Walther Wenck

On 1 May 1982, Wenck died while on a trip to Austria, when his car collided with a tree. He was buried in his hometown of Bad Rothenfelde in Lower Saxony a few days later.

In Cornelius Ryan's 1966 epic The Last Battle he was listed as a contributor.

In 1957, he was invited to become Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, but refused after being informed that his requirements, such as turning the office into that of Commander-in-chief, could not be met.

Wenck was taken prisoner by the U.S. Army. He was released in 1947, and then began a second career as an industrialist. During the 1950s, he worked as the managing director of Dr. C. Otto & Comp., a producer of industrial ovens, and in the 1960s as the director of the Diehl Group, an arms manufacturer.

Historians consider Wenck a capable commander and a brilliant improviser, although incapable of the impossible task he was given of saving Berlin in 1945.

On 13 February 1945, after a long argument, Guderian persuaded Hitler to make Wenck chief of staff of Army Group Vistula (with the power to launch an attack) under Himmler. Wenck's attack was initially successful, but Hitler requested him to attend daily Führer's briefings which forced him to make a daily round trip of 200 miles. On February 17, 1945, an extremely tired Wenck took the driving wheel from his driver Dorn who had collapsed. Wenck then fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his car off the road. Saved by Dorn, he ended up in the hospital with a fractured skull and five broken ribs. Meanwhile, the attack failed.

On 10 April 1945, Wenck was appointed commander of the German Twelfth Army located to the west of Berlin to guard against the advancing American and British forces. But, as the Western Front moved eastwards and the Eastern Front moved westwards, the German armies making up both fronts backed towards each other. As a result, the area of control of Wenck's army to his rear and east of the Elbe River had become a vast refugee camp for Germans fleeing from the approaching Soviet Army. Wenck took great pains to provide food and lodging for these refugees. At one stage, the Twelfth Army was estimated to be feeding more than a quarter of a million people every day.

On about 22 July 1944, Wenck was appointed Chief of Operations at OKH, the High Command of the German Army, by Heinz Guderian, who had just been appointed as OKH Chief of Staff by Hitler. He was soon advanced to Chief of Command Staff (Chief of the Führungsstab) an office that replaced Quartermaster General I.

From 1942 to 1943, he was chief of staff of "Army Detachment Hollidt", named after Karl-Adolf Hollidt, which was subordinated to the Third Romanian Army. In 1943, he was Chief of Staff of the ill-fated Sixth Army. From 1943 to 1944, Wenck served in the same capacity in the 1st Panzer Army. In 1944, he was chief of staff of Army Group South Ukraine. There he first attracted Adolf Hitler's attention with his report about conditions on the Eastern Front, saying, "As you see My Führer, the Eastern Front is like Swiss cheese, full of holes." Even though he was reprimanded for using informal language, Hitler commended the "liveliness" of his report.

On 21 April, Adolf Hitler ordered Waffen SS Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner to attack the forces of Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front. Zhukov's forces were encircling Berlin from the north, while the forces of Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front were encircling from the south. Steiner was to attack Zhukov with his Army Detachment Steiner. With few operational tanks and roughly a division's worth of infantry, Steiner requested that his "army" be allowed to retreat instead of attacking.

Wenck joined a paramilitary group (Freikorps) in 1919 and then the Army (Reichswehr) of the Weimar Republic in 1920. From 1939 to 1942, Wenck was Chief of Operations for the 1st Panzer Division. In 1942, he was an instructor at the War Academy, chief of staff for the LVII Corps, and then the Third Romanian Army on the Eastern Front.

Walther Wenck (German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈvɛŋk]) (18 September 1900 – 1 May 1982) was a German officer and industrialist. He was the youngest General of the branch (General der Truppengattung) in the German Army and a staff officer during World War II. At the end of the war, he commanded the German Twelfth Army that took part in the Battle of Berlin. Wenck left the military after surrendering to the Allies. He was asked to become Inspector General of the Bundeswehr as West Germany was re-arming in 1957, but declined to take the post when conditions he set were not met, such as the Inspector General being the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, not just an administrative leader.

The third son of officer Maximilian Wenck, Walter was born in Wittenberg, Germany in 1900. In 1911 he joined the Naumburg Cadet Corps of the Prussian Army. From the spring of 1918 he went to the secondary military school in Gross-Lichterfeld.