Wilm Hosenfeld Biography

Wilm Hosenfeld was a German Army officer who served as a captain (Hauptmann) during the Second World War. He helped to hide or rescue several Polish people as well as Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Though he had joined the Nazi Party in 1935, Hosenfeld soon grew disillusioned with the regime. He also found the Nazi crimes against the Poles and Jews unbearable. He had been stationed in Poland from the beginning of the war until the Soviets captured Warsaw. When he was confronted with the crimes committed against the Polish and German Jews by his own people, he was filled with shame and guilt. This led him to help a number of Jews and Poles survive and escape. He was posthumously awarded with a Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the President of Poland Lech Kaczyński in 2007. He was also recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.