Hans von Salmuth (11 November 1888 – 1 January 1962) was a Colonel-General of the German Wehrmacht during World War II, commanding the German Fifteenth Army in France and several armies in Russia.
Biography[]
Hans von Salmuth was born on 11 November 1888 in Metz, German Empire (now in France), and he joined the Imperial German Army in 1907. Salmuth remained in the Reichswehr after the Treaty of Versailles limited the size of the officer corps to 4,000 men, and he served on the General Staff of the Wehrmacht during the 1930s. In 1939, he served as Chief of Staff of Fedor von Bock's Army Group North during the invasion of Poland, and he would be given command of a corps for Operation Barbarossa. In January 1943, he was promoted to Colonel-General after two army commands, and his German Second Army was nearly destroyed in the Voronezh-Kastornensk Operation in February. He was sent to command the German Fifteenth Army in Calais, France in August 1943, and he was finally removed from command in August 1944 after the German front line disintegrated. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes, but he was released in 1953, and he died in Heidelberg in 1962.