Walter Scherff
- Birth Date:
- 01.11.1898
- Death date:
- 24.05.1945
- Length of life:
- 46
- Days since birth:
- 45840
- Years since birth:
- 125
- Days since death:
- 28834
- Years since death:
- 78
- Extra names:
- Walter Scherff
- Categories:
- General, Historian, WWII participant
- Nationality:
- german
- Cemetery:
- Set cemetery
Major General Walter Scherff (1 November 1898 – 24 May 1945) was a German army officer and military historian appointed by Adolf Hitler to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in May 1942 to compile the history of the war.
He served in a Panzer Battalion and was promoted Oberstleutnant in 1939, Oberst in September 1941 and Generalmajor in September 1943. He was injured in 1944 by the 20 July plot bomb at the Wolf's Lair headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia.
A great admirer of Hitler, he was captured by the Americans and shot himself after the German surrender.
Scherff was responsible for the destruction of parts of the complete stenographic record of Hitler's military conferences despite not having the authority to do so. Those copies under the administration of the Stenographic Service were ordered burned early in May 1945, at his direction. His personal copies were also "probably" burned, according to historians, as "Scherff made it plain that his opinion of Hitler as a general had changed, and he strongly criticized the military strategy of the last few years."
Source: wikipedia.org
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20.07.1944 | Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg
The 20 July plot refers to the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Third Reich, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia, in July 1944. The apparent purpose of the assassination attempt was to seize political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party (including the SS) in order to obtain peace with the Allies as soon as possible. The underlying desire of many of the involved high ranking Wehrmacht officers was apparently to show to the world that not all Germans were like Hitler and the NSDAP. The details of the conspirators' peace initiatives remain unknown, but they likely would have included demands to accept wide reaching territorial annexations by Germany in Europe.