Ferdinand Porsche Nazi Party and allegedly the SS. He was a recipient of the German National Prize for Art and Science, the SS-Ehrenring and the War Merit Cross, and was called the "Great German Engineer" by Nazi officials. Porsche was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1996 and won the Car Engineer of the Century award in 1999. Ferdinand Porsche was born to ethnic German parents in Liberec (), northern Bohemia, part of the Austrian Empire at that time, and today part of the Czech Republic. Ferdinand was his parents' third child. His father, Anton Porsche, was a master
Waffen-SS and during the Soviet counter-offensive were withdrawn to France to recover and be reformed as Panzergrenadier divisions. Due to the efforts of Himmler and "Obergruppenführer" Paul Hausser, the new commander of the SS Panzer Corps, the three SS Panzergrenadier divisions "Leibstandarte", "Das Reich", and "Totenkopf" were to be formed with a full regiment of tanks rather than only a battalion. This meant that the SS Panzergrenadier divisions were full-strength Panzer divisions in all but name. They each received nine Tiger tanks, which were formed into the heavy panzer companies. The Soviet offensive of January 1942 trapped a number of German