Buhle, Walter.

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Buhle, Walter
germanyGeneralWehrmacht
Buhle, Walter, born 26-10-1894 in Heilbronn, was an Infantry General in the German army, who was the Chief of the Army Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht  from 1942 and Chief of Armaments for the Army in 1945. Buhle joined the Army as a Cadet in July 1913, age 18. During World War I he was an officer in the infantry and in the summer of 1915 he was wounded  in battle. Buhle is awarded with the Knight’s Cross  and the Königlichen Preussischen Hausorden . Between the wars he served on the General Staff of the new 100.000 men Reichswehr and the infantry and cavalry and by the outbreak of World War II, he had reached the rank of Oberst in the Wehrmacht and was appointed Chief of the organizations section of the Oberkommando des Heeres  as senior officer to Oberst der Kavallerie, Graf Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg
   Walter became the Chief of the Army Staff and promoted to Generalleutnant, on 01-04-1942. Buhle was injured in 1944 by the 20 July plot bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenberg at the Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia. The headquarters was located in the Masurian woods, near the village of Görlitz in Ostpreußen (now Gierłoż), about 8 kilometres (5 miles) east of the small East Prussian town of Rastenburg (now Kętrzyn), in present-day Poland.
He entered the conference room with von Stauffenberg and when a point was raised that von Stauffenberg might have been expected to answer, Buhle was perplexed that he was no longer present and looked for him in the corridor. A telephonist said he had left the building so he returned to the conference.
In the meanwhile General Heinz Brandt,
also a resistance man, wanted to get a better look at a map on the table and moved the briefcase to the other side of a thick table leg. Seven minutes later the bomb exploded and blew one of Brandt’s legs off. He died two days later on 22-07-1945, age 37, in Rastenburg hospital  and was posthumously promoted to Generalmajor by Hitler. Ironical on 13-03-1943 Generalmajor Henning Tresckow
  asked Brandt to carry a package containing bottles of what he claimed was cognac onto Hitler’s Condor plane  for delivery to Oberst Helmuth Stieff 
   as payment for a lost bet. The package in fact contained a primed bomb which in the event failed to detonate. In May 1943 Brandt was promoted to Oberst. Stieff was sentenced to death 08-08-1944 and executed the same day in Plötzensee prison in Berlin.
   Three other people also died as a result of the explosion. General der Flieger Günther Korten  , Heinrich Berger Berger, Heinrich  (civilian stenographer) en Generalleutnant Rudolf Schmundt    It was later concluded that its exact positioning next to a leg of the map table was a crucial factor in determining who in the room survived. Hitler survived, as did everyone else who was shielded from the blast by the conference table leg. His trousers were singed and tattered  and he suffered from a perforated eardrum, as did most of the other 24 people in the room. Buhle recovered from his injuries and in the last days of Nazi Germany,  Adolf Hitler(did you know) pointed him Chief of Armaments for the Army. On 01-02-1945 he, here right of Hitler, left Keitel is assigned to Chief of the Wehrmacht Armament and lands in Allied captivity until 1947.

Death and burial ground of Buhle, Walter.

 Released Buhle lived in Stuttgart and died at the age of 65, on 28-12-1959. Walter von Buhle is buried on the Prayer cemetery in Stuttgart and only steps away from the graves of Generalmajor der Infanterie, Dr. Hans Speidel,
       adjutant of Generalfeldmarschall der Panzertruppe, Erwin Rommel,
Speidel was a German nationalist who wanted to fight against France and overturn the Treaty of Versailles, but did not agree with Nazi racial politics. Speidel was a member of the group that had organized the failed plot of July 20, 1944, after which the Gestapo brought him before the ‘Ehrenhof’, the court-martial of the Wehrmacht. However, he was found ‘not guilty, but not free from suspicion’, so he did not have to appear at Roland Freisler‘s People’s Court.
However, Speidel was imprisoned. A letter from Rommel to Hitler asking for his release was to no avail. During his captivity, he nevertheless indicated that Rommel knew or must have known about the attack on the Führer, which meant that Rommel, as the highest ranking person, was considered primarily responsible. Rommel was eventually forced to commit suicide. Rommel was not a supporter of Nazi ideology and eventually joined the resistance, but he was against an assassination attempt on Hitler, fearing civil war and making Hitler a martyr. Instead, he had come up with a plan of his own, namely opening the Western Front to the Allies. Speidel managed to escape together with several commanders and went into hiding. On 29-04-1945, he was liberated from his hiding place by French troops.
Also buried there, Oberst Fritz Jaeger, a 20 July Plot member and his brother Franz, the Generaloberarzt Fritz Jaeger, Generalleutnant der Pioniere, Kommandeur des Ersatzheeres, Hans von Donat and Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin,
     alas the gravestone of von Buhle is removed.

Message(s), tips or interesting graves for the webmaster:    robhopmans@outlook.com

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