Wilm Hosenfeld
German Army officer
Died when: 57 years 103 days (687 months)Star Sign: Taurus
Wilhelm Adalbert Hosenfeld (German pronunciation: ['v?l(h?l)m 'ho?z?nf?lt]; 2 May 1895 – 13 August 1952), originally a school teacher, was a German Army officer who by the end of the Second World War had risen to the rank of Hauptmann (Captain).
He helped to hide or rescue several Polish people, including Jews, in Nazi-German occupied Poland, and helped Jewish pianist and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman to survive, hidden, in the ruins of Warsaw during the last months of 1944, an act which was portrayed in the 2002 film The Pianist.
He was taken prisoner by the Red Army and died in Soviet captivity in 1952.In October 2007, Hosenfeld was posthumously honoured by the president of Poland Lech Kaczynski with a Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.
In June 2009, Hosenfeld was posthumously recognized in Yad Vashem (Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust) as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
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German Army officer
German army officer
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German Army officer