinner with Himmler on Christmas Day, 1944. On 6 March 1945, shortly before the end of the war, Guderian participated in a propaganda broadcast that denied the Holocaust; the Red Army in its advance had just liberated several extermination camps. Despite the general's later claims of being anti-Nazi, Hitler most likely found Guderian's values to be closely aligned with Nazi ideology. Hitler brought him out of retirement in 1943 and especially appreciated the orders he issued in the aftermath of the failed plot.

Later life and death
Guderian and his staff surrendered to US forces on 10 May 1945. He avoided being convicted as a war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials because there was no substantial documentary evidence against him at that time. He answered questions from the Allied forces and denied being an ardent supporter of Nazism. He joined the US Army Historical Division in 1945 and the US refused requests from the Soviet Union to have him extradited. Even after the war, Guderian retained an affinity with Hitler and National Socialism. While interned by the Americans, his conversations were secretly taped. In one such recording, while conversing with former Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb and former General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, Guderian opined: "The fundamental principles [of Nazism] were fine".

Guderian was released from internment in 1948. Many of his peers were ill-fated. Von Manstein was sentenced to 18 years and Albert Kesselring was given a life sentence. Guderian had informed on his ex-colleagues and co-operated with the Allies, which had helped him evade prosecution. He retired to Schwangau near Füssen in Southern Bavaria and began writing. His most successful book was Panzer Leader. He remained an ardent German nationalist for the rest of his life. Guderian died on 14 May 1954 at the age of 65 and is buried at the Friedhof Hildesheimer Straße in Goslar.

After the Second World War, the Central Intelligence Agency was highly interested in using Guderian to rally the German right to the Atlanticist cause.

Panzer Leader myth
Guderian's post-war autobiography Panzer Leader was a success with the reading public. He cast himself as an innovator and the "father" of the German panzer arm, both before the war and during the blitzkrieg years. This allowed him to re-imagine himself as the master of the blitzkrieg between 1939 and 1941; however, this was an exaggeration. Guderian's German memoirs were first published in 1950. At that time they were the only source on the development of panzer forces, German military records having been misplaced or lost. Consequently, historians based their interpretation of historical events upon Guderian's self-centred autobiography. Subsequent biographers supported the myth and embellished it. In 1952 Guderian's memoirs were reprinted in English. British journalist and military theorist B. H. Liddell Hart gained access to a group of German generals, imprisoned in the No. 1 POW camp in Grizedale Hall in the north of England from 9 August 1945, as a Political Intelligence Department lecturer taking part in the Re-education programme, in an effort to use that to re-establish his reputation as a military theorist and commentator. He asked Guderian to say that he had based his military theories on Liddell Hart's; Guderian obliged. Liddell Hart, in turn, became an advocate for West German rearmament.

In newer studies, historians began to question Guderian's memoirs and criticize the myth that they had created. Battistelli, examining Guderian's record, said he was not the father of the panzer arm. He was one of a number of innovators. He stood out from his arguably more able compatriot, Lutz, for two reasons. Firstly, he sought the limelight, and secondly, he fostered a close relationship with Hitler. In portraying himself as the father of blitzkrieg and ingratiating himself with the Americans, he avoided being handed over to the Soviet Union. Battistelli writes that his most remarkable skill was not as a theoretician or commander, it was as an author. His books Achtung-Panzer! and Panzer Leader were a critical and commercial success upon publication and continue to be discussed, researched and analysed many years after his death.

Guderian was a capable tactician and technician, leading his troops successfully in the Invasion of Poland, the Battle of France and during the early stages of the invasion of the Soviet Union: especially in the advance to Smolensk and the Battle of Kiev. Liddell Hart writes that most of his success came from positions of substantial advantage, and he was never able to accomplish victory from a position of weakness. Hart suggests that his strengths were outweighed by his deficiencies, such as deliberately creating animosity between his panzer force and the other military arms, with disastrous consequences. His memoirs omitted mention of his military failings and his close relationship with Hitler. James Corum writes in his book The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform that Guderian was an excellent general, a first-rate tactician and a man who played a central role in developing Panzer divisions, irrespective of his memoirs.

Myth of the clean Wehrmacht
Freelance historian Pier Battistelli argues that Guderian rewrote history in his memoirs, but notes that the biggest re-writing of history comes not in his putative fathering of the panzer force but in the cover-up of his culpability for war crimes during Operation Barbarossa. Units under his command carried out the Commissar Order, which entailed the murder of Red Army political officers. He also played a large role in the commission of reprisals after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Like other generals, Guderian's memoirs emphasized his loyalty to Germany and the German people; however, he neglected to mention that Hitler bought this loyalty with bribes, including landed estates and a monthly payment of. Guderian wrote in his memoirs that he had been given a Polish estate as a retirement gift. Worth, the estate covered an area of 2000 acre and it was located at Deipenhof (now Głębokie, Poland) in the Warthegau area of occupied Poland. The occupants had been evicted. Guderian also did not mention that he had initially requested an estate three times larger, but he was turned down by the local Gauleiter, with support from Himmler. The Gauleiter balked at giving such an opulent estate to someone with the rank of only a Colonel-General.

In 1950, Guderian published a pamphlet entitled Can Europe Be Defended?, where he lamented that the Western powers had picked the wrong side to ally themselves with during the war, even as Germany "was fighting for its naked existence", as a "defender of Europe" against the supposed Bolshevik menace. Guderian issued apologetics for Hitler, writing: "For one may judge Hitler's acts as one will, in retrospect his struggle was about Europe, even if he made dreadful mistakes and errors". He claimed that only the Nazi civilian administration (not the Wehrmacht) was responsible for atrocities against Soviet civilians, and scapegoated Hitler and the Russian winter for the Wehrmacht's military reverses, as he later did in Panzer Leader; in addition, he wrote that six million Germans died during their expulsion from the Eastern territories by the Soviet Union and its allies, while also writing that the defendants executed at the Nuremberg trials (for war crimes such as the Holocaust) were "defenders of Europe".

Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, in their book The Myth of the Eastern Front, conclude that Guderian's memoirs are full of "egregious untruths, half truths, and omissions", as well as outright "nonsense". Guderian claimed, contrary to historical evidence, that the criminal Commissar Order was not carried out by his troops because it "never reached [his] panzer group". He also lied about the Barbarossa Decree that preemptively exempted German troops from prosecution for crimes committed against Soviet civilians, claiming that it was never carried out either. Guderian claimed to have been solicitous towards the civilian population, that he took pains to preserve Russian cultural objects and that his troops had "liberated" Soviet citizens.

David Stahel writes that English-speaking historians too readily presented a distorted image of German generals in the post-war era. In his book Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East, Stahel wrote: "The men in control of Hitler's armies were not honourable men, carrying out their orders as dutiful servants of the state. With resolute support for the regime, the generals unquestioningly waged one war of aggression after the other, and, once Barbarossa began, willingly partook in the genocide of the Nazi regime".

In popular culture

Guderian's memoirs remain popular. The favourable descriptions started with the British journalist and military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart, who described Guderian as one of the "Great Captains of History" in a book published by the mass-market Ballantine Books in 1957. As late as 2002, for the 55th anniversary of the first publication of the book, The New York Times, Newsweek, The New Yorker and other outlets published positive reviews, reinforcing the tenets of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. The reviews stressed the separation between the professional soldiers and the Nazi regime, while The New York Times Book Review described the book as one of the best written by former German generals. Kenneth Macksey in his biography eulogized Guderian, inflating his true accomplishments.

In 1976, the leading wargaming magazine, Strategy and Tactics, spotlighted Guderian in a featured game of the month called Panzergruppe Guderian. The magazine cover included a photo of Guderian in military dress, with his Knight's Cross and a pair of binoculars, suggesting a commanding role. The magazine featured a glowing profile of Guderian in which he was identified as the originator of blitzkrieg and lauded for his military achievements. Adhering to the postwar myths, the profile posited that a commander like this could "function in any political climate and be unaffected by it". Guderian thus came across as a consummate professional who stood apart from the crimes of the Nazi regime.

Works

 * Guderian reviews the development of armoured forces in the European nations and Soviet Russia, and describes what he felt was essential for the effective use of armoured forces.
 * Originally published in German, titled Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (Memories of a Soldier) (, Heidelberg 1950; 10th edition 1977).
 * Originally published in German, titled Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (Memories of a Soldier) (, Heidelberg 1950; 10th edition 1977).
 * Originally published in German, titled Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (Memories of a Soldier) (, Heidelberg 1950; 10th edition 1977).

Awards

 * Iron Cross (1914)
 * 2nd Class (17 September 1914)
 * 1st Class (8 November 1916)
 * Knight 2nd class of the Friedrich Order with Swords (Württemberg) (15 December 1915)
 * Saxe-Ernestine House Order Commander 2nd Class with Swords (1 July 1935)
 * Wehrmacht Long Service Award 1st Class (1 October 1936)
 * Royal Hungarian War Memorial Medal with Swords (14 January 1937)
 * Honour Cross of the World War 1914/1918
 * War Memorial Medal with Swords (Austria) (9 March 1937)
 * Anschluss Medal (13 March 1938)
 * Order of St. Sava 1st Class (21 November 1939)
 * Clasp to the Iron Cross (1939)
 * 2nd Class (5 September 1939)
 * 1st Class (13 September 1939)
 * Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves
 * Knight's Cross on 27 October 1939 as General der Panzertruppe and commanding general of the XIX. Army Corps
 * 24th Oak Leaves on 17 July 1941 as Generaloberst and commander-in-chief of the 2nd Panzer Group

title: Heinz Guderian