Gerhard Schmidhuber

Gerhard Schmidhuber ( 9 April 1894 – 11 February 1945 in the battle of Budapest) was a German major general.

Born in Dresden in the Kingdom of Saxony, Schmidhuber was commanding officer of the Wehrmacht Heer's 13th Panzer Division during World War II. When the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944, Schmidthuber was supreme commander of German army forces in that country. In that capacity, he had extensive dealings with the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the latter who saved countless thousands of Jews from extermination during the Holocaust. Schmidhuber died in the Battle of Budapest.

Schmidhuber was recently memorialized by the Hungarian newspaper "Népszabadság" for preventing the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in the face of the advancing Red Army.

Awards

* German Cross in Gold (28 February 1944)
* Eisernes Kreuz 2. and 1. Klasse
* Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub
** Ritterkreuz (13 October 1943)
** Eichenlaub (21 January 1945)

References

*cite web |title=Lexikon der Wehrmacht|work=Gerhard Schmidhuber|url=http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Personenregister/S/SchmidhuberG.htm|accessdate=6 June| accessyear=2007
* Fellgiebel, Walther-Peer. "Die Träger des Ritterkreuzes des Eisernen Kreuzes 1939-1945". Friedburg, Germany: Podzun-Pallas, 2000. ISBN 3-7909-0284-5.
* Patzwall, Klaus D. and Scherzer, Veit. "Das Deutsche Kreuz 1941 - 1945 Geschichte und Inhaber Band II". Norderstedt, Germany: Verlag Klaus D. Patzwall, 2001. ISBN 3-931533-45-X.

External links

* [http://nol.hu/cikk/431935/ (Hungarian)]
* [http://www.budapester.hu/?do=article&id=2332&issue=127 (German)]