Early life and pre-WW2 activities Hosenfeld was born into the family of a
Roman Catholic schoolmaster living near
Fulda in
Hesse. He was influenced by the
Catholic Action and Church-inspired social work. He fought as an
infantry soldier with the
Imperial German Army during
World War I in
Flanders, the
Baltics and
Romania from 1914 to 1917. Severely wounded in 1917, he received the
Iron Cross Second Class. He viewed the
Treaty of Versailles as a
national humiliation. After returning from the front he married Annemarie Krummacher, In 1938, he expressed disquiet over the Nazi attacks on religion. In 1939, he was employed as the head teacher in .
World War II , where Hosenfeld helped
Władysław Szpilman Hosenfeld was deployed to
Poland for the entirety of his involvement in
World War II. He was mobilised as a sergeant of the
reserve on 26 August 1939, but his unit did not leave Fulda at the start of the
invasion of Poland on 1 September. In late September, with Poland nearly defeated, he arrived in
Pabianice with a
company under his orders and was appointed as the commander of the prisoner-of-war camp set up in the former textile factory (
Lager Pabianitz) and the
oflag located in the nearby School No. 5 at 65 Zamkowa St, both organised as transit camps for captives taken at the
Battle of the Bzura. He oversaw the construction of
barbed wire fencing, watch towers and machine gun positions to guard the camp. While stationed in Pabianice, Hosenfeld recorded his "outrage" at the "rough treatment" of Jewish prisoners, and the "relish" of Polish observers. He considered the "terrible rage" of local ethnic Germans against the Poles justified by the presumed "bestial behaviour of the Poles who were irresponsibly incited" against Germans in the lead-up to the war. Hosenfeld permitted the families of inmates to visit them against the camp rules. He intervened to secure the release of several Poles from German custody, befriended their families, and would later lodge his wife with his Polish contacts. From December 1939, he was stationed in
Węgrów, where he remained until his battalion was moved another 30 km away to
Jadów at the end of May 1940. He was finally transferred to Warsaw in July 1940, where he spent the rest of the war, for the most part, attached to
Wachbataillon (guard battalion) 660, part of the
Wach-Regiment Warschau (Warsaw Guard Regiment) in which he served as a
staff officer and as the
battalion sports officer. As an
intelligence officer, he reported to the ''
in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. In late August and early September 1940, he acted as a liaison officer for the Wien-Film crew commissioned by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and helped it choose set locations across the General Government for the making of the anti-Polish propaganda film Homecoming'' (1941). He ran the Wehrmacht sports school in Warsaw and was in charge of military sports events at the
Polish Army Stadium, renamed the Wehrmacht Stadium. During the deportation and mass murder of Jews from the
Warsaw Ghetto (codenamed
Grossaktion Warsaw) in the summer of 1942, he organised a week-long sports competition featuring 1,200 military athletes, then left with his wife for a week's leave in
Berlin. Following his return, he hid two surviving Jews, among them Leon Warm-Warczyński who had escaped a transport to the
Treblinka extermination camp, on the sports school premises. Throughout the Warsaw period, he used his position to protect fugitives from the
Gestapo, including at least one
anti-Nazi ethnic German, by providing them with documents and jobs at the sports school. Hosenfeld was promoted to captain of the reserve in 1942. In his diary from this period, he began to draw a moral equivalence between National Socialism and
Communism, but expressed his pride in belonging to the "resilient" German nation and argued that the National Socialist idea was a lesser evil compared to losing the war. By the end of 1943, he noted down his hope for a coup within the Third Reich similar to Marshal
Pietro Badoglio's
takeover in
Italy, leading to a
separate peace between Germany and the
Western Allies. During the
Warsaw Uprising in August and September 1944, Hosenfeld carried out
counterintelligence tasks by
interrogating Polish resistance fighters and civilians and
Red Army soldiers, whom the German troops began to take prisoner in the second week of fighting. In letters to his family, he reported that he was unable to extract any information from a group of high school girls, whose religious devotion he noted, and claimed that he strove to save the girls' lives. He also compared the systematic
destruction of Warsaw with the
Allied area bombing of German cities. He described the insurgents as "bandits" using "misguided" civilians as
human shields and asserted that
the Wehrmacht had acted honourably in Warsaw. Only after the capitulation of the uprising did he express admiration for the "national spirit" of the Poles. As the planned razing of Warsaw commenced in October 1944 as part of the Nazi defensive fortification project (
Festung Warschau), Hosenfeld was assigned to take the Nazi and neutral press on a tour of the ruins. In mid-November 1944, he discovered
Władysław Szpilman hiding in an abandoned attic at the Aleja Niepodległości 223 address, which he was tasked with preparing as headquarters for an army staff, and after testing Szpilman's piano playing abilities (with
Chopin's
Nocturne No. 20 in C♯ minor) he decided to help him. He allowed Szpilman to stay in the building undetected, gave him a coat, and supplied him with bread and jam for several weeks until assuming command of a company in the
9th Army.
Soviet captivity and death Hosenfeld was captured by the
Red Army at the head of his company after a brief skirmish near
Błonie some 39km west of Warsaw on 17 January 1945, one day after his retreat from the destroyed Polish capital. In May 1945, he was transferred to a camp for officers in
Minsk, where he was kept in
solitary confinement for six months and interrogated three times by the
NKVD under the suspicion of having conducted intelligence activity against the
Soviet Union. Once he returned to the main camp site in late 1945, his health improved and he was able to write letters to his family. In a 1946 letter to his wife in
West Germany, Hosenfeld named the
Jews who he had saved, and begged her to contact the Soviet authorities and ask them to arrange his release. His wife requested help from a former
Nazi concentration camp inmate, the German Communist Karl Hörle, the head of the local chapter of the
Association of Political Prisoners and Persecutees of the Nazi System, who eventually intervened on Hosenfeld's behalf with the authorities of the
German Democratic Republic in October 1947. In July 1947, Hosenfeld underwent a major
stroke and although he received prompt medical attention and recovered, he later experienced complications from the condition. In mid-1950, the tribunal of the
Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic sentenced Hosenfeld in
administrative process to 25 years in a
labour camp for his involvement in a unit that committed
war crimes. In June 1952, Hosenfeld's health deteriorated and he had to dictate his postcard to the family. He died of an
aortic rupture in August 1952. ==Commemorations==