
Wilhelm Mohnke (15 March 1911 – 6 August 2001) was an SS-Brigadefuhrer and Waffen-SS Major-General of Nazi Germany during World War II.
Biography[]
Wilhelm Mohnke was born in Lubeck, German Empire on 15 March 1911, and he joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1931. As one of the three best soldiers in his company, he was transferred to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the personal bodyguard unit of Adolf Hitler, and he was awarded the Wound Badge and two Iron Crosses after being wounded during the 1939 invasion of Poland. In 1940, he commanded a battalion during the Battle of France, and he was implicated in the massacre of 80 British and French prisoners-of-war near Wormhoudt on 28 May 1940. Mohnke later fought in the Balkans, and a part of his foot had to be removed after being hit by shrapnel from a Yugoslavian air attack on 6 April 1941, the first day of the April War. In September 1943, he became the commander of a Hitler Youth panzergrenadier regiment that fought in France and at the Battle of the Bulge, and he was accused of executing Allied POWs. He was later given command of the Reich Chancellery and the Fuhrerbunker sectors of Berlin during the Battle of Berlin, and he was forced to surrender to the Soviet Red Army on 2 May 1945 after Adolf Hitler's suicide. He was imprisoned in a Soviet internment camp until 1955, and he settled in Barsbuttel, West Germany after the war, dying there in 2001 at the age of 90.