27 Facts About Helmuth Groscurth

Helmuth Groscurth was a German staff and Abwehr officer in the Wehrmacht and a member of the German resistance.

Helmuth Groscurth was later reassigned to the regular army following his criticism of war crimes committed by German forces in Poland.

Helmuth Groscurth was involved in the events of the Bila Tserkva massacre where he attempted to avert the killing of Jewish children.

Helmuth Groscurth ended his active service as Karl Strecker's Chief of Staff in the 11th Army Corps.

Helmuth Groscurth participated in the Battle of Stalingrad and helped draft the final message from the German forces trapped there.

Helmuth Groscurth's older brother Reinhard, was a German lawyer who worked against corruption and Nazi influence in the Evangelical Church of Bremen.

Helmuth Groscurth joined the German 75th Infantry Regiment in 1916 and fought on the Western Front where he was severely wounded and taken as a POW by the British the following year.

Helmuth Groscurth rejoined the Reichswehr in 1924 and in 1929 was appointed as the adjunct to Erwin von Witzleben, a fellow anti-Hitler conspirator who would go on to be executed for his participation in the 20 July plot.

Helmuth Groscurth was recruited into the Abwehr in 1935, eventually becoming an active conspirator in the extensive network of officers within military intelligence who were part of the German resistance under the direction of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

Helmuth Groscurth's mission included strengthening moderate ethnic Germans in the area in the hope that a negotiated solution could be found and a war avoided.

Helmuth Groscurth collected intelligence on Czechoslovak defenses, planted secret arms dumps, and trained potential insurgents in sabotage.

Helmuth Groscurth's plan set up an underground route for German weapons to be sent to by sea to Lebanon and then loaded onto local Arab fishing boats, which ferried the weapons to Palestine.

Terrified, Henlein's wife begged Helmuth Groscurth to protect them from the SS, which Helmuth Groscurth and the Abwehr tried to do, with limited success.

Helmuth Groscurth was replaced by Erwin von Lahousen and promoted to be the chief of Abteilung Heerwesen zbV, a newly created liaison unit between the Abwehr and the OKH.

Helmuth Groscurth used his position and the contacts that came with it to further the resistance to Hitler and the SS, including becoming one of the primary co-ordinators between the various elements of the Oster conspiracy.

Helmuth Groscurth went so far as to secure explosives for an assassination attempt.

Additionally, Helmuth Groscurth was active in maintaining communications between the anti-Hitler elements in Germany and the Chamberlain government in Britain.

In December 1939, Helmuth Groscurth traveled throughout the Western Front during the Phoney War, disseminating reports and memorandums of atrocities committed during the invasion of Poland passed to him by a fellow objector Johannes Blaskowitz in an attempt to convince commanders there to act against Hitler.

Helmuth Groscurth visited Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, Erwin von Witzleben, Gerd von Rundstedt, and Fedor von Bock, but only Leeb was willing to take any official action by authoring a complaint to Hitler.

Helmuth Groscurth was then reassigned to command an infantry battalion in the West, where he took part in the invasion of France.

Helmuth Groscurth became aware of the children's situation after several Heer soldiers confronted the SS Sergeant in charge of guarding a church locked full of crying children who had been recently orphaned by the execution of their parents.

On 8 August 1941, Helmuth Groscurth reported his concerns to the Chief of the General Staff of Army Group South, General Georg von Sodenstern.

Helmuth Groscurth continued his objection all the way to Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau at a meeting in the field commander's office on 21 August 1941.

Some reports assert that Helmuth Groscurth was then beaten although Helmuth Groscurth did not mention that in his own report on the matter.

Helmuth Groscurth was placed in an officer's prison camp in Frolovo, where he later died of typhus.

Helmuth Groscurth was one of the first Army officers to join the resistance and became known, along with Oster, as the "soul of the Resistance within the Abwehr" since the summer of 1938.

Helmuth Groscurth was one of the authors of a secret memorandum written in October 1939 titled, "An imminent disaster," with diplomats Hasso von Etzdorf and Erich Kordt, outlining a potential coup against Hitler.